Atlas of Empires E-Book

Peter Davidson

• Herausgeber: CompanionHouse Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 387

Beschreibung

Atlas of Empires tells the story of how and why the great empires of history came into being, operated, and ultimately declined, and it discusses the future of the empire in today's globalized world. This book features 60 beautiful and detailed maps of the empires' territories at different stages of their existence, and it organizes them thematically to reflect the different driving forces behind empires throughout history (such as faith, nomadic culture, nationhood, and capitalism). Each section discusses the rise and fall of the empires that existed in a region: *Government and society *Wealth and technology *War and military force *Religious beliefs *And more! From the earliest empires of the Sumerians and the Pharaohs to the modern empires of the USSR and the European Union, this is a story that reveals how empires are created and organized, how later empires resolve the problems of governance faced by earlier empires, and how the political and cultural legacies of ancient empires are still felt today.

Leseprobe

For my mother who wanted to read this book but didn’t get the chance

ATLAS OF EMPIRES

CompanionHouse Books™ is an imprint of Fox Chapel Publishers International Ltd.

Project Team

Vice President–Content: Christopher Reggio

Editor: Jeremy Hauck

Copy Editor: Laura Taylor

Design: Justin Speers

Index: Elizabeth Walker

Copyright © 2018 by IMM Lifestyle Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Fox Chapel Publishers, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Davidson, Peter (Peter Bruce), 1963- author.

Title: Atlas of empires / Peter Davidson.

Description: Mount Joy, PA : CompanionHouse Books, [2018] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017048739 | ISBN 9781620082874 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism--History. | Imperialism--Maps.

Classification: LCC JC359 .D29 2018 | DDC 909--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048739

This book has been published with the intent to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter within. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the author and publisher expressly disclaim any responsibility for any errors, omissions, or adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

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Introduction

“Murder, incest, and the wearing of expensive jewelry.” That is the definition of “empire” a friend gave me when I said I was writing this book. It covers the basics of how to seize power, how to keep it in the family, and what to do with the spoils. But beyond this, what is “empire”?

For the Romans, the Latin word imperium meant simply the power to rule. Imperator, from which we get our word “emperor,” was a title given to a military commander after a particularly great victory on the battlefield, allowing him to parade through the streets of Rome in triumph. Later, it became a title reserved for the one man who ruled Rome and all its possessions.

There is the image here both of glorious conquest and of power held over far-flung lands, and indeed this captures something of what we have come to mean by the term “empire.” But how, then, does empire come about, what forms can it take, and does it have a defining characteristic?

Early in the 20th century, explanations of empire in terms of international finance capitalism were put forward by both English political scientist J. A. Hobson and Russian revolutionary V. I. Lenin. They each wanted to explain the sudden race of Western powers to carve up Africa and Asia from the 1870s onward and believed the root cause to be huge concentrations of money created by the growth of monopolies. There was too much money to bring continued returns at home so investment opportunities were sought abroad, safeguarded by political and military intervention. This was imperialism: for Hobson, a perversion of capitalism; for Lenin, its inevitable final stage.

Back in the mid-19th century, however, Karl Marx had seen empire not so much as a development of capitalism but rather as its underlying foundation. According to him, gold and silver plundered from the newly discovered Americas led to a buildup of capital in 16th-century Europe, without which capitalist economies could not have emerged in the first place.

But economics can only be part of the story. During the late 19th century, France grabbed vast yet economically worthless tracts of West Africa. Writing at the end of the First World War, Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter thought military expansion expressed a primitive urge unrelated to economic interests. He suggested that wherever a military class influences government, a “war machine” is produced that seeks conquest as an end in itself. Schumpeter’s first example was New Kingdom Egypt.

These are all particular descriptions of a general phenomenon: the domination of one state by another. This idea lies at the heart of the common use of the term “empire” and is as old as state-building itself. The earliest city-states tried to grow by taking over their neighbors. Where they succeeded, a single larger state might form, but more often the aggressor became a core state holding sway over a number of semi-independent peripheral states—a halfway stage to a larger state.

This core state became more than merely the strongest in the region. Ancient Sparta was the leader of a league of states but had little interest in interfering with their domestic politics. Athens, by contrast, also led a league but forced a supervised Athenian-style democracy on its supposedly independent members. Sparta was a hegemonic state, the strongest of a group, while Athens was interventionist and thereby imperial. The fact that Athens replaced tyrants with democratic government did not lessen the imperial nature of this relationship.

This book, then, defines “empire” as an unequal relationship between a core state and a periphery of one or more states controlled from the core. On the simplest level, control means military occupation or other formal political intervention, but it can also cover informal economic or cultural influence. Economic pressure by itself has frequently been enough to manipulate governments. Religion, ideology, or other cultural forces have habitually accompanied political or economic persuasion.

The culture of the colonized, however, can exert its own pull and threaten to absorb a conquering power, most famously in the case of the Mongol conquest of China. As such, the imposition of an imperial culture is not a necessary feature of empire. More often than not, a cultural cross-fertilization develops. The rise of national independence movements in recent centuries might imply otherwise, but national identity is itself a weaving together and never easy to rely on, here producing a hybrid, there masking regional identities that tell a truer story about how people see themselves. In the end, the acid test for cultural identity has remained solidarity in the face of a common enemy, and this is a test most empires have at some stage passed.

