A History of the World (8 page)

Once the system of manpower and specialized skills was in place, the managers had the brawn to build ever greater temples. The feedback from successful irrigation to the power of those who directed it is obvious: over time, the managers were able to claim they spoke for, with, and to, the gods. They were responsible for the settlement’s very
survival. The original ruling class, high on their platforms, ears tilted to the heavens, had arrived. Below them, totting up the deliveries of grain, beer, meat and metals they required from the toilers, were the scribes or middle management. You cannot have a hierarchically organized society without the paperwork – or in this case, the clay-work.

Feedback is an essential idea. It explains why, once people are organized and crammed together inside a city wall, the rate of development accelerates. For the Sumerians and after them the other people of ancient Mesopotamia, the Akkadians and Babylonians, experienced a speed of change completely unlike anything humans had known before. Priests demand their special places – intimidating, nearer the gods. This required huge numbers of workers and full-time craftsmen, as well as measuring and planning. That in turn meant detailed note-taking, indeed writing. Then, large tributes of food, beer and raw materials were called for, to keep the building workers alive.

Making people pay what were in effect taxes would not have been pleasant; force would have been needed. At the same time, all the accumulating wealth would be a temptation to robbers and ultimately to rival cities. So walls were built and some men given the job of full-time protectors. A warrior class emerged. Nothing, sad to say, has advanced technical progress faster than war. The invention of bronze, replacing flint or bone as the cutting-edge technology, gave the Sumerians a brief advantage. Then came chariots, first slow and four-wheeled, later two-wheeled. (They may have developed first for that next novelty, leisure time, which the upper classes used for hunting.)

Priests of religion. Large-scale building projects. Writing. Taxes. Soldiers. Kings. The ability to make war. All arrive in human history alongside one another, based on the first cities, which are really the first concentrations of stored wealth, themselves based on riverside farming cultures that needed to work together to tame nature. This is the shift that is more powerful than the old ties of clan, kin and lineage, and marks the next important moment in human development after farming itself. Rivalry between cities and peoples will start to accelerate change, unless and until full-scale war brings catastrophe; which from time to time it does. The rise of trained bureaucrats, with their cuneiform writing implements, permits different people with different languages to communicate; Sumerian becomes the lingua
franca for Mesopotamia, and scribes become bilingual. A momentum is under way, which may be lost here or there but which has never stopped since.

The first cities also nurtured a flowering of abstract thought. The ruling class of kings and priests had time to speculate, not least about the mysterious world of winking lights and movements overhead that had also obsessed the builders of Stonehenge. So it is no surprise that Mesopotamia gave us mathematics, both the simple sums to tally trade and taxes and the more complicated ones used to try to track the stars. Looking up, the Sumerians and Babylonians wondered about this nightly message, with its shapes and regular patterns. If the gods were able to send messages back to them, were these the divine writing? Was there a pattern, which could then be imposed on the hazier rhythms of human life?

Reading the stars required measurement of angles. The Sumerians plotted the movements of the five planets they could see – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – and named a day after each. They then named one day after the Moon and another after the Sun, giving them a seven-day week. Seven was regarded as a perfect number; and the Sumerian week is of course our week, its days still named in the Sumerian fashion, though with Roman or Old English words. Saturn becomes Saturday, Sol (‘the sun’ in Latin) becomes Sunday. Luna, the moon, becomes
lundi
in French, or our Monday (Moon-day). Mars is
mardi
, though in English, thanks to a Norse god, Tuesday. Similarly, Wednesday is Wodin’s day, but Wodin was the god associated with the planet Mercury. Jupiter is
jeudi
; or in English, Thursday, Thor being the northern god associated with Jupiter. Venus is
vendredi
, or Friday. The Sumerians also developed a counting system based on the number sixty, which is divisible by eleven other numbers and so particularly handy for Bronze Age accountancy. From this we get our 60-second minutes, 60-minute hours, 360-day years and 360-degree circles. By Babylonian times, scribes had to be fast and accurate: one examination tablet from their city of Nippur asks, ‘Do you know multiplication, reciprocals, coefficients, balancing of accounts, administrative accounting, how to make all kinds of pay allotments, divide property and delimit shares of fields?’
¹⁸

