CHAPTER TEN Deep Pasts Interconnections and Comparative History in the Ancient World NORMAN YOFFEE World history might be said to have begun when the first group of hominins left Africa about 1.9 million years ago and when subsequent migrations left Africa 500,000 to 300,000 years ago and then after 100,000 years ago (Science Daily 2010). The history of the world is a record of migrations, ecological adaptations, and social interactions over larger and shorter distances ever since. Although all peoples have history, historians limit their purview severely, only considering history to refer to times when people produced written documents, that is, to the last 5,000 years, a mere twinkling in the history of human societies. Although some historians regard Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BCE, as “the father of history,” ancient historians study documents of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Iran, Anatolia, China, and South Asia that date well before the invention of the Greek alphabet (itself an adaptation from older scripts). These documents show the large interregional systems of interactions of ancient peoples as well as the distinctive qualities of several ancient states and civilizations. Archaeologists have documented the history of the development of cities and states and of long-distance trade networks that flourished long before writing was invented in the Old World. (Levi, in this volume, discusses much more recent trade networks.) Thus, the exchange of obsidian (volcanic glass that could be used to make surgically sharp blades) has been traced from its sources in eastern Anatolia (Asiatic Turkey) into Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt, starting at least as early as 8000 BCE. By 3500 BCE lapis lazuli, a turquoise-like stone, was brought from its sources in northeastern Afghanistan, into Iran, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Weights that were used to measure precious metals were found in the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia in the mid-third millennium BCE and were identical to those found in Harappan cities in South Asia, showing the presence and importance of long-distance trade between the regions (Potts 1997; 2007). Even the first writing, invented in Mesopotamia towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE, was quickly transported to Iran, Syria, Anatolia, and the Levant. History itself was a kind of export and import since Mesopotamian chronicles, epics, royal A Companion to World History, First Edition. Edited by Douglas Northrop. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DEEP PASTS 157 inscriptions, and lexical lists/encyclopedias were learned in schools outside Mesopotamia as ways to teach scribes how to write and, necessarily, how to think about the past. The Meaning and Mechanisms of Interconnections Interconnections between regions in the ancient world are easily documented in the prehistoric archaeological record. These include the spread of farming from nuclear zones to nearer and farther areas. For example, in the Old World wheat moved from West Asia into Europe and into Africa, in the New World maize moved from southern Mexico south to South America and north to North America (Bellwood 2005; Smith 1995). Languages and the people speaking them moved from the Indo-European heartland, north of the Black Sea (Mallory and Adams 2006; Anthony 2007), eastward to South Asia and westward to Europe. But what is the cause of the spread of domesticated plants and animals and people and their languages from one region to other regions, and what were the changes effected in cultures and social organizations that were the recipients of new products and folk? To a certain extent, this is a false question, since there was never a time when some people were localized and sealed from movements and contacts, and so the appearances of new things/people were integrated in existing cultures and environments in a variety of ways. However, there were certainly cases in which the long-distance movements of people resulted in the introduction of plants, animals, pests, and diseases in places where they were unknown before. An obvious example is the migration and colonization of Pacific islands. (See Salesa, this volume.) Although popularizers of the effects of migrations across the globe, like Jared Diamond (1997), ascribe culture change to underlying geographic asymmetries, superior weaponry, and the catastrophic transfer of diseases, they tend to simplify the complex historical specificities of movements of people and culture change in favor of the inevitable triumph of the West (Blaut 2000). (See Simmons, this volume.) Close study, however, reveals the complexities of the movement of goods and the ensuing changes in cultures and social organizations. In the American Southwest, archaeologists show that ancestral Puebloan people were in contact with Mesoamerican