The Via Appia running from Rome to Brindisi, begun in 312 bce to supply troops across mountains and marshes. As Rome colonized the Italian peninsula, the need for efficient communications between core and periphery grew, and a web of highways radiating out from Rome developed.

To tell the story of how empires, thus defined, have risen, persisted, and fallen over the millennia, the imperial core, the colonized periphery, and the international situation each need to be examined.

The core state is the place to look to find various motives for expansion, from the dream of imposing an imperial peace on squabbling states to desire for economic exploitation, lust for the glory of conquest, or evangelical zeal, whether religious or ideological.

The periphery is the place to look for crucial resistance or collaboration. The fates of many empires have hinged on leaders of colonized states deciding where their best interests lay. Often, the core can provide an account of an empire’s rise, while the periphery better explains its persistence.

Decline and collapse may come from internal decay, but usually the international situation plays a part. Some empires have been able to exist pretty much in isolation, but the threat of war from other powers has been more common. In this context, a bipolar world has often been more stable than one composed of several rival empires. On the other hand, an international situation dominated by two rivals tends to leave no place for neutral states, so provides an additional motive for expansion.

In the background lies technology. Who acquires an empire, what form it takes, and how long it lasts have always been inseparable from the kinds of weapons empire-builders wield, the kinds of transport and communications technology they possess, and the kinds of finance they have access to.

As changing motives, changing structures, and changing technology have produced different empires, so this book is organized as a roughly historical progression of themes. This is not meant to suggest watertight categories, but simply to offer ways of looking at various empires. There is in any case a good deal of overlap between sections.

Nonetheless, different themes have come and gone over the centuries. The first empires, born from endemic war, gave way to empires espousing social and political ideals, which in turn gave way to empires fired by religion. Land empires won on horseback gave way to maritime empires won by seapower. Industrialization, the most profound revolution since the introduction of farming, brought new kinds of imperial relationships. Each empire furthered an inexorable movement toward wider integration.

Such a short book can be only the briefest introduction to a handful of the more influential empires of the last 5,000 years or so. All have involved murder, incest by one definition or another, and the wearing of extremely expensive jewelry.

Statues depicting Genghis Khan’s warriors, near the capital of present-day Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar. During the 13th century Temüjin, the Genghis Khan (“supreme ruler”), and his descendants used the horse to establish the Mongolian Empire, at a cost of up to 40 million lives.

1. War and Peace

Sumer and Akkad / Egypt / Assyria and Babylonia / Persia

The first empires were attempts to keep the peace. The great river valleys of the Nile, Tigris–Euphrates, and Indus all gave rise to wealthy farming civilizations able to produce crops, pottery, and textiles. Lacking minerals, timber, and other raw materials, however, these societies had to trade with people who lived in the less fertile lands beyond.

Competition for natural resources led to war, which became a struggle to impose peace and stability over an ever-wider area so economic life could flourish. But maintaining peace required more than force. Communications systems were necessary. Some form of local administration for conquered territories was needed. In the long run, a way to win hearts and minds had to be found—the more so the larger empires grew.

The context in which the first empires arose 3000–2000bce

Irrigation agriculture produced centrally organized states, expanding trade networks, and a competitiveness fiercest along the Tigris and Euphrates.

Sumer and Akkad

The first experiments in empire-building emerged from the evolution of city-states in Mesopotamia. Each city-state concentrated wealth and power into the hands of one person as never before, but there was competition between them. The result was war, to which the only answer seemed to be more war, driven by the dream of a supreme victor imposing peace. But waging war and imposing lasting peace were two different things.

Inventing the state

Before about 6000 bce, no one had settled the delta created by the Tigris and the Euphrates, which the Greeks were later to call Mesopotamia, “the land between the rivers,” and which is now Iraq. There was little here to attract hunters and gatherers of wild food and even less to attract the first farmers working the surrounding hillsides. They needed rain for their crops but in the Mesopotamian valley there was hardly any rain. Instead, there were two rivers that flooded the region every spring, creating a temporary swampland destined only to bake dry and crack in the scorching heat.

But the silt from the two rivers produced a light soil that was easy to work in a time before metal tools, so gradually people began to come down from the hills until, by around 5000 bce, the riverbanks of the far south had become dotted with villages. The villagers shared a common culture and named the region “Sumer.”

What made life in Sumer possible was cooperation. There was more than enough water in the rivers to make up for the lack of rainfall, but to make cultivation possible it had to be controlled. Dikes were needed to prevent flooding, then a network of irrigation channels had to be dug to bring river water to the crops. Constructing and maintaining dikes and ditches was a huge undertaking that demanded a great and ongoing collective effort. But irrigation yielded big enough harvests for stores of surplus food to be built up, which made taxation possible.

Eannatum of Lagash leads his troops against the city of Umma in a border dispute concerning irrigation ca. 2450 bce. Eannatum was one of several Sumerian rulers who moved toward controlling the whole of Sumer in the period between Gilgamesh and Sargon.