All of this is remarkable enough, but the first cities also bring a flowering of art and design, with gorgeously made alabaster carvings
and mosaics and graceful (as well as useful) stamp-seals for parcels of goods from Uruk, plus inlaid gaming-boards, musical instruments and delicate gold jewellery from Ur – even before we get to the amazing carved reliefs of the Assyrians and Babylonians. Today, thanks to the habits of nineteenth-century archaeologists, the loveliest of these things can be found in Berlin and (to a lesser extent) London, not in Iraq. Each Mesopotamian city had its own gods, culture and reputation. Uruk was famous not only for its huge ziggurat and sky-god but for its sexy female deity Inanna, who was associated with all kinds of fertility and whose rites shocked one Babylonian writer: ‘Uruk . . . city of prostitutes, courtesans and call-girls . . . the party-boys and festival people who changed masculinity to femininity’.
¹⁹
(And it took a lot to shock a Babylonian.)

So these first cities are among the most important sites in the human story. Successive floods have reduced many of them to gritty stumps, and obliterated others. Neglect, war and the lack of interest of later cultures followed by aggressive, treasure-hunting Victorian archaeology has meant that while some of their greatest carvings and other artefacts are in European museums, the sites themselves are often dusty disappointments. This is tragic, since the achievements of the Sumerians, Akkadians and early Babylonians were huge, and in some ways much more impressive than those of the better-known Egyptians. Their city culture was bureaucratic and clearly in some ways oppressive, weighing heavily on farmers, requiring payment in return for the canals and wells that kept their fields so fertile. It allowed the emergence of kings with enough muscle to go to war against one another, and to carve out the first empires, along with the misery that early mass-killers such as Sargon of Akkad brought to the land. But these first cities were also places of beauty, intellectual advance, wonder and – quite clearly – a great deal of not very innocent fun.

Da Yu to You

You might imagine that the earliest named Chinese hero was a warrior-ruler like Gilgamesh, or some bearded sage; but you would be wrong. He is a public servant, an engineer and only latterly a king. Da Yu, or ‘the Great Yu’, a figure who stands just on the wrong side of
the line between myth and history, was the man who tamed the Yellow River, that life-giving but capricious core of early Chinese culture. Da Yu’s father, so the story goes, was a man called Gun who had been given the job by the local ruler of dealing with devastating river floods. Most early cultures, particularly across Asia and Europe, have flood stories, suggesting that there was a time of flooding so bad that it remained in the consciousness of peoples for millennia.

In China’s case, Gun tried to cope by building dykes, presumably using the same rammed-earth technique found in early Chinese towns. But more floods came and simply washed the earth walls away. The king who had commissioned Gun punished him by cutting him into many pieces. Gun’s son, the presumably rather anxious Da Yu, then took on the job in his scattered father’s place.

Da Yu, it is said, worked ferociously hard – but he did not build dykes. First, he travelled up and down the river talking to the local tribes and persuading people that they would have to work together and accept central authority if the problem was to be coped with. The parallels with the rise of the Mesopotamian cities are obvious. Next, he had channels dug to send the water to other rivers, and irrigation systems built to spread it across the farmland. Instead of confronting his enemy head-on, Da Yu confused the river by dividing it. For thirteen years he worked fanatically, reducing his hands and feet to callused pads. It is said that during that time he passed by his home on three occasions. The first time he heard his wife in labour, but did not stop or go in. The second time, his son was old enough to call out his name. He did not stop, because the floods were in full spate. The third time, his son was over ten years old. Again, Da Yu ignored him, and kept working. Today he would be pursued by the Child Support Agency and condemned by newspaper columnists. Things were different then.

The king was so impressed by his diligence and dedication that he passed the throne to him. Da Yu reigned for forty-five years, and then by passing the throne to his son founded the Xia dynasty.

