The New Penguin History of the World (18 page)

Undoubtedly, it is in changes affecting the whole ancient world that much of the explanation of the decline of Egypt must be sought, yet it is impossible to resist the feeling that the last centuries of the New Kingdom expose weaknesses present in Egyptian civilization from the beginning.
These are not easy to discern at first sight; the spectacular heritage of Egypt’s monuments and a history counted not in centuries but in millennia stagger the critical sense and stifle scepticism. Yet the creative quality of Egyptian civilization seems, in the end, strangely to miscarry. Colossal resources of labour are massed under the direction of men who, by the standards of any age, must have been outstanding civil servants, and the end is the creation of the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality is employed, and its masterpieces are grave-goods. A highly literate élite, utilizing a complex and subtle language and a material of unsurpassed convenience, uses them copiously, but has no philosophical or religious idea comparable to those of Greek or Jew to give to the world. It is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility, a nothingness, at the heart of this glittering
tour de force
.

In the other scale must be placed the sheer staying-power of ancient Egyptian civilization; after all, it worked for a very long time, a spectacular fact. Though it underwent at least two phases of considerable eclipse, it recovered from them, seemingly unchanged. Survival on such a scale is a great material and historical success; what remains obscure is why it should have stopped there. Egypt’s military and economic power in the end made little permanent difference to the world. Her civilization was never successfully spread abroad. Perhaps this is because its survival owed much to its setting. If it was a positive success to create so rapidly institutions which with little fundamental change could last so long, this could probably have been done by any ancient civilization enjoying such a degree of immunity from intrusion. China was to show impressive continuity, too.

It is important also to remember once more how slow and imperceptible all social and cultural change was in early times. Because we are used to change, we must find it difficult to sense the huge inertia possessed by any successful social system (one, that is, which enables men to grapple effectively with their physical and mental environment) in almost any age before the most recent. In the ancient world the sources of innovation were far fewer and far more occasional than now. The pace of history is rapid in ancient Egypt if we think of prehistoric times; it seems glacially slow if we reflect how little the daily life of Egyptians must have changed between Menes and Thotmes III, a period of more than fifteen hundred years and therefore comparable to that which separates us from the end of Roman Britain. Marked change could only come from sudden and overwhelming natural disaster (and the Nile was a reliable safeguard), or invasion or conquest (and Egypt long stood at the edge of the battleground of peoples in the Near East, affected only occasionally by their comings and goings). Only very slowly could technology or economic forces exert such pressures
for change as we take for granted. As for intellectual stimuli, these could hardly be strong in a society where the whole apparatus of a cultural tradition was directed to the inculcation of routine.

In reflecting on the nature of Egyptian history, there is always a temptation to revert in the end to the great natural image of the Nile always physically present to Egyptian eyes. It was so prominent, perhaps, that it could not be seen for the colossal and unique influence it was, for no context broader than its valley needed consideration. While in the background the incomprehensible (but in the end world-shaping) wars of the Fertile Crescent rage across the centuries, the history of Old Egypt goes on for thousands of years, virtually a function of the remorseless, beneficent flooding and subsidence of the Nile. On its banks a grateful and passive people gathers the richness it bestows. From it could be set aside what they thought necessary for the real business of living: the proper preparation for death.

4
Intruders and Invaders:
The Dark Ages of the Ancient Near East

Mesopotamia and Egypt are the foundation stones of written history. For a long time the first two great centres of civilization dominate chronology and may conveniently be dealt with more or less in isolation. But obviously their story is not the whole story of the ancient Near East, let alone that of the ancient world. Soon after 2000
BC
the movements of other peoples were already breaking it up into new patterns. A thousand years later, other centres of civilization were in existence elsewhere and we are well into the historical era.