people to the south. Maize, domesticated in Mexico, was transported to the Southwest (roughly Arizona and New Mexico), macaws from the tropical jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala were raised in northern Mexico and taken northward to the American Southwest, where their feathers were used in ceremonies and the birds themselves were carefully interred. Copper bells from Mexico were likewise taken to the Southwest, and recently chocolate and the kinds of beakers used to drink chocolate in Mesoamerica have been found in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. These pots are identical to those used in Maya ceremonies, and the chocolate itself must have come from the Mesoamerican region (Crown 2009; Cordell 1997; Lekson 2009). Although it is impossible to understand the nature of prehistoric Southwestern cultures without reference to Mesoamerican cultures, it is equally clear that Southwestern cultures were, first, quite different from one another (Hohokam in southern Arizona and New Mexico being unlike Anasazi/ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners region of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona), and, second, simply “peripheries” of Mesoamerica. And connections between these regions also worked in the other direction: Mesoamerican cultures, after acquiring turquoise from the American Southwest, incorporated the precious stones into their own ideas of decoration in their societies and rituals. 158 NORMAN YOFFEE Thus, the situation in the ancient world was certainly not like the one described for the eighteenth century (CE) in The World That Trade Created (Pomeranz and Topik 2006: xi): Silver mined in the New World and taken to Spain was used to purchase coffee from Muslims trading in Yemen. The coffee was traded to European courts, where it was served on Chinese porcelain, sweetened with sugar from Brazil, and French soirées were followed by a smoke of Virginian tobacco. If this trade was part of a “world-system” (Wallerstein 1974; Mair 2006), the scale and penetration of goods throughout the ancient world was not comparable to the premodern world. Still, much production in the ancient world was not for local consumption but was intended for exchange, sometimes over very long distances (Kohl 1978; 1989; Sherratt 2000; 2006; Wengrow 2010). One cannot understand local affairs apart from a larger geographic context. Since I am a Mesopotamian historian, I present some illustrations of the movements of goods and people to show the nature of these long-distance interactions. Interregional interactions in West Asia flourished in the fifth millennium BCE, the Ubaid period, as shown by the transfer of metals from their sources to the places where they are found in the archaeological record. David Wengrow has synthesized the evidence for smelting, forging, casting, and alloying on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, in the Turkish highlands, and as far as the Negev Desert. Chemical analysis of a hoard of copper artifacts from a site in the Negev shows traces of arsenic and antimony which must have come from about 1,000 kilometers distant in eastern Turkey or Azerbaijan. Also, in the Ubaid period new farming practices were invented and disseminated. These new practices include grafting and artificial pollination and a resulting hybridization of new foods in which “unprecedented flavors, smells, and sensations” were the products of “what Andrew Sherratt has called the ‘diversification of desire’” (Wengrow 2010: 59). In the Ubaid period also new techniques of ceramic production were invented and diffused, such as use of the slow potter’s wheel, which afforded a greater and more standardized production of containers. Newly crafted stone seals impressed distinctive marks on the vessels. These marks denoted ownership of the contents of the pots and their point of origin. At the end of the Uruk period (ca. 4000–3200 BCE) (Rothman 2001), cities suddenly appeared in Mesopotamia, both in the south and in the north (Emberling 1999). These cities, the best known of which is the site of Uruk itself (which gives its name to the prehistoric period) (Englund 1994; Liverani 2006) was populated by around 20,000 people in 2.5 square kilometers (1.1 square miles) and the immediately adjacent countryside. In Uruk, in southmost modern Iraq, there was a ceremonial center with several temples (one of which was nearly a football field in length), an ornately decorated sunken court, and other buildings. In this complex the first written tablets were found. Attendant to the first urbanization in Mesopotamia and the world, there was also a process of “ruralization,” in which the countryside became depopulated as people moved into cities (Nissen 1988; Pollock 1999; Yoffee 2005). If this demographic process could be called an “implosion” (from about 3200 to 2500 BCE), there was also an “explosion” in which the events in Uruk and