Later, copious amounts of nonsense were glued onto the story, ranging from Da Yu cutting through a mountain with a magic battle-axe, to his having engaged the services of a yellow dragon and a black turtle to help him. But the first key point is that, according to the earliest Chinese historians, the first Chinese dynasty began with attempts
to control flooding. And that is at the very least a good guess on their part. About four thousand years ago there seems to have been a collapse in Chinese settlements, at just the time when the same was happening in the Middle East and Egypt. Going back to those flood stories, Noah and the rest, the historian Ian Morris asks, ‘Could climate change have brought on an Old World-crisis?’
²⁰
The same annals that describe Da Yu speak of rain continuing for nine years, causing catastrophic flooding.

But there is no Noah, no Ark: China starts with a public-servant hero, an organizer working for the state. There is something here that feels very unWestern.

From almost the beginning, Chinese culture looks, as well as feels, distinctively Chinese. Put a reasonably educated person from anywhere in the world in front of certain late-Neolithic pottery, or very early bronze vessels, or show them the first symbols being used for writing – and even if they have never seen such things before, they will probably instantly declare: ‘Chinese.’ The origins of the Chinese are shrouded in archaeological uncertainty and political argument. Many Chinese insist they did not emerge, like the rest of the world’s human population, out of Africa, but evolved separately from an earlier ape migration, that of
Homo erectus
, in China. Thus they are biologically distinct from foreigners – satisfying to the Chinese world view, even if the scientific consensus outside China is that they are wrong.

Overall, human development in China followed along similar lines to that of the Fertile Crescent, but around two thousand years later – though in some things, like pottery, it was more advanced. The breakthroughs in the taming of plants and animals, the appearance of villages, graves suggesting ancestor worship, are all relatively similar. Yet by the time myth first begins to edge into history, Chinese objects are already different-looking. Today’s archaeologists tend to emphasize the variation and complexity of ancient China – many cultures, many different kinds of pottery and building, scattered over a wide area. Recent finds have upended the old idea of there being one central Chinese civilization, in the north, which spread to the rest and has carried on more or less intact. But what is very different from the European experience is the emotional grip of a continuity with earliest times on the Chinese imagination.

For instance, the culture known as Longshan lasted for around a
thousand years, from roughly 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, about the same time as the various phases of the Neolithic cultures of Britain. But while Europeans have lost any record or memory of the Stonehenge people, Chinese history claims a link with the first kings and cultures. There were five mythical emperors, primordial godly rulers who gave mankind the key inventions of civilization such as cooking, farming, fire, medicine, marriage, the domestication of animals. The last of these mythic rulers is said to have introduced writing, pottery and the calendar – the very inventions which indeed mark out the Longshan culture from earlier settlements.
²¹
(In claiming that humans began as parasites or worms on the body of the creator, Pan Gu, there may be an element of early human self-criticism too.)

After the five emperors come the dynasties that are considered the beginning of historic China – the Xia, the Shang and the Zhou. In the almost two thousand years they cover, we have the names of kings, increasingly complicated and beautiful artefacts, evidence of cities, temples and fortresses, and writing that is clearly the predecessor of modern Chinese. In short, we have China.

Right at the beginning of this, however, we are still in the dim and misty place where there is more myth than evidence. Of around 300
BC
, the
Shang-Shu
, or ‘Book of History’, is the first written text about what is called China’s first dynasty, the Xia. The same account talks of ten thousand states coexisting at the same time, so clearly the Xia were hardly China-straddling. Archaeology suggests numerous rival chiefdoms. The Xia are said to have been founded in 2205
BC
by our remarkable tamer of rivers and floods, Da Yu. All early Chinese history is the history of dynasties, one succeeding another like the succession of kings and queens that British schoolchildren once memorized. Even if he was plucked from half-remembered oral traditions by later writers keen to proclaim one China, Da Yu is in at the start of all this. He was supposed to have divided central China into a neat series of parallel box-like zones. The centre of the nine
zhou
, or provinces, was the province of the king, leading eventually to a zone for foreigners and then to the wilderness beyond – all of which sounds like the Chinese version of the Middle Kingdom and therefore suspiciously like propaganda.