Roman Civilization
Rome had been founded in 753 BC as a hill town on the Tiber river.Roman civilization started as a small settlement of farmers & later grew into one of the mightiest on the planet ,which lasted for centuries.The ancient Roman society was divided into two classes called patricians and plebians.The aristocrats & big landlords constituted patricians class whereas workers,farmers and artisans formed plebian class.
There were lot of struggles among patricians & plebians for control of power, which resulted in evolution of Rome as a Republic having the senate & the assembly.
Roman civilization was very developed. They devised a strong legal system for making a better society where people could have rights & regulations. The laws and ways we determine what to do with someone who is accused of breaking a law came originally from the Roman principles.
The Romans built a huge empire and conquered new lands, thanks to their very strong army.
The Roman army could march up to 40km a day!Roman laws were carved on twelve tablets. They
were actually carved out on rocks so that every one could know what the laws were.
Slaves were very important in Roman lives. Romans thought that not owning slaves was a sign of
poverty. Many people would take 2 to 3 slaves with them just to go to the baths. Funny, isn’t it!
The early Romans spoke a Greek dialect known as ‘Konie’, from this dialect ‘Latin’ developed later.
The language used in Western world especially in Europe today was developed from the Romans.Many of modern words are based on Latin.We remember the Romans all year round. They invented most of our calendar , which is known as Gregorian calendar . Did you know that the calendar we use today is more than 2,000 years old? It was started by Julius Caesar, a Roman ruler. It is based on the movement of the earth around the sun and so is called the 'solar calendar.' The solar calendar has 365 days a year, and 366 days every leap year, or every fourth year. The names of our months are taken from the names of Roman gods and rulers. January is named after Janus,their 2-headed god of new beginnings.The month 'July,' in fact, is named after Julius Caesar himself.
Even the practice of census (counting people living in a country/boundary) was started by early Romans.The Roman Empire was huge and included millions of people living over a large area.
How did they keep track of all these people? Easy! They counted them! The Roman Empire began
the practice of taking a census, or a 'count,' of all the people within its boundaries every so often.
The Romans also invented central heating. Rich people’s homes had heating. The warmth came from
an under floor wood-burning fire,looked after by the slaves.The first-ever shopping mall was built by the Emperor Trajan in Rome. It consisted of several levels and more than 150 outlets that sold everything ranging from food and spices to clothes Heating Systems Shopping Malls.
In absence of any newspaper ,TV or any other mass media ,Roman coins were used to publicize the emperor, his achievements, and his family .Romans were highly superstitious .One of the example is their fear for anything to do with the left, which is why their words for ‘left’ and ‘left-handed’ were sinister and sinstra , giving us the modern meaning of the word ‘sinister’ meaning bad or wicked.
Romans used powdered mouse brains as toothpaste! Yuck!
The Roman army didn't have toilet paper so they used a water soaked sponge on the end of a stick instead!Romans wore wedding rings. And Roman brides wore veils and carried flowers too.
The bride and groom signed a contract to become man and wife, just like today Roman schoolboys practised their writing on wax tablets, using a pointed stylus.They could melt the wax to reuse the tablet again and again!Purple, the most expensive dye in those days, which was made from Murex seashells,was reserved for the emperors’ clothes or senators. It was considered to be a treason for anyone other than the emperor to dress completely in purple The snake was a common image in Roman art and jewelry and it was believed to have powers over a family’s well-being.
The Romans liked to enjoy their food, often lying down on a couch while eating with their hands. They occasionally used a spoon, but they would never use a knife and fork.
Ancient Mesopotamia
Ancient Mesopotamia refers to the place where humans first formed civilizations. It was here that people first gathered in large cities, learned to write, and created governments. For this reason Mesopotamia is often called the "Cradle of Civilization".Geography
The word Mesopotamia means "the land between rivers". When people say Mesopotamia they are referring to a section of land in the Middle East between and around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Today this land is located mostly in the country of Iraq. There are also portions in southwestern Iran, southeastern Turkey, and northeastern Syria.
The heart of Mesopotamia lies between the two rivers in southern Iraq. The land there is fertile and there is plenty of water around the major two rivers to allow for irrigation and farming.
Civilizations and Empires
Early settlers in Mesopotamia started to gather in small villages and towns. As they learned how to irrigate land and grow crops on large farms, the towns grew bigger. Eventually these towns became large cities. New inventions such as government and writing were formed to help keep order in the cities. The first human civilization was formed.
The Sumerians Civilization
The Sumerians are thought to have formed the first human civilization in world history. They lived in southern Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the Middle East.
Cradle of Civilization
Many historians think that cities and towns were first formed in Sumer around 5000 BC. Nomads moved into the fertile land and began to form small villages which slowly grew into large towns. Eventually these cities developed into the civilization of the Sumer. This land is often called the "Cradle of Civilization".
Sumer City-States
As the Sumerian villages grew into large cities, they formed city-states. This is where a city government would rule the city as well as the land around it. These city-states often fought each other. They built walls around their cities for protection. Farmland was outside the walls, but people would retreat to the city when invaders came.
There were many city-states throughout Sumer. Some of the most powerful city-states included Eridu, Bad-tibura, Shuruppak, Uruk, Sippar, and Ur. Eridu is thought to be the first of the major cities formed and one of the oldest cities in the world.
Sumerian Rulers and Government
Each city-state had its own ruler. They went by various titles such as lugal, en, or ensi. The ruler was like a king or governor. The ruler of the city was often the high priest of their religion as well. This gave him even more power. The most famous king was Gilgamesh of Uruk who was the subject of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's oldest surviving works of literature.
In addition to the king or governor, there was a fairly complex government with officials who helped to organize city building projects and keep the city running. There were also laws that the citizens must follow or face punishment. The invention of government is often credited to the Sumerians.
Religion
Each city-state also had its own god. In the center of each city was a large temple to the city god called a ziggurat. The ziggurat looked like a step pyramid with a flat top. Here the priests would perform rituals and sacrifices.
Important Inventions and Technology
One of the great contributions the Sumerians made to civilization was their many inventions. They invented the first form of writing, a number system, the first wheeled vehicles, sun-dried bricks, and irrigation for farming. All of these things were important for the development of human civilization.
They also had an interest in science including astronomy and the movement of the moon and the stars. They used this information to make a more accurate calendar
The Akkadians - The Akkadians came next. They formed the first united empire where the city-states of the Sumer were united under one ruler. The Akkadian language replaced the Sumerian language during this time. It would be the main language throughout much of the history of Mesopotamia.
The first Empire to rule all of Mesopotamia was the Akkadian Empire. It lasted for around 200 years from 2300 BC to 2100 BC.
How it Began
The Akkadians lived in northern Mesopotamia while the Sumerians lived in the south. They had a similar government and culture as the Sumerians, but spoke a different language. The government was made up of individual city-states. This was where each city had its own ruler that controlled the city and the surrounding area. Initially these city-states were not united and often warred with each other.
Over time, the Akkadian rulers began to see the advantage of uniting many of their cities under a single nation. They began to form alliances and work together.
Sargon the Great
Around 2300 BC Sargon the Great rose to power. He established his own city named Akkad. When the powerful Sumerian city of Uruk attacked his city, he fought back and eventually conquered Uruk. He then went on to conquer all of the Sumerian city-states and united northern and southern Mesopotamia under a single ruler.
The Empire Expands
Over the next two hundred years, the Akkadian Empire continued to expand. They attacked and conquered the Elamites to the east. They moved south to Oman. They even went as far west as the Mediterranean Sea and Syria.
Naram-Sin
One of the great kings of Akkad was Naram-Sin. He was the grandson of Sargon the Great. Naram-Sin ruled for over 50 years. He crushed revolts and expanded the empire. His reign is considered the peak of the Akkadian Empire.
Fall of the Empire
In 2100 BC the Sumerian city of Ur rose back into power conquering the city of Akkad. The Empire was now ruled by a Sumerian king, but was still united. The empire grew weaker, however, and was eventually conquered by the Amorites in around 2000 BC.
The Babylonians - The city of Babylon became the most powerful city in Mesopotamia. Throughout the history of the region, the Babylonians would rise and fall. At times the Babylonians would create vast empires that ruled much of the Middle East. The Babylonians were the first to write down and record their system of law.
After the fall of the Akkadian Empire, two new empires rose to power. They were the Babylonians in the south and the Assyrians to the north. The Babylonians were the first to form an empire that would encompass all of Mesopotamia.
Rise of the Babylonians and King Hammurabi
The city of Babylon had been a city-state in Mesopotamia for many years. After the fall of the Akkadian Empire, the city was taken over and settled by the Amorites. The city began its rise to power in 1792 BC when King Hammurabi took the throne. He was a powerful and capable leader who wanted to rule more than just the city of Babylon.
Not long after becoming King, Hammurabi began to conquer other city-states in the area. Within a few years, Hammurabi had conquered all of Mesopotamia including much of the Assyrian lands to the north.
The City of Babylon
Under Hammurabi's rule, the city of Babylon became the most powerful city in the world. Located on the banks of the Euphrates River, the city was a major trade hub bringing together new ideas and products. Babylon also became the largest city in the world at the time with as many as 200,000 people living there at its peak.
At the center of the city was a large temple called a ziggurat. This temple looked something like a pyramid with a flat top and archeologists think that it was 300 feet tall! There was a wide street leading from the gates to the center of the city. The city was also famous for its gardens, palaces, towers, and artwork. It would have been an amazing sight to see.
The city was also the cultural center of the empire. It was here that art, science, music, mathematics, astronomy, and literature were able to flourish.
Hammurabi's Code
King Hammurabi established firm laws called Hammurabi's Code. This was the first time in history that the law was written down. It was recorded on clay tablets and tall pillars of stones called steles.
Pillar with Hammurabi's Code
Hammurabi's code consisted of 282 laws. Many of them were quite specific, but were meant as guidelines to be used in similar circumstances. There were laws governing commerce such as wages, trade, rental rates, and the sale of slaves. There were laws governing criminal behavior describing the penalties for stealing or damaging property. There were even laws governing adoption, marriage, and divorce.
Fall of Babylon
After Hammurabi died, his sons took over. However, they were not strong leaders and soon Babylon grew weak. In 1595 the Kassites conquered Babylon. They would rule for 400 years. Later, the Assyrians would take over. It wasn't until 612 BC that Babylonia once again rose to power as the ruler of the empire over Mesopotamia. This second Babylonian Empire is called the neo-Babylonian Empire.
Neo-Babylonian Empire
Around 616 BC King Nabopolassar took advantage of the fall of the Assyrian Empire to bring the seat of the empire back to Babylon. It was his son Nebuchadnezzar II who led Babylon back to its former glory.
Nebuchadnezzar II ruled for 43 years. He was a great military leader and expanded the empire to include much of the Middle East all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. This included the conquering of the Hebrews and taking them into slavery for 70 years as told in the Bible. Under Nebuchadnezzar's rule, the city of Babylon and its temples were restored. It also became the cultural center of the world, just like during Hammurabi's rule.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. This was a large series of terraces that rose to around 75 feet high. They were covered with all sorts of trees, flowers, and plants. The gardens is considered one of the great wonders of the ancient world.
Fall of Neo-Babylonia
After Nebuchadnezzar II died, the empire began to fall apart once again. In 529 BC, the Persians conquered Babylon and made it part of the Persian Empire.
The Assyrians were one of the major peoples to live in Mesopotamia during ancient times. They lived in northern Mesopotamia near the start of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The Assyrian Empire rose and fell several times throughout history.
The First Rise
The Assyrians first rose to power when the Akkadian Empire fell. The Babylonians had control of southern Mesopotamia and the Assyrians had the north. One of their strongest leaders during this time was King Shamshi-Adad. Under Shamshi-Adad the empire expanded to control much of the north and the Assyrians grew wealthy. However, after Shamshi-Adad's death in 1781 BC, the Assyrians grew weak and soon fell under control of the Babylonian Empire.
Second Rise
The Assyrians once again rose to power from 1360 BC to 1074 BC. This time they conquered all of Mesopotamia and expanded the empire to include much of the Middle East including Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, and Cypress. They reached their peak under the rule of King Tiglath-Pileser.
The neo-Assyrian Empire
The final, and perhaps strongest, of the Assyrian Empires ruled from 744 BC to 612 BC. During this time Assyria had a string of powerful and capable rulers such as Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Ashurbanipal. These leaders built the empire into one of the most powerful empires in the world. They conquered much of the Middle East and Egypt. Once again, it was the Babylonians who brought down the Assyrian Empire in 612 BC.
Great Warriors
The Assyrians were perhaps most famous for their fearsome army. They were a warrior society where fighting was a part of life. It was how they survived. They were known throughout the land as cruel and ruthless warriors.
Two things that made the Assyrians great warriors were their deadly chariots and their iron weapons. They made iron weapons that were stronger than the copper or tin weapons of some of their enemies. They were also skilled with their chariots which could strike fear in the hearts of their enemies.
The Library at Nineveh
The last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, constructed a great library at the city of Nineveh. He collected clay tablets from all over Mesopotamia. These included the stories of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi, and more. Much of our knowledge of the Ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia comes from the remains of this library. According to the British Museum in London, just over 30,000 tablets have been recovered. These tablets make up around 10,000 different texts.
Persians - The Persians put an end to the rule of the Assyrians and the Babylonians. They conquered much of the Middle East including Mesopotamia.
The first Persian Empire took control of the Middle East after the fall of the Babylonian Empire. It is also called the Achaemenid Empire.
Cyrus the Great
The empire was founded by Cyrus the Great. Cyrus first conquered the Median Empire in 550 BC and then went on to conquer the Lydians and the Babylonians. Under later kings, the empire would grow to where it ruled Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, and Turkey. Its borders would eventually stretch over 3,000 miles from east to west making it the largest empire on Earth at the time.
Different Cultures
Under Cyrus the Great, the Persians allowed the peoples they conquered to continue their lives and cultures. They could keep their customs and religion as long as they paid their taxes and obeyed the Persian rulers. This was different from how earlier conquerors such as the Assyrians had ruled.
Government
In order to maintain control of the large empire, each area had a ruler called a satrap. The satrap was like a governor of the area. He enforced the king's laws and taxes. There were around 20 to 30 satraps in the empire.
The empire was connected by many roads and a postal system. The most famous road was the Royal Road built by King Darius the Great. This road stretched around 1,700 miles all the way from Sardis in Turkey to Suza in Elam.
Religion
Although each culture was allowed to keep their own religion, the Persians followed the teaching of the prophet Zoroaster. This religion was called Zoroastrianism and believed in one main god called Ahura Mazda.
Fighting the Greeks
Under King Darius the Persians wanted to conquer the Greeks who he felt were causing rebellions within his empire. In 490 BC Darius attacked Greece. He captured some Greek city-states, but when he attempted to take the city of Athens, he was soundly defeated by the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon.
In 480 BC Darius' son, Xerxes I, attempted to finish what his father started and conquer all of Greece. He amassed a great army of hundreds of thousands of warriors. This was one of the largest armies assembled during ancient times. He initially won the Battle of Thermopylae against a much smaller army from Sparta. However, the Greek fleet defeated his navy at the Battle of Salamis and he was eventually forced to retreat.
Fall of the Persian Empire
The Persian Empire was conquered by the Greeks led by Alexander the Great. Starting in the year 334 BC, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire from Egypt all the way to the borders of India.
Ancient China: Shang & Zhou Dynasties
In this lesson, we will study the Shang and Zhou Dynasties. We will pay close attention to the founding, major accomplishments and characteristics, and decline of these dynasties.
Three Dynasties
The time: about 1600 BC. The place: China's Yellow River valley. A warrior stands surveying the land around him. He has just won a great victory, and a new age has dawned for his people. As the head of his family, he will lead a new dynasty and rule over this land.
The warrior's name is Cheng Tang, and he is the first ruler of the Shang Dynasty, which will control China from about 1600 BC to about 1100 BC. He has defeated the rulers of the Xia Dynasty, a mysterious dynasty that left no historical record. One day, his family will be overthrown by the Zhou Dynasty, which will reign from about 1100 BC to 221 BC. For Cheng Tang, that is far in the future. Now, he must concentrate on building his kingdom.
The Shang Dynasty
In the approximately 500 years of the Shang Dynasty, which was centered in the Yellow River valley, 33 kings ruled over as many as 13.5 million people. The kings, called wangs, beginning with Cheng Tang, stood at the top of the social scale in this extremely hierarchical and patriarchal dynasty. They held supreme power but were supported by the royal family, the nobility, the warriors, the priests, and the government officials. These social classes typically lived in walled cities and enjoyed the finer things in life: silk clothing, good food, flower gardens, and splendid homes.
Outside the cities, merchants and craftsmen plied their trades and went home to their mud huts. They were better off, however, than the peasant farmers who lived in nearby villages and scraped out their meager living on land owned by nobles. They were often forced to work on construction projects for the king and their landlords in the agricultural off-season.
This rigid social structure extended right down into the family. The oldest male held authority over the household, and everyone else followed his orders under the risk of severe punishment.
Shang Accomplishments and Characteristics
Tang certainly didn't realize the accomplishments and characteristics that his Shang Dynasty would present to the world. These include:
Bronze work - The Shang Dynasty created exquisite bronze vessels and weapons as it reached the heights of China's Bronze Age.
Military technology - Shang warriors fought with horse-drawn chariots, bronze-tipped spears, and compound bows.
Writing - Many of the symbols developed during the Shang Dynasty are still used in China today.
A calendar - The Shang calendar designated 12 months, each with 30 days, and recognized the cycles of both the sun and the moon.
Religion - The people of the Shang Dynasty worshiped a supreme god named Shang Di, but they also worshiped their ancestors, who served as go-betweens with the god and had to be kept happy for the people to prosper. Priests were also very interested in discovering the future, and they used cattle bones and tortoise shells as oracle bones. They punched holes in the bones and then studied the pattern of cracks that developed to answer their questions about the future. In the process, they recorded the dynasty's history on the shells and bones.
Shang to Zhou
The last Shang king, Shang Zhou, was a nasty sort of fellow, far different from his predecessor Cheng Tang. He focused mostly on his lavish lifestyle and wasn't even above killing his own son to preserve his dominance. Understandably, people rebelled, and the Zhou family, led by King Wen, overthrew the last Shang king and formed a new dynasty about 1100 BC. They did so under what they called the Mandate of Heaven, by which, they claimed, the gods gave them the right to rule supreme so long as they ruled with justice and cared for the people. If they failed, the gods would replace them.
The Zhou Dynasty
The Zhou did not fail, at least not for a long time. The Zhou Dynasty lasted, in various forms, for nearly a thousand years. During the first era of Zhou reign, called the Xi, or Western Zhou Dynasty, the dynasty's kings held almost complete power in a time of prosperity and peace. Then came rebellion in 770 BC. The Zhou rulers managed to hold onto their throne, but in the new Dong or Eastern Zhou Dynasty, their power was limited and a set of seven states constantly vied for dominance. Eventually, one of them, the Qin, would rise to the top and overthrow the Zhou Dynasty in 221 BC.
Zhou Accomplishments and Characteristics
In the years of the Zhou Dynasty, China changed greatly. New technology flourished in the form of iron tools and weapons, crossbows, major irrigation projects, and even chopsticks. Zhou rulers encouraged the building of new canals, roads, and communications systems to increase trade, and for the first time, the Chinese began to ride horseback. The writing method that had begun under Shang rule developed even more.
Social Class in Early China: Aristocrat, Farmer, Craftsman & Merchant
In this lesson we'll explore the various social classes of the ancient Chinese world which existed in an extremely rigid class structure inspired by the teachings of Confucius.
Ancient Chinese Social Classes
What 'class' of America do you see yourself or your family in? Class today is generally considered in terms of income level. Interestingly, in America today, recent polling has shown that most of United States considers itself middle class, including families which make $40,000 a year and those who make $4,000,000 a year! Regardless of how amorphous class labels might be in America today, in some ancient cultures these labels were far more concrete and important. In this lesson we'll explore the class system which existed in ancient China, its origins, and the important distinctions between each class.
Origins and Emperor
The social structure of ancient China evolved over several centuries, likely solidifying sometime in either the second or third century A.D. The social structure was very rigid; there was virtually no possibility of upward (or even downward) mobility. In other words, if your father was a farmer, chances were you were going to be a farmer, too. The genders were not equal in ancient Chinese society either; women were largely domestic creatures, and even aristocratic women were not allowed to attend school. This social structure was reinforced by the revered Chinese thinker, Confucius, who claimed that social structure and rigid order was important if one wanted a peaceful kingdom and a happy society.
It should be mentioned that the one occupation which existed outside the realm of ancient Chinese social structure was the emperor and the royal family. The emperor was often considered ordained by god in ancient Chinese society, and therefore he did not have to answer to any humans on earth. He expected complete obedience from his subjects and had total control over military affairs.
Aristocrats and Farmers
The first social class which existed below the emperor was the aristocratic class. The aristocrats made up a very small portion of Chinese society and were often well connected to the emperor. These aristocrats were generally landowners who collected rent from their tenants and, in turn, paid tribute to the emperor as a show of allegiance. This class is also sometimes called the 'gentry scholars' because many sons began their adult lives by being sent to state schools if their families could afford it. After attending school and taking the requisite exams, these young aristocrats took up positions as officials in the state bureaucracy.
The next social class in importance in ancient China was farmers. Farmers were respected in ancient China as they fed the country's already burgeoning population. Many of these farmers were successful enough that they owned their own land, while others worked as tenants on the farms of aristocrats. The life of a farmer in ancient China was hard as their livelihood was often subject to the randomness of weather while still being subjected to the taxes imposed by the emperor and the upper classes. In the farmer class, gender roles were not as rigid as they were in other classes; though it was considered ideal for women to stay in the house, they at times were required to help in the fields during harvest times or under extreme circumstances.
Confucianism: Views, Philosophy & Teaching
In this lesson, we explore the life and teachings of the ancient Chinese thinker, Confucius, as well as discovering the various ways his teachings were used to shape Chinese society after his death.
Confucianism
Are you on Twitter? If you are, you probably 'follow' many people from news organizations to media personalities to your own friends. It's how you get information about what they're thinking and what's important to them.
Well, long before the advent of Twitter, if you wanted to 'follow' someone, you really had to actually follow them around! Such was the case for the followers of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, whose followers codified his beliefs and teachings after his death into something akin to a religion, which had an enormous impact on Chinese civilization in the centuries after his death.
Origins
Confucius was not the philosopher's given name; after all, Confucius hardly sounds Chinese, does it? Confucius is a Latinized name of the Chinese title K'ung-Fu-tzu, and was given by later western scholars to the teacher and wandering philosopher, who was born around 552 B.C.E. Confucius certainly did not set out to start a new religion or even start a movement. What Confucius really wanted was to be an advisor to a king or powerful statesman in China. When this position never materialized, he sometimes considered himself a failure.
This is not to say, of course, that Confucius was an unhappy man. Confucius had a deep love of learning, education, and an unparalleled reverence for tradition and Chinese culture. Instead of working to instill that culture from a high government position as he had hoped, he traveled from place to place teaching. He had a small group of followers that traveled with him from location to location, learning from him as well as helping him teach, and several of these followers took up important government positions after Confucius' death in 479 B.C.E.
In Confucius' time, he did not delineate the social system or worldview that was later attributed to him. Instead, Confucius' teachings focused on real-world contemporary society and ways in which humans could better respect one another, and he held especially high esteem for one's elders and for state authority.
Views
In fact, some historians and theologians even question the categorization of Confucianism as a religion because it does not necessarily consider many of the basic questions most religions consider. For example, Confucius considered any contemplation of god or the afterlife to be unimportant. Confucius believed absolute truth on either subject was impossible to know, so humans should focus their energies on doing the right thing in this world, rather than worrying about the next.
The main thrust of Confucius' teachings was creating a moral and just society in this world. The foundation of this society according to Confucius should be mutual respect in all its forms: respect for one another, respect for culture and tradition, respect for institutions, etc. Confucius sought to revitalize society through instilling respect for various institutions, traditions, and rituals, which Confucius claimed had long kept Chinese society just and moral. Confucius felt the family was one of the basic units of the social organization that should be respected. The elderly and infirm were to be cared for by their able family members, while it was the responsibility of the entire family to teach the children to be moral members of society.
Confucius believed the best way to fuel this respect in society was the promotion of rituals. Rituals for Confucius encompassed many things, from the semi-religious routines and practices that you and I would think of to the basic courtesies and social conventions of conversation. Many of the rituals Confucius believed should be implemented were ancient vestiges of the Zhou dynasty, which began ruling China several centuries before Confucius' time and had slowly deteriorated. According to Confucius, through conformity to these ancient rituals and social conventions, each individual could promote a more humane and moral society.