other southern Mesopotamian cities affected far distant regions in Iran, Syria, and Anatolia. This is the so-called “Uruk expansion” (Algaze 2009) and it marks a new chapter in interregional relations in West Asia. As a result of salvage excavations in Syria and Turkey that were launched in the 1970s to study sites that would be flooded in a new dam project, archaeologists discovered that several of these sites had material culture (building plans, especially of temples, and DEEP PASTS 159 various kinds of artifacts) that was characteristic of the late Uruk period (ca. 3350–3100 BCE) in southern Mesopotamia. Guillermo Algaze (1989; 1993; 2009) has argued that these sites, including those in Syria and southern Turkey, about 500 miles up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as well as other sites into the Zagros Mountains of Iran, were part of an “Uruk phenomenon,” or an “Uruk expansion,” or even an “Uruk World System” (using Wallerstein’s terminology and concepts). (See Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume.) Algaze proposed that the new cities in southern Mesopotamia required natural resources that were lacking in the south of Iraq but were found in “peripheral” regions, especially in the north. The southern Mesopotamian plain favored the growth of large cities because abundant water resources, rich aquatic life, and enormously productive agriculture – all of which could and did produce large surpluses – led to large concentrations of population. The hilly and mountainous areas to the north and east contained timber and stone for building, copper and silver, and semiprecious stones, and were near trade routes for more distant materials (such as gold and lapis lazuli). These regions, however, had less capacity to produce surplus agricultural products and to support cities. Algaze proposed that southern Mesopotamian cities were manufacturing centers, especially of expensive woolen textiles, which were produced by specialized herders, fullers, dyers, and weavers – the latter being female captives. In southern Mesopotamian cities, which were socially and economically stratified, other industries developed to produce copper tools and jewelry. The southern Mesopotamian cities, which were politically centralized under kings and their officers, including military cadres, sent merchants and founded colonies, according to Algaze, in the underdeveloped periphery to assure themselves of a supply of raw materials. Algaze’s economic model of “the Sumerian advantage” (the earliest Mesopotamian texts from Uruk and other sites in the south were written in the Sumerian language), in which economies of scale privilege producers of goods over suppliers of raw materials, has been criticized (Emberling 2011). Some archaeologists have shown that some of the Uruk “colonies” in Syria and southern Anatolia were not dominated by southern Mesopotamians (Stein 1999; 2005; Frangipane 1997; 2001; 2002) – meaning that the Uruk material culture was restricted only to some parts of sites and in some instances local Anatolian rulers and local Anatolian material culture were dominant in sites which also had Uruk Mesopotamian presence. Although Algaze’s synthesis of the existence of southern Mesopotamian Uruk culture found well outside the cultural region of Mesopotamia is extremely valuable, new research has shown that the “margins” of Mesopotamia had their own historical trajectories. Large sites like Tell Brak and Hamoukar existed in Syria as early as if not earlier than Uruk and other cities in southern Mesopotamia, although the north was never the heartland of cities and Mesopotamian civilization. Furthermore, the Uruk expansion was marked by significant conflict in and among northern sites, the most important of which disappeared at the end of the Uruk period, as did several of the “Uruk colonies.” Nevertheless, the experience of southern Mesopotamians in the north sets the stage for further interregional connections in West Asia. The effects of Mesopotamians in Syria and Anatolia and Iran are seen in the use of the cuneiform script, first used to write Sumerian, then Akkadian, in Mesopotamia, for local languages of Syria, notably Eblaite (Huehnergard and Woods 2004), and in the Elamite language of southern Iran (Stolper 2004) during the third millennium BC. Around 2300 160 NORMAN YOFFEE Mesopotamian kings of the dynasty of Akkade campaigned in Syria and Iran, conquering sites and ruling territories, if only for a short time. Logically a prime goal in these campaigns was to acquire goods from regions that had been known for millennia to southern Mesopotamians. In northern Mesopotamia, at the city-state of Assur, around 1900 BCE, another strategy shows how goods from Anatolia were obtained by (northern) Mesopotamians (Larsen 1976; Veenhof 2008; 2010). The texts recounting these activities come from an Assyrian trading colony, Karum Kanesh, which is in central Anatolia, nearly 