An administrator was chosen to oversee a single irrigation system connecting several villages. He organized work teams and collected taxes to pay for maintenance work in the form of a percentage of agricultural produce. The administrator’s village grew larger and more wealthy than its neighbors, becoming the center for local trade as well as taxation. It became a city-state, controlling a group of satellite villages and their fields. Between 4000 and 3000 bce, dozens of such city-states established themselves throughout Sumer.

These were societies of a size and complexity hitherto unknown, brought into being by efficient management. Without keeping track of who owed what to whom, the latticework of relationships supporting the economy would collapse. Luckily, the land between the rivers had no shortage of clay and a series of marks made by the end of a reed pressed into a wet clay tablet created a permanent record when the clay dried. From these beginnings the Sumerians invented writing and recorded history.

War

As Sumer prospered, so its agricultural wealth enticed the nomads of the western desert and the hill-tribes of the Zagros Mountains to mount raids. Each city-state responded by choosing a war-leader, who used the public coffers to equip and train an army and build a city wall behind which everyone could hide.

But the raiding parties kept coming. It became obvious that collective action beyond city-state level was called for, so the war-leaders of several cities met in the city of Nippur and formed a league to defend all of Sumer against outsiders. Impromptu raids by scattered tribes were no match for the combined powers of a developed civilization, and after the formation of the Nippur League, they largely died away.

Deprived of a common enemy, however, Sumer’s city-states found cooperation more difficult. Each of the big cities now had a wall, a well-equipped army, and a military commander reluctant to hand power back to a peacetime administrator. There was always an excuse for conflict in Sumer because land and water had to be so carefully managed. There was also more to be gained from going to war against a wealthy city than a raiding party, especially because they now contained stashes of luxury goods.

The surplus produced by irrigation farming was able to support new social classes. Incessant raiding had pushed many to leave the land for a safer life within the city walls where they became potters and weavers in the employ of a new business class. These merchants were keen to trade pots and textiles upriver for the materials Sumer lacked, in particular copper and gold from Anatolia. So the rich became richer and Sumer’s cities acquired expensive jewelry, precious artifacts, and weapons made of bronze. And now Sumer’s war-leaders began to fight each other for booty, using the spoils of war to increase their personal power.

For hundreds of years Sumer was torn apart by endemic warfare. Out of the exploits of its warrior kings grew the epic stories of Sumer’s “Age of Heroes” (ca.2650–ca.2550 bce), the most famous of whom was Gilgamesh of Uruk. After sacking Kish, foremost city of the time, Gilgamesh took the title “King of Kish,” though he was still king of Uruk. This began a tradition of the title “King of Kish” being claimed by the most powerful king in Sumer at any one time.

Now the object of these intercity wars began to shift. Plunder became less attractive than the goal of subduing enough cities to put an end to fighting in the interests of peace and prosperity.

Around 2400 bce, the king of Ur succeeded in uniting his city with its rival, Uruk, and then taking Kish, thereby bringing pretty much the whole of the lower Euphrates under his control. A later king of Umma, Lugal-zage-si (ca.2295–ca.2271 bce), conquered Lagash, Umma’s old rival on the Tigris, inherited control of Ur–Uruk, and sacked Kish once more, making almost all the cities on both rivers his. Sumer seemed to be edging toward the formation of a larger state.

But Lugal-zage-si had not reckoned with Sargon.

Enforced peace

Sumer ended where the Tigris and Euphrates neared each other. Close to both rivers and a pass in the Zagros Mountains, this region became a crossroads for trade. The people who lived here and as far afield as Mari were descendants of Sumer’s early desert raiders. They were heavily influenced by Sumerian culture, but they looked different and spoke their own Semitic language called Akkadian.

Sargon I (ca.2270–ca.2215 bce) was Akkadian. According to Sumerian records, he was the son of a date farmer who became cup-bearer to the king of Kish—though, like many empire-builders, Sargon’s origins are clouded by several rags-to-riches stories. It seems he somehow escaped Lugal-zage-si’s sacking of Kish to become the first king of Akkad, a city he founded near where the two rivers come together.

Sargon’s rise to greater power began in reaction to further aggression from Sumer. Lugal-zage-si led a coalition of numerous cities against Akkad, little expecting its young king to resist such force, let alone that he would take Lugal-zage-si and 50 other rulers prisoner. Knowing he had to press his surprise victory, Sargon immediately advanced south, taking the cities of Ur, Umma, and Lagash and claiming the title of “King of Kish” for himself.

But Sargon had concerns beyond imposing peace on the squabbling cities of Sumer. The trade on which Akkad relied was all too vulnerable to disruption by bandits or by rival cities charging tolls to allow goods to pass. Sargon embarked on a further round of conquests designed to create a single, stable zone of trade stretching all the way to the copper mines of Anatolia, the cedar forests of the Mediterranean coast, and into the Zagros to the kingdom of Elam.

For a time, Sargon’s imperial peace bore fruit. He used his monopoly of power to enforce business contracts, settle disputes, and provide a constant police presence. Farmers returned to their land and merchants traveled in safety. Ships from the cities of the Indus valley could sail all the way up to Akkad, which soon became the richest city yet known.