Finally, as just hinted at, Confucius taught that a moral and just society could only be arrived at if each person committed to these ideals individually. On several occasions, when questioned by his followers as to how best to encourage an ideal society in China, Confucius replied that the best way to do that is to set an example for others by practicing Confucian principles at home. Confucius himself often claimed to be on a personal journey of self-realization through learning and teaching, and he instructed his followers to look inward to find the strength to act in a moral and just manner.
Confucianism in History
Though in Confucius' time he may not have meant to set up an entirely new religion or way of life, this is certainly what happened in the centuries after his death. Indeed, Confucius never actually wrote a book or intended his teachings to have a major impact after his death, but his committed followers were determined to spread Confucius' word. From their notes and remembrances of his life and teachings, they compiled the Analects, a book of edited conversations and lessons each had with or learned from Confucius.
Jen, Li, and the Five Relationships of Confucianism
This lesson will focus on Confucianism's concepts of Jen and Li. In doing so, it will highlight how the religion is often seen as a code of conduct or an ethical system. It will also explain the Five Key Relationships of Confucianism.
Code of Conduct
Unlike Judaism or Christianity, which give their allegiance to an all-powerful, personal God, Confucianism does not teach the worship of any particular deity. Instead, it focuses more on human behavior, causing many scholars to consider it more of an ethical system or a code of conduct rather than a religion. Rather than focusing on the attributes of a deity, Confucianism focuses on human behavior. It's things like wisdom and kindness that take center stage.
With this centering on human behavior, two of the most important concepts taught by Confucianism are the virtues of Jen and Li. Since Jen is considered the most important, we'll start by explaining it.
Jen
In very simple terms, Jen, sometimes spelled as Ren, can be translated as 'goodness' or 'humaneness.' In Confucianism, Jen is seen as very inward and personal attribute. It does not connote right action; it deals with inward thoughts. Being inwardly oriented, it's also characterized as truly desiring only good for others. In short, it's an attitude of the heart.
So important is Jen that all other virtues spring from it. It should be the preeminent funnel for all human behavior and actions. In fact, Confucianism teaches that one should be willing to give his own life in order to protect Jen. In addition, it relates to all of mankind. It knows no boundaries of race or religion.
Although Jen is of utmost importance in Confucianism, many scholars purport that Confucius' believed he never really saw Jen being fully played out in a person's life. Some also believe he taught that only the greatest wise man of China would ever be able to truly achieve Jen. However, that should never be an excuse for the common man not to try!
Li
With this we come to the principle of Li. Differing from Jen, Li deals with one's outward social behavior. Translated as both 'propriety' and 'ritual,' Li is sometimes thought of as the working out of Jen in one's life. To use some common western phrasing, Li is sort of like giving feet to Jen.
Because Li deals with outward behavior, it deals with accepted etiquette, customs and even morality. With this in mind, its main focus seems to be on human relationships. In its ideal sense, a person honoring Li will be perfect in all his relationships. This working out of Li is especially important in what Confucianism holds as the Five Key Relationships; they are the relationship of ruler to subject, father to son, husband to wife, elder to younger and friend to friend.
If one follows the concept of Li, each of these relationships will be marked with harmony. Since several of these relationships deal with family, Confucianism asserts that when the principal relationships of the family are tranquil, Li will seep into the culture. All of society, from the home to the village to the empire, will be tranquil.
However, in studying Li it's important to remember that Confucianism teaches Li must be motivated by Jen. In other words, if you are just nice to someone because you want something from them or because you want to look good, then this is not Li. Li is only truly Li when it is preceded by the selflessness of Jen. Just like in the alphabet, J comes before L, Jen must come before Li.
The Qin Dynasty in China: The Great Wall & Legalism
In this lesson, we will explore the short-lived but powerful Qin Dynasty of China. We will examine the dynasty's founding, life under Qin rule, the Qin legacy, and the downfall of the Qin.
A Short but Important Dynasty
Ying Zheng, the King of the Qin, had a plan. His state was small, but the ruling Zhou Dynasty was weak and had been plagued by competitive, warring minor states for years. He was determined to overthrow the Zhou rule and to take over the sovereignty of all Zhou lands and beyond.
As the 200s BC progressed, Ying Zheng increased the power of the Qin. He developed his military technology and built his army. He pooled his resources and set them to work to defeat other states and put them out of the running for leadership. He studied the teachings of Shang Yang, a statesman of the previous century, who called for total war and abandonment of all rules in battle. In 221 BC, Ying Zheng finally got his chance. He achieved a huge victory over his competitor states and over the last Zhou ruler and declared himself to be the first emperor of China under the title Qin Shihuangdi.
Qin Shihuangdi's new Qin Dynasty lasted only 15 years, from 221 BC to 207 BC, but as we shall see, it is an extremely important period in Chinese history.
Life Under Qin Rule
Qin Shihuangdi quickly made himself an absolute ruler with absolute power, and he extended his reign throughout much of modern China. Life under Qin rule was highly structured and often brutal.
For one thing, the emperor followed a philosophy called legalism, which claimed that the state was much more important than the individual and that the individuals had to conform completely to the decrees of their supreme rulers. Qin Shihuangdi developed a strong central government with most of its power concentrated in himself as the supreme sovereign. He was backed by a powerful army that intimidated any opposition and an efficient and obedient bureaucracy that micromanaged nearly every aspect of daily life for the nobility all the way down to the peasants.
Qin Shihuangdi was not above using terror tactics to keep his reign secure and demonstrate his supreme power. He seized the land of many noble families and forced them to live in cities where he could keep an eye on them and prevent any rebellion they might be planning. Those who did try to rebel were buried alive or sent to work on the emperor's building projects. Peasants were assigned specific jobs, usually in farming or silk raising. If they resisted, they were simply killed or perhaps sent to work elsewhere at a less pleasant job of hard labor.
The emperor also wanted to keep his subjects uneducated to prevent any defiance of his rule and to make them easier to control, so he ordered books burned throughout his empire. Scholars and teachers scrambled to hide their books, but those who were caught or resisted in any way were often burned alive with their books.
Qin Shihuangdi was so intent upon controlling every aspect of Chinese life that he implemented a program of standardization throughout the empire. He created a standard code of law that applied to everyone. He regulated money, written language, weights and measures, and the tax system. He built roads, irrigation systems, and defense works. He even standardized the width of chariot axles to make sure his military had the best possible equipment.
A Qin Legacy
The emperor longed to leave a legacy, and indeed, he did. First, he gave China its name, which comes from the word 'Qin.' Second, he gave China one of its primary landmarks, the Great Wall. Even though the current wall dates from a later period, the first structure was built during the Qin Dynasty by forced labor, of course, as a means of defense.
Third, he gave China an eternal army. Qin Shihuangdi was obsessed with death. He began building his tomb even before he became emperor, and he filled it with marvelous treasures, including an army of over 7,000 terracotta soldiers, which was discovered during an archeological excavation in 1974. A few years later, archeologists uncovered more treasures, including a set of bronze horses and chariots. Apparently, Qin Shihuangdi wanted to continue his absolute rule even in the afterlife.
The End of Qin
Of course, the emperor wanted to delay that transition as long as possible. In fact, he traveled throughout the empire, seeking some sort of elixir that would give him immortality. He failed. It was on one of these journeys that he suddenly died in 210 BC.
The Han Dynasty in China: Characteristics, Wu Ti & Xiongnu
In this lesson, we will explore China's Han dynasty. We will discover the ups and downs of its history and learn about some of its major characteristics and accomplishments.
The Han Dynasty Begins
Liu Bang was a commoner, a minor official in the court of the powerful Emperor Qin Shihuangdi of the Qin dynasty. Like many others, he wasn't satisfied at all with the brutal Qin rule, so he began to plot. In 206 BCE, he became king of the Han people, and that year, the new, weak Qin emperor gave him the opportunity he was seeking. Liu Bang prepared an army and stepped in to take over China.
It proved to be a hard fight against famous general Xiang Yu, who was in charge of the Qin forces. At one point, the general captured Liu Bang's father and threatened to boil him alive. Liu replied, 'Send me a cup of the soup.' His dad never did get boiled, and Liu Bang came out victorious. He was crowned Emperor Gaozu of the Han dynasty in 202 BCE, the first commoner to rule a dynasty that would last about 400 years and bring a time of prosperity and advancement to China.
Han Government
In the beginning, Han rule was not much different from Qin rule. The emperor and his bureaucratic government still stood at the center of Chinese life, and the emperor still claimed absolute power and followed legalism, a philosophy that maintained that the state was much more important than the individual, and that individuals had to conform completely to the decrees of their supreme rulers.
Over time, however, he introduced Confucianism to the government with all of its ideals of duty to society, individual virtue, and tradition. Confucianism moderated the harshness of legalism and absolute rule with a sense of morality, at least in theory. In practice, the government still directly controlled the people as it sought to unify China, and punishments for rebels were still quite harsh.
Han High Point
The Han dynasty reached its high point under Emperor Wu Ti, who ruled from 141 BCE to 87 BCE. Accomplishments and characteristics during and following this high point in Han history include:
Military conquest and expansion - In its quest for more territory, the emperor's army bumped up against the nearby Xiongnu people, better known as the Huns, in the north. The Xiongnu made periodic raids on Han territory, but eventually the powerful Han army split the Xiongnu in two. The southern Xiongnu surrendered; the northern Xiongnu moved away to the west. The Han dynasty expanded its borders from Korea to Vietnam.
Trade - The dynasty's military conquests made travel possible along the famous Silk Road, which allowed Chinese merchants to engage in active trade and cultural contact with people all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.
Paper - Paper was first used in the Han dynasty. It was developed by a man named Cai Lun about 105 CE.
History - Historian Sima Qian (145-circa 85 BCE) wrote his famous Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, during Wu Ti's reign. This work, sponsored by the government, recorded over 2,000 years of history and legend and became a standard and model for histories for many years to come.
Education - Han rulers valued education and set up a national university that taught Confucianism. Chinese scholars in the Han dynasty wrote books about everything from geography to botany to mythology, and even created an encyclopedia.
A Dynasty Interrupted
All this happened under what came to be known as the Western Han dynasty, but troubles were just around the corner. About 9 CE, Wang Mang, the power-hungry nephew of a widowed empress, seized the throne and set up the new Xin dynasty. Most people actually liked Wang Mang pretty well and accepted him as an emperor, but not everybody.
Wang was killed in 22 or 23 CE by a group of angry peasants led by Liu Xiu and called the Red Eyebrows (they actually painted their eyebrows bright red). The fighting lasted until 25 CE and led to millions of casualties, but in the end, Liu Xiu became the new emperor. Because he was a descendant of Liu Bang, the Han dynasty continued, but it was now called the Eastern Han dynasty.
Another Nearly Two Hundred Years of Han
The Eastern Han dynasty lasted nearly 200 more years. About 73 CE, the new Han rulers once again conquered the Xiongnu, who were trying to reunite and create their own empire. Unfortunately for the Han, things went downhill from there. Economic troubles, political conflicts, and natural disasters plagued the empire for decades, and the peasants grew restless. In 184 CE, they rebelled, led by a group called the Yellow Turbans. Han factions had to unite in a hurry to put down the rebellion, and somehow they managed the task.
The Silk Roads During the Han Dynasty & The Roman Empire
The Silk Roads connected some of the most diverse cultures in history, as well as providing a link between the superpowers of 2,000 years ago. Learn more about the route that connected the Han Dynasty and Imperial Rome.
Two Empires
Around 2,000 years ago, two great empires stood at either side of Eurasia. In the West, the Roman Empire was at the height of its power, surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and having complete control over the goods traded there. To the far east, the Han Dynasty had gained control of much of what would eventually form modern-day China. The two great powers were too far separated to have any sort of military conflict, but there was plenty that the two could offer. The Chinese valued Roman metalworking and glass, while Chinese silks were among the most prized possessions in many rich Roman households. To this end, the trade routes connecting the two powers were called the Silk Road.
Of course, trade between East and West had been going on for centuries, predating even Alexander the Great's attempt to conquer the whole known world. While Alexander's empire reached India, the trade routes snaked further through the mountains of the Himalayas onto China and south to Southeast Asia. However, now with large markets at either end of the route, trade had become even more profitable. That said there were still plenty of obstacles for the would-be merchant.
Obstacles
Distance alone was not the only obstacle between the two empires, although the distance between the two empire's capitals was more than 5,000 miles. Instead, it was what was contained within those 5,000 miles that made the Silk Road such a treacherous route. If you were a merchant wanting to travel the Silk Road, starting in Alexandria (one of the great ports of the Roman Empire), you'd first have to cross the Arabian Desert into Mesopotamia. From there, you'd then have to cross the lands of the Persian Empire, which traditionally hated the Roman Empire. If you were lucky enough to make it through Persia, the Central Asian grasslands, or steppe, now presented itself as a large vastness of nothing but grass. . . oh, and raiding barbarians. If somehow you made it past that, the Gobi Desert, one of the coldest regions in the world, was your reward as you stumbled into the trading posts of China.
Of course, there were multiple routes. You could instead opt for the heat of India and the perilous mountain passes of the Himalaya, or even sail around Southern Asia and arrive in one of the Chinese ports. This could be faster, depending on how you timed it, but just as you would be prone to face barbarians in the Northern steppe, many pirates operated in the waters around Indonesia, relying on the many small islands as hiding places for secret bases. All of this, of course, assumed that you did not die of a disease that you would have no immunity towards or that people back home would even want to purchase your goods once you bought them.
Opportunity
Still, the opportunities presented by the Silk Road and its trading were too much for many to resist, although more merchants would travel much shorter distances than brave the whole 5,000 mile journey. As such, this meant that merchant towns sprung up along the Silk Road, including cities like Samarkand and Bukhara, as well as Kabul in modern Afghanistan. This mixing of cultures and goods made these places very rich, but also made them attractive targets for barbarian raiders.
Ancient India Civilizations
India is a country in South Asia whose name comes from the Indus River. The name `Bharata’ is used as a designation for the country in their constitution referencing the ancient mythological emperor, Bharata, whose story is told, in part, in the Indian epic Mahabharata. According to the writings known as the Puranas (religious/historical texts written down in the 5th century CE) Bharata conquered the whole sub-continent of India and ruled the land in peace and harmony. The land was, therefore, known as Bharatavarsha (`the sub-continent of Bharata’). Homonid activity in the Indian sub-continent stretches back over 250,000 years and it is, therefore, one of the oldest inhabited regions on the planet.
Archaeological excavations have discovered artifacts used by early humans, including stone tools, which suggest an extremely early date for human habitation and technology in the area. While the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt have long been recognized for their celebrated contributions to civilization, India has often been overlooked, especially in the West, though her history and culture is just as rich.
PRE-HISTORY OF INDIA
The areas of present-day India, Pakistan, and Nepal have provided archaeologists and scholars with the richest sites of the most ancient pedigree. The species Homo heidelbergensis (a proto human who was an ancestor of modern Homo sapiens) inhabited the sub-continent of India centuries before humans migrated into the region known as Europe. Evidence of the existence of Homo heidelbergensis was first discovered in Germany in 1907 and, since, further discoveries have established fairly clear migration patterns of this species out of Africa. Recognition of the antiquity of their presence in India has been largely due to the fairly late archaeological interest in the area as, unlike work in Mesopotamia and Egypt, Western excavations in India did not begin in earnest until the 1920’s CE. Though the ancient city of Harappa was known to exist as early as 1842 CE, its archaeological significance was ignored and the later excavations corresponded to an interest in locating the probable sites referred to in the great Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana (both of the 5th or 4th centuries BCE) while ignoring the possibility of a much more ancient past for the region. The village of Balathal (near Udaipur in Rajasthan), to cite only one example, illustrates the antiquity of India’s history as it dates to 4000 BCE. Balathal was not discovered until 1962 CE and excavations were not begun there until the 1990’s CE.
Archaeological excavations in the past fifty years have dramatically changed the understanding of India’s past and, by extension, world history. A 4000 year-old skeleton discovered at Balathal in 2009 CE provides the oldest evidence of leprosy in India. Prior to this find, leprosy was considered a much younger disease thought to have been carried from Africa to India at some point and then from India to Europe by the army of Alexander the Great following his death in 323 BCE. It is now understood that significant human activity was underway in India by the Holocene Period (10,000 years ago) and that many historical assumptions based upon earlier work in Egypt and Mesopotamia, need to be reviewed and revised. The beginnings of the Vedic tradition in India, still practiced today, can now be dated, at least in part, to the indigenous people of ancient sites such as Balathal rather than, as often claimed, wholly to the Aryan invasion of c. 1500 BCE.
MOHENJO-DARO AND HARAPPAN CIVILIZATION
The Indus Valley Civilization dates to 5000 BCE and grew steadily throughout the lower Ganetic Valley region southwards and northwards to Malwa. The cities of this period were larger than contemporary settlements in other countries, were situated according to cardinal points, and were built of mud bricks, often kiln-fired. Houses were constructed with a large courtyard opening from the front door, a kitchen/work room for the preparation of food, and smaller bedrooms. Family activities seem to have centred on the front of the house, particularly the courtyard and, in this, are similar to what has been inferred from sites in Rome, Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia.
The most famous sites of this period are the great cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa both located in present-day Pakistan (Mohenjo-Daro in the Sindh province and Harappa in Punjab) which was part of India until the 1947 CE partition of the country which created the separate nation. Harappa has given its name to the Harappan Civilization (another name for the Indus Valley Civilization) which is usually divided into Early, Middle, and Mature periods corresponding roughly to 5000-4000 BCE (Early), 4000-2900 BCE (Middle), and 2900-1900 BCE (Mature). Harappa dates from the Middle period (c. 3000 BCE) while Mohenjo-Daro was built in the Mature period (c. 2600 BCE). Harappa was largely destroyed in the 19th century when British workers carried away much of the city for use as ballast in constructing the railroad and many buildings had already been dismantled by citizens of the local village of Harappa (which gives the site its name) for use in their own projects. It is therefore now difficult to determine the historical significance of Harappa save that it is clear it was once a significant Bronze Age community with a population of as many as 30,000 people. Mohenjo-Daro, on the other hand, is much better preserved as it lay mostly buried until 1922 CE. The name `Mohenjo-Daro’ means `mound of the dead’ in Sindhi. The original name of the city is unknown although various possibilities have been suggested by finds in the region, among them, the Dravidian name `Kukkutarma’, the city of the cock, a possible allusion to the site as a center of ritual cock-fighting or, perhaps, as a breeding centre for cocks.
Mohenjo-Daro was an elaborately constructed city with streets laid out evenly at right angles and a sophisticated drainage system. The Great Bath, a central structure at the site, was heated and seems to have been a focal point for the community. The citizens were skilled in the use of metals such as copper, bronze, lead and tin (as evidenced by art works such as the bronze statue of the Dancing Girl and by individual seals) and cultivated barley, wheat, peas, sesame, and cotton. Trade was an important source of commerce and it is thought that ancient Mesopotamian texts which mention Magan and Meluhha refer to India generally or, perhaps, Mohenjo-Daro specifically. Artifacts from the Indus Valley region have been found at sites in Mesopotamia though their precise point of origin in India is not always clear.
The people of the Harappan Civilization worshipped many gods and engaged in ritual worship. Statues of various deities (such as, Indra, the god of storm and war) have been found at many sites and, chief among them, terracotta pieces depicting the Shakti (the Mother Goddess) suggesting a popular, common worship of the feminine principle. In about 1500 BCE it is thought another race, known as the Aryans, migrated into India through the Khyber Pass and assimilated into the existing culture, perhaps bringing their gods with them. While it is widely accepted that the Aryans brought the horse to India, there is some debate as to whether they introduced new deities to the region or simply influenced the existing belief structure. The Aryans are thought to have been pantheists (nature worshippers) with a special devotion to the sun and it seems uncertain they would have had anthropomorphic gods.
At about this same time (c. 1700-1500 BCE) the Harappan culture began to decline. Scholars cite climate change as one possible reason. The Indus River is thought to have begun flooding the region more regularly (as evidenced by approximately 30 feet or 9 metres of silt at Mohenjo-Daro) and the great cities were abandoned. Other scholars cite the Aryan migration as more of an invasion of the land which brought about a vast displacement of the populace. Among the most mysterious aspects of Mohenjo-Daro is the vitrification of parts of the site as though it had been exposed to intense heat which melted the brick and stone. This same phenomenon has been observed at sites such as Traprain Law in Scotland and attributed to the results of warfare. Speculation regarding the destruction of the city by some kind of ancient atomic blast (possibly the work of aliens from other planets) is not generally regarded as credible.
THE VEDIC PERIOD
The Aryan influence, some scholars claim, gave rise to what is known as the Vedic Period in India (c. 1700- 150 BCE) characterized by a pastoral lifestyle and adherence to the religious texts known as The Vedas. Society became divided into four classes (the Varnas) popularly known as `the caste system’ which were comprised of the Brahmana at the top (priests and scholars), the Kshatriya next (the warriors), the Vaishya (farmers and merchants), and the Shudra (labourers). The lowest caste was the Dalits, the untouchables, who handled meat and waste, though there is some debate over whether this class existed in antiquity. At first, it seems this caste system was merely a reflection of one’s occupation but, in time, it became more rigidly interpreted to be determined by one’s birth and one was not allowed to change castes nor to marry into a caste other than one’s own. This understanding was a reflection of the belief in an eternal order to human life dictated by a supreme deity.
While the religious beliefs which characterized the Vedic Period are considered much older, it was during this time that they became systematized as the religion of Sanatan Dharma (which means `Eternal Order’) known today as Hinduism (this name deriving from the Indus (or Sindus) River where worshippers were known to gather, hence, `Sindus’, and then `Hindus’). The underlying tenet of Sanatan Dharma is that there is an order and a purpose to the universe and human life and, by accepting this order and living in accordance with it, one will experience life as it is meant to be properly lived. While Sanatan Dharma is considered by many a polytheistic religion consisting of many gods, it is actually monotheistic in that it holds there is one god, Brahma (the Self), who, because of his greatness, cannot be fully apprehended save through the many aspects which are revealed as the different gods of the Hindu pantheon. It is Brahma who decrees the eternal order and maintains the universe through it. This belief in an order to the universe reflects the stability of the society in which it grew and flourished as, during the Vedic Period, governments became centralized and social customs integrated fully into daily life across the region. Besides The Vedas, the great religious and literary works of The Upanishads, The Puranas, The Mahabharata, and The Ramayana all come from this period.
In the 6th century BCE, the religious reformers Vardhaman Mahavira (549-477 BCE) and Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 BCE) broke away from mainstream Sanatan Dharma to eventually create their own religions of Jainism and Buddhism. These changes in religion were a part of a wider pattern of social and cultural upheaval which resulted in the formation of city states and the rise of powerful kingdoms (such as the Kingdom of Magadha under the ruler Bimbisara). Increased urbanization and wealth attracted the attention of Cyrus, ruler of the Persian Empire, who invaded India in 530 BCE and initiated a campaign of conquest in the region. Ten years later, under the reign of his son, Darius I, northern India was firmly under Persian control (the regions corresponding to Afghanistan and Pakistan today) and the inhabitants of that area subject to Persian laws and customs. One consequence of this, possibly, was an assimilation of Persian and Indian religious beliefs which some scholars point to as an explanation for further religious and cultural reforms.
Map of India, 600 BCE
THE GREAT EMPIRES OF ANCIENT INDIA
Persia held dominance in northern India until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 327 BCE. One year later, Alexander had defeated the Achaemenid Empire and firmly conquered the Indian subcontinent. Again, foreign influences were brought to bear on the region giving rise to the Greco-Buddhist culture which impacted all areas of culture in northern India from art to religion to dress. Statues and reliefs from this period depict Buddha, and other figures, as distinctly Hellenic in dress and pose (known as the Gandhara School of Art). Following Alexander’s departure from India, the Maurya Empire (322-185 BCE) rose under the reign of Chandragupta Maurya (322-298) until, by the end of the third century BCE, it ruled over almost all of northern India.
Chandragupta’s son, Bindusara reigned between 298-272 BCE and extended the empire throughout the whole of India. His son was Ashoka the Great (lived 304-232, reigned 269-232 BCE) under whose rule the empire flourished at its height. Eight years into his reign, Ashoka conquered the eastern city-state of Kalinga which resulted in a death toll numbering over 100,000. Shocked at the destruction and death, Ashoka embraced the teachings of the Buddha and embarked on a systematic programme advocating Buddhist thought and principles. He established many monasteries and gave lavishly to Buddhist communities. His ardent support of Buddhist values eventually caused a strain on the government both financially and politically as even his grandson, Sampadi, heir to the throne, opposed his policies. By the end of Ashoka’s reign the government treasury was severely depleted through his regular religious donations and, after his death, the empire declined rapidly.