500 miles from Assur (see Map 10.1). Kārum is the Akkadian word for “harbor, quay,” a place where merchants lived in or near a Mesopotamian city, presumably originally along a river or canal. In Anatolia it denotes a settlement of Assyrian traders living outside the Anatolian town of Kanesh (and other towns as well). The remarkable finds of more than 20,000 clay tablets in Karum Kanesh document the activities of Assyrian merchants, and they allow us to write new chapters in economic and world history. Assyrian merchants did not control the territory of the Anatolian colonies (there were several dozen Assyrian karums and smaller way-stations in Anatolia), which were colonies in the absence of colonialism. (See Sinha, this volume.) Rulers of Anatolian towns were the overlords of the Assyrian merchants. Assyrian trade consisted in the movement of textiles, produced in Assyria and obtained also from Babylonia to the south, and tin. The sources of this tin are obscure, perhaps from Afghanistan. Texts show only that the tin moved through Iran and central Mesopotamia to Assyria and then to Anatolia. In Anatolia the Assyrian traders exchanged these textiles and tin for silver and gold, which they shipped to Assur. Assyrian merchants made a huge profit, moving goods from where they were plentiful to where they were scarce (Yoffee 2005: 150).1 This profit was made solely on their organizational ability. In Assur, where silver was scarce and was used as the most important system of value, the silver to tin ratio was about 1:15, whereas in Anatolia, where silver was comparatively plentiful, the ratio was about 1:7. If 15 units of tin could be economically transported from Assur to Anatolia, by means of donkey caravans, 2 units of silver could be obtained. These 2 units of silver could then be brought to Assur and turned into 30 units of tin. Assuming a constant demand, the knowledge of where and how to get tin, and the technology of how to move the tin to Anatolia, great profits could be and were made by Assyrian merchants. Long-term business contracts were negotiated whereby joint capital could be accumulated and continuity in business relations could be assured for decades. In one such document, an Assyrian state official sanctions the proceedings, thus attesting to the interest the Assyrian government had in trade. Indeed, some leading merchant families in Assur, which established “branches” in Anatolia, held high governmental ranks. The Assyrian state was in fact administered by councils of “great and small” at a “city-hall,” and these councils coexisted with the city ruler and his court. Assyrian rulers also established treaties with potentates living along the trade routes so that Assyrian traders could ply their wares. The Assyrian traders had to pay a variety of taxes to the local Anatolian ruler at Kanesh and to their own governmental organization in Karum Kanesh. Documents record that Assyrians tried to evade these taxes by smuggling goods, but merchants could suffer punishment if the Anatolian ruler caught them. The documents record profits and losses, various kinds of debts, lawsuits, and claims of economic injuries of various kinds. The traders were not officers of the state but private entrepreneurs. The Assyrian state was, BCE 161 DEEP PASTS Black Sea Caspian Sea L.Van Kanesh Gr ea ter Z iya la ur Hab D S ate O phr R Eu G Tigris Mediterranean Sea ab rZ sse Le A Assur Z Balikh ab L. Urmia M O U N s Babylon T A IN S ELAM Ni le Main route followed by Assyrian traders 0 Red Sea 0 300 miles Persian Gulf 400 km Map 10.1 Major sites in the Old Assyrian trading system. Source: Based on M. Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC, 2nd edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), map 5.2, p. 102. however, not simply a disinterested spectator of the trade, but was concerned to promote trade, for example through treaties, because the merchants also paid taxes to the government in Assur. The collapse of the lucrative system, which flourished for about 150 years, is related to the larger political structure of the entire region. After 2000 BCE, there was no territorial power in Mesopotamia, and one Assyrian king, Ilushuma, undertook a campaign to the southern cities of Babylonia, presumably to ensure access to Assyrian traders to Babylonian goods, such as rich textiles. Similarly, in the north itself, no city was supremely powerful, and Assur was one of a number of cities in the region. Finally, in the early days of the Assyrian trading system of the late twentieth to early eighteenth centuries BCE, there was no central power in Anatolia. Assyrian traders thus flourished in conditions when political interferences in the long-distance exchange system were few. If the Assyrian trade in the early second millennium BCE was immensely profitable, it was also fragile. In the early eighteenth century BCE, the political constellation had changed. Hammurabi of Babylon established a central, regional state in Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia), an interloper seized the throne in Assur and conquered northern Mesopotamia, and a new group of people, the Hittites, were in the process of establishing their authority in central Anatolia. When unrestricted passage to trade was apparently constricted by political maneuvers and wars, long-distance trade suffered, and the prosperous trading families in Assur disappeared. When the new ruling family in Assur was defeated, the whole structure of the state became decentralized, and the region entered into a kind of dark age when not only trade but literate, urban traditions went into a centuries-long decline (Van De Mieroop 2007). 