Sargon’s idea of how to govern his assembled conquests, however, remained crude. Local rulers were left to run their own affairs but any whiff of disorder was immediately pounced on by Sargon’s imperial forces. It was both too little and too much and, inevitably, revolts broke out. Realizing he needed to pay more attention to regional administration, Sargon replaced local rulers with his own men from Akkad. At the same time, he tore down the walls of the cities he stormed to make rebellion harder—a measure which only reinforced the feeling of living in a police state.

Sargon was able to get away with this because he provided the strong and charismatic leadership an empire run by force alone requires, but neither of his sons had his talents.

His daughter Enheduanna became a famous poet and high priestess of the moon god Sin at the temple of Ur, where Sin was the city’s protector god. Her standing may have gone some way towards ameliorating Akkadian rule in the south of Sumer, but if so neither of Sargon’s twin sons had the leadership qualities to build on it. Rimush managed to alienate pretty much the whole of Sumer by an obsessively bloodthirsty mania in his punishment of rebelling cities, Manishtusu tried to calm things down, and both died at the hands of their courtiers in palace intrigues. As a result, the empire quickly unraveled, leaving Sargon’s grandson Naram-Suen (ca. 2190–ca. 2154 bce) with only the city of Akkad itself and Elam.

Naram-Suen, however, was cut from the same cloth as Sargon and his achievements in battle were even more spectacular. The major Sumerian cities plus Mari and several others all attacked Akkad together, forcing Naram-Suen to fight nine defensive battles in one year. He won them all and went on to reconquer his grandfather’s empire.

The people of Akkad were so astounded by Naram-Suen’s feats they decided he must be more than human. After consulting the gods on the matter, they made him the patron god of their city and built a temple to him. A leader able to inspire this type of personality cult was exactly what Sargon’s administratively primitive empire needed. Unfortunately, there were no more Naram-Suens and by 2115 bce, Akkad had been overrun by Gutians, hill tribes from the Zagros, who laid waste to all but the far south of Sumer.

The first empires of Mesopotamia ca. 2270–ca. 1940 bce

Sumer was finally brought under single rule by Sargon of Akkad. His empire reached the Mediterranean, but relied simply on force. The later Sumerian empire built by the Third Dynasty of Ur was smaller but brought with it the beginnings of bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy

Spared the worst of the Gutian devastation, the cities of Uruk and Ur soon rose again to develop a new Sumerian empire based more on bureaucracy than force.

Utu-hegal of Uruk (ca.2055–ca.2048 bce) took the first step by driving the Gutians out of Sumer, after which agriculture and river trade began to revive. At the time, the city of Ur was run by a military governor from Uruk called Ur-Nammu, who succeeded Utu-hegal to take charge of both cities around 2047 bce. He took the next step in the creation of a new empire by annexing Lagash and its surrounding countryside.

There Ur-Nammu stopped. Any conquests farther afield would be too expensive to hold on to and would only distract from more important reconstruction nearer home, such as building a safe harbor for seagoing ships and restoring temples fallen into disrepair under the Gutians.

Ur-Nammu turned to figuring out how best to keep control of his modest empire. He divided it into a core area around the cities of Ur and Uruk and a peripheral area toward Lagash and beyond from which to exact tribute. He appointed regional governors whom he shuffled from post to post lest they build up their own power base. Sumer’s pioneering of writing enabled him to introduce standard laws to apply across his empire—replacing violent punishment with fines for many offenses provided an extra source of revenue. Ur-Nammu’s conservative and bureaucratic empire provided enough wealth for him to build the great Ziggurat at Ur, the largest temple yet built.

Shulgi (ca.2029–ca.1982 bce) further developed his father’s infrastructure, having main roads measured and rest houses built along them for traveling merchants. Subsequently, he tried to expand his territory, but the later part of his reign saw waves of Semitic tribes, the Amorites, pressing in from the desert. Sumer’s wealth had long attracted immigrants, such as the Akkadians, but the scale of the new influx was too much to absorb, so Shulgi began building a massive fortified wall along Sumer’s northwestern border to keep the Amorites out.

The wall was not enough to save Sumer, however. Centuries of over-irrigation had made the soil around Ur so salty the area had become dangerously dependent on food imports. With trade and communications disrupted by social upheaval, the result was famine. Finally, seeing its age-old foe weakened, Elam sacked the city of Ur around 1940bce.

Sumer had fallen, yet its influence lived on. By digging ditches along the riverbank, it had produced taxation, war, and empire, together with a literate culture destined to underpin new societies formed by the very Amorite tribes whose arrival spelled its downfall. The empire of Ur-Nammu, with its law code and bureaucratic bent, formed the blueprint for the future rise of Babylon.

Sumer had also established the pattern for one route to empire, that of a dynamic, competitive society trying to transcend local rivalries. A different route, charted by a state more centralized from the outset, first emerged in Ancient Egypt.

Egypt

While the city-states of Sumer were trapped in an endless cycle of war, Egyptian society found peace. Here, the stable larger realm that eluded the Sumerians was achieved early on and regarded as a single, unified country for a thousand years. Subsequently, Egypt remodeled itself as a military state and became an aggressive imperial presence on the stage of the ancient world.