The country splintered into many small kingdoms and empires (such as the Kushan Empire) in what has come to be called the Middle Period. This era saw the increase of trade with Rome (which had begun c. 130 BCE) following Augustus Caesar’s conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE (Egypt had been India’s most constant partner in trade in the past). This was a time of individual and cultural development in the various kingdoms which finally flourished in what is considered the Golden Age of India under the reign of the Gupta Empire (320-550 CE).
The Gupta Empire is thought to have been founded by one Sri Gupta (`Sri’ means `Lord’) who probably ruled between 240-280 CE. As Sri Gupta is thought to have been of the Vaishya (merchant) class, his rise to power in defiance of the caste system is unprecedented. He laid the foundation for the government which would so stabilize India that virtually every aspect of culture reached its height under the reign of the Guptas. Philosophy, literature, science, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, technology, art, engineering, religion, and astronomy, among other fields, all flourished during this period, resulting in some of the greatest of human achievements. The Puranas of Vyasa were compiled during this period and the famous caves of Ajanta and Ellora, with their elaborate carvings and vaulted rooms, were also begun. Kalidasa the poet and playwright wrote his masterpiece Shakuntala and the Kamasutra was also written, or compiled from earlier works, by Vatsyayana. Varahamihira explored astronomy at the same time as Aryabhatta, the mathematician, made his own discoveries in the field and also recognized the importance of the concept of zero, which he is credited with inventing. As the founder of the Gupta Empire defied orthodox Hindu thought, it is not surprising that the Gupta rulers advocated and propagated Buddhism as the national belief and this is the reason for the plentitude of Buddhist works of art, as opposed to Hindu, at sites such as Ajanta and Ellora.
THE DECLINE OF EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF ISLAM
The empire declined slowly under a succession of weak rulers until it collapsed around 550 CE. The Gupta Empire was then replaced by the rule of Harshavardhan (590-647) who ruled the region for 42 years. A literary man of considerable accomplishments (he authored three plays in addition to other works) Harshavardhan was a patron of the arts and a devout Buddhist who forbade the killing of animals in his kingdom but recognized the necessity to sometimes kill humans in battle. He was a highly skilled military tactician who was only defeated in the field once in his life. Under his reign, the north of India flourished but his kingdom collapsed following his death. The invasion of the Huns had been repeatedly repelled by the Guptas and then by Harshavardhan but, with the fall of his kingdom, India fell into chaos and fragmented into small kingdoms lacking the unity necessary to fight off invading forces.
In 712 CE the Muslim general Muhammed bin Quasim conquered northern India, establishing himself in the region of modern-day Pakistan. The Muslim invasion saw an end to the indigenous empires of India and, from then on, independent city states or communities under the control of a city would be the standard model of government. The Islamic Sultanates rose in the region of modern-day Pakistan and spread north-west. The disparate world views of the religions which now contested each other for acceptance in the region and the diversity of languages spoken, made the unity and cultural advances, such as were seen in the time of the Guptas, difficult to reproduce. Consequently, the region was easily conquered by the Islamic Mughal Empire. India would then remain subject to various foreign influences and powers (among them the Portuguese, the French, and the British) until finally winning its independence in 1947 CE.
Ancient Egypt Civilization
The civilization of Ancient Egypt is known for its stupendous achievements in a whole range of fields, including art and architecture, engineering, medicine and statecraft. Its great buildings on the banks of the River Nile still strike awe into those who see them.
Overview and Timeline
The civilization of Ancient Egypt was one of the earliest in world history. It is usually held to have begun around 3000 BC, when the lower Nile Valley became unified under a single ruler. By this date the only other people in the world to have a a literate, urban civilization were the Sumerians, in Mesopotamia.
Timeline of Ancient Egyptian civilization:
c.5000 BC: The coming of farming to the Nile Valley, As Details-
One of the great civilizations of world history, that of Ancient Egypt, is taking shape in the Nile Valley.
In the thousands of years after the end of the last Ice Age, North Africa had a much wetter climate than it does today. It was a well-watered grassland, supporting a varied wildlife. Hunter-gatherers roamed the region, exploiting the flora and fauna to be found there.
Over time the climate of North Africa began to get dryer. Over thousands of years the wet grasslands gave way to the Sahara Desert that we know today - a vast, dry waste, hostile to human societies of any kind. However, through the region which we now call Egypt, flowed the river Nile.
Near the Nile, life could survive. In fact, it could thrive. By around 5000 BC the Nile Valley was a swampland of reed beds, pools, and plenty of wildlife, all watered by the great river rolling by.
The drying of the surrounding terrain was pushing more and more people onto the narrow strip of land along the river banks. Archaeological evidence suggests a big expansion of population in the Nile Valley from around this time; and crucially, they had adopted farming. This had spread down from the Middle East, and was the only way that the growing number of people could live on such a limited area of land. They were already cultivating barley and emmer, which would be the staple crops of ancient Egypt, along with beans, peas and host of other plants.
Hard Labour
Despite the plentiful water, the geography of the Nile Valley offered major challenges to these early farmers. The Nile floods each year. This allowed plant life to thrive - for a time. If the water is allowed to flow on to the sea, the water levels drop, leaving the land to the mercy of the searing sun. Crops shrivel and die.
To feed the growing population, therefore, the flood waters of the Nile had to be channelled into pools and tanks, where they could be stored. As the waters receded, enough could then be available to keep the crops growing throughout the growing season. Bountiful harvests would have allowed a growing population to be fed.
To construct and maintain the dykes, dams, ponds, irrigation canals and drainage ditches needed to hold the flood water back, and then guide it along chosen paths to where it was needed, required a huge amount of labour. It also called for many communities to work together in a coordinated effort, on a (for that time) huge scale and over a wide area. This in turn required what we today would call "management". In those days, it would be seen as the sacred authority of powerful leaders.
A Civilization in the Making
Taming the flood waters of the Nile conferred another great benefit on the land. Its waters brought a rich load of mud from the lands further south, through which the long river flowed. During the annual flood, much of this was deposited as a wonderfully fertile soil on the valley floor. This allowed a very dense population to grow.
By around 3500 BC, the effort of irrigating and farming the land, carried out over generations upon generations, had reshaped the social and physical geography of the Nile Valley. The river was now flanked by numerous farming villages, surrounded by a dense network of irrigated fields. These villages were ruled by to powerful chiefdoms, each covering a section of the long Nile valley. Within these chiefdoms, a social elite had emerged, apparent to modern archaeologists in the refined grave goods recovered from the period. These were royal officials, serving sacred rulers, set in authority over the rest of the population to ensure that the work was carried out properly, and that the flood waters of the Nile were shared out fairly. Large, well-planned towns with fortified walls and brick-built buildings had also appeared. These developments represent a fundamental upgrading of material culture in the country.
In the course of their work, these officials were developing a range of capabilities which would later allow the civilization of ancient Egypt to flourish. These included organizing and controlling large numbers of people; deploying advanced techniques in construction, engineering and mathematics; and, possibly even by this early date, an early form of writing.
Within these chiefdoms, then, the characteristic features of Ancient Egypt, one of the great civilizations of world history, were beginning to take shape.
c. 3500-3000: The Pre-dynastic period, leading to the unification of Egypt, As Details-
The thousand years between 3500 BC and 2500 BC saw the civilization of Ancient Egypt reach full maturity.
Unification
Down to around 3000 BC Egypt remained fragmented amongst various chiefdoms. An interpretation of the thin available evidence suggests that the first powerful chiefdoms (or confederacies of chiefdoms) were centred on the largest towns in southern Egypt, such as Abydos and Hierakonpolis. The prominence of military motifs in the art of the period suggests frequent warfare, and it is easy to speculate that from this situation emerged a victor, who went on to dominate the entire country.
In any event, a unified kingdom had appeared by 2900 BC at the latest. The unification is traditionally credited to king Menes, but scholars now think he was a mythical figure, and not to be identified with the first king whose rule was clearly country-wide, Narmer.
The Early Dynastic period
Already in Narmer’s reign some of the key elements of Egyptian royal imagery are evident: he is represented as a living god, his monuments are adorned with heiroglyphic writing, and they are in a style that is recognizably “Egyptian” in motif and design.
Narmer was the founder of the 1st dynasty of Ancient Egypt (there would eventually be 30 or so dynasties), and therefore the period known to modern archaeologists as the Early Dynastic period. The capital was established at Memphis, which, along with Thebes, would become one of the two royal cities of Egypt.
During the Early Dynastic period, Egyptian civilization achieved its mature form. At their capital city of Memphis, the kings of the Old Kingdom erected more and more magnificent tombs for themselves. By the 3rd dynasty (c. 2650-2575 BC), these had evolved into huge pyramid structures. Modern scholars designate this development the start of the “Old Kingdom” period, one of the greatest ages of ancient Egyptian history.
The Pyramid Age
In the early years of the Old Kingdom, the kings of Egypt began interfering in the affairs of the peoples of the south, in Nubia. Under the 4th dynasty (c. 2575-2465 BC), an Egyptian colony was established deep in Nubian territory, beside the second cataract. This was withdrawn fairly quickly, but Egyptian officials remained active in the area, fostering friendly relations with the tribes who controlled the trade routes.
Djoser’s step pyramid at Sakkara (c.2610 BC) was the first in the sequence of Pyramids to be built entirely of stone, and it was not long before the giant pyramids of Giza were being built for the kings of the 4th dynasty (c. 2575-2465 BC). These enormous edifices were surrounded by a host of other tombs, of courtiers and officials. This complex served as the spiritual heart of Ancient Egypt for centuries to come.
The construction of the Great Pyramids were astonishing achievements.
They involved a very high level of engineering and mathematics, and amazing feats of organization and logistics. However it as not only in Pyramid-building that Old Kingdom Egypt excelled. Refined and lifelike sculpture in wood and stone, as well as a whole range of beautiful objects - jewellery, finely carved furniture, ivory cosmetic boxes - have been recovered from tombs of this period. It was in this period that the conventions of ancient Egyptian art were developed, and never afterwards, while this civilization endured, did artists and craftsmen stray too far from them.
c. 2650: The beginning of the Old Kingdom
c.2575-2465: The Great Pyramids of Giza built
c. 2150: The fall of the Old Kingdom leads to the 1st Intermediate period begins
2074: The Middle Kingdom begins; Egypt is united and powerful again
1759: The fall of the Middle Kingdom leads to the 2nd Intermediate period, and the occupation of norhern Egypt by the Hyksos
The period between 2500 BC and 1500 BC saw Ancient Egypt go through periods of division and weakness, and of unity and strength.
The First Intermediate Period c. 2150-2080 BC
The last large pyramid of the Old Kingdom was erected for Pepy II, after a 96 year reign (c. 2246-2152 BC). Perhaps partly as a result of his extraordinarily long reign, by his death the king’s authority seems no longer to have been so effective, nor his prestige so great. Provincial governors now had themselves buried locally, not in the royal cemetery at Memphis. They commissioned monumental works in their own name, and took credit for themselves for their policies, rather than giving it to the king.
This marked the beginning of what is known in ancient Egyptian history as the First Intermediate period, when central authority was weak and power became fragmented amongst provincial families, usually descended from Old Kingdom governors. Inevitably, this period of royal impotence ended in civil war.
This started in the south, where the family which ruled the minor city of Thebes began expanding its territories at the expense of its neighbours. Soon Thebes dominated the south, and then, under its ruler Montjuhotep I (c. 2080-2074 BC), succeeded in subduing the entire country. These events inaugurated the period known as the "Middle Kingdom" in Ancient Egypt.
The Middle Kingdom c. 2074-1759 BC
The king once again became the unifying presence in the country. A new royal burial complex was built, to the south of Memphis, to rival that of the Old Kingdom cemetery at Giza. Major reclamation projects were undertaken in the Fayum and Delta regions, bringing much productive land under cultivation. International trade – which was a royal monopoly – was expanded, particularly with the Levant and its major port, Byblos, and on the caravan routes to Palestine, where a string of forts in the Sinai desert were built to bring these more under Egyptian control.
In the south, the kings of the 12th dynasty (c. 1937-1759 BC) systematically brought northern Nubia under Egyptian rule, with forts being built down to the second cataract; and later, under king Senusret II (c. 1842-1836 BC), these were extended further south as far as Semna. To further expand trade with the southern lands, a Red Sea port was established as a base for trade with the land of Punt (a country probably situated on the south-western coast of the Red Sea).
he Second Intermediate Period c. 1759-1539 BC
When Montjuhotep reunified the country at the start of the Middle Kingdom, he seems to have left many of the local ruling families in place, and the provinces remained in the hands of what were essentially hereditary princes throughout the Middle Kingdom period.
During the 13th dynasty (c.1759-1641 BC), these gradually asserted themselves against the central authorities, and the power of the kings became diminished again. The weakness of the kings had an immediate effect in the loss of Nubia, which came under the rule of the powerful kingdom of Kush. The Nile Delta region seems to have fallen under the control of a dynasty called the Hyksos. Though the Hyksos were probably of Canaanite origins, they were fully assimilated into Egyptian culture, and they styled themselves as Egyptian kings. They ruled from the city of Avaris.
Reunification
Much of the Nile valley fell under the sway of rulers again based at Thebes, known to history as the 17th dynasty (c. 1641-1759 BC). An ambitious king of Thebes, Kamose, set about reuniting the “Black Land” in about 1540 BC.
He seems to have taken northern Nubia from the kingdom of Kush with relative ease, but Avaris proved more difficult, and it was left to his son, Ahmose (c. 1539-1514 BC), to complete the reunification.
It took five campaigns to take Avaris, and then Ahmose firmly established Egyptian control over the roads across Sinai, as far as Palestine. He defeated two rebellions against his authority, and was able to pass on a strong and united Egypt to his successors. The period of the New Kingdom, one of the high points in the long history of Ancient Egypt, had begun.
1539: The reunification of Egypt and the expulsion of the Hyksos begins the New Kingdom, a period when Egypt became a leading power in the Middle East
1344-1328: The pharaoh Akhenaton carries out a short-lived religious reformation
1336-1327: Tutankhamen reigns
1279-1213: The reign of Ramses II brings Egypt to the height of its power
The period of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt was one in which Egypt reached the height of its international power, and was a leading player in the war and diplomacy of the Middle East. This was matched by prosperity and firm government at home. However, decline set in after about 1200 BC, bringing an end to the great days of Ancient Egypt.
A Strong Monarchy
The kings of the New Kingdom concentrated power firmly in their own hands. The court was again the source of all authority, the localities firmly subordinated to central control.
The resources of the entire country were mobilized in a thoroughgoing way, this time not so much to create magnificent tombs for the kings – though the wonderful temples in the Valley of the Kings testify to the ongoing importance of this concern – but to developing the territorial and economic resources of the country. In so doing, they turned Egypt into a true imperial power.
An Imperial Power
To the south, Egypt waged an unrelenting war against the kingdom of Kush. By Thutmose I’s day (c. 1493-1481) the Egyptian frontier lay at the third cataract on the Nile – a mere 30 kilometres north of the Kush capital, Kerma. During the reign of Thutmose III (c. 1479-1425) they drove their frontier much further south, establishing a fortified town at Napata, deep within Kushite territory.
The lands thus conquered were assimilated into the Egyptian administration and heavily guarded with forts and garrisons. Native chiefs were co-opted into the provincial system as local officials, and they soon adopted the trappings of Egyptian civilization. Temples to the Egyptian gods were scattered throughout the land, a testament to cultural imperialism.
c. 1150 onwards: The New Kingdom falls into decline
728: Egypt is conquered by Nubian kings
From the time of Thutmose III, chiefs outside direct Egyptian control also recognized Egyptian suzerainty, giving their aid to the Egyptian gold-mining operations. It was these, along with the trade goods coming up from the south, that gave the Egyptian kings the wealth to conduct the large-scale international trade (which was still a royal monopoly) and diplomacy with which they furthered Egypt’s interests to the north.
International Trade and Diplomacy
In fact, international trade and diplomacy were so intertwined that it is doubtful whether the Egyptians recognized any distinction between the two.
The kings of the New Kingdom adopted a much more aggressive stance in their relations with the rulers of Palestine and Syria. Thutmose I led an army as far as the Euphrates, and Thutmose III undertook no less than 17 campaigns in Palestine and Syria. The strategic pattern seems clear.
The great seaport of Byblos was again the lynchpin of Egypt’s influence in the region and the logistics base for the Egyptian presence in the Levant, which was used to control the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the rich lands of Mesopotamia. Further south Egypt’s interests lay in securing the land-based caravan routes through Palestine.
Egyptian Imperialism
In order to pursue these goals, the Egyptian government adopted an “indirect rule” policy: Egyptian forces only intervened in Syria or Palestine on rare occasions, and Egypt did not seek to rule territories in Palestine or Syria directly. Instead, the Egyptian government used loyal chiefs of tribes and rulers of city-states to protect its interests in the region.
The Armarna letters, found in a royal archive containing over 350 diplomatic letters between the Egyptian king and foreign rulers, offer a fascinating glimpse into the international scene at this time. The king of Egypt related to the powerful kings of Babylon and the Hittites as equals (“brothers”), but to the many petty chiefs and kinglets of Palestine he was their overlord.
Religious Upheavals
The kings of Egypt during the period covered by the Armarna letters were experiencing – or perhaps provoking – internal struggles. Amenhotep IV (1344-1328 BC) sponsored the cult of the Sun god, Aten. Indeed, he replaced the god Amon with Aten as the chief deity in the Egyptian pantheon. He had himself renamed Akhenaten, and after a time promoted the worship of Aten as the one true god.
656: Egypt is occupied by the Assyrians
This was a revolutionary departure from the ancient religion of the country, and was quickly reversed after his death. The end result may well have been to increase the power of the priests of Amun, with their chief centre at Thebes. Certainly, subsequent pharaohs of the New Kingdom emphasised their loyalty to Amun.
The Hittite Challenge
A new and more dangerous phase began for Egypian foreign policy with the aggressive expansion of the Hittites. This posed an increasing threat to the trade routes to Mesopotamia, and hence to Egyptian commercial/diplomatic interests in Syria, and even Palestine.
It was the kings of the 19th dynasty that had to deal with this danger, above all one of the most famous kings in all Egyptian history, Ramses II (c. 1279-1213).
Ramses led his army to battle against the Hittites at the strategically sited city of Kaddesh, and won a famous victory there – or so he claimed in his account of the action inscribed on his temple in the Valley of the Kings. The battle came near to disaster for Ramses, and probably ended as a draw. In the end the rise of another power, Assyria, convinced both Ramses and Hattusili II of Hatti to come to terms, and in c. 1259 BC they agreed to divide Syria between them.
New Threats
By the end of the 19th dynasty (c. 1295-1186) a new threat was appearing from the west. Lybian tribes began migrating – which, given their military capabilities, effectively meant invading - into the Delta region from the western coastal desert.
The Egyptians built a series of forts to control this nuisance, and under Merenptah (c. 1213-1203 BC) and Ramses III (c. 1184-1153 BC) inflicted several defeats on them. In the time of Ramses III, also, a new set of invaders, this time from the north, had to be dealt with.
These were the “Sea Peoples”, an apparently diverse group of peoples whose origins lay in Europe but with elements who may well have been refugees from Asia Minor, where the Hittite state had recently been destroyed.
These threats seem to have been dealt with reasonably effectively, and, unlike many states in the Middle East, Egypt survived as a wealthy and united country. However, internal developments were at work to undermine the centralizing power of the kings.
Throughout the New Kingdom, temples had been accorded high status and a privileged position within the state. The lands and wealth they controlled made them indispensable allies of the king. This wealth and power had gradually been increasing, above all for the priests of Thebes.
It was now that the high priest of Amun at Thebes elevated himself to kingly status, challenging the status of the kings of the 20th dynasty (c. 1186-1069 BC).
Impotence Abroad c. 1153-1069 BC
A civil war broke out which ended with the confirmation of the Theban priest-king’s position as an autonomous ruler within the wider land of Egypt, and the permanent reduction of the pharaoh’s prestige and authority.
The weakening power of the king of Egypt at home soon had its effects abroad. To the south, Nubia was lost to a rebellious general. This cut off Egypt’s supply of gold, on which its commercial/diplomatic influence had been largely based. Local rulers in Palestine and Syria drifted away from their centuries-long Egyptian loyalties.
A glimpse of this decline in Egyptian power is seen in “The Tale of Wenamum”, in which a royal official encounters all sorts of difficulties and humiliations in a journey to and from Byblos. Whatever the exact significance of this tale – was it fiction? – the impression it gives of Egyptian international impotence is unmistakable.
Weakness at Home
The weakness of the kingdom of Egypt did not mean that there was an immediate fragmentation, however. A rapprochement was worked out between the high priests of Thebes and the kings of the 21st dynasty (c. 1069-945 BC), whereby the high priests seem to have usually recognized the secular authority of the pharaohs. In return, the pharaohs sent their daughters as brides for the Theban high priest; and in due course the families became so intertwined that the Theban high priest Har-Psusennes ascended the throne as pharaoh (c. 959-945 BC).
639: The Egyptians expel the Assyrians and begin a period of revival
For Ancient Egypt, the years between 1000 BC and 500 BC were ones of decline and foreign occupation.
For a time the kings were able to hold things together by co-opting leading provincial families as allies of the royal family through marriage ties and grants of hereditary privileges. The inevitable result of these policies, however, was further fragmentation of power, exacerbated by divisions within the royal family itself as different princes contended with each other. Rival principalities emerged within Egypt’s borders.
Kings from the South
It was into this situation that the king of Kush invaded Egypt, culminating in a campaign that brought the entire country under Kushite subjection in 728 BC. The new king, Piy, presented himself in purely traditional terms, and clearly saw himself as a true Egyptian pharaoh. Furthermore, he did not depose the existing kings and princes, but imposed himself upon them as their overlord.
The dominance of Piy and his dynasty (the 25th) was short-lived, however. A foreign policy which sought to regain Egyptian influence in Palestine brought Egypt into conflict with the huge and aggressive Assyrian empire. A series of Assyrian invasions, in which the invaders were by no means always victorious but which could in the end have only one outcome, resulted in complete defeat for the Nubian kings, their flight back to their Nubian capital, Napata, the sack of the historic city of Thebes, and the occupation of northern Egypt by an Assyrian army.
Assyrian Occupation 656-639 BC
For the first time in their long history, the ancient Egyptians found themselves conquered by a foreign empire. The Assyrians on the whole preferred to exert their control over Egypt through local rulers, who in effect swapped the overlordship of the king of Kush for the (more distant) overlordship of the king of Assyria.
This suited many of them very well. Above all, it suited the princes of Saise, in the Delta. Necko of Sais built up his power under Assyrian sponsorship, and was given the governorship of Memphis by them. His son Psamteck I (664-610 BC) inherited Necko’s positions and then took full advantage of troubles elsewhere in the Assyrian empire to expand his power throughout the entire country. By 639 BC Psamteck ruled an independent, united Egypt.
National Revival 639-525 BC
Psamteck founded the 26th dynasty (639-525 BC). The kings of this dynasty associated themselves with the glory days of Ancient Egypt by erecting monuments in the style of the Old Kingdom.
This policy masked great changes that had taken place in the country. Sizeable communities of foreigners now lived within its borders. Libyans, Greeks, Phoenicians and Jews had brought their distinctive cultures as well as their particular technological skills with them – it was with Greek assistance that Neko II (610-595 BC) set about building a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, and it was Phoenician seamen that he sent on a famous expedition to explore the west coast of Africa. Naukratis, a Greek colony, was now the chief port of Egypt. Foreign mercenaries lived in scattered settlements throughout the country. Temples now owned much of the cultivated land, correspondingly weakening the economic base for royal power.
The Babylonian Threat
The kings of the 26th dynasty resumed the traditional Egyptian policy of seeking to secure a predominant influence in Palestine. Their chief opponent was now the resurgent power of Babylon, who had take over from Assyria as the leading empire in the Middle East.