162 NORMAN YOFFEE As a postscript to this history of Assyria and its traders in the early second millennium I note that a new state in Assyria rose in the fourteenth century BCE and gradually transformed itself into a centralized military power. As if reading its own history, Assyrian rulers decided that it would now be more efficient for its newly constituted army to seize needed goods from nearer and farther away and not worry about political vicissitudes that dictated how and when trade could flourish. Of course this military state met its fate when tough, new enemies allied with old enemies of Assyria, and the Assyrian state itself perished (Yoffee 2009). BCE, Comparative History of the Ancient World If long-distance and interregional interactions characterize the rise and character of Mesopotamian civilization and long-distance interactions flavored the worlds of prehistory, from the time of hunter-gatherers onward (Sassaman 2010), Mesopotamian states present only one example of the evolution of the first cities, states, and civilizations in the ancient world (Yoffee 2005).2 Indeed, ancient world history includes the comparative study of the earliest cities and states (see Adas, this volume), some of which were in contact with one another, whereas there are striking parallels in evolutionary sequences in cities and states that were not in contact (such as in the New and Old Worlds). The first cities and states were those in Mesopotamia (Algaze 2009; Pollock 1999) and Egypt (Wengrow 2006; Bard 2008). In Mesopotamia the first cities arose in the middle of the third millennium BCE, and in Egypt the city of Hierakonpolis (and others) flourished just after that time. In South Asia (Wright 2010), the cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa and other urban sites are dated to around 2600 BCE, and in China (Liu 2009) the first cities and states date to shortly after 2000 BCE. In the New World, the first Maya cities (Houston and Inomata (2009) grew in the pre-Classic period, by around 100 BCE, and Teotihuacan (Cowgill 2007) was an urban metropolis in south-central Mexico at about the same time, while in Andean South America (Silverman and Isbell 2008) cities appeared early in the first millennium CE. After the retreat of the last ice ages, about 12,000 years ago, in wetter and warmer climatic conditions there appeared the first villages and farming and eventually the rise of cities and states. This evolutionary process, the details of which are outside the purview of this chapter, is an important area of research in world history. Over time the countryside of the earliest agricultural villages, along with new and spectacular ceremonial sites that were built by the earliest farmers or proto-farmers,3 were transformed into landscapes with cities. In these cities social groups, themselves progressively internally differentiated and stratified, were recombined under new kinds of centralized leadership. This new kind of leadership was “legitimized” by new ideologies that insisted that the new leaders, kings and their minions, were not only possible but the only possibility. The new ideologies, which proclaimed that the first states included richer and poorer, elites and slaves, leaders and subjects were invented in the new urban centers. The first states that exercised authority over members of different groups, maintained the central symbols of the state, defended the state and guided its expansion, especially against other states, were very small. Indeed, the first states were in effect citystates or microstates (Hansen 2000). These first cities evolved as nodal points of pilgrimages and ceremonies, sites for defense and warfare, places for the exchange of goods, storage facilities, and centers of invented rituals that connected rulers with newly created citizens and the gods. These DEEP PASTS 163 rituals displayed and justified the supremacy and legitimacy of kings and reaffirmed command over the social order. The social roles and practices of citizens were routinized within the urban layout of monumental constructions, streets, pathways, walls, and courtyards. The newly built environments of cities demonstrated the superior access to knowledge and