Unification

What sets a unified state apart from an empire is often less a question of structure than of whether central rule is accepted as legitimate.

Around 3100 bce, farming communities in the Nile Delta (Lower Egypt) and further upstream (Upper Egypt) came together under single rule from the city of Memphis. All the farmers along this stretch of the Nile shared elements of a common culture but it seems that what precipitated unification was an invasion of Lower Egypt by a ruler of Upper Egypt, known as Narmer or Menes (most likely two names for the same person).

During the fourth millennium bce, the settlements of Upper Egypt had gradually become walled towns, perhaps in response to skirmishes with Nubian tribes from further upriver. In time, these towns formed themselves into three groups centered on Hierakonopolis, Naqada, and Abydos, until Narmer brought all three under his control. From this power base, Narmer seems to have embarked on a conquest of the less centralized delta, and an overall capital at Memphis followed.

Egyptian religious ideas enabled the Memphis rulers to present themselves as offspring of the gods, able to control the ebb and flow of the Nile itself. While the leaders of Sumer’s jostling city-states were having to prove themselves in battle, the pharaohs of Egypt had found a way to put their authority beyond question. Their real power, however, lay largely in the hands of the nomarchs, local rulers of the 42 independent states, or nomes, of the Nile. The decision of the nomarchs to accept the authority of Memphis transformed what might have been seen as imperial subjugation into a unified Egypt, of which the nomes became districts.

The cooperation of the nomarchs led to 500 years of stable rule under the Old Kingdom (ca.2686–ca.2181 bce), expressing itself most clearly in the building of the pyramids, which required the mobilization of huge workforces across the country. After about 2180 bce, however, famines brought on by climate change made the pharaohs’ ability to mediate with the gods look suspect, and the authority of Memphis crumbled.

The unification of Egypt ca. 3100 bce

From Upper Egypt Narmer invaded Lower Egypt to create a unified state along the Nile. Hemmed in by the desert, Egypt under the Old Kingdom did not seek further expansion.

After a century and a half, central control was reestablished by the nomarchs of Thebes, who became the first pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom (ca.2040–ca.1650 bce), ruling from a new capital upriver and ushering in a second 500-year period of stability. In reviving Egypt’s economy they began to look outwards, establishing maritime trade with Lebanon and along the Red Sea, as well as opening the first mines in Nubia and the Sinai Desert.

Nonetheless, the pharaohs of both the Old and Middle Kingdoms ruled a largely insular society defined by a desert boundary that kept external threats to a minimum and within which their rule was, for the most part, accepted as legitimate. For over a thousand years there was little incentive for aggressive expansion.

Occupation and expulsion

Then, around 1650 bce, a people known as the Hyksos gained control of Lower Egypt, setting themselves up as Egyptian pharaohs in a new capital at Avaris. They formed an alliance with the Nubian kingdom of Kush in the south, but kept only indirect control of Upper Egypt, which continued to be ruled from Thebes.

Who the Hyksos were and how they came to power remains obscure. Historical accounts have them storming across the Sinai Desert into Egypt on horse-drawn chariots armed with small, high-tensile bows that could be fired on the move, none of which equipment the Egyptians had seen before. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests the Hyksos may have been one of many immigrant populations in the delta region that gradually grew in size and influence as central authority waned.

Egypt under the Hyksos ca. 1650–ca. 1550 bce

The Middle Kingdom ended with Lower Egypt falling to incomers from the Levant. In Upper Egypt, a resistance movement grew, imitated Hyksos warfare, and after a century reconquered Lower Egypt.

What is beyond dispute is that Hyksos rule provoked a reaction from the native royal family at Thebes. Egypt does not seem to have suffered under the Hyksos, not least because the Hyksos imitated Egyptian rule and adopted Egyptian traditions. But this did not prevent them being seen as foreign usurpers.

So at Thebes, a resistance movement developed. The new military hardware was adopted, a series of campaigns fought, and, eventually, Ahmose I, the Theban ruler, succeeded in driving the Hyksos out of Egypt and back across the Sinai Peninsula. Ahmose then reunited his country under native rule, founding the 18th Dynasty, the first dynasty of the New Kingdom (ca.1550-ca.1069bce), under which Egypt asserted itself for a final 500 years.

Empire

Egypt under the New Kingdom was a changed society. The demands of taking on the Hyksos had produced a centralized military state with nomarchs appointed from the capital, agricultural production streamlined, and the organization of the armed forces closely linked both to the structure of government and to the social hierarchy.

Generals now wielded as much power as priests. A military class had been created, with the ear of the country’s rulers and a vested interest in campaigning. The army moved beyond Egypt’s borders to create buffer zones. The plan was to prevent another Hyksos experience but, with a new military establishment, campaigning soon developed a self-sustaining dynamic.

Under Thutmose I (ca.1506-ca.1493bce) Nubia was effectively annexed. His troops pushed up beyond the fourth cataract of the Nile. In their wake came miners, merchants, and civil servants to exploit the region’s gold reserves, as well as priests who all but stamped out indigenous Nubian culture.