Unfortunately for the historian, there is no simple and obvious unity to this story even in the Fertile Crescent, which for a long time continued to show more creativity and dynamism than any other part of the world. There is only a muddle of changes whose beginnings lie far back in the second millennium and which go on until the first of a new succession of empires emerges in the ninth century
BC
. The sweeping upheavals and rearrangements which stud this confusion are hard even to map in outline, let alone to explain; fortunately, their details do not need to be unravelled here. History was speeding up and civilization was providing men with new opportunities. Rather than submerge ourselves in the flood of events, we can more usefully try to grasp some of the change-making forces at work.

A COMPLICATING WORLD

The most obvious of these forces for change continue to be great migrations. Their fundamental pattern does not change much for a thousand years or so after 2000
BC
, nor does the ethnic cast of the drama. The basic dynamic was provided by the pressure of peoples of Indo-European linguistic stocks on the Fertile Crescent from both east and west. Their variety and numbers grow but their names need not be remembered here even if some of them bring us to the remote origins of Greece. Meanwhile,
Semitic peoples dispute with the Indo-Europeans the Mesopotamian valleys; with Egypt and the mysterious ‘Peoples of the Sea’ they fight over Sinai, Palestine and the Levant. Another group of northerners establishes itself in Iran – and from it will eventually come the greatest of all the empires of the ancient past, that of sixth-century Persia. Still another branch of these peoples pushes out into India. These movements must explain much of what lies behind a shifting pattern of empires and kingdoms stretching across the centuries. By the standards of modern times some of them were quite long-lived; from about 1600
BC
a people called Kassites from Caucasia ruled in Babylon for four and a half centuries, which is a duration comparable to that of the entire history of British overseas empire. Yet, by the standards of Egypt such polities are the creatures of a moment, born today and swept away tomorrow.

It would indeed be surprising if they had not proved fragile in the end, for many other new forces were also at work which multiplied the revolutionary effects of the wanderings of peoples. One of them which has left deep traces is improvement in military technique. Fortification and, presumably, siege-craft had already reached a fairly high level in Mesopotamia by 2000
BC
. Among the Indo-European peoples who nibbled at the civilization these skills protected were some with recent nomadic origins; perhaps for that reason they were able to revolutionize warfare in the field, though they long remained unskilled in siege-craft. Their introduction of the two-wheeled war chariot and the cavalryman transformed operations in open country. The soldiers of Sumer are depicted trundling about in clumsy four-wheeled carts, drawn by asses; probably these were simply a means of moving generals about or getting a leader into the mêlée, so that spear and axe could be brought to bear. The true chariot is a two-wheeled fighting vehicle drawn by horses, the usual crew being two, one man driving, the other using it as a platform for missile weapons, especially the composite bow formed of strips of horn. The Kassites were probably the first people to exploit the horse in this way and their rulers seem to have been of Indo-European stock. Access to the high pastures to the north and east of the Fertile Crescent opened to them a reserve of horses in the lands of the nomads. In the river valleys horses were at first rare, the prized possessions of kings or great leaders, and the barbarians therefore enjoyed a great military and psychological superiority. Eventually, though, chariots were used in the armies of all the great kingdoms of the Near East; they were too valuable a weapon to be ignored. When the Egyptians expelled the Hyksos, they did so by, among other things, using this weapon against those who had conquered them with it.

Warfare was changed by riding horses, too. A cavalryman proper not
only moves about in the saddle but fights from horseback; it took a long time for this art to be developed, for managing a horse and a bow or a spear at the same time is a complex matter. Horse-riding came from the Iranian highlands, where it may have been practised as early as 2000
BC
. It spread through the Near East and Aegean well before the end of the next millennium. Later, after 1000
BC
, there appeared the armoured horseman, charging home and dominating foot-soldiers by sheer weight and impetus. This was the beginning of a long era in which heavy cavalry were a key weapon, though their full value could only be exploited centuries later, when the invention of the stirrup gave the rider real control of his horse.