The Babylonians defeated the Egyptians at the battle of Carchemish (605 BC), and so got the upper hand in Syria. Two Babylonian invasions of Egypt (601 and 569 BC) were beaten back. Psamtek II (595-589 BC) secured the allegiance of the Philistine cities, and Apries (589-570 BC) supported Judaea in her abortive revolt against Babylon (589 BC) before occupying the Levantine cities of Tyre and Sidon (574-750 BC). His successor, Amasis (570-526 BC) occupied Cyprus in 560 BC. In the south, Psamtek II had invaded Nubia, and penetrated as far as Napata, but had not occupied the country.
Persian Conquest 525 BC
The occupation of Cyprus proved to be the high watermark of Egyptian success under the 26th dynasty. In 545 BC a new power in the Middle East, Persia, took that island from the Egyptians. The Persians went on to conquer the Babylonian empire, and in 526 BC invaded Egypt.
At the battle of Pelusium the Egyptian army was defeated, and Egypt incorporated into the huge Persian empire. This event marked the effective end of the history of ancient Egypt as the home of an autonomous civilization. Henceforth her history was as a member of a wider world, her fate largely determined by foreign players.
525: Egypt is conquered by the Persians
332: Egypt is conquered by Alexander the Great
305: Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals, founds a Greek-speaking dynasty
The Ancient Home of Great Civilizations
CHAPTER 1: THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION
A region of dry grasslands and fertile river plains, the Middle East was the natural home to the first agriculture, and then to the first civilizations.
The cradle of farming...
The Middle East is a huge area, with many different kinds of climate and landscape. Large parts are covered by desert or grassland; elsewhere there are highlands and mountains covered by forests. Running through all these zones are long rivers, especially the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, and the Nile in Egypt.
The highlands of the Middle East are the natural habitat of grasses, such as wild wheat and barley, and it was almost inevitable that agriculture based on these crops, which would eventually cover so much of the world, would begin here, around 10,000 years ago. Farming had spread around the Middle East by c. 6000 BC, and was gradually pushing westward into Europe and eastward into India and South Asia.
Large parts of the Middle East lie within a hot, dry zone, where rainfall is insufficient to grow crops such as wheat and barley. The melting snows in the high mountains and the spring rains in the hills carry fresh water and silt down into the lowlands, flooding the dry river plains and depositing a rich mud for miles around.
This means that the land surrounding the lower reaches of these rivers is potentially very fertile. However, it is too dry for farming most of the year - except during the spring and early summer, when there is too much water!
Farmers gradually mastered this challenging environment by developing irrigation techniques, beginning around 5000 BC. This created a wonderfully productive agriculture, lead to the rise of the first civilizations in world history, those of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and of Ancient Egypt in the Nile Valley.
Link: map of the Middle East in 3500 BC
Nomads
The communities which settled the broad river plains of Mesopotamia naturally came to devote much of their land to fields of wheat and barley, as this was the most productive use for it. In the highlands and grasslands surrounding these the river plains, however, keeping sheep and goats was a good use of the less fertile terrain.
The importance of stock-rearing increased as the expanding populations of crop-growers in the river plains grew, and created an intensifying demand for the animal products which they lacked (wool, skin, meat, cheese and so on).
As a result, societies grew up on the highlands and plains of the Middle East which specialised in stock-rearing, and took to a more nomadic way of life than before. These nomads were to play a large part in the history of the region.
The same was far less true for Egypt, where the Nile Valley is flanked by bone dry desert. Apart from near the banks of the river Nile itself, human habitation is only possible in the oases.
Trade on a new scale
The thousand years between 3500 BC and 2500 BC saw urban civilization spread across the Middle East, carried by long-distance trade.
The economies of the two great civilizations of the Middle East – Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia - were built upon irrigation systems needed to make the fertile soils of the Nile and Euphrates-Tigris river plains support large populations. However, being essentially mud, these river plains (especially Mesopotamia) offer precious little else other than good crops. They contain few minerals for metal and stone, trees for wood, and, away from the rivers, forage for too few sheep or goats for the required quantities of meat, skins, wool and diary produce.
To bring in these things, the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians turned to trade on a scale never seen before in human history.
The need for metals
For millennia, people had been using copper, a soft metal only useful for making jewellery and other decorations. Sometime around 3000 BC, the metal smiths of Mesopotamia developed bronze. This was much tougher than copper, and was ideal for armour and weapons, as well as for sculptures and building decorations. It was strong enough for farming tools, but was far too expensive, so farmers continued to make do with stone and wood implements.
Why was bronze so expensive? It is an alloy of two other metals, copper and tin. These metals occur naturally in widely separated regions, mostly some distance from Mesopotamia. The Sumerians needed to import both.
Bronze began being made in Egypt a little later than in Mesopotamia, and like Mesopotamia, it had no tin or copper of its own. It too needed to bring these metals in from outside.
As a result, trade routes radiated out from Mesopotamia and Egypt into neighbouring regions. Trade was carried up the river Euphrates and Tigris into Asia Minor, a mineral-rich region; and across into Syria and Canaan. Trade routes soon linked the two great centres of civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile valleys. The first great seaports in history emerged on the Syrian coast, at Byblos and Ugarit. To the east, trade routes spread into Iran in the search of metals and other goods, and connected with trade radiating out from the cities of the Indus Valley civilization. A sea route was also opened up along the Indian Ocean coast between Indus and Mesopotamian ports. To the west, the expanding trade links began to have affect the societies of south-west Europe.
The impact of trade
These trade routes had a major impact on the societies which they touched, for example leading to the rise of new civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean.
Wherever trade went, local markets sprang up and towns and cities grew – often, as in Asia Minor, around settlements of Mesopotamian traders. Literacy, sophisticated art production and other techniques of civilization spread. These markets acting as the nodes of long distance trade stimulated more local trade and crafts, which, by encouraging more intensive production of food and goods, raised the material wealth of these localities. Over the thousand years between 3500 and 2500 BC, urban life and the arts of civilization spread over much of the Middle East, and beyond.
Link: map of the Middle East in 2500 BC
CHAPTER 2: KINGDOMS AND EMPIRES
The period from 3000 BC through to 1500 BC saw the formation of large, well-organized kingdoms in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia.
The first large states
The long, narrow lower Nile valley lends itself to the formation of a single state to rule it. At this stage in world history, well-nigh impenetrable barriers guarded this land: to the north, the sea; to east and west, the desert; and to the south, a series of easily guarded cataracts rushing through narrow ravines.
From around 3000 BC, the lower Nile valley came under the united control of one regime. The rulers of what modern scholars call the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt brought the entire lower Nile valley under their firm control. It was these pharaohs who presided over construction of the earliest and most enduring of man-made Wonders of the World, the Pyramids.
Mesopotamia is far less amenable to unified control. Its broad plain, with its two great rivers and many branches, are wide open to outside attack or immigration. Protecting the settled farming communities has always been difficult, right up to the present day. Local power centres have therefore tended to be the norm. It was inevitable, then, that the land of Mesopotamia should produce a multiplicity of small city-states; and equally inevitable that any attempts to unite them under one rule would be short-lived.
Nevertheless, it was the Mesopotamians who produced the first real empires in world history.
The first empires
The first of these to appear was the large but relatively short-lived empire of Sargon and his successors. This state covered most of Mesopotamia and some of Asia Minor and Syria, reaching as far as the Mediterranean Sea. It clearly had a major cultural influence on Middle Eastern history. Brief as it was, it led to the imposition of the Akkadian language as the chief language of Mesopotamia.
This Akkadian empire was followed by another empire, centred on Ur, a Sumerian city-state located near the coast of the Persian Gulf.
The Amorites
By this time, much of the Middle East was being effected by the migration of a nomadic people called the Amorites.
We have seen how nomadic peoples, sheep- and goat-herders, sprang up on the fringes of the Tigris-Euphrates plain. Some time after 2500 BC such a people, the Amorites, settled the dry grasslands between Mesopotamia and Syria.
Sometime before 2000 BC, they began to move out of these wild wastes into the civilized lands on either side. There is increasing evidence that this expansion of nomadism was linked to the onset of a dry period, which lasted for some 200-300 years. The area of cereal-growing shrank as marginal lands, with restricted access to water, were abandoned. Conditions may well have become much more suitable for herders than farmers in many places. This dry period seems to have affected the whole of the Middle East, as well as south east Europe.
In any event, the Amorites (and their close relatives the Canaanites) had soon conquered cities and founded kingdoms in Syria, Canaan and Mesopotamia. The most successful of these new states was that centred on Babylon; under its famous king, Hammurabi (reigned c. 1792-1750 BC), it came to rule an extensive empire covering Mesopotamia and much of Syria.
The Chariot
The coming of the chariot was a significant development in Middle Eastern history, as it was in other regions. It was probably introduced by Indo-European speaking peoples coming into the region, either from the steppes of central Asia or eastwards from the Balkans, in Europe. Any ruler with a force of chariots at his call had an imediate advantage over any opponent who did not, and this military technology spread rapidly through the Middle East.
These Indo-European chieftains set up kingdoms which were to rule large tracts of the region - the Hittites in Asia Minor, the Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia and Syria, and the Kassites in southern Mesopotamia. Non Indo-Europeans also adopted this technology, with for example Assyrian rulers soon had chariots in their army.
The Hyksos
The civilization of Ancient Egypt, which up to now had flourished in relative isolation, was also deeply affected by these upheavals; in fact it suffered the first major invasion from the north since the founding of the united Old Kingdom of Egypt in 3000 BC.
The Hyksos were a nomadic people, quite likely near relatives of the Amorites. They entered Canaan from the eastern deserts at the same time that the Amorites were founding kingdoms in Syria. Whilst in Canaan the Hyksos adopted the chariot, and with this technology invaded Egypt. There, they defeated the old-fashioned (and chariotless) Egyptian army and established a powerful kingdom around the Nile Delta.
In due course, this provoked a national response under capable Egyptian leaders who drove the Hyksos out and established the New Kingdom of Egypt over the entire country. To achieve this, they too adopted the chariot as an important part of their army.
Link: map of the Middle East in 1500 BC
Great powers
The Middle East was by this time dominated by large and powerful states, and the relationships between them as they competed with one another for power and influence. New Kingdom Egypt, under its warlike pharaohs, was a major power in the region throughout this whole period. To its north, first the Mitanni and then the Hittites challenged Egypt for control of Syria and Canaan. These powers in turn were faced with a strong and ambitious Assyria, centred in northern Mesopotamia, while southern Mesopotamia was under the Kassite dynasty, ruling from their capital, Babylon. Another people to mention were the Minoans of Crete, where Knossos was undoubtedly the centre of wealthy and powerful state.
For the first time in world history, a group of major powers were involved in a long-lasting system of alliances, in which sophisticated diplomacy regulated the relationships between them. A glimpse of this can be seen in a cache of diplomatic correspondence between Egypt and other leading Middle Eastern states of the time, known as the Armana letters. Found in the Egyptian desert, these letters were written in Babylonian cuneiform. They were clearly written by highly educated civil servants working in a government bureaux devoted to foreign affairs.
Diplomacy and war
This alliance system was underpinned by marriage agreements and exchanges of gifts, and the territories between the leading powers were partitioned into spheres of influence. When these alliances were not able to contain the aggression of one power or another, war broke out, on a scale not seen before.
The first battles of which any details are known occur in this period. The leading armies now all contained large contingents of chariots. These were expensive to maintain and repair, and the crews who manned them required long training to manoeuvre them in battle. Armies were therefore more professional than before, more expensive, and required more elaborate organization. The states which maintained them, therefore, had to develop more effective tax raising capabilities than before, and larger and more complex bureaucracies.
CHAPTER 3: CATASTROPHE AND ADVANCE
The period between 1500 and 1200 BC was the high point of the Bronze-Age civilization in the Middle East. It ended in catastrophe for almost all the states concerned.
A double blow fell on them. From the west came the "Sea Peoples", a group of tribes set in motion by population movements in Europe and swarming along the coasts of Asia Minor, Syria, Canaan and Egypt. The Hittites were overwhelmed by them, their empire completely vanishing. The Egyptians, already weakened by internal struggles, only narrowly escaped complete defeat.
Meanwhile, another group of nomadic tribes called the Aramaeans, who had replaced the Amorites in the deserts and grasslands between Mesopotamia and Syria sometime in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, now expanded violently outwards, capturing cities in northern Syria and attacking deep into Mesopotamia.
Iron
This period of upheaval was accompanied by two major cultural and technological advances. Iron had been used in small quantities since the dawn of metallurgy, but only as a precious metal. Sometime in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, a new way of smelting and manufacturing iron objects had been developed, probably somewhere in Asia Minor. These developments made iron suitable for use in weapons and other artefacts.
At this stage, iron was no stronger than bronze, but the upheavals in the Middle East after 1200 BC probably disrupted the long-distance trade routes which made large-scale bronze production possible. Between 1200 and 1000 BC, therefore, iron, which is a commonly occurring mineral throughout the world, became used in making weapons. Being plentiful and cheap, iron also began to be used for making agricultural implements. In this, it is vastly more suitable than stone and wood, which, because of the expense of Bronze, had been the chief material for agricultural tools up to now. The spread of iron farming tools was to greatly raise agricultural productivity.
Gradual improvements in iron-smelting techniques increased its strength and flexibility, making it more suitable in armour and weaponry than bronze, and further increasing its use in agriculture.
The alphabet
The second major cultural advance was the alphabet. Like iron, this had also been developed sometime in later 2nd millennium BC, probably in Canaan. It is possible that its distribution was held back by opposition from the ruling elites. The cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing systems in use in the Bronze Age were highly complex and took a long time to master. As a result, literacy was restricted to a small class of priests, scribes and rulers, who could afford to put their children through long years of training. Literacy, in fact, was a mysterious craft belonging to those of elite status.
Alphabetic scripts, on the other hand, can be learnt quickly, and had the potential to spread to much larger sections of the population as reading and writing could now be mastered without a long, specialised education. The prospect of the masses becoming literate would have appalled the old elites.
The disruption of the late 2nd millennium, however, greatly slackened these elites' hold on power, at least for a time, and use of the alphabet began to spread.
New peoples to the fore
With the great powers of the late Bronze Age gone or weakened, new peoples were able to come to the fore. In Syria, the Phoenician cities adopted the early alphabet as their writing system. Being a trading people, having literate merchants and craftsmen was a valuable asset. When more stable conditions returned to the Mediterranean, after about 1100 BC, they pioneered long-distance trade routes as far as Spain, and even into the Atlantic, eventually reaching southern Britain. They grew rich on the proceeds of trade, but they would also transmit the use of the alphabet to the peoples of the Mediterranean.
Two other peoples emerged into the light of history at this time of upheaval. The Philistines had come to the region as part of the Sea Peoples, and settled in a confederacy of five city-states on the coast of Canaan. In fact, the country of Canaan came to be called after them, Palestine.
The Israelites
The other people were the Israelites. These had invaded Palestine sometime in the troubled times around 1200 BC, when the grip of the great powers of the area had been withdrawn. They had formed a loose coalition of tribes before being united under one king (the ill-fated Saul), around 1050 BC.
The Israelites had brought with them the first (as far as we know) monotheistic religion in world history, centred on the worship of the One God, Yahweh. This fact would have profound effects on later history.
Meanwhile the Kingdom of Israel flourished for a brief period after 1000 BC under its kings, David and Solomon, before splitting into two halves. The surrounding peoples who had come under Israelite control, the Moabites, Edomites, Philistines and Aramaeans, soon shook themselves free.
The Camel tamed
A final development to mention is the domestication of the camel at about this time. This allowed the desert fastnesses of the Arabian peninsula to be crossed by trade routes, and the way of life of the nomadic Bedouin tribes dates from this time. Probably connected to this development was the rise of an urban civilization in southern Arabia, beginning in 1000 BC.
Link: map of the Middle East in 1000 BC
CHAPTER 4: MULTINATIONAL EMPIRES
The early 1st millennium BC saw the Middle East covered by a patchwork of small and medium-sized kingdoms. On the Syrian coast, the Phoenician cities had risen to prominence as maritime trading states, and over the next two or three centuries would spread the Middle Eastern techniques, above all the alphabet, to the peoples further west. To its south and east, small Aramaean and Israelite kingdoms squabbled with one another. The kingdom of Assyria still held out in northern Mesopotamia, shrunken and defensive; and in southern Mesopotamia, the Babylonians had experienced invasion and upheaval.
Assyria and its successors
From 800 BC, however, the days of independence for these small kingdoms were numbered, as they fell under the domination of the kingdom of Assyrian. From the mid-8th century the Assyrian empire directly governed a huge swathe of the Middle East, from the Mediterranean coast to the Gulf coast, and it pioneered many of the techniques of imperialism used by later empires. Assyrian conquests were often accompanied by the destruction of whole societies, as large numbers of their people were resettled far from their homelands. The Middle East became a melting pot in which long-established peoples lost their historic identities. The most famous example was fall of the kingdom of Israel, in 722 BC.
In Asia Minor, the wealthy kingdoms of Phrygia and Lydia were able to resist Assyrian encroachments, but suffered from the first great invasions into the Middle East by nomadic peoples from the steppe. The Cimmerians and Scythians came sweeping down and inflicted great destruction on the stable societies of northern Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. By the time they retreated, the great Assyrian empire was gone.
In its place, two ancient states had reappeared on the stage, Egypt and Babylon. They were joined by an entirely new empire, that of the Medes, a people new to history who had migrated down from central Asia and settled in Iran during the previous centuries.
From the end of the 7th century to the late 6th century, these three powers, together the wealthy kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor, virtually divided the Middle East between them. It was during this period that the kingdom of Judah was destroyed by Babylon (586 BC).
The Persian Empire
From the 540s, all four powers fell one by one to the Persians, who thereby established the largest empire yet seen in human history (and the largest, in terms of area, in the Ancient World).
Persian rule was comparatively mild, and unlike their predecessors, they left local peoples and their cultures in place. Indeed, they actually encouraged the resettlement of the exiled Jews back in their homeland around Jerusalem.
By 500 BC, many local loyalties had been the undermined by the state-sponsored resettlements of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and the inhabitants of the Middle East were accustomed to living in huge multi-national states under imperial regimes. One common language, Aramaic, covered the region (although the official language of government was Persian), and with it, the Aramaic alphabetical script. Middle Eastern trade communications were further strengthened by the empire-spanning Persian road network.
New directions in religion
Also, by 500 BC the Middle East had become the first region to become acquainted with a new development in religion, monotheism. The Israelites had focussed their worship on the One God, Yahweh, which, paradoxically, had been strengthened by a period of exile in Babylon for many of the religious elite. The Persians had developed their own monotheistic faith in Zoroastrianism (perhaps more accurately Zoroastrianism should be described as a dualistic faith, as it holds that two gods, one good and one evil, battle for control of the cosmos, though good is assured of ultimate victory). What connection, if any, there was between the origin and early development of the two religions is unknown, although modern scholars often see a strong Zoroastrian influence on later Judaism.
For two centuries after 500 BC, the Persian empire ruled almost the entire Middle East. Then, in a few short years after 334 BC, the conquests of Alexander the Great transformed the region.
Link: map of the Middle East in 500 BC
CHAPTER 5: AN ALIEN CIVILIZATION
The Persian empire brought an unprecedented degree of peace, stability and prosperity in the century and a half after 500 BC. As the 4th century drew on, however, its political stability began to weaken and revolts began to rock the empire. Greek mercenaries played a major part in these episodes,and were highly valued for their fighting qualities.
Alexander the Great and his successors
These qualities were evident on a grand scale in the conquests of Alexander the Great.
After uniting the Greek city-states under his leadership, Alexander, king of Macedon, invaded Persian-held Asia Minor in 334 BC. Over the next ten years he completely conquered the huge Persian empire, and even invaded India.
After Alexander's untimely death in 323 BC, his empire immediately began to fall apart as his generals fought each other for supremacy. By 300 BC, the empire had broken into three main pieces, each under a family of one of Alexander's generals: Macedonia in Greece and the Balkans, under the Antigonids; a vast territory stretching from Asia Minor to India, under the Seleucids; and Egypt, under the Ptolemies. Other ruling families controlled smaller territories.
Despite the short time in which they occurred, and the swiftness with which they were divided up amongst his successors, the conquests of Alexander the Great transformed the Middle East for centuries to come. They imposed a new and alien culture on the region, the first time in history this had been done on such an extensive scale.
The Hellenistic Age
Alexander and his successors founded numerous Greek-style cities, right across the Middle East as far as Afghanistan and India. Each city was a self-governing community so far as local affairs were concerned; each had its gymnasium, temples, theatres, stoa (public square), town council and other institutions of a Greek city-state. They were populated by Greeks and Macedonians brought in in their thousands to bolster the rule of the new regimes, either veterans of the armies, or immigrants.
Some of these cities became very large indeed by the standards of the period, especially Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in Syria, and Ephesus and Pergamum in Asia Minor. These and the many smaller cities became centres for the diffusion of Greek language and culture throughout the region. Even the ancient cities of Asia Minor and Syria, such as Tyre, Sidon and Sardis, became Greek in language, culture, institutions and architecture. Greek cultural influences were felt far beyond the political frontiers of Hellenism: the statue of a southern Arabian king is depicted in Greek clothes, and Greek styles had a profound influence on Indian art and architecture.
Modern scholars distinguish this phase of Greek civilization from the earlier, Classical age, by labelling it the "Hellenistic" period. Advances in the arts and sciences, begun by the Greeks centuries earlier, continued apace, and some of the greatest names of Greek civilization belong to this period - Euclid and Archimedes being prime examples. New schools of Greek philosophy appeared, the most famous being the Stoics and the Epicurians, and centres of Greek learning flourished throughout the Middle East, at above all at Alexandria, Antioch and Pergamum.
Non-Greek peoples, if not completely absorbed into Hellenistic culture, were profoundly influenced by it. For example, the Jews, who by this time were to be found in all the major cities of the Middle East as well as in their Judaean homeland, translated their scriptures into Greek at this time, and Greek ideas became embedded in the Jewish faith.
The Hellenistic period was a time of economic expansion. This was helped by an international coinage based on the gold and silver standard which had originated in Athens. New trade routes were opened to the East, via the Indian Ocean, using the Monsoons, and later, via central Asia, the famous Silk Road to China.
A hybrid civilization
Cultural influences were by no means one way, and alien elements were grafted onto Greek ways. The Ptolemies of Egypt portrayed themselves as pharaohs; the Indo-Greek kings of Bactria were patrons of Buddhism; Egyptian cults spread throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean worlds, as did mystery cults from Mesopotamia and Iran. Babylonian astrology exerted a strong influence on Greek thought. It has even been suggested that the ideas of the Stoics contained an echo of Buddhism in their call to renounce worldy ambitions. Many Hellenistic kings were worshipped as living gods - a thing which would have shocked earlier generations of Greeks, but was a centuries-old tradition in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
It must be remembered, however, that for the majority of people in the Middle East, the farmers in the countryside, Hellenistic civilization remained an exotic, foreign plant. The Greek language and culture was mostly confined to the cities. Rural populations retained their traditional ways of life, along with their native languages and cultures.
Link: map of the Middle East in 200 BC
CHAPTER 6: A REGION DIVIDED
In the last two centuries BC, the Hellenistic kingdoms which had been carved out of the conquests of Alexander the Great were squeezed from both east and west.
Political division, cultural unity
In the east, the Parthians, a people closely related to the Persians, rapidly conquered a large empire, seizing Iran and Iraq from the Seleucid kings. In the west, the rising power of Rome gradually expanded into Greece and the Balkans, and then into Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and finally Egypt. Having swallowed up all the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean, Roman power faced the Parthians directly. An attempt by the Romans to conquer onwards into Parthia met with disaster at the battle of Carrhae, in 54 BC.
The resulting division of the Middle East between the Roman and Parthian empires set the pattern for the political map of the region which was to persist until the coming of Islam, more than six hundred years later.
The Hellenistic civilization, centred on the numerous cities founded by Alexander the Great and his successors which dotted the Middle East, survived in both portions of the Middle East. The Hellenistic cities of Iran and Iraq continued to flourish under their new Parthian masters, and the Romans, being the inheritors of centuries of Greek influence in their Italian homeland, actively fostered Hellenistic culture.
One partial exception to the prevalence of Hellenistic civilization was the conscious rejection of Hellenism by many Jews. By this date, Jewish communities could be found in many cities throughout the Middle East. Many of the inhabitants of the Jewish homeland of Judaea clung tenaciously to their ancestral ways. They had rebelled against the efforts of the Seleucid kings to Hellenize them, and established an independent Jewish state.
Many high-status Jews continued to embrace Hellenism, however, and as time went by even the elite of the new Jewish state slipped increasingly back into the Hellenistic world.