Across the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian forces reached up the Levant as far as Carchemish on the upper reaches of the Euphrates, threatening the kingdom of Mitanni. Thutmose III (ca.1479–ca.1425 bce), most militaristic of all the pharaohs, fought almost annual campaigns against Mitanni in the first 20 years of his reign before accepting he had to stay south of Carchemish.

Thutmose III expanded Egyptian rule to its farthest extent, turning Canaan into tribute-paying provinces overseen by Egyptian officials and policed by the army. In the larger cities, local princes were left as puppet rulers, their loyalty guaranteed by taking their sons hostage.

Egypt was drawn into the world of Middle Eastern rivalries, exchanging gifts with Babylon, arranging a marriage alliance with Mitanni, and conducting diplomatic correspondence with all its neighbors. The cosmopolitanism and vastly increased wealth of the New Kingdom, with its gold mines and tributary provinces, brought Egyptian cultural influence to a peak under Amenhotep III (ca.1388–ca.1351 bce), who built Egypt’s largest temple at Luxor.

New Kingdom Egypt was transformed into a military power by adopting the horse, the two-wheeled chariot, and a light and powerful bow made by laminating strips of wood together. Here Tutankhamun (ca. 1333–ca. 1323 bce) fights Nubians from upriver.

Egypt in a wider context during the New Kingdom ca. 1550–ca. 1069 bce

After expelling the Hyksos, the pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty continued expanding north and south, creating a larger Egyptian state with provinces in Asia.

Amenhotep III’s son, also named Amenhotep, took Egypt in a different direction, changing his name to Akhenaten and moving the capital downstream to Amarna, where he practiced a reworked religion centered on the sun god Aten, which exchanged traditional concern over the afterlife for focus on the here and now. Sculpture became more naturalistic, ceasing to show the pharaoh as all-powerful, and Akhenaten’s rule became unpopular.

His own son, the boy king Tutankhamun (ca.1332-ca.1323bce), moved back to Thebes and began to undo all this but died young, whereupon his widow asked to marry a prince from the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia. When he was murdered en route to Egypt, the Hittites became a new and aggressive enemy and Canaan was soon lost to them. The dynasty died out and the early pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty found themselves trying to claw back the empire.

Faced with hostility from the Hittites, expansion was harder than it had been for Thutmose I and III and more expensive. Rameses II (ca.1279-ca.1213bce) managed to retake Canaan but after 15 years of draining the public purse by trying to push the Hittites farther north, he agreed to a truce near Kadesh in 1274 bce, after the largest chariot battle in history.

What he may have failed to achieve on the battlefield, however, Rameses II more than made up for through the advertising power of architecture. Peace, the provinces restored, plus a reign of 67 years allowed him to pursue a continuous program of monumental building projects throughout the lands he ruled with an accent on size and quantity rather than quality. The colossal monuments he built may have lacked a refinement known in the days of Amenhotep III, but they succeeded in stamping the image of imperial Egypt on the consciousness of all who laid eyes on them for three thousand years and winning him a reputation, deserved or otherwise, as greatest of the pharaohs.

But by the 20th Dynasty and the reign of Rameses III (ca.1186-ca.1155bce), last of the great New Kingdom pharaohs, new and terminal stresses had arrived. Successive waves of seafaring raiders known collectively as the Sea Peoples swept down across the eastern Mediterranean, wiping out the Hittites and pushing Egypt back to the Nile. Here Rameses III held the Sea Peoples at bay in two epic battles fought in one year, in addition to fighting off invasions from the western desert. But the cost of warfare on such a scale was producing food shortages and even led to a strike by the royal tomb builders. After Rameses III the provinces slipped away and climate change brought years of famine, weakening the treasury further and exposing once more the inability of the pharaohs to control the Nile. Now Egypt entered a slow decline set to continue until the arrival of Alexander the Great in 331bce.

Egypt’s New Kingdom demonstrated the dynamic for expansion that a government tied to a military career structure can deliver. It stood in stark contrast to the Egypt of earlier times, whose rulers had kept to a zone in which they could rely on religion and a common culture to provide legitimacy.

Farther east, this contrast between military power and cultural authority had, by the time of the New Kingdom, become the focus of the ongoing battle for control of Mesopotamia.

Assyria and Babylonia

Sargon’s attempt to control the whole of Mesopotamia was only the first act in a drama that would take almost 2,000 years to play itself out. After the fall of Akkad and Sumer, two new powers appeared: one militaristic, the other a largely cultural force. It became increasingly clear that only a partnership of the two would create an empire of any stability.

Sibling rivalry

The years around 2000 bce brought ethnic change to the whole of Mesopotamia as Amorite tribes came to settle and mix with indigenous populations. When the dust began to settle, ruling Amorite clans had taken hold over much of the region and the cities of Mesopotamia were held in a new web of rivalries.

One area that fell under Amorite sway was Assyria, centered around the city of Ashur on the upper reaches of the Tigris. Ashur imported copper from beyond the Taurus Mountains through a trading outpost in the northwestern city of Kanesh. Shamsi-Adad of Ashur (ca.1749–ca.1717 bce) began to take control of this trade route and by the end of his rule, all of northern Mesopotamia down to Mari was in his grip. But Assyria fell afoul of a neighboring Amorite clan headed by Hammurapi (ca.1728–ca.1686 bce).