During the second millennium
BC
chariots came to have parts made of iron; soon they had hooped wheels. The military advantages of this metal are obvious and it is not surprising to find its uses spreading rapidly through the Near East and far beyond, in spite of attempts by those who had iron to restrict it. At first, these were the Hittites. After their decline iron-working spread rapidly, not only because it was a more effective metal for making arms, but because iron ore, though scarce, was more plentiful than copper or tin. It was a great stimulus to economic as well as military change. In agriculture, iron-using peoples could till heavy soils which had remained impervious to wood or flint. But there was no rapid general transfer to the new metal; iron supplemented bronze, as bronze and copper had supplemented stone and flint in the human tool kit, and did so in some places more rapidly than others. Already in the eleventh century
BC
iron was used for weaponry in Cyprus (some have argued that steel was produced there, too) and from that island iron spread to the Aegean soon after 1000
BC
. That date can serve as a rough division between the Bronze and Iron Ages, but is no more than a helpful prop to memory. Though iron implements became more plentiful after it, parts of what we may call the ‘civilized world’ went on living in a Bronze Age culture. Together with the ‘Neolithic’ elsewhere, the Bronze Age lives on well into the first millennium
BC
, fading away only slowly like the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat. For a long time, after all, there was very little iron to go round.

Metallurgical demand helps to explain another innovation, a new and increasingly complex inter-regional and long-distance trade. It is one of those complicating inter-reactions which seem to be giving the ancient world a certain unity just before its disruption at the end of the second millennium
BC
. Tin, for example, so important a commodity, had to be brought from Mesopotamia and Afghanistan, as well as Anatolia, to what we should now call ‘manufacturing’ centres. The copper of Cyprus was another widely traded commodity and the search for more of it gave
Europe, at the margins of ancient history though she was, a new importance. Mine-shafts in what was to be Yugoslavia were sunk sixty and seventy feet below ground to get at copper even before 4000
BC
. Perhaps it is not surprising that some European peoples later came to display high levels of metallurgical skill, notably in the beating of large sheets of bronze and in the shaping of iron (a much more difficult material to work than bronze until temperatures high enough to cast it were available).

Long-range commerce turns on transport. At first, the carriage of goods was a matter of asses and donkeys; the domestication of camels in the middle of the second millennium
BC
made possible the caravan trade of Asia and the Arabian peninsula which was later to seem to be of ageless antiquity, and opened an environment hitherto almost impenetrable, the waterless desert. Except among nomadic peoples, wheeled transport probably had only local importance, given the poor quality of early roads. Early carts were drawn by oxen or asses; they may have been in service in Mesopotamia about 3000
BC
, in Syria around 2250
BC
, in Anatolia two or three hundred years later and in mainland Greece about 1500
BC
.

For goods in quantity, water transport was already likely to be cheaper and simpler than transport by land; this was to be a constant of economic life until the coming of the steam railway. Long before caravans began to bring up to Mesopotamia and Egypt the gums and resins of the south Arabian coasts, ships were carrying them up the Red Sea and merchants were moving back and forth in trading vessels across the Aegean. Understandably, it was in maritime technology that some of the most important advances in transport were made.

We know that Neolithic peoples could make long journeys by sea in dug-out canoes and there is even some evidence of navigation from the seventh millennium. The Egyptians of the Third Dynasty had put a sail on a sea-going ship; the central mast and square sail were the beginning of seamanship relying on anything but human energy. Improvements of rigging came slowly over the next two millennia. It has been thought that these made some approach to the fore-and-aft rigging which was necessary if ships were to sail closer to the wind, but for the most part the ships of antiquity were square-rigged. Because of this, the direction of prevailing winds was decisive in setting patterns of sea-borne communication. The only other source of energy was human: the invention of the oar is an early one and it provided the motive power for long sea crossings as well as for close handling. It seems likely, though, that oars were used more frequently in warships, and sail in what it is at a very early date possible to call merchantmen. By the thirteenth century
BC
, ships capable of carrying more than 200 copper ingots were sailing about the eastern Mediterranean,
and within a few centuries more, some of these ships were being fitted with watertight decks.