Link: map of the Middle East in 30 BC
The frontiers of civilization
As well as carving out an empire for themselves in Iran and Iraq, the Parthians performed a valuable service to the civilizations of the Middle East by developing a heavy cavalry which patrolled the borderlands of the steppe. For several centuries this defence would save the lands of the Middle East from being overrun by the turbulent nomads from central Asia, diverting their attention eastward into northern India.
Rome versus Parthia
For most of the period, the borders between the Roman and Parthian empires were comparatively peaceful, although heavily defended. Every now and again, wars between the two powers broke out. In these, the Romans on the whole got the better of the fighting, their armies occasionally attacking deep into Parthian territory. These invasions did not have a permanent impact on the geopolitics of the region, as occupying much Parthian territory for any period of time proved too much for them.
Apart from major wars, there was an on-going tussle for control of the strategically valuable kingdom of Armenia, which acted as a buffer between the two empires. This tussle usually took the form of attempts to place a puppet on the Armenian throne, sometimes backed up by military action. By 200 AD, Armenia was firmly in the Roman camp.
Link: map of the Middle East in AD 200
The revival of Iranian civilization
The fact that it was Roman armies who penetrated Parthian territory, and not vice versa, meant that the inhabitants of the Roman empire knew a greater measure of peace and prosperity than those of the Parthian empire. In the latter, the centres of Hellenistic civilization in Mesopotamia were in the direct path of invading Roman armies, and suffered accordingly. This had the effect of greatly weakening Hellenistic cultural influences in the Parthian empire. This development was strengthened by an apparently deliberate policy of fostering an Iranian cultural revival by the Parthian aristocracy.
Christians and Jews
The Middle East at this period was a region of religious change. New mystery religions such as Mithraism were spreading in the region. Above all, Christianity was born in Judaea and Galillee, and began spreading around the Middle East from after AD 30. By AD 200 it was to be found throughout both the Roman and Parthian empires, and even (on a much smaller scale) in India.
Judaea, the small area which gave birth to Christianity, saw disastrous developments for its Jewish inhabitants. It was the scene of two great rebellions against the Roman empire (AD 66-71 and AD 132-36) which ended in the complete destruction of the Jewish holy city of Jerusalem (and its rebuilding as a Roman colony), and the dispersal of the Jewish people from their homeland.
A new dynasty
In 224 the Parthians were overthrown by a Persian dynasty called the Sasanians. They tightened the administration of the empire and breathed new life into the struggle with Rome. By this time the Roman empire was facing difficulties on all its frontiers, and so the Sasanians were soon posing a formidable threat to Rome's eastern provinces. The nadir of Roman fortunes came when their emperor, Valerian, was captured by the Persians in 260. After this they were able to restore their defences and the Sasanians were unable to achieve such a striking success again for centuries. Nevertheless, the Persian empire continued to pose a constant threat to the security of Rome's eastern frontier, and from the late 3rd century onwards, the two empires, both now much more militarized than before, glowered at each other across their heavily armed frontiers. They even employed rival Arab tribes to protect their southern desert frontiers.
Transformations
Behind these frontiers, the Roman empire was changing almost out of recognition. The first great change was the adoption of Christianity as the leading religion of the empire. In this, Armenia in fact preceded the Romans, their king converting to Christianity in 314. Another innovation was the installation of a new capital at Constantinople. This brought the seat of imperial power much closer to the inhabitants of the Middle East. It also hastened a shift towards the use of Greek as the usual, if not as yet the official, language of government in Rome's eastern provinces. This process was given added impetus by the loss of the empire's western (and Latin-speaking) provinces in the 5th century.
Meanwhile, the Persian empire had adopted another monotheistic faith, Zoroastrianism, as its official religion. The practice of Zoroastrianism was largely confined to the Persian ruling class, the lower classes, especially in the cities, widely embracing Christianity.
30: Cleopatra, the last queen of independent Egypt in ancient times, dies, and Egypt is annexed by the Roman Empire
As can be seen, as well as being one of the earliest, Ancient Egypt was one of the longest lasting civilizations in world history. The great days of Ancient Egypt fell between c. 3000 BC and c. 1000 BC, but the civilization remained very much a going concern for centuries after this. Egypt was a leading Middle Eastern power again between 612 and 525 BC, and the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great felt the need to have himself crowned as pharaoh in 332 BC - which suggests that the civilization of the pharaohs still had life in it. His general, Ptolemy, on becoming independent ruler of the country in 305 BC, was also crowned pharaoh, and his line lasted down to the famous queen, Cleopatra, who died in 31 BC. Some may regard the civilization of Egypt under the Ptolemies as being more Greek than Egyptian, but the older civilization was still vital enough for the kings to feel the need to present themselves to their subjects in the traditional style of the pharaohs. After that, the Nile Valley became a province of the Roman empire, and was ruled from outside its borders for nearly a thousand years. During this time its culture changed out of all recognition.
This period of history, between the civilization's beginnings in c. 3000 BC to its conquest by the Romans in 31 BC, was almost a thousand years longer than the period between 31 BC and the present day.
Location
Egypt is situated in the Nile Valley, in the north east of Africa. Its origins lay in several chiefdoms in Upper Egypt, at Abydos and Hierakonpolis, which then spread northwards towards Memphis and the Mediterranean. By 3000 BC, the unified kingdom of Egypt occupied the entire Nile Valley north of a series of rapids called the 1st Cataract (the other cataracts lay in a chain stretching south along the River Nile into present-day Sudan). At its greatest extent, in c. 1250 BC, Ancient Egypt occupied the land in all directions from the Syrian coast in the north, to the Red Sea in the east, down the Nile Valley to Nubia in the south, and spreading west inland into the Lybian Desert.
The life of Ancient Egypt centered around the river Nile and the fertile land along its banks. The farmers in the long, narrow Nile Valley developed irrigation methods to control the flow of the water, so that crops could grow through both its rainy and dry seasons. The valley was fertile and rich, creating vast surpluses of crops that made possible incredible building projects such as the Pyramids and the temples of Luxor. The surpluses were also used to fund a refined lifestyle for the elite; to develop overseas trade and diplomacy; and to pay for wars of conquest.
The achievements of the civilization involved innovations in writing - hieroglyphics and demotic; in administration; in quarrying and surveying, maths and architecture; in irrigation and agricultural methods; as well as in develooing some of the earliest ships.
Government
The Ancient Egyptian civilization produced the first government to rule an entire nation. The Sumerians, who were the only other people to have a literate and urban civilization by 3000 BC, lived in small city-states, each numbering no more than a few tens of thousand people. The unified kingdom of Egypt, on the other hand, covered an entire country thousands of square miles in size and with millions of inhabitants.
The Pharaoh was the ruler of Ancient Egypt, both politically and religiously. The Pharaoh held the title 'Lord of the Two Lands', meaning that he ruled all of Upper and Lower Egypt; and 'High Priest of Every Temple', meaning that he represented all the gods on all the Earth. In Egyptian eyes, the pharaoh was a god himself, who stood between heaven and earth. His personal welfare and the welfare of the entire people were bound tightly together.
Pharaoh was in charge of the army, and would go to war when his lands were threatened - demanding valuable gifts from the conquered people if victory was obtained.
To help the Pharaoh in governing the land, an elaborate organization of officials, scribes and overseers – the world’s first civil service – developed, bringing the reach of government down to the lowliest villager. Egypt was divided into nomes, which were administrative regions (up to 42 of them), each governed by a nomarch. Pharaoh himself was surrounded in his palace by high officials, ministers and courtiers. For much of Ancient Egypt’s history the Pharaoh was served by a powerful chief minister called a Vizier. He represented the Pharaoh in the administration of the land, treasury and legal system. Temples were used as places of worship and also as granaries and treasuries where grain and goods were stored.
The Army
Soldiers of ancient Egyptian armies were armed with bows and arrows, spears, and round-topped shields made from stretched animal skin over wooden frames. Weapons and armour continued to improve after the adoption of bronze: shields were now made from solid wood with a bronze buckle, spears were tipped with a bronze point, and the bronze Khopesh - a hook shaped slashing weapon - was introduced. In the New Kingdom, chariots became a standard part of the army.
Pharaohs are often shown riding at the head of the army. Modern scholars tend to think this may be a propaganda device, as for a commander-in-chief to be fighting in the thick of the action alongside his troops would not necessarily have been the best place for him to be. On occasion, however, he may well have done; many commanders in subsequent history have charged into battle in person when conditions called for this kind of example. What is not in doubt is that being the commander of the army was an important part of the Pharaoh's role.
The prime duty of the army was to defend Egypt against foreign invasion. It was also at times deployed in conquering and occupying foreign possessions, in protecting mining expeditions to the Sinai and Nubia, and in garrisoning forts along important trade routes, especially in Nubia.
Religion
The ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods and goddesses. These included Ra, the sun god; Isis, the goddess of nature and magic; Horus, the god of war; and Osiris, the god of the dead. The pantheon of gods and goddesses gradually changed over time, as new gods became more important, and some less so. The rise and fall of gods and goddesses seems to have mirrored the political fortunes of the different temples and priesthoods. For example, when the rulers of Thebes became kings of all Egypt, and founded the New Kingdom, its local god Amun became the chief god, and was united with Ra to become Amun-Ra.
Gods were worshipped in temples run by priests. These were not apparently places of public worship: the place where the god's image was located was usually sealed off from the outside world. Only on occasions was the god brought out and shown to the public. Small domestic statues were used by normal Egyptians to worship the gods and goddesses in their own homes. Charms and amulets were worn for protection against the forces of evil.
Egyptian religious beliefs about the afterlife also changed over time. In early times, the afterlife seems to have been intimately connected to the preservation of the physical body by mummification. This always retained some force. However, the idea grew up that human beings are composed of both physical and spiritual aspects. After death, the latter lived on. Some people become disembodied souls, or ghosts, wandering the earth; but if judged worthy, a person could become a "blessed one", living in a land of goodness and plenty.
Economy and Society
As with all pre-industrial civilizations, Ancient Egypt’s economy was based on agriculture. The great majority of the people were peasant farmers. Because of the fertile nature of the Nile Valley, they were able to produce the large surplus which sustained the refined lifestyle of the Pharaoh and his court, his officials, the priests and all the other members of the elite. Peasants also provided the mass labour which built the pyramids and temples along the Nile Valley.
Agriculture
Farming in Egypt was dependent completely on the Nile River. Just a few miles away from the river, on both sides, was bone dry desert.
The flooding season lasted from June to September, depositing a layer of wonderfully fertile silt on the land beside the river. As much as the flood water as possible was stored in tanks and ponds. After the flood waters had receded, the growing season lasted from October to February. Egypt receives very little rainfall, so farmers irrigated their fields with river water from the reservoirs, and from the river itself. Ditches and canals carried the water to the fields.
Trade
Trade inside Egypt would have been greatly aided by the presence of the River Nile, and by the fact that no part of the country lay more than a few miles from this great waterway. Until modern times, for anything longer than very small distances, water transport has always been much less expensive than land transport. Numerous towns dotted the river bank, centres of local administration, and of local markets. Egypt has often been regarded as a civilization without cities. This is not true. Unlike the Sumerians, Egyptian cities were not independent states; however, there were numerous urban settlements in the Nile Valley, and Memphis was one of the largest cities in the world, if not at times the largest.
In the Bronze Age, international trade was almost the same as diplomacy, taking the form of exchanges of “gifts” between rulers. The Egyptians were ideally situated to take full advantage of this. Before the development of long-range trade routes across the Sahara, the Nile Valley functioned as the only “pinch point” through which trade goods from sub-Saharan Africa could flow north to the Mediterranean. Trading expeditions ranged far south into the present-day Sudan and the Red Sea in search of exotic goods such as ivory, gold, ostrich feathers and black slaves. These highly valued commodities underpinned Egypt's influence in the international world of the Bronze Age Middle East, finding their way to Hittite, Syrian and Mesopotamian courts.
Mineral resources
Egypt is rich in mineral resources, and these were well exploited in ancient times. Limestone and granite quarries occurred along the Nile valley. In the eastern desert was mined porphyry, alabaster, carnelian and emeralds. There were extensive gold mines in Nubia. Copper smelted from malachite ore mined in the Sinai. Iron deposits found in upper Egypt were utilized in the Late Period.
Many of these minerals were to be found in distant, inhospitable locations in the eastern and the Sinai deserts. They required large expeditions to get at them. These were organized by the government, and often had to be protected by troops. However, these natural resources allowed the ancient Egyptians to build monuments, sculpt statues of all sizes, manufacture metal tools and fashion jewellery.
Society
As in all societies of the ancient world, peasant farmers made up the bulk of the population. However, the land was owned by the Pharaoh, or by one of the temples, which were immensely wealthy, or by a noble family. Peasants were also subject to a labour tax, and were at times required to work on public projects such as irrigation or construction works.
Craftsmen seem to have had a higher status than farmers. Most of these probably worked for temples or the state. Scribes and officials were of high rank in ancient Egyptian society. Within this elite group were also priests, physicians and engineers; and from them were drawn the leading priests, ministers and courtiers.
At the very top was the royal family, below which was a powerful class of hereditary landowners (nobles). Slavery was known in ancient Egypt, but its extent is unclear. Most slaves seem to have been used as domestic servants in wealthy households rather than as agricultural workers. By law, slaves were able to buy and sell, like other people, or work their way to freedom.
Women seem to have had a comparatively high status in Egyptian society. Like men, they could own and sell property, make contracts, marry and divorce, receive inheritance, and pursue legal disputes in court. Married couples could own property jointly. Some women enjoyed huge status as high priestesses. On the other hand, as in virtually all ancient societies, public office was usually reserved for men.
Writing and literature
The first hieroglyphic writing that has come down to us dates from c. 3000 BC. A hieroglyph can represent a word, a sound, or a silent determinative; and the same symbol can serve different purposes in different contexts. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is composed of hundreds of symbols, which could be read in rows or columns, and in either direction (though in the majority of cases, written from right to left).
Hieroglyphics were, as far as we know, exclusively used on stone monuments and in tombs. In their daily work, scribes used another kind of writing, called hieratic. This uses a cursive script (that is, joined-up writing) which was far quicker and easier to use than hieroglyphics. Hieratic writing was always written from right to left, usually in horizontal rows.
Later, around 500 BC, and therefore towards the end of Ancient Egyptian civilization, a new form of writing, Demotic, came into widespread use. This was a phonetic, semi-alphabetical script, which began life as the transcription of everyday spoken language, but over time developed into the language of literature, high culture and religion.
Literature
Egyptian hieroglyphic literature is found on public monuments, and the walls of temples and tombs, and consists of records of the deeds of gods and men, as well as poetry. Love poetry, hymns, proverbs, spells and curses, instructional and medical texts, and myths and legends, are found in hieratic, and later demotic scripts.
The Story of Sinuhe is probably the best known work of Egyptian literature that has come down to us. Another popular tale is the Story of Wenamun, which gives an insight into Egypt in its declining phase.
Art
Much of the art which has come down to us is funerary art - art designed for the tomb. The Ancient Egyptians believed that life could continue into the afterlife, and so the dead were accompanied in their graves by everyday and luxury goods – including art objects - to help them enjoy their new life.
Ancient Egyptian art emphasised a rigid style which changed remarkably little over the millennia. This did not mean that Egyptian art was unchanging – but change took place within fairly narrow bounds. Ironically, in the declining centuries of Ancient Egyptian civilization, its art became more conservative and rigid, harking back to the glorious days of old.
The iconic Egyptian two-dimensional style is found in tombs, temples and statues. Egyptian statues were carved from stone and rock, or wood as a cheap alternative, with paint obtained from mineral ores quarried from surrounding areas.
The wall paintings in tombs often depict lively scenes of everyday life, bringing this ancient civilization vividly to life. The houses of the wealthy also had richly painted walls with scenes of people, birds, water pools, deities and geometric designs.
Architecture
The Ancient Egyptians built some of the most-awe inspiring structures the world has ever seen, such as the Pyramids of Giza. The construction of pyramids was in fact restricted to the earlier days of Egyptian civilization. Later monumental architecture can be seen most clearly in the temples and giant statues of the Valley of the Kings and Abu Simbel.
The average Egyptian lived in a simple mud, wood or brick abode, with the elite having elaborate multi-room mansions with richly painted walls, decorated floors, and built around courtyards.
Technology
Mathemetics
The Ancient Egyptians developed high levels of mathematical skills to enable them to build their pyramids and temples with remarkably simple tools. There mathematics seems to have been of a more practical nature than that of the Mesopotamians, and therefore may have influenced later civilizations less; however, this practical mathematics must have been of a very high order indeed.
Medicine
Ancient Egyptian funerary practices, which involved embalming the dead, did not lead to detailed knowledge of human anatomy. Nevertheless, Egyptian medicine acquired an excellent reputation in the Ancient World. Ancient Egyptian doctors could stitch up wounds, repair broken bones and amputate infected limbs. Cuts were bandaged by raw meat, linen, and swabs soaked with honey. Opium was also used as a painkiller. Onions and garlic were used as health foods in the diet.
Close proximity to the Nile meant that water-borne diseases, such as malaria, were rife. Other common ailments included physical stresses caused from a life of labour. Life expectancy was between 30 (women) and 35 (men), however about one third of infants never reached adulthood.
Ship Building
The long river along which Ancient Egyptian civilization flourished was an ideal environment for the development of boat technology. As early as 3000 BC an Egyptian ship of 75ft in length had been built. Planks of wood were originally held together by straps, with reeds or grass pushed in to seal the gaps. Soon tree nails were used to hold planks together, with pitch and caulking to close the seams; and mortise and tenon joints had also been developed. However, despite having ships on which to sail, they were not renowned as great sailors and do not seem to have engage in shipping across the Mediterranean or Red Seas on a regular basis.
Ancient Egypt in World History
The clearest evidence for the legacy of Ancient Egypt can be seen in architecture. The later Egyptian temples look very similar to early Greek temples; and it has been suggested that the Ancient Greeks got the very idea of monumental building in stone from the Egyptians.
Other items of Egypt’s legacy are harder to pin down. Archaic Greek sculpture seems to be more closely related to Mesopotamian and astronomical models than Egyptian; similarly, Greek mathematics bears a closer relationship to Babylonian precedents.
What is unmistakable is that this ancient civilization has exercised an unmatched spell upon future civilizations. The Greeks already regarded Egypt as a land of wisdom and mystery, and the Ancient Roman fascination with Egypt can be seen in the number of obelisks to be found in the city of Rome to this day (some of them shipped from Egypt to the imperial capital, others copies of Egyptian models). The medieval Arabs wrote about Egyptian civilization, and the modern European fascination with Egypt was fuelled by Napoleon’s conquest of the country in 1798. Modern Egyptology started at that date, and has continued ever since. Today, Egypt is one of the prime tourist destinations of the world, witnessing to the ongoing fascination with this, one of the world’s truly great civilizations.
So what, in sum, is the place of Ancient Egypt in world history? It is surely this - here, almost at the very beginnings of recorded history, was a great civilization which produced wonderful art, architecture, engineering, literature, medicine and so on. The wide range of highly-developed practical techniques these involved were transmitted to other peoples and later cultures; but more than this, what an inspiration it must have been for the civilizations which came after! We know that many Greeks and Romans travelled to the land of Egypt, and were awed by the magnificent remains they saw there. In short, Ancient Egypt set the bar high!
India is a country in South Asia whose name comes from the Indus River. The name `Bharata’ is used as a designation for the country in their constitution referencing the ancient mythological emperor, Bharata, whose story is told, in part, in the Indian epic Mahabharata. According to the writings known as the Puranas (religious/historical texts written down in the 5th century CE) Bharata conquered the whole sub-continent of India and ruled the land in peace and harmony. The land was, therefore, known as Bharatavarsha (`the sub-continent of Bharata’). Homonid activity in the Indian sub-continent stretches back over 250,000 years and it is, therefore, one of the oldest inhabited regions on the planet.
Archaeological excavations have discovered artifacts used by early humans, including stone tools, which suggest an extremely early date for human habitation and technology in the area. While the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt have long been recognized for their celebrated contributions to civilization, India has often been overlooked, especially in the West, though her history and culture is just as rich.
PRE-HISTORY OF INDIA
The areas of present-day India, Pakistan, and Nepal have provided archaeologists and scholars with the richest sites of the most ancient pedigree. The species Homo heidelbergensis (a proto human who was an ancestor of modern Homo sapiens) inhabited the sub-continent of India centuries before humans migrated into the region known as Europe. Evidence of the existence of Homo heidelbergensis was first discovered in Germany in 1907 and, since, further discoveries have established fairly clear migration patterns of this species out of Africa. Recognition of the antiquity of their presence in India has been largely due to the fairly late archaeological interest in the area as, unlike work in Mesopotamia and Egypt, Western excavations in India did not begin in earnest until the 1920’s CE. Though the ancient city of Harappa was known to exist as early as 1842 CE, its archaeological significance was ignored and the later excavations corresponded to an interest in locating the probable sites referred to in the great Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana (both of the 5th or 4th centuries BCE) while ignoring the possibility of a much more ancient past for the region. The village of Balathal (near Udaipur in Rajasthan), to cite only one example, illustrates the antiquity of India’s history as it dates to 4000 BCE. Balathal was not discovered until 1962 CE and excavations were not begun there until the 1990’s CE.
Archaeological excavations in the past fifty years have dramatically changed the understanding of India’s past and, by extension, world history. A 4000 year-old skeleton discovered at Balathal in 2009 CE provides the oldest evidence of leprosy in India. Prior to this find, leprosy was considered a much younger disease thought to have been carried from Africa to India at some point and then from India to Europe by the army of Alexander the Great following his death in 323 BCE. It is now understood that significant human activity was underway in India by the Holocene Period (10,000 years ago) and that many historical assumptions based upon earlier work in Egypt and Mesopotamia, need to be reviewed and revised. The beginnings of the Vedic tradition in India, still practiced today, can now be dated, at least in part, to the indigenous people of ancient sites such as Balathal rather than, as often claimed, wholly to the Aryan invasion of c. 1500 BCE.
MOHENJO-DARO AND HARAPPAN CIVILIZATION
The Indus Valley Civilization dates to 5000 BCE and grew steadily throughout the lower Ganetic Valley region southwards and northwards to Malwa. The cities of this period were larger than contemporary settlements in other countries, were situated according to cardinal points, and were built of mud bricks, often kiln-fired. Houses were constructed with a large courtyard opening from the front door, a kitchen/work room for the preparation of food, and smaller bedrooms. Family activities seem to have centred on the front of the house, particularly the courtyard and, in this, are similar to what has been inferred from sites in Rome, Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia.
The most famous sites of this period are the great cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa both located in present-day Pakistan (Mohenjo-Daro in the Sindh province and Harappa in Punjab) which was part of India until the 1947 CE partition of the country which created the separate nation. Harappa has given its name to the Harappan Civilization (another name for the Indus Valley Civilization) which is usually divided into Early, Middle, and Mature periods corresponding roughly to 5000-4000 BCE (Early), 4000-2900 BCE (Middle), and 2900-1900 BCE (Mature). Harappa dates from the Middle period (c. 3000 BCE) while Mohenjo-Daro was built in the Mature period (c. 2600 BCE). Harappa was largely destroyed in the 19th century when British workers carried away much of the city for use as ballast in constructing the railroad and many buildings had already been dismantled by citizens of the local village of Harappa (which gives the site its name) for use in their own projects. It is therefore now difficult to determine the historical significance of Harappa save that it is clear it was once a significant Bronze Age community with a population of as many as 30,000 people. Mohenjo-Daro, on the other hand, is much better preserved as it lay mostly buried until 1922 CE. The name `Mohenjo-Daro’ means `mound of the dead’ in Sindhi. The original name of the city is unknown although various possibilities have been suggested by finds in the region, among them, the Dravidian name `Kukkutarma’, the city of the cock, a possible allusion to the site as a center of ritual cock-fighting or, perhaps, as a breeding centre for cocks.
Mohenjo-Daro was an elaborately constructed city with streets laid out evenly at right angles and a sophisticated drainage system. The Great Bath, a central structure at the site, was heated and seems to have been a focal point for the community. The citizens were skilled in the use of metals such as copper, bronze, lead and tin (as evidenced by art works such as the bronze statue of the Dancing Girl and by individual seals) and cultivated barley, wheat, peas, sesame, and cotton. Trade was an important source of commerce and it is thought that ancient Mesopotamian texts which mention Magan and Meluhha refer to India generally or, perhaps, Mohenjo-Daro specifically. Artifacts from the Indus Valley region have been found at sites in Mesopotamia though their precise point of origin in India is not always clear.