Hammurapi ruled Babylon, a city not far from Akkad. Where Shamsi-Adad was a warrior, Hammurapi was a politician. He had already outmaneuvered another Amorite ruler, Rim-Sin, who ran a mini-empire based around the southern cities of Isin and Larsa. Rim-Sin helped Hammurapi take Elam only to have Hammurapi turn the tables on him, after which southern Mesopotamia, now controlled from Babylon, became known as Babylonia.

Hammurapi then smoothed the way for a northern takeover by exchanging ambassadors with both Assyria and Mari. By now, Shamsi-Adad was dead and Hammurapi was able to persuade Mari to help invade a weakened Ashur before turning on Mari itself.

Having won an empire by manipulation, Hammurapi used bureaucracy to hold on to it. He was heir to the empire of Ur-Nammu as well as more generally to the literate culture of Sumer. His government was staffed by teams of scribes and he kept abreast of developments hundreds of miles away through letters, the cutting-edge communications technology of the day. He also disseminated written laws, adding the Amorite custom of “an eye for an eye” to Ur-Nammu’s code. Written laws allowed Hammurapi, like Ur-Nammu, to extend centralized administration throughout his realm while giving his subjects a sense of benefiting from his rule by having rights.

Beyond this, inheriting the Sumerian tradition made Babylon the guardian of Mesopotamian culture, now a fusion of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Amorite elements. The Babylonians spoke and wrote a dialect of Akkadian, but Sumerian remained the language of priests and scholars. Sumerian literature was carefully copied out and Marduk, Babylon’s city god, joined Sumer’s pantheon.

The first Assyrian and Babylonian Empires ca. 1749–ca. 1531 bce

After the fall of Sumer, the Assyrians and Babylonians gained control of Mesopotamia. Assyria soon fell to its southern neighbor, then, in 1531 bce, Old Babylonia itself fell. But Assyrians and Babylonians remained rivals for a millennium.

Conquest and influence

Hammurapi’s Babylon was sacked by Hittites around 1531 bce, after which the Middle East entered centuries of turbulent power play, barbarian raiding, and large-scale movement of peoples. Assyrians and Babylonians fought, made alliances, and broke them off to fight again. Underneath the confusion, however, a pattern was emerging. Assyria was defining itself as a warrior society eager to subdue its neighbors while Babylonia was demonstrating its growing ability to exert a widespread cultural pull.

The Kassites of the Zagros Mountains were the first to feel this pull. They took over Babylon in the wake of the Hittites and simply became Babylonian themselves. Their first act was to retrieve the statue of Marduk from the Hittites. Since Sumerian times, carrying off a city’s protector god from its temple had been a standard ploy to ensure a sacked city remained broken in spirit. Kassite Babylon was to be confident.

Meanwhile, Assyria had come under the grip of Mitanni and had to wait until around 1340 bce when the Hittites sacked Washukanni, Mitanni’s capital, before it could regain its independence. Under Ashur-uballit I (ca.1353–ca.1318 bce), Assyria began 300 years of flexing its own military muscle, largely thanks to new technology. The Assyrians became masters in the use of the new two-wheeled chariot. Later on, as metalworkers in the nearby mountains improved smelting, they were the first to use iron weapons as standard equipment.

But Assyria’s rise served Babylon’s interests too. Ashur-uballit married his daughter to Babylon’s king, who then died in a revolt, at which Ashur-uballit stepped in to restore the monarchy. Under the new king, Kurigalzu II (ca.1332–ca.1308 bce), Kassite Babylon’s influence reached its full extent. Ashur adopted Babylon’s Marduk cult and a subsequent outbreak of war only brought more Babylonian customs to Assyria.

Around 1155 bce, a joint Assyrian–Elamite operation finally brought Kassite Babylonia down, but under the new dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar I (ca.1125–ca.1104 bce), Babylon rose yet stronger. Bringing Marduk back from Elam, Nebuchadnezzar I elevated him to head the Mesopotamian pantheon. He also began collating texts from Hammurapi’s time to create a Babylonian literary canon.

Assyrian military might also reached a high point at this time under Tiglath-pileser I (ca.1115–ca.1076 bce). The raids of the Sea Peoples had destroyed the Hittites and left a power vacuum along the Mediterranean coast which Tiglath-pileser I was able to fill. Shortly afterward, however, Mesopotamia was once again overrun by Semitic migrants from the west who would alter its ethnic makeup—this time tribes of Aramaeans and Chaldeans. Assyria shrank back to its heartland and waited.

A new Assyria

Surrounded by mountains, the Assyrians had always been vulnerable to sudden raids from nearby hill tribes. In order to survive, they themselves became a warlike raiding people. But under Ashurnasipal II (883–859 bce) a tribe of warriors became a military empire.

Previously, Assyrian campaigns in the west had really been giant raiding parties, periodically repeated. Now they became annual tribute-collecting processions through conquered lands. As these processions journeyed farther afield, Ashurnasipal built local depots to store grain and other tribute. In time, these depots formed the nuclei of provincial capitals run by Assyrian officials.