The people of the Harappan Civilization worshipped many gods and engaged in ritual worship. Statues of various deities (such as, Indra, the god of storm and war) have been found at many sites and, chief among them, terracotta pieces depicting the Shakti (the Mother Goddess) suggesting a popular, common worship of the feminine principle. In about 1500 BCE it is thought another race, known as the Aryans, migrated into India through the Khyber Pass and assimilated into the existing culture, perhaps bringing their gods with them. While it is widely accepted that the Aryans brought the horse to India, there is some debate as to whether they introduced new deities to the region or simply influenced the existing belief structure. The Aryans are thought to have been pantheists (nature worshippers) with a special devotion to the sun and it seems uncertain they would have had anthropomorphic gods.
At about this same time (c. 1700-1500 BCE) the Harappan culture began to decline. Scholars cite climate change as one possible reason. The Indus River is thought to have begun flooding the region more regularly (as evidenced by approximately 30 feet or 9 metres of silt at Mohenjo-Daro) and the great cities were abandoned. Other scholars cite the Aryan migration as more of an invasion of the land which brought about a vast displacement of the populace. Among the most mysterious aspects of Mohenjo-Daro is the vitrification of parts of the site as though it had been exposed to intense heat which melted the brick and stone. This same phenomenon has been observed at sites such as Traprain Law in Scotland and attributed to the results of warfare. Speculation regarding the destruction of the city by some kind of ancient atomic blast (possibly the work of aliens from other planets) is not generally regarded as credible.
THE VEDIC PERIOD
The Aryan influence, some scholars claim, gave rise to what is known as the Vedic Period in India (c. 1700- 150 BCE) characterized by a pastoral lifestyle and adherence to the religious texts known as The Vedas. Society became divided into four classes (the Varnas) popularly known as `the caste system’ which were comprised of the Brahmana at the top (priests and scholars), the Kshatriya next (the warriors), the Vaishya (farmers and merchants), and the Shudra (labourers). The lowest caste was the Dalits, the untouchables, who handled meat and waste, though there is some debate over whether this class existed in antiquity. At first, it seems this caste system was merely a reflection of one’s occupation but, in time, it became more rigidly interpreted to be determined by one’s birth and one was not allowed to change castes nor to marry into a caste other than one’s own. This understanding was a reflection of the belief in an eternal order to human life dictated by a supreme deity.
While the religious beliefs which characterized the Vedic Period are considered much older, it was during this time that they became systematized as the religion of Sanatan Dharma (which means `Eternal Order’) known today as Hinduism (this name deriving from the Indus (or Sindus) River where worshippers were known to gather, hence, `Sindus’, and then `Hindus’). The underlying tenet of Sanatan Dharma is that there is an order and a purpose to the universe and human life and, by accepting this order and living in accordance with it, one will experience life as it is meant to be properly lived. While Sanatan Dharma is considered by many a polytheistic religion consisting of many gods, it is actually monotheistic in that it holds there is one god, Brahma (the Self), who, because of his greatness, cannot be fully apprehended save through the many aspects which are revealed as the different gods of the Hindu pantheon. It is Brahma who decrees the eternal order and maintains the universe through it. This belief in an order to the universe reflects the stability of the society in which it grew and flourished as, during the Vedic Period, governments became centralized and social customs integrated fully into daily life across the region. Besides The Vedas, the great religious and literary works of The Upanishads, The Puranas, The Mahabharata, and The Ramayana all come from this period.
In the 6th century BCE, the religious reformers Vardhaman Mahavira (549-477 BCE) and Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 BCE) broke away from mainstream Sanatan Dharma to eventually create their own religions of Jainism and Buddhism. These changes in religion were a part of a wider pattern of social and cultural upheaval which resulted in the formation of city states and the rise of powerful kingdoms (such as the Kingdom of Magadha under the ruler Bimbisara). Increased urbanization and wealth attracted the attention of Cyrus, ruler of the Persian Empire, who invaded India in 530 BCE and initiated a campaign of conquest in the region. Ten years later, under the reign of his son, Darius I, northern India was firmly under Persian control (the regions corresponding to Afghanistan and Pakistan today) and the inhabitants of that area subject to Persian laws and customs. One consequence of this, possibly, was an assimilation of Persian and Indian religious beliefs which some scholars point to as an explanation for further religious and cultural reforms.
Map of India, 600 BCE
THE GREAT EMPIRES OF ANCIENT INDIA
Persia held dominance in northern India until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 327 BCE. One year later, Alexander had defeated the Achaemenid Empire and firmly conquered the Indian subcontinent. Again, foreign influences were brought to bear on the region giving rise to the Greco-Buddhist culture which impacted all areas of culture in northern India from art to religion to dress. Statues and reliefs from this period depict Buddha, and other figures, as distinctly Hellenic in dress and pose (known as the Gandhara School of Art). Following Alexander’s departure from India, the Maurya Empire (322-185 BCE) rose under the reign of Chandragupta Maurya (322-298) until, by the end of the third century BCE, it ruled over almost all of northern India.
Chandragupta’s son, Bindusara reigned between 298-272 BCE and extended the empire throughout the whole of India. His son was Ashoka the Great (lived 304-232, reigned 269-232 BCE) under whose rule the empire flourished at its height. Eight years into his reign, Ashoka conquered the eastern city-state of Kalinga which resulted in a death toll numbering over 100,000. Shocked at the destruction and death, Ashoka embraced the teachings of the Buddha and embarked on a systematic programme advocating Buddhist thought and principles. He established many monasteries and gave lavishly to Buddhist communities. His ardent support of Buddhist values eventually caused a strain on the government both financially and politically as even his grandson, Sampadi, heir to the throne, opposed his policies. By the end of Ashoka’s reign the government treasury was severely depleted through his regular religious donations and, after his death, the empire declined rapidly.
The country splintered into many small kingdoms and empires (such as the Kushan Empire) in what has come to be called the Middle Period. This era saw the increase of trade with Rome (which had begun c. 130 BCE) following Augustus Caesar’s conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE (Egypt had been India’s most constant partner in trade in the past). This was a time of individual and cultural development in the various kingdoms which finally flourished in what is considered the Golden Age of India under the reign of the Gupta Empire (320-550 CE).
The Gupta Empire is thought to have been founded by one Sri Gupta (`Sri’ means `Lord’) who probably ruled between 240-280 CE. As Sri Gupta is thought to have been of the Vaishya (merchant) class, his rise to power in defiance of the caste system is unprecedented. He laid the foundation for the government which would so stabilize India that virtually every aspect of culture reached its height under the reign of the Guptas. Philosophy, literature, science, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, technology, art, engineering, religion, and astronomy, among other fields, all flourished during this period, resulting in some of the greatest of human achievements. The Puranas of Vyasa were compiled during this period and the famous caves of Ajanta and Ellora, with their elaborate carvings and vaulted rooms, were also begun. Kalidasa the poet and playwright wrote his masterpiece Shakuntala and the Kamasutra was also written, or compiled from earlier works, by Vatsyayana. Varahamihira explored astronomy at the same time as Aryabhatta, the mathematician, made his own discoveries in the field and also recognized the importance of the concept of zero, which he is credited with inventing. As the founder of the Gupta Empire defied orthodox Hindu thought, it is not surprising that the Gupta rulers advocated and propagated Buddhism as the national belief and this is the reason for the plentitude of Buddhist works of art, as opposed to Hindu, at sites such as Ajanta and Ellora.
THE DECLINE OF EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF ISLAM
The empire declined slowly under a succession of weak rulers until it collapsed around 550 CE. The Gupta Empire was then replaced by the rule of Harshavardhan (590-647) who ruled the region for 42 years. A literary man of considerable accomplishments (he authored three plays in addition to other works) Harshavardhan was a patron of the arts and a devout Buddhist who forbade the killing of animals in his kingdom but recognized the necessity to sometimes kill humans in battle. He was a highly skilled military tactician who was only defeated in the field once in his life. Under his reign, the north of India flourished but his kingdom collapsed following his death. The invasion of the Huns had been repeatedly repelled by the Guptas and then by Harshavardhan but, with the fall of his kingdom, India fell into chaos and fragmented into small kingdoms lacking the unity necessary to fight off invading forces.
In 712 CE the Muslim general Muhammed bin Quasim conquered northern India, establishing himself in the region of modern-day Pakistan. The Muslim invasion saw an end to the indigenous empires of India and, from then on, independent city states or communities under the control of a city would be the standard model of government. The Islamic Sultanates rose in the region of modern-day Pakistan and spread north-west. The disparate world views of the religions which now contested each other for acceptance in the region and the diversity of languages spoken, made the unity and cultural advances, such as were seen in the time of the Guptas, difficult to reproduce. Consequently, the region was easily conquered by the Islamic Mughal Empire. India would then remain subject to various foreign influences and powers (among them the Portuguese, the French, and the British) until finally winning its independence in 1947 CE.
Ancient Egypt Civilization
The civilization of Ancient Egypt is known for its stupendous achievements in a whole range of fields, including art and architecture, engineering, medicine and statecraft. Its great buildings on the banks of the River Nile still strike awe into those who see them.
Overview and Timeline
The civilization of Ancient Egypt was one of the earliest in world history. It is usually held to have begun around 3000 BC, when the lower Nile Valley became unified under a single ruler. By this date the only other people in the world to have a a literate, urban civilization were the Sumerians, in Mesopotamia.
Timeline of Ancient Egyptian civilization:
c.5000 BC: The coming of farming to the Nile Valley, As Details-
One of the great civilizations of world history, that of Ancient Egypt, is taking shape in the Nile Valley.
In the thousands of years after the end of the last Ice Age, North Africa had a much wetter climate than it does today. It was a well-watered grassland, supporting a varied wildlife. Hunter-gatherers roamed the region, exploiting the flora and fauna to be found there.
Over time the climate of North Africa began to get dryer. Over thousands of years the wet grasslands gave way to the Sahara Desert that we know today - a vast, dry waste, hostile to human societies of any kind. However, through the region which we now call Egypt, flowed the river Nile.
Near the Nile, life could survive. In fact, it could thrive. By around 5000 BC the Nile Valley was a swampland of reed beds, pools, and plenty of wildlife, all watered by the great river rolling by.
The drying of the surrounding terrain was pushing more and more people onto the narrow strip of land along the river banks. Archaeological evidence suggests a big expansion of population in the Nile Valley from around this time; and crucially, they had adopted farming. This had spread down from the Middle East, and was the only way that the growing number of people could live on such a limited area of land. They were already cultivating barley and emmer, which would be the staple crops of ancient Egypt, along with beans, peas and host of other plants.
Hard Labour
Despite the plentiful water, the geography of the Nile Valley offered major challenges to these early farmers. The Nile floods each year. This allowed plant life to thrive - for a time. If the water is allowed to flow on to the sea, the water levels drop, leaving the land to the mercy of the searing sun. Crops shrivel and die.
To feed the growing population, therefore, the flood waters of the Nile had to be channelled into pools and tanks, where they could be stored. As the waters receded, enough could then be available to keep the crops growing throughout the growing season. Bountiful harvests would have allowed a growing population to be fed.
To construct and maintain the dykes, dams, ponds, irrigation canals and drainage ditches needed to hold the flood water back, and then guide it along chosen paths to where it was needed, required a huge amount of labour. It also called for many communities to work together in a coordinated effort, on a (for that time) huge scale and over a wide area. This in turn required what we today would call "management". In those days, it would be seen as the sacred authority of powerful leaders.
A Civilization in the Making
Taming the flood waters of the Nile conferred another great benefit on the land. Its waters brought a rich load of mud from the lands further south, through which the long river flowed. During the annual flood, much of this was deposited as a wonderfully fertile soil on the valley floor. This allowed a very dense population to grow.
By around 3500 BC, the effort of irrigating and farming the land, carried out over generations upon generations, had reshaped the social and physical geography of the Nile Valley. The river was now flanked by numerous farming villages, surrounded by a dense network of irrigated fields. These villages were ruled by to powerful chiefdoms, each covering a section of the long Nile valley. Within these chiefdoms, a social elite had emerged, apparent to modern archaeologists in the refined grave goods recovered from the period. These were royal officials, serving sacred rulers, set in authority over the rest of the population to ensure that the work was carried out properly, and that the flood waters of the Nile were shared out fairly. Large, well-planned towns with fortified walls and brick-built buildings had also appeared. These developments represent a fundamental upgrading of material culture in the country.
In the course of their work, these officials were developing a range of capabilities which would later allow the civilization of ancient Egypt to flourish. These included organizing and controlling large numbers of people; deploying advanced techniques in construction, engineering and mathematics; and, possibly even by this early date, an early form of writing.
Within these chiefdoms, then, the characteristic features of Ancient Egypt, one of the great civilizations of world history, were beginning to take shape.
c. 3500-3000: The Pre-dynastic period, leading to the unification of Egypt, As Details-
The thousand years between 3500 BC and 2500 BC saw the civilization of Ancient Egypt reach full maturity.
Unification
Down to around 3000 BC Egypt remained fragmented amongst various chiefdoms. An interpretation of the thin available evidence suggests that the first powerful chiefdoms (or confederacies of chiefdoms) were centred on the largest towns in southern Egypt, such as Abydos and Hierakonpolis. The prominence of military motifs in the art of the period suggests frequent warfare, and it is easy to speculate that from this situation emerged a victor, who went on to dominate the entire country.
In any event, a unified kingdom had appeared by 2900 BC at the latest. The unification is traditionally credited to king Menes, but scholars now think he was a mythical figure, and not to be identified with the first king whose rule was clearly country-wide, Narmer.
The Early Dynastic period
Already in Narmer’s reign some of the key elements of Egyptian royal imagery are evident: he is represented as a living god, his monuments are adorned with heiroglyphic writing, and they are in a style that is recognizably “Egyptian” in motif and design.
Narmer was the founder of the 1st dynasty of Ancient Egypt (there would eventually be 30 or so dynasties), and therefore the period known to modern archaeologists as the Early Dynastic period. The capital was established at Memphis, which, along with Thebes, would become one of the two royal cities of Egypt.
During the Early Dynastic period, Egyptian civilization achieved its mature form. At their capital city of Memphis, the kings of the Old Kingdom erected more and more magnificent tombs for themselves. By the 3rd dynasty (c. 2650-2575 BC), these had evolved into huge pyramid structures. Modern scholars designate this development the start of the “Old Kingdom” period, one of the greatest ages of ancient Egyptian history.
The Pyramid Age
In the early years of the Old Kingdom, the kings of Egypt began interfering in the affairs of the peoples of the south, in Nubia. Under the 4th dynasty (c. 2575-2465 BC), an Egyptian colony was established deep in Nubian territory, beside the second cataract. This was withdrawn fairly quickly, but Egyptian officials remained active in the area, fostering friendly relations with the tribes who controlled the trade routes.
Djoser’s step pyramid at Sakkara (c.2610 BC) was the first in the sequence of Pyramids to be built entirely of stone, and it was not long before the giant pyramids of Giza were being built for the kings of the 4th dynasty (c. 2575-2465 BC). These enormous edifices were surrounded by a host of other tombs, of courtiers and officials. This complex served as the spiritual heart of Ancient Egypt for centuries to come.
The construction of the Great Pyramids were astonishing achievements.
They involved a very high level of engineering and mathematics, and amazing feats of organization and logistics. However it as not only in Pyramid-building that Old Kingdom Egypt excelled. Refined and lifelike sculpture in wood and stone, as well as a whole range of beautiful objects - jewellery, finely carved furniture, ivory cosmetic boxes - have been recovered from tombs of this period. It was in this period that the conventions of ancient Egyptian art were developed, and never afterwards, while this civilization endured, did artists and craftsmen stray too far from them.
c. 2650: The beginning of the Old Kingdom
c.2575-2465: The Great Pyramids of Giza built
c. 2150: The fall of the Old Kingdom leads to the 1st Intermediate period begins
2074: The Middle Kingdom begins; Egypt is united and powerful again
1759: The fall of the Middle Kingdom leads to the 2nd Intermediate period, and the occupation of norhern Egypt by the Hyksos
The period between 2500 BC and 1500 BC saw Ancient Egypt go through periods of division and weakness, and of unity and strength.
The First Intermediate Period c. 2150-2080 BC
The last large pyramid of the Old Kingdom was erected for Pepy II, after a 96 year reign (c. 2246-2152 BC). Perhaps partly as a result of his extraordinarily long reign, by his death the king’s authority seems no longer to have been so effective, nor his prestige so great. Provincial governors now had themselves buried locally, not in the royal cemetery at Memphis. They commissioned monumental works in their own name, and took credit for themselves for their policies, rather than giving it to the king.
This marked the beginning of what is known in ancient Egyptian history as the First Intermediate period, when central authority was weak and power became fragmented amongst provincial families, usually descended from Old Kingdom governors. Inevitably, this period of royal impotence ended in civil war.
This started in the south, where the family which ruled the minor city of Thebes began expanding its territories at the expense of its neighbours. Soon Thebes dominated the south, and then, under its ruler Montjuhotep I (c. 2080-2074 BC), succeeded in subduing the entire country. These events inaugurated the period known as the "Middle Kingdom" in Ancient Egypt.
The Middle Kingdom c. 2074-1759 BC
The king once again became the unifying presence in the country. A new royal burial complex was built, to the south of Memphis, to rival that of the Old Kingdom cemetery at Giza. Major reclamation projects were undertaken in the Fayum and Delta regions, bringing much productive land under cultivation. International trade – which was a royal monopoly – was expanded, particularly with the Levant and its major port, Byblos, and on the caravan routes to Palestine, where a string of forts in the Sinai desert were built to bring these more under Egyptian control.
In the south, the kings of the 12th dynasty (c. 1937-1759 BC) systematically brought northern Nubia under Egyptian rule, with forts being built down to the second cataract; and later, under king Senusret II (c. 1842-1836 BC), these were extended further south as far as Semna. To further expand trade with the southern lands, a Red Sea port was established as a base for trade with the land of Punt (a country probably situated on the south-western coast of the Red Sea).
he Second Intermediate Period c. 1759-1539 BC
When Montjuhotep reunified the country at the start of the Middle Kingdom, he seems to have left many of the local ruling families in place, and the provinces remained in the hands of what were essentially hereditary princes throughout the Middle Kingdom period.
During the 13th dynasty (c.1759-1641 BC), these gradually asserted themselves against the central authorities, and the power of the kings became diminished again. The weakness of the kings had an immediate effect in the loss of Nubia, which came under the rule of the powerful kingdom of Kush. The Nile Delta region seems to have fallen under the control of a dynasty called the Hyksos. Though the Hyksos were probably of Canaanite origins, they were fully assimilated into Egyptian culture, and they styled themselves as Egyptian kings. They ruled from the city of Avaris.
Reunification
Much of the Nile valley fell under the sway of rulers again based at Thebes, known to history as the 17th dynasty (c. 1641-1759 BC). An ambitious king of Thebes, Kamose, set about reuniting the “Black Land” in about 1540 BC.
He seems to have taken northern Nubia from the kingdom of Kush with relative ease, but Avaris proved more difficult, and it was left to his son, Ahmose (c. 1539-1514 BC), to complete the reunification.
It took five campaigns to take Avaris, and then Ahmose firmly established Egyptian control over the roads across Sinai, as far as Palestine. He defeated two rebellions against his authority, and was able to pass on a strong and united Egypt to his successors. The period of the New Kingdom, one of the high points in the long history of Ancient Egypt, had begun.
1539: The reunification of Egypt and the expulsion of the Hyksos begins the New Kingdom, a period when Egypt became a leading power in the Middle East
1344-1328: The pharaoh Akhenaton carries out a short-lived religious reformation
1336-1327: Tutankhamen reigns
1279-1213: The reign of Ramses II brings Egypt to the height of its power
The period of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt was one in which Egypt reached the height of its international power, and was a leading player in the war and diplomacy of the Middle East. This was matched by prosperity and firm government at home. However, decline set in after about 1200 BC, bringing an end to the great days of Ancient Egypt.
A Strong Monarchy
The kings of the New Kingdom concentrated power firmly in their own hands. The court was again the source of all authority, the localities firmly subordinated to central control.
The resources of the entire country were mobilized in a thoroughgoing way, this time not so much to create magnificent tombs for the kings – though the wonderful temples in the Valley of the Kings testify to the ongoing importance of this concern – but to developing the territorial and economic resources of the country. In so doing, they turned Egypt into a true imperial power.
An Imperial Power
To the south, Egypt waged an unrelenting war against the kingdom of Kush. By Thutmose I’s day (c. 1493-1481) the Egyptian frontier lay at the third cataract on the Nile – a mere 30 kilometres north of the Kush capital, Kerma. During the reign of Thutmose III (c. 1479-1425) they drove their frontier much further south, establishing a fortified town at Napata, deep within Kushite territory.
The lands thus conquered were assimilated into the Egyptian administration and heavily guarded with forts and garrisons. Native chiefs were co-opted into the provincial system as local officials, and they soon adopted the trappings of Egyptian civilization. Temples to the Egyptian gods were scattered throughout the land, a testament to cultural imperialism.
c. 1150 onwards: The New Kingdom falls into decline
728: Egypt is conquered by Nubian kings
From the time of Thutmose III, chiefs outside direct Egyptian control also recognized Egyptian suzerainty, giving their aid to the Egyptian gold-mining operations. It was these, along with the trade goods coming up from the south, that gave the Egyptian kings the wealth to conduct the large-scale international trade (which was still a royal monopoly) and diplomacy with which they furthered Egypt’s interests to the north.
International Trade and Diplomacy
In fact, international trade and diplomacy were so intertwined that it is doubtful whether the Egyptians recognized any distinction between the two.
The kings of the New Kingdom adopted a much more aggressive stance in their relations with the rulers of Palestine and Syria. Thutmose I led an army as far as the Euphrates, and Thutmose III undertook no less than 17 campaigns in Palestine and Syria. The strategic pattern seems clear.
The great seaport of Byblos was again the lynchpin of Egypt’s influence in the region and the logistics base for the Egyptian presence in the Levant, which was used to control the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the rich lands of Mesopotamia. Further south Egypt’s interests lay in securing the land-based caravan routes through Palestine.
Egyptian Imperialism
In order to pursue these goals, the Egyptian government adopted an “indirect rule” policy: Egyptian forces only intervened in Syria or Palestine on rare occasions, and Egypt did not seek to rule territories in Palestine or Syria directly. Instead, the Egyptian government used loyal chiefs of tribes and rulers of city-states to protect its interests in the region.
The Armarna letters, found in a royal archive containing over 350 diplomatic letters between the Egyptian king and foreign rulers, offer a fascinating glimpse into the international scene at this time. The king of Egypt related to the powerful kings of Babylon and the Hittites as equals (“brothers”), but to the many petty chiefs and kinglets of Palestine he was their overlord.
Religious Upheavals
The kings of Egypt during the period covered by the Armarna letters were experiencing – or perhaps provoking – internal struggles. Amenhotep IV (1344-1328 BC) sponsored the cult of the Sun god, Aten. Indeed, he replaced the god Amon with Aten as the chief deity in the Egyptian pantheon. He had himself renamed Akhenaten, and after a time promoted the worship of Aten as the one true god.
656: Egypt is occupied by the Assyrians
This was a revolutionary departure from the ancient religion of the country, and was quickly reversed after his death. The end result may well have been to increase the power of the priests of Amun, with their chief centre at Thebes. Certainly, subsequent pharaohs of the New Kingdom emphasised their loyalty to Amun.
The Hittite Challenge
A new and more dangerous phase began for Egypian foreign policy with the aggressive expansion of the Hittites. This posed an increasing threat to the trade routes to Mesopotamia, and hence to Egyptian commercial/diplomatic interests in Syria, and even Palestine.
It was the kings of the 19th dynasty that had to deal with this danger, above all one of the most famous kings in all Egyptian history, Ramses II (c. 1279-1213).
Ramses led his army to battle against the Hittites at the strategically sited city of Kaddesh, and won a famous victory there – or so he claimed in his account of the action inscribed on his temple in the Valley of the Kings. The battle came near to disaster for Ramses, and probably ended as a draw. In the end the rise of another power, Assyria, convinced both Ramses and Hattusili II of Hatti to come to terms, and in c. 1259 BC they agreed to divide Syria between them.
New Threats
By the end of the 19th dynasty (c. 1295-1186) a new threat was appearing from the west. Lybian tribes began migrating – which, given their military capabilities, effectively meant invading - into the Delta region from the western coastal desert.
The Egyptians built a series of forts to control this nuisance, and under Merenptah (c. 1213-1203 BC) and Ramses III (c. 1184-1153 BC) inflicted several defeats on them. In the time of Ramses III, also, a new set of invaders, this time from the north, had to be dealt with.
These were the “Sea Peoples”, an apparently diverse group of peoples whose origins lay in Europe but with elements who may well have been refugees from Asia Minor, where the Hittite state had recently been destroyed.
These threats seem to have been dealt with reasonably effectively, and, unlike many states in the Middle East, Egypt survived as a wealthy and united country. However, internal developments were at work to undermine the centralizing power of the kings.
Throughout the New Kingdom, temples had been accorded high status and a privileged position within the state. The lands and wealth they controlled made them indispensable allies of the king. This wealth and power had gradually been increasing, above all for the priests of Thebes.
It was now that the high priest of Amun at Thebes elevated himself to kingly status, challenging the status of the kings of the 20th dynasty (c. 1186-1069 BC).
Impotence Abroad c. 1153-1069 BC
A civil war broke out which ended with the confirmation of the Theban priest-king’s position as an autonomous ruler within the wider land of Egypt, and the permanent reduction of the pharaoh’s prestige and authority.
The weakening power of the king of Egypt at home soon had its effects abroad. To the south, Nubia was lost to a rebellious general. This cut off Egypt’s supply of gold, on which its commercial/diplomatic influence had been largely based. Local rulers in Palestine and Syria drifted away from their centuries-long Egyptian loyalties.
A glimpse of this decline in Egyptian power is seen in “The Tale of Wenamum”, in which a royal official encounters all sorts of difficulties and humiliations in a journey to and from Byblos. Whatever the exact significance of this tale – was it fiction? – the impression it gives of Egyptian international impotence is unmistakable.
Weakness at Home
The weakness of the kingdom of Egypt did not mean that there was an immediate fragmentation, however. A rapprochement was worked out between the high priests of Thebes and the kings of the 21st dynasty (c. 1069-945 BC), whereby the high priests seem to have usually recognized the secular authority of the pharaohs. In return, the pharaohs sent their daughters as brides for the Theban high priest; and in due course the families became so intertwined that the Theban high priest Har-Psusennes ascended the throne as pharaoh (c. 959-945 BC).
639: The Egyptians expel the Assyrians and begin a period of revival
For Ancient Egypt, the years between 1000 BC and 500 BC were ones of decline and foreign occupation.
For a time the kings were able to hold things together by co-opting leading provincial families as allies of the royal family through marriage ties and grants of hereditary privileges. The inevitable result of these policies, however, was further fragmentation of power, exacerbated by divisions within the royal family itself as different princes contended with each other. Rival principalities emerged within Egypt’s borders.
Kings from the South
It was into this situation that the king of Kush invaded Egypt, culminating in a campaign that brought the entire country under Kushite subjection in 728 BC. The new king, Piy, presented himself in purely traditional terms, and clearly saw himself as a true Egyptian pharaoh. Furthermore, he did not depose the existing kings and princes, but imposed himself upon them as their overlord.
The dominance of Piy and his dynasty (the 25th) was short-lived, however. A foreign policy which sought to regain Egyptian influence in Palestine brought Egypt into conflict with the huge and aggressive Assyrian empire. A series of Assyrian invasions, in which the invaders were by no means always victorious but which could in the end have only one outcome, resulted in complete defeat for the Nubian kings, their flight back to their Nubian capital, Napata, the sack of the historic city of Thebes, and the occupation of northern Egypt by an Assyrian army.
Assyrian Occupation 656-639 BC
For the first time in their long history, the ancient Egyptians found themselves conquered by a foreign empire. The Assyrians on the whole preferred to exert their control over Egypt through local rulers, who in effect swapped the overlordship of the king of Kush for the (more distant) overlordship of the king of Assyria.
This suited many of them very well. Above all, it suited the princes of Saise, in the Delta. Necko of Sais built up his power under Assyrian sponsorship, and was given the governorship of Memphis by them. His son Psamteck I (664-610 BC) inherited Necko’s positions and then took full advantage of troubles elsewhere in the Assyrian empire to expand his power throughout the entire country. By 639 BC Psamteck ruled an independent, united Egypt.
National Revival 639-525 BC
Psamteck founded the 26th dynasty (639-525 BC). The kings of this dynasty associated themselves with the glory days of Ancient Egypt by erecting monuments in the style of the Old Kingdom.
This policy masked great changes that had taken place in the country. Sizeable communities of foreigners now lived within its borders. Libyans, Greeks, Phoenicians and Jews had brought their distinctive cultures as well as their particular technological skills with them – it was with Greek assistance that Neko II (610-595 BC) set about building a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, and it was Phoenician seamen that he sent on a famous expedition to explore the west coast of Africa. Naukratis, a Greek colony, was now the chief port of Egypt. Foreign mercenaries lived in scattered settlements throughout the country. Temples now owned much of the cultivated land, correspondingly weakening the economic base for royal power.
The Babylonian Threat
The kings of the 26th dynasty resumed the traditional Egyptian policy of seeking to secure a predominant influence in Palestine. Their chief opponent was now the resurgent power of Babylon, who had take over from Assyria as the leading empire in the Middle East.
The Babylonians defeated the Egyptians at the battle of Carchemish (605 BC), and so got the upper hand in Syria. Two Babylonian invasions of Egypt (601 and 569 BC) were beaten back. Psamtek II (595-589 BC) secured the allegiance of the Philistine cities, and Apries (589-570 BC) supported Judaea in her abortive revolt against Babylon (589 BC) before occupying the Levantine cities of Tyre and Sidon (574-750 BC). His successor, Amasis (570-526 BC) occupied Cyprus in 560 BC. In the south, Psamtek II had invaded Nubia, and penetrated as far as Napata, but had not occupied the country.
Persian Conquest 525 BC
The occupation of Cyprus proved to be the high watermark of Egyptian success under the 26th dynasty. In 545 BC a new power in the Middle East, Persia, took that island from the Egyptians. The Persians went on to conquer the Babylonian empire, and in 526 BC invaded Egypt.
At the battle of Pelusium the Egyptian army was defeated, and Egypt incorporated into the huge Persian empire. This event marked the effective end of the history of ancient Egypt as the home of an autonomous civilization. Henceforth her history was as a member of a wider world, her fate largely determined by foreign players.
525: Egypt is conquered by the Persians
332: Egypt is conquered by Alexander the Great
305: Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals, founds a Greek-speaking dynasty
The Ancient Home of Great Civilizations
CHAPTER 1: THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION
A region of dry grasslands and fertile river plains, the Middle East was the natural home to the first agriculture, and then to the first civilizations.
The cradle of farming...
The Middle East is a huge area, with many different kinds of climate and landscape. Large parts are covered by desert or grassland; elsewhere there are highlands and mountains covered by forests. Running through all these zones are long rivers, especially the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, and the Nile in Egypt.
The highlands of the Middle East are the natural habitat of grasses, such as wild wheat and barley, and it was almost inevitable that agriculture based on these crops, which would eventually cover so much of the world, would begin here, around 10,000 years ago. Farming had spread around the Middle East by c. 6000 BC, and was gradually pushing westward into Europe and eastward into India and South Asia.
Large parts of the Middle East lie within a hot, dry zone, where rainfall is insufficient to grow crops such as wheat and barley. The melting snows in the high mountains and the spring rains in the hills carry fresh water and silt down into the lowlands, flooding the dry river plains and depositing a rich mud for miles around.
This means that the land surrounding the lower reaches of these rivers is potentially very fertile. However, it is too dry for farming most of the year - except during the spring and early summer, when there is too much water!
Farmers gradually mastered this challenging environment by developing irrigation techniques, beginning around 5000 BC. This created a wonderfully productive agriculture, lead to the rise of the first civilizations in world history, those of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and of Ancient Egypt in the Nile Valley.
Link: map of the Middle East in 3500 BC
Nomads
The communities which settled the broad river plains of Mesopotamia naturally came to devote much of their land to fields of wheat and barley, as this was the most productive use for it. In the highlands and grasslands surrounding these the river plains, however, keeping sheep and goats was a good use of the less fertile terrain.
The importance of stock-rearing increased as the expanding populations of crop-growers in the river plains grew, and created an intensifying demand for the animal products which they lacked (wool, skin, meat, cheese and so on).
As a result, societies grew up on the highlands and plains of the Middle East which specialised in stock-rearing, and took to a more nomadic way of life than before. These nomads were to play a large part in the history of the region.
The same was far less true for Egypt, where the Nile Valley is flanked by bone dry desert. Apart from near the banks of the river Nile itself, human habitation is only possible in the oases.
Trade on a new scale
The thousand years between 3500 BC and 2500 BC saw urban civilization spread across the Middle East, carried by long-distance trade.
The economies of the two great civilizations of the Middle East – Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia - were built upon irrigation systems needed to make the fertile soils of the Nile and Euphrates-Tigris river plains support large populations. However, being essentially mud, these river plains (especially Mesopotamia) offer precious little else other than good crops. They contain few minerals for metal and stone, trees for wood, and, away from the rivers, forage for too few sheep or goats for the required quantities of meat, skins, wool and diary produce.
To bring in these things, the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians turned to trade on a scale never seen before in human history.
The need for metals
For millennia, people had been using copper, a soft metal only useful for making jewellery and other decorations. Sometime around 3000 BC, the metal smiths of Mesopotamia developed bronze. This was much tougher than copper, and was ideal for armour and weapons, as well as for sculptures and building decorations. It was strong enough for farming tools, but was far too expensive, so farmers continued to make do with stone and wood implements.
Why was bronze so expensive? It is an alloy of two other metals, copper and tin. These metals occur naturally in widely separated regions, mostly some distance from Mesopotamia. The Sumerians needed to import both.
Bronze began being made in Egypt a little later than in Mesopotamia, and like Mesopotamia, it had no tin or copper of its own. It too needed to bring these metals in from outside.
As a result, trade routes radiated out from Mesopotamia and Egypt into neighbouring regions. Trade was carried up the river Euphrates and Tigris into Asia Minor, a mineral-rich region; and across into Syria and Canaan. Trade routes soon linked the two great centres of civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile valleys. The first great seaports in history emerged on the Syrian coast, at Byblos and Ugarit. To the east, trade routes spread into Iran in the search of metals and other goods, and connected with trade radiating out from the cities of the Indus Valley civilization. A sea route was also opened up along the Indian Ocean coast between Indus and Mesopotamian ports. To the west, the expanding trade links began to have affect the societies of south-west Europe.
The impact of trade
These trade routes had a major impact on the societies which they touched, for example leading to the rise of new civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean.
Wherever trade went, local markets sprang up and towns and cities grew – often, as in Asia Minor, around settlements of Mesopotamian traders. Literacy, sophisticated art production and other techniques of civilization spread. These markets acting as the nodes of long distance trade stimulated more local trade and crafts, which, by encouraging more intensive production of food and goods, raised the material wealth of these localities. Over the thousand years between 3500 and 2500 BC, urban life and the arts of civilization spread over much of the Middle East, and beyond.
Link: map of the Middle East in 2500 BC
CHAPTER 2: KINGDOMS AND EMPIRES
The period from 3000 BC through to 1500 BC saw the formation of large, well-organized kingdoms in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia.
The first large states
The long, narrow lower Nile valley lends itself to the formation of a single state to rule it. At this stage in world history, well-nigh impenetrable barriers guarded this land: to the north, the sea; to east and west, the desert; and to the south, a series of easily guarded cataracts rushing through narrow ravines.
From around 3000 BC, the lower Nile valley came under the united control of one regime. The rulers of what modern scholars call the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt brought the entire lower Nile valley under their firm control. It was these pharaohs who presided over construction of the earliest and most enduring of man-made Wonders of the World, the Pyramids.
Mesopotamia is far less amenable to unified control. Its broad plain, with its two great rivers and many branches, are wide open to outside attack or immigration. Protecting the settled farming communities has always been difficult, right up to the present day. Local power centres have therefore tended to be the norm. It was inevitable, then, that the land of Mesopotamia should produce a multiplicity of small city-states; and equally inevitable that any attempts to unite them under one rule would be short-lived.
Nevertheless, it was the Mesopotamians who produced the first real empires in world history.
The first empires
The first of these to appear was the large but relatively short-lived empire of Sargon and his successors. This state covered most of Mesopotamia and some of Asia Minor and Syria, reaching as far as the Mediterranean Sea. It clearly had a major cultural influence on Middle Eastern history. Brief as it was, it led to the imposition of the Akkadian language as the chief language of Mesopotamia.
This Akkadian empire was followed by another empire, centred on Ur, a Sumerian city-state located near the coast of the Persian Gulf.
The Amorites
By this time, much of the Middle East was being effected by the migration of a nomadic people called the Amorites.
We have seen how nomadic peoples, sheep- and goat-herders, sprang up on the fringes of the Tigris-Euphrates plain. Some time after 2500 BC such a people, the Amorites, settled the dry grasslands between Mesopotamia and Syria.
Sometime before 2000 BC, they began to move out of these wild wastes into the civilized lands on either side. There is increasing evidence that this expansion of nomadism was linked to the onset of a dry period, which lasted for some 200-300 years. The area of cereal-growing shrank as marginal lands, with restricted access to water, were abandoned. Conditions may well have become much more suitable for herders than farmers in many places. This dry period seems to have affected the whole of the Middle East, as well as south east Europe.
In any event, the Amorites (and their close relatives the Canaanites) had soon conquered cities and founded kingdoms in Syria, Canaan and Mesopotamia. The most successful of these new states was that centred on Babylon; under its famous king, Hammurabi (reigned c. 1792-1750 BC), it came to rule an extensive empire covering Mesopotamia and much of Syria.
The Chariot
The coming of the chariot was a significant development in Middle Eastern history, as it was in other regions. It was probably introduced by Indo-European speaking peoples coming into the region, either from the steppes of central Asia or eastwards from the Balkans, in Europe. Any ruler with a force of chariots at his call had an imediate advantage over any opponent who did not, and this military technology spread rapidly through the Middle East.
These Indo-European chieftains set up kingdoms which were to rule large tracts of the region - the Hittites in Asia Minor, the Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia and Syria, and the Kassites in southern Mesopotamia. Non Indo-Europeans also adopted this technology, with for example Assyrian rulers soon had chariots in their army.
The Hyksos
The civilization of Ancient Egypt, which up to now had flourished in relative isolation, was also deeply affected by these upheavals; in fact it suffered the first major invasion from the north since the founding of the united Old Kingdom of Egypt in 3000 BC.
The Hyksos were a nomadic people, quite likely near relatives of the Amorites. They entered Canaan from the eastern deserts at the same time that the Amorites were founding kingdoms in Syria. Whilst in Canaan the Hyksos adopted the chariot, and with this technology invaded Egypt. There, they defeated the old-fashioned (and chariotless) Egyptian army and established a powerful kingdom around the Nile Delta.
In due course, this provoked a national response under capable Egyptian leaders who drove the Hyksos out and established the New Kingdom of Egypt over the entire country. To achieve this, they too adopted the chariot as an important part of their army.
Link: map of the Middle East in 1500 BC
Great powers
The Middle East was by this time dominated by large and powerful states, and the relationships between them as they competed with one another for power and influence. New Kingdom Egypt, under its warlike pharaohs, was a major power in the region throughout this whole period. To its north, first the Mitanni and then the Hittites challenged Egypt for control of Syria and Canaan. These powers in turn were faced with a strong and ambitious Assyria, centred in northern Mesopotamia, while southern Mesopotamia was under the Kassite dynasty, ruling from their capital, Babylon. Another people to mention were the Minoans of Crete, where Knossos was undoubtedly the centre of wealthy and powerful state.
For the first time in world history, a group of major powers were involved in a long-lasting system of alliances, in which sophisticated diplomacy regulated the relationships between them. A glimpse of this can be seen in a cache of diplomatic correspondence between Egypt and other leading Middle Eastern states of the time, known as the Armana letters. Found in the Egyptian desert, these letters were written in Babylonian cuneiform. They were clearly written by highly educated civil servants working in a government bureaux devoted to foreign affairs.
Diplomacy and war
This alliance system was underpinned by marriage agreements and exchanges of gifts, and the territories between the leading powers were partitioned into spheres of influence. When these alliances were not able to contain the aggression of one power or another, war broke out, on a scale not seen before.
The first battles of which any details are known occur in this period. The leading armies now all contained large contingents of chariots. These were expensive to maintain and repair, and the crews who manned them required long training to manoeuvre them in battle. Armies were therefore more professional than before, more expensive, and required more elaborate organization. The states which maintained them, therefore, had to develop more effective tax raising capabilities than before, and larger and more complex bureaucracies.
CHAPTER 3: CATASTROPHE AND ADVANCE
The period between 1500 and 1200 BC was the high point of the Bronze-Age civilization in the Middle East. It ended in catastrophe for almost all the states concerned.
A double blow fell on them. From the west came the "Sea Peoples", a group of tribes set in motion by population movements in Europe and swarming along the coasts of Asia Minor, Syria, Canaan and Egypt. The Hittites were overwhelmed by them, their empire completely vanishing. The Egyptians, already weakened by internal struggles, only narrowly escaped complete defeat.
Meanwhile, another group of nomadic tribes called the Aramaeans, who had replaced the Amorites in the deserts and grasslands between Mesopotamia and Syria sometime in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, now expanded violently outwards, capturing cities in northern Syria and attacking deep into Mesopotamia.
Iron
This period of upheaval was accompanied by two major cultural and technological advances. Iron had been used in small quantities since the dawn of metallurgy, but only as a precious metal. Sometime in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, a new way of smelting and manufacturing iron objects had been developed, probably somewhere in Asia Minor. These developments made iron suitable for use in weapons and other artefacts.
At this stage, iron was no stronger than bronze, but the upheavals in the Middle East after 1200 BC probably disrupted the long-distance trade routes which made large-scale bronze production possible. Between 1200 and 1000 BC, therefore, iron, which is a commonly occurring mineral throughout the world, became used in making weapons. Being plentiful and cheap, iron also began to be used for making agricultural implements. In this, it is vastly more suitable than stone and wood, which, because of the expense of Bronze, had been the chief material for agricultural tools up to now. The spread of iron farming tools was to greatly raise agricultural productivity.
Gradual improvements in iron-smelting techniques increased its strength and flexibility, making it more suitable in armour and weaponry than bronze, and further increasing its use in agriculture.
The alphabet
The second major cultural advance was the alphabet. Like iron, this had also been developed sometime in later 2nd millennium BC, probably in Canaan. It is possible that its distribution was held back by opposition from the ruling elites. The cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing systems in use in the Bronze Age were highly complex and took a long time to master. As a result, literacy was restricted to a small class of priests, scribes and rulers, who could afford to put their children through long years of training. Literacy, in fact, was a mysterious craft belonging to those of elite status.
Alphabetic scripts, on the other hand, can be learnt quickly, and had the potential to spread to much larger sections of the population as reading and writing could now be mastered without a long, specialised education. The prospect of the masses becoming literate would have appalled the old elites.
The disruption of the late 2nd millennium, however, greatly slackened these elites' hold on power, at least for a time, and use of the alphabet began to spread.
New peoples to the fore
With the great powers of the late Bronze Age gone or weakened, new peoples were able to come to the fore. In Syria, the Phoenician cities adopted the early alphabet as their writing system. Being a trading people, having literate merchants and craftsmen was a valuable asset. When more stable conditions returned to the Mediterranean, after about 1100 BC, they pioneered long-distance trade routes as far as Spain, and even into the Atlantic, eventually reaching southern Britain. They grew rich on the proceeds of trade, but they would also transmit the use of the alphabet to the peoples of the Mediterranean.
Two other peoples emerged into the light of history at this time of upheaval. The Philistines had come to the region as part of the Sea Peoples, and settled in a confederacy of five city-states on the coast of Canaan. In fact, the country of Canaan came to be called after them, Palestine.
The Israelites
The other people were the Israelites. These had invaded Palestine sometime in the troubled times around 1200 BC, when the grip of the great powers of the area had been withdrawn. They had formed a loose coalition of tribes before being united under one king (the ill-fated Saul), around 1050 BC.
The Israelites had brought with them the first (as far as we know) monotheistic religion in world history, centred on the worship of the One God, Yahweh. This fact would have profound effects on later history.
Meanwhile the Kingdom of Israel flourished for a brief period after 1000 BC under its kings, David and Solomon, before splitting into two halves. The surrounding peoples who had come under Israelite control, the Moabites, Edomites, Philistines and Aramaeans, soon shook themselves free.
The Camel tamed
A final development to mention is the domestication of the camel at about this time. This allowed the desert fastnesses of the Arabian peninsula to be crossed by trade routes, and the way of life of the nomadic Bedouin tribes dates from this time. Probably connected to this development was the rise of an urban civilization in southern Arabia, beginning in 1000 BC.
Link: map of the Middle East in 1000 BC
CHAPTER 4: MULTINATIONAL EMPIRES
The early 1st millennium BC saw the Middle East covered by a patchwork of small and medium-sized kingdoms. On the Syrian coast, the Phoenician cities had risen to prominence as maritime trading states, and over the next two or three centuries would spread the Middle Eastern techniques, above all the alphabet, to the peoples further west. To its south and east, small Aramaean and Israelite kingdoms squabbled with one another. The kingdom of Assyria still held out in northern Mesopotamia, shrunken and defensive; and in southern Mesopotamia, the Babylonians had experienced invasion and upheaval.
Assyria and its successors
From 800 BC, however, the days of independence for these small kingdoms were numbered, as they fell under the domination of the kingdom of Assyrian. From the mid-8th century the Assyrian empire directly governed a huge swathe of the Middle East, from the Mediterranean coast to the Gulf coast, and it pioneered many of the techniques of imperialism used by later empires. Assyrian conquests were often accompanied by the destruction of whole societies, as large numbers of their people were resettled far from their homelands. The Middle East became a melting pot in which long-established peoples lost their historic identities. The most famous example was fall of the kingdom of Israel, in 722 BC.
In Asia Minor, the wealthy kingdoms of Phrygia and Lydia were able to resist Assyrian encroachments, but suffered from the first great invasions into the Middle East by nomadic peoples from the steppe. The Cimmerians and Scythians came sweeping down and inflicted great destruction on the stable societies of northern Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. By the time they retreated, the great Assyrian empire was gone.
In its place, two ancient states had reappeared on the stage, Egypt and Babylon. They were joined by an entirely new empire, that of the Medes, a people new to history who had migrated down from central Asia and settled in Iran during the previous centuries.
From the end of the 7th century to the late 6th century, these three powers, together the wealthy kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor, virtually divided the Middle East between them. It was during this period that the kingdom of Judah was destroyed by Babylon (586 BC).
The Persian Empire
From the 540s, all four powers fell one by one to the Persians, who thereby established the largest empire yet seen in human history (and the largest, in terms of area, in the Ancient World).
Persian rule was comparatively mild, and unlike their predecessors, they left local peoples and their cultures in place. Indeed, they actually encouraged the resettlement of the exiled Jews back in their homeland around Jerusalem.
By 500 BC, many local loyalties had been the undermined by the state-sponsored resettlements of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and the inhabitants of the Middle East were accustomed to living in huge multi-national states under imperial regimes. One common language, Aramaic, covered the region (although the official language of government was Persian), and with it, the Aramaic alphabetical script. Middle Eastern trade communications were further strengthened by the empire-spanning Persian road network.
New directions in religion
Also, by 500 BC the Middle East had become the first region to become acquainted with a new development in religion, monotheism. The Israelites had focussed their worship on the One God, Yahweh, which, paradoxically, had been strengthened by a period of exile in Babylon for many of the religious elite. The Persians had developed their own monotheistic faith in Zoroastrianism (perhaps more accurately Zoroastrianism should be described as a dualistic faith, as it holds that two gods, one good and one evil, battle for control of the cosmos, though good is assured of ultimate victory). What connection, if any, there was between the origin and early development of the two religions is unknown, although modern scholars often see a strong Zoroastrian influence on later Judaism.
For two centuries after 500 BC, the Persian empire ruled almost the entire Middle East. Then, in a few short years after 334 BC, the conquests of Alexander the Great transformed the region.
Link: map of the Middle East in 500 BC
CHAPTER 5: AN ALIEN CIVILIZATION
The Persian empire brought an unprecedented degree of peace, stability and prosperity in the century and a half after 500 BC. As the 4th century drew on, however, its political stability began to weaken and revolts began to rock the empire. Greek mercenaries played a major part in these episodes,and were highly valued for their fighting qualities.
Alexander the Great and his successors
These qualities were evident on a grand scale in the conquests of Alexander the Great.