This system relied on continuing military dominance. Now cavalry was adopted as well as new hardware such as the siege engine, a kind of wooden tank fitted with a battering ram. Assyria’s makeover was completed by Tiglath-pileser III (745–727 bce), who created the first paid standing army, one of the subsequent hallmarks of any strong state.

The New Assyrian Empire 911–612 bce

Assyria came under Mitanni rule until ca. 1340 bce, after which it began to expand. Expansion was checked from about 1100 by tribes arriving from the west, before a remodelled Assyria emerged during the reign of Ashurnasipal II.

Tiglath-pileser III used his new professional army to check Urartu, a successor state to Mitanni threatening access to the Mediterranean. He then pushed down the coast all the way to Sinai, regaining the lands his namesake had conquered 350 years earlier. Assyria was now the greatest military power the world had yet known and was ready to play a new part in the fortunes of Babylon.

In the far south of Babylonia, Chaldean tribes had settled around the old city of Ur. The Babylonians had mixed feelings toward these outsiders who had taken over part of their country but adopted Babylonian ways. The Assyrians, however, saw them simply as a new rival power. So, when the Chaldeans made a bid for the Babylonian throne in Tiglath-pileser III’s time, he stepped in and took it for himself.

From now on, Babylon became a prize held by Assyria, sometimes snatched by Chaldea. Caught in a tug of war, the loyalties of the Babylonians wavered until Sennacherib (704–681 bce) sowed what may have been the seed of Assyria’s eventual downfall.

Sennacherib spent his time making Nineveh a sumptuous Assyrian capital, leaving one of his sons to rule in Babylon. When Babylonian rebels kidnapped this son and handed him to the Elamites in 689 bce, Sennacherib vented his fury by opening Babylon’s dikes and flooding the city. Any other city could have expected worse but this was Mesopotamia’s religious mother city. The shock of its desecration was never forgotten by Babylonians or Assyrians alike.

Despised by all, Sennacherib was assassinated a few years later, probably by another of his sons. His successor Esarhaddon (680–669 bce) became obsessed with making amends by rebuilding Babylon’s temples. Hoping to avoid future trouble, he split Assyria and Babylonia between his two sons, but this only produced a four-year war, after which one of the brothers, Ashurbanipal (668–627 bce), claimed both crowns.

Ashurbanipal was almost more Babylonian than a Babylonian. Taught to read as a child, he was steeped in Babylonian literature and, like his father, acutely aware of how politically sensitive religious matters were. He knew the importance of having the gods on his side and would publicly consult priests and astrologers before making big decisions.

Assyrian forces under Tiglath-pileser III use a siege engine to storm a city, impaling inhabitants on wooden stakes outside the walls to dissuade others from resisting. From Ashurnasipal II’s capital at Kalhu (Nimrud), ca. 730bce.

All of this found expression in the great project of Ashurbanipal’s life, the creation of the world’s first organized library at Nineveh—much larger than the later library at Alexandria. Ashurbanipal employed teams of scribes to collect, edit, copy, and translate all manner of texts from the 1,000-year-old Babylonian literary tradition. There were medical works, mythologies, guides to religious ritual, and a large section devoted to astrology, designed to help Ashurbanipal achieve stability throughout his 40-year reign. It seems to have worked quite well.

A new Babylon

But no one had forgotten Sennacherib. After Ashurbanipal, Assyrian authority in Babylon collapsed and the Chaldeans came to power under Nabopolassar (625–605 bce).

Nabopolassar wanted more than Babylon. He made a pact with the Medes from across the Zagros Mountains to attack Assyria and divide the spoils. Together they took Nineveh in 612 bce. Nabopolassar then pursued the last Assyrian king, who had fled west to seek protection from an Egypt eager to keep Babylon away from the coast. But Nabopolassar could not be stopped, and his son, Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 bce), eventually pushed all the way down to Egypt itself.

The only persistent trouble Nebuchadnezzar met with was in the little kingdom of Judah. When this irksome state finally fell, he demolished its capital, Jerusalem, and deported its people to Babylon to prevent further problems. Most of them intermarried and became assimilated like others before them, but a hardened core was radicalized by exile, nurturing its cultural identity and keeping alive the dream of a future homecoming.

Under Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylon became fabulously rich, displaying its wealth in wonders such as the Hanging Gardens and the gorgeously tiled Ishtar Gate at the city’s main entrance. It owed all this to the Assyrians—it was their empire Nebuchadnezzar had usurped. In another sense, however, Babylon had simply taken administrative control of a region over which it had long wielded spiritual authority. By ignoring this authority, Sennacherib had seriously weakened Assyria. In the end, the same mistake would bring down Babylon itself.

In 556 bce, Nabonidus came to the throne in Babylon. He was a religious man, but of the wrong sort. His mother was a priestess from Harran, a city where the moon god Sin was worshipped, and Nabonidus pressed this cult on Babylon. He made the further mistake of moving to an Arabian oasis for ten years, leaving Babylon in the hands of his son, Belshazzar. All this time, the New Year festival of Marduk, which guaranteed the city’s well-being, could not take place because Marduk could only make the journey from his temple to the New Year’s house accompanied by the king.