After uniting the Greek city-states under his leadership, Alexander, king of Macedon, invaded Persian-held Asia Minor in 334 BC. Over the next ten years he completely conquered the huge Persian empire, and even invaded India.
After Alexander's untimely death in 323 BC, his empire immediately began to fall apart as his generals fought each other for supremacy. By 300 BC, the empire had broken into three main pieces, each under a family of one of Alexander's generals: Macedonia in Greece and the Balkans, under the Antigonids; a vast territory stretching from Asia Minor to India, under the Seleucids; and Egypt, under the Ptolemies. Other ruling families controlled smaller territories.
Despite the short time in which they occurred, and the swiftness with which they were divided up amongst his successors, the conquests of Alexander the Great transformed the Middle East for centuries to come. They imposed a new and alien culture on the region, the first time in history this had been done on such an extensive scale.
The Hellenistic Age
Alexander and his successors founded numerous Greek-style cities, right across the Middle East as far as Afghanistan and India. Each city was a self-governing community so far as local affairs were concerned; each had its gymnasium, temples, theatres, stoa (public square), town council and other institutions of a Greek city-state. They were populated by Greeks and Macedonians brought in in their thousands to bolster the rule of the new regimes, either veterans of the armies, or immigrants.
Some of these cities became very large indeed by the standards of the period, especially Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in Syria, and Ephesus and Pergamum in Asia Minor. These and the many smaller cities became centres for the diffusion of Greek language and culture throughout the region. Even the ancient cities of Asia Minor and Syria, such as Tyre, Sidon and Sardis, became Greek in language, culture, institutions and architecture. Greek cultural influences were felt far beyond the political frontiers of Hellenism: the statue of a southern Arabian king is depicted in Greek clothes, and Greek styles had a profound influence on Indian art and architecture.
Modern scholars distinguish this phase of Greek civilization from the earlier, Classical age, by labelling it the "Hellenistic" period. Advances in the arts and sciences, begun by the Greeks centuries earlier, continued apace, and some of the greatest names of Greek civilization belong to this period - Euclid and Archimedes being prime examples. New schools of Greek philosophy appeared, the most famous being the Stoics and the Epicurians, and centres of Greek learning flourished throughout the Middle East, at above all at Alexandria, Antioch and Pergamum.
Non-Greek peoples, if not completely absorbed into Hellenistic culture, were profoundly influenced by it. For example, the Jews, who by this time were to be found in all the major cities of the Middle East as well as in their Judaean homeland, translated their scriptures into Greek at this time, and Greek ideas became embedded in the Jewish faith.
The Hellenistic period was a time of economic expansion. This was helped by an international coinage based on the gold and silver standard which had originated in Athens. New trade routes were opened to the East, via the Indian Ocean, using the Monsoons, and later, via central Asia, the famous Silk Road to China.
A hybrid civilization
Cultural influences were by no means one way, and alien elements were grafted onto Greek ways. The Ptolemies of Egypt portrayed themselves as pharaohs; the Indo-Greek kings of Bactria were patrons of Buddhism; Egyptian cults spread throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean worlds, as did mystery cults from Mesopotamia and Iran. Babylonian astrology exerted a strong influence on Greek thought. It has even been suggested that the ideas of the Stoics contained an echo of Buddhism in their call to renounce worldy ambitions. Many Hellenistic kings were worshipped as living gods - a thing which would have shocked earlier generations of Greeks, but was a centuries-old tradition in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
It must be remembered, however, that for the majority of people in the Middle East, the farmers in the countryside, Hellenistic civilization remained an exotic, foreign plant. The Greek language and culture was mostly confined to the cities. Rural populations retained their traditional ways of life, along with their native languages and cultures.
Link: map of the Middle East in 200 BC
CHAPTER 6: A REGION DIVIDED
In the last two centuries BC, the Hellenistic kingdoms which had been carved out of the conquests of Alexander the Great were squeezed from both east and west.
Political division, cultural unity
In the east, the Parthians, a people closely related to the Persians, rapidly conquered a large empire, seizing Iran and Iraq from the Seleucid kings. In the west, the rising power of Rome gradually expanded into Greece and the Balkans, and then into Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and finally Egypt. Having swallowed up all the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean, Roman power faced the Parthians directly. An attempt by the Romans to conquer onwards into Parthia met with disaster at the battle of Carrhae, in 54 BC.
The resulting division of the Middle East between the Roman and Parthian empires set the pattern for the political map of the region which was to persist until the coming of Islam, more than six hundred years later.
The Hellenistic civilization, centred on the numerous cities founded by Alexander the Great and his successors which dotted the Middle East, survived in both portions of the Middle East. The Hellenistic cities of Iran and Iraq continued to flourish under their new Parthian masters, and the Romans, being the inheritors of centuries of Greek influence in their Italian homeland, actively fostered Hellenistic culture.
One partial exception to the prevalence of Hellenistic civilization was the conscious rejection of Hellenism by many Jews. By this date, Jewish communities could be found in many cities throughout the Middle East. Many of the inhabitants of the Jewish homeland of Judaea clung tenaciously to their ancestral ways. They had rebelled against the efforts of the Seleucid kings to Hellenize them, and established an independent Jewish state.
Many high-status Jews continued to embrace Hellenism, however, and as time went by even the elite of the new Jewish state slipped increasingly back into the Hellenistic world.
Link: map of the Middle East in 30 BC
The frontiers of civilization
As well as carving out an empire for themselves in Iran and Iraq, the Parthians performed a valuable service to the civilizations of the Middle East by developing a heavy cavalry which patrolled the borderlands of the steppe. For several centuries this defence would save the lands of the Middle East from being overrun by the turbulent nomads from central Asia, diverting their attention eastward into northern India.
Rome versus Parthia
For most of the period, the borders between the Roman and Parthian empires were comparatively peaceful, although heavily defended. Every now and again, wars between the two powers broke out. In these, the Romans on the whole got the better of the fighting, their armies occasionally attacking deep into Parthian territory. These invasions did not have a permanent impact on the geopolitics of the region, as occupying much Parthian territory for any period of time proved too much for them.
Apart from major wars, there was an on-going tussle for control of the strategically valuable kingdom of Armenia, which acted as a buffer between the two empires. This tussle usually took the form of attempts to place a puppet on the Armenian throne, sometimes backed up by military action. By 200 AD, Armenia was firmly in the Roman camp.
Link: map of the Middle East in AD 200
The revival of Iranian civilization
The fact that it was Roman armies who penetrated Parthian territory, and not vice versa, meant that the inhabitants of the Roman empire knew a greater measure of peace and prosperity than those of the Parthian empire. In the latter, the centres of Hellenistic civilization in Mesopotamia were in the direct path of invading Roman armies, and suffered accordingly. This had the effect of greatly weakening Hellenistic cultural influences in the Parthian empire. This development was strengthened by an apparently deliberate policy of fostering an Iranian cultural revival by the Parthian aristocracy.
Christians and Jews
The Middle East at this period was a region of religious change. New mystery religions such as Mithraism were spreading in the region. Above all, Christianity was born in Judaea and Galillee, and began spreading around the Middle East from after AD 30. By AD 200 it was to be found throughout both the Roman and Parthian empires, and even (on a much smaller scale) in India.
Judaea, the small area which gave birth to Christianity, saw disastrous developments for its Jewish inhabitants. It was the scene of two great rebellions against the Roman empire (AD 66-71 and AD 132-36) which ended in the complete destruction of the Jewish holy city of Jerusalem (and its rebuilding as a Roman colony), and the dispersal of the Jewish people from their homeland.
A new dynasty
In 224 the Parthians were overthrown by a Persian dynasty called the Sasanians. They tightened the administration of the empire and breathed new life into the struggle with Rome. By this time the Roman empire was facing difficulties on all its frontiers, and so the Sasanians were soon posing a formidable threat to Rome's eastern provinces. The nadir of Roman fortunes came when their emperor, Valerian, was captured by the Persians in 260. After this they were able to restore their defences and the Sasanians were unable to achieve such a striking success again for centuries. Nevertheless, the Persian empire continued to pose a constant threat to the security of Rome's eastern frontier, and from the late 3rd century onwards, the two empires, both now much more militarized than before, glowered at each other across their heavily armed frontiers. They even employed rival Arab tribes to protect their southern desert frontiers.
Transformations
Behind these frontiers, the Roman empire was changing almost out of recognition. The first great change was the adoption of Christianity as the leading religion of the empire. In this, Armenia in fact preceded the Romans, their king converting to Christianity in 314. Another innovation was the installation of a new capital at Constantinople. This brought the seat of imperial power much closer to the inhabitants of the Middle East. It also hastened a shift towards the use of Greek as the usual, if not as yet the official, language of government in Rome's eastern provinces. This process was given added impetus by the loss of the empire's western (and Latin-speaking) provinces in the 5th century.
Meanwhile, the Persian empire had adopted another monotheistic faith, Zoroastrianism, as its official religion. The practice of Zoroastrianism was largely confined to the Persian ruling class, the lower classes, especially in the cities, widely embracing Christianity.
30: Cleopatra, the last queen of independent Egypt in ancient times, dies, and Egypt is annexed by the Roman Empire
As can be seen, as well as being one of the earliest, Ancient Egypt was one of the longest lasting civilizations in world history. The great days of Ancient Egypt fell between c. 3000 BC and c. 1000 BC, but the civilization remained very much a going concern for centuries after this. Egypt was a leading Middle Eastern power again between 612 and 525 BC, and the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great felt the need to have himself crowned as pharaoh in 332 BC - which suggests that the civilization of the pharaohs still had life in it. His general, Ptolemy, on becoming independent ruler of the country in 305 BC, was also crowned pharaoh, and his line lasted down to the famous queen, Cleopatra, who died in 31 BC. Some may regard the civilization of Egypt under the Ptolemies as being more Greek than Egyptian, but the older civilization was still vital enough for the kings to feel the need to present themselves to their subjects in the traditional style of the pharaohs. After that, the Nile Valley became a province of the Roman empire, and was ruled from outside its borders for nearly a thousand years. During this time its culture changed out of all recognition.
This period of history, between the civilization's beginnings in c. 3000 BC to its conquest by the Romans in 31 BC, was almost a thousand years longer than the period between 31 BC and the present day.
Location
Egypt is situated in the Nile Valley, in the north east of Africa. Its origins lay in several chiefdoms in Upper Egypt, at Abydos and Hierakonpolis, which then spread northwards towards Memphis and the Mediterranean. By 3000 BC, the unified kingdom of Egypt occupied the entire Nile Valley north of a series of rapids called the 1st Cataract (the other cataracts lay in a chain stretching south along the River Nile into present-day Sudan). At its greatest extent, in c. 1250 BC, Ancient Egypt occupied the land in all directions from the Syrian coast in the north, to the Red Sea in the east, down the Nile Valley to Nubia in the south, and spreading west inland into the Lybian Desert.
The life of Ancient Egypt centered around the river Nile and the fertile land along its banks. The farmers in the long, narrow Nile Valley developed irrigation methods to control the flow of the water, so that crops could grow through both its rainy and dry seasons. The valley was fertile and rich, creating vast surpluses of crops that made possible incredible building projects such as the Pyramids and the temples of Luxor. The surpluses were also used to fund a refined lifestyle for the elite; to develop overseas trade and diplomacy; and to pay for wars of conquest.
The achievements of the civilization involved innovations in writing - hieroglyphics and demotic; in administration; in quarrying and surveying, maths and architecture; in irrigation and agricultural methods; as well as in develooing some of the earliest ships.
Government
The Ancient Egyptian civilization produced the first government to rule an entire nation. The Sumerians, who were the only other people to have a literate and urban civilization by 3000 BC, lived in small city-states, each numbering no more than a few tens of thousand people. The unified kingdom of Egypt, on the other hand, covered an entire country thousands of square miles in size and with millions of inhabitants.
The Pharaoh was the ruler of Ancient Egypt, both politically and religiously. The Pharaoh held the title 'Lord of the Two Lands', meaning that he ruled all of Upper and Lower Egypt; and 'High Priest of Every Temple', meaning that he represented all the gods on all the Earth. In Egyptian eyes, the pharaoh was a god himself, who stood between heaven and earth. His personal welfare and the welfare of the entire people were bound tightly together.
Pharaoh was in charge of the army, and would go to war when his lands were threatened - demanding valuable gifts from the conquered people if victory was obtained.
To help the Pharaoh in governing the land, an elaborate organization of officials, scribes and overseers – the world’s first civil service – developed, bringing the reach of government down to the lowliest villager. Egypt was divided into nomes, which were administrative regions (up to 42 of them), each governed by a nomarch. Pharaoh himself was surrounded in his palace by high officials, ministers and courtiers. For much of Ancient Egypt’s history the Pharaoh was served by a powerful chief minister called a Vizier. He represented the Pharaoh in the administration of the land, treasury and legal system. Temples were used as places of worship and also as granaries and treasuries where grain and goods were stored.
The Army
Soldiers of ancient Egyptian armies were armed with bows and arrows, spears, and round-topped shields made from stretched animal skin over wooden frames. Weapons and armour continued to improve after the adoption of bronze: shields were now made from solid wood with a bronze buckle, spears were tipped with a bronze point, and the bronze Khopesh - a hook shaped slashing weapon - was introduced. In the New Kingdom, chariots became a standard part of the army.
Pharaohs are often shown riding at the head of the army. Modern scholars tend to think this may be a propaganda device, as for a commander-in-chief to be fighting in the thick of the action alongside his troops would not necessarily have been the best place for him to be. On occasion, however, he may well have done; many commanders in subsequent history have charged into battle in person when conditions called for this kind of example. What is not in doubt is that being the commander of the army was an important part of the Pharaoh's role.
The prime duty of the army was to defend Egypt against foreign invasion. It was also at times deployed in conquering and occupying foreign possessions, in protecting mining expeditions to the Sinai and Nubia, and in garrisoning forts along important trade routes, especially in Nubia.
Religion
The ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods and goddesses. These included Ra, the sun god; Isis, the goddess of nature and magic; Horus, the god of war; and Osiris, the god of the dead. The pantheon of gods and goddesses gradually changed over time, as new gods became more important, and some less so. The rise and fall of gods and goddesses seems to have mirrored the political fortunes of the different temples and priesthoods. For example, when the rulers of Thebes became kings of all Egypt, and founded the New Kingdom, its local god Amun became the chief god, and was united with Ra to become Amun-Ra.
Gods were worshipped in temples run by priests. These were not apparently places of public worship: the place where the god's image was located was usually sealed off from the outside world. Only on occasions was the god brought out and shown to the public. Small domestic statues were used by normal Egyptians to worship the gods and goddesses in their own homes. Charms and amulets were worn for protection against the forces of evil.
Egyptian religious beliefs about the afterlife also changed over time. In early times, the afterlife seems to have been intimately connected to the preservation of the physical body by mummification. This always retained some force. However, the idea grew up that human beings are composed of both physical and spiritual aspects. After death, the latter lived on. Some people become disembodied souls, or ghosts, wandering the earth; but if judged worthy, a person could become a "blessed one", living in a land of goodness and plenty.
Economy and Society
As with all pre-industrial civilizations, Ancient Egypt’s economy was based on agriculture. The great majority of the people were peasant farmers. Because of the fertile nature of the Nile Valley, they were able to produce the large surplus which sustained the refined lifestyle of the Pharaoh and his court, his officials, the priests and all the other members of the elite. Peasants also provided the mass labour which built the pyramids and temples along the Nile Valley.
Agriculture
Farming in Egypt was dependent completely on the Nile River. Just a few miles away from the river, on both sides, was bone dry desert.
The flooding season lasted from June to September, depositing a layer of wonderfully fertile silt on the land beside the river. As much as the flood water as possible was stored in tanks and ponds. After the flood waters had receded, the growing season lasted from October to February. Egypt receives very little rainfall, so farmers irrigated their fields with river water from the reservoirs, and from the river itself. Ditches and canals carried the water to the fields.
Trade
Trade inside Egypt would have been greatly aided by the presence of the River Nile, and by the fact that no part of the country lay more than a few miles from this great waterway. Until modern times, for anything longer than very small distances, water transport has always been much less expensive than land transport. Numerous towns dotted the river bank, centres of local administration, and of local markets. Egypt has often been regarded as a civilization without cities. This is not true. Unlike the Sumerians, Egyptian cities were not independent states; however, there were numerous urban settlements in the Nile Valley, and Memphis was one of the largest cities in the world, if not at times the largest.
In the Bronze Age, international trade was almost the same as diplomacy, taking the form of exchanges of “gifts” between rulers. The Egyptians were ideally situated to take full advantage of this. Before the development of long-range trade routes across the Sahara, the Nile Valley functioned as the only “pinch point” through which trade goods from sub-Saharan Africa could flow north to the Mediterranean. Trading expeditions ranged far south into the present-day Sudan and the Red Sea in search of exotic goods such as ivory, gold, ostrich feathers and black slaves. These highly valued commodities underpinned Egypt's influence in the international world of the Bronze Age Middle East, finding their way to Hittite, Syrian and Mesopotamian courts.
Mineral resources
Egypt is rich in mineral resources, and these were well exploited in ancient times. Limestone and granite quarries occurred along the Nile valley. In the eastern desert was mined porphyry, alabaster, carnelian and emeralds. There were extensive gold mines in Nubia. Copper smelted from malachite ore mined in the Sinai. Iron deposits found in upper Egypt were utilized in the Late Period.
Many of these minerals were to be found in distant, inhospitable locations in the eastern and the Sinai deserts. They required large expeditions to get at them. These were organized by the government, and often had to be protected by troops. However, these natural resources allowed the ancient Egyptians to build monuments, sculpt statues of all sizes, manufacture metal tools and fashion jewellery.
Society
As in all societies of the ancient world, peasant farmers made up the bulk of the population. However, the land was owned by the Pharaoh, or by one of the temples, which were immensely wealthy, or by a noble family. Peasants were also subject to a labour tax, and were at times required to work on public projects such as irrigation or construction works.
Craftsmen seem to have had a higher status than farmers. Most of these probably worked for temples or the state. Scribes and officials were of high rank in ancient Egyptian society. Within this elite group were also priests, physicians and engineers; and from them were drawn the leading priests, ministers and courtiers.
At the very top was the royal family, below which was a powerful class of hereditary landowners (nobles). Slavery was known in ancient Egypt, but its extent is unclear. Most slaves seem to have been used as domestic servants in wealthy households rather than as agricultural workers. By law, slaves were able to buy and sell, like other people, or work their way to freedom.
Women seem to have had a comparatively high status in Egyptian society. Like men, they could own and sell property, make contracts, marry and divorce, receive inheritance, and pursue legal disputes in court. Married couples could own property jointly. Some women enjoyed huge status as high priestesses. On the other hand, as in virtually all ancient societies, public office was usually reserved for men.
Writing and literature
The first hieroglyphic writing that has come down to us dates from c. 3000 BC. A hieroglyph can represent a word, a sound, or a silent determinative; and the same symbol can serve different purposes in different contexts. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is composed of hundreds of symbols, which could be read in rows or columns, and in either direction (though in the majority of cases, written from right to left).
Hieroglyphics were, as far as we know, exclusively used on stone monuments and in tombs. In their daily work, scribes used another kind of writing, called hieratic. This uses a cursive script (that is, joined-up writing) which was far quicker and easier to use than hieroglyphics. Hieratic writing was always written from right to left, usually in horizontal rows.
Later, around 500 BC, and therefore towards the end of Ancient Egyptian civilization, a new form of writing, Demotic, came into widespread use. This was a phonetic, semi-alphabetical script, which began life as the transcription of everyday spoken language, but over time developed into the language of literature, high culture and religion.
Literature
Egyptian hieroglyphic literature is found on public monuments, and the walls of temples and tombs, and consists of records of the deeds of gods and men, as well as poetry. Love poetry, hymns, proverbs, spells and curses, instructional and medical texts, and myths and legends, are found in hieratic, and later demotic scripts.
The Story of Sinuhe is probably the best known work of Egyptian literature that has come down to us. Another popular tale is the Story of Wenamun, which gives an insight into Egypt in its declining phase.
Art
Much of the art which has come down to us is funerary art - art designed for the tomb. The Ancient Egyptians believed that life could continue into the afterlife, and so the dead were accompanied in their graves by everyday and luxury goods – including art objects - to help them enjoy their new life.
Ancient Egyptian art emphasised a rigid style which changed remarkably little over the millennia. This did not mean that Egyptian art was unchanging – but change took place within fairly narrow bounds. Ironically, in the declining centuries of Ancient Egyptian civilization, its art became more conservative and rigid, harking back to the glorious days of old.
The iconic Egyptian two-dimensional style is found in tombs, temples and statues. Egyptian statues were carved from stone and rock, or wood as a cheap alternative, with paint obtained from mineral ores quarried from surrounding areas.
The wall paintings in tombs often depict lively scenes of everyday life, bringing this ancient civilization vividly to life. The houses of the wealthy also had richly painted walls with scenes of people, birds, water pools, deities and geometric designs.
Architecture
The Ancient Egyptians built some of the most-awe inspiring structures the world has ever seen, such as the Pyramids of Giza. The construction of pyramids was in fact restricted to the earlier days of Egyptian civilization. Later monumental architecture can be seen most clearly in the temples and giant statues of the Valley of the Kings and Abu Simbel.
The average Egyptian lived in a simple mud, wood or brick abode, with the elite having elaborate multi-room mansions with richly painted walls, decorated floors, and built around courtyards.
Technology
Mathemetics
The Ancient Egyptians developed high levels of mathematical skills to enable them to build their pyramids and temples with remarkably simple tools. There mathematics seems to have been of a more practical nature than that of the Mesopotamians, and therefore may have influenced later civilizations less; however, this practical mathematics must have been of a very high order indeed.
Medicine
Ancient Egyptian funerary practices, which involved embalming the dead, did not lead to detailed knowledge of human anatomy. Nevertheless, Egyptian medicine acquired an excellent reputation in the Ancient World. Ancient Egyptian doctors could stitch up wounds, repair broken bones and amputate infected limbs. Cuts were bandaged by raw meat, linen, and swabs soaked with honey. Opium was also used as a painkiller. Onions and garlic were used as health foods in the diet.
Close proximity to the Nile meant that water-borne diseases, such as malaria, were rife. Other common ailments included physical stresses caused from a life of labour. Life expectancy was between 30 (women) and 35 (men), however about one third of infants never reached adulthood.
Ship Building
The long river along which Ancient Egyptian civilization flourished was an ideal environment for the development of boat technology. As early as 3000 BC an Egyptian ship of 75ft in length had been built. Planks of wood were originally held together by straps, with reeds or grass pushed in to seal the gaps. Soon tree nails were used to hold planks together, with pitch and caulking to close the seams; and mortise and tenon joints had also been developed. However, despite having ships on which to sail, they were not renowned as great sailors and do not seem to have engage in shipping across the Mediterranean or Red Seas on a regular basis.
Ancient Egypt in World History
The clearest evidence for the legacy of Ancient Egypt can be seen in architecture. The later Egyptian temples look very similar to early Greek temples; and it has been suggested that the Ancient Greeks got the very idea of monumental building in stone from the Egyptians.
Other items of Egypt’s legacy are harder to pin down. Archaic Greek sculpture seems to be more closely related to Mesopotamian and astronomical models than Egyptian; similarly, Greek mathematics bears a closer relationship to Babylonian precedents.
What is unmistakable is that this ancient civilization has exercised an unmatched spell upon future civilizations. The Greeks already regarded Egypt as a land of wisdom and mystery, and the Ancient Roman fascination with Egypt can be seen in the number of obelisks to be found in the city of Rome to this day (some of them shipped from Egypt to the imperial capital, others copies of Egyptian models). The medieval Arabs wrote about Egyptian civilization, and the modern European fascination with Egypt was fuelled by Napoleon’s conquest of the country in 1798. Modern Egyptology started at that date, and has continued ever since. Today, Egypt is one of the prime tourist destinations of the world, witnessing to the ongoing fascination with this, one of the world’s truly great civilizations.
So what, in sum, is the place of Ancient Egypt in world history? It is surely this - here, almost at the very beginnings of recorded history, was a great civilization which produced wonderful art, architecture, engineering, literature, medicine and so on. The wide range of highly-developed practical techniques these involved were transmitted to other peoples and later cultures; but more than this, what an inspiration it must have been for the civilizations which came after! We know that many Greeks and Romans travelled to the land of Egypt, and were awed by the magnificent remains they saw there. In short, Ancient Egypt set the bar high!
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