planning held by the rulers, ostensibly on behalf of all. Statecraft in the earliest cities involved providing an order to the present, which the rulers declared in literature and in a created landscape that overlay the unruliness of a society composed of many groups, each with its own interests and orientations. The evolution of cities and states was rapid, at least as measured in the long history of humans as hunter-gatherers. Furthermore, the transition from agricultural villages to cities across the planet was not gradual, that is, with small villages getting larger and larger and finally becoming cities. Rather, modest villages, that is, of about 10 hectares (about 25 acres) and with a few hundred inhabitants, within the time of a few hundred years (a short time in prehistoric reckoning) became urban sites ranging from 150 hectares to more than 3,000 hectares (30 km2, about 11.5 square miles), with 10,000 to more than 100,000 inhabitants (Yoffee 2005). These urban transformations were often supernovas that exploded from the environment of village life that preceded them. The new cities rerouted the experiences of everyday life, in cities and their countrysides, and incubated new ideologies in which economic and social differences and bases of power could be expressed and contested. Let us look more closely at the histories of the areas of the world where the first cities and states appeared to determine both the general historical trends of development and also the particularities of cultures. While cities emerged in ancient Egypt about the time they appeared in Mesopotamia, the relation between cities and states could not have been more different. In Egypt, the first cities, initially rivals, became quickly embedded in a politically centralized territorial state that was tube-like, flanking the Nile River. Egyptians perceived their world in terms of its frontiers, with national kings ensuring an ordered and unified polity, commanding and managing the production and distribution of resources. Egyptian cities were dedicated to displays of royal power and religious ceremony (especially in mortuary displays). The population of Egypt was relatively small, about a million people in the Old Kingdom (the pyramid age) and perhaps twice that in the New Kingdom (the time of kings Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, and Ramses II). In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, cities were seldom incorporated in territorial states, and when one city managed to conquer others to form a regional state in early Mesopotamia, the centralized apparatus of governance did not last long and cities were soon able to reestablish their independence. Mesopotamian cities were multi-ethnic communities, and the cities themselves provided identifications of citizenship. There was, nevertheless, a common cultural construct that we term “Mesopotamian,” in that the same high gods were worshipped in all Mesopotamian cities and the same literary texts were copied in schools in Mesopotamian cities, including the same lists of the gods, which has been called the Mesopotamian “stream of tradition” (Oppenheim 1964). In the political sense of the word, there was no Mesopotamian state, only a Mesopotamian culture (which, however, included ideas of what the state was and how kings were to behave in it). The Maya cities in the New World were also independent microstates, like Mesopotamian city-states, with their dynastic lines of succession and histories. As in Mesopotamia, Maya cities continuously fought one another, occasionally forming larger 164 NORMAN YOFFEE territorial states, but ones that soon dissolved. In second millennium BCE China, the scene of the largest cities in the world at the time – at 1200 BCE, Anyang covered more than 30 km2, with a population estimated at over 100,000 – territorial states were exceptional. Even the most powerful early state in China, the late Shang state with its center at Anyang, was, in the evocative words of David Keightley (1978), not solid like tofu but full of holes like Swiss cheese. Territorial organization did not come to China until the first emperor’s unification of the country in the late third century BCE. In ancient South Asia, in the modern states of Pakistan and India, there was, as in Mesopotamia and the Maya region, a number of cities that were politically independent, but there was also a cultural commonality that overlay them. This “Harappan civilization” included city-plans, a writing system (that remains undeciphered), a uniform set of weights (for measuring goods and precious metals), and similar styles of artifacts. In the New World, Teotihuacan, in the Valley of Mexico, is an exception to our model of politically independent cities flourishing as part of a large cultural set of commonalities that we call “civilizations” (because, among other things, they contained cities). In fact Teotihuacan had no peer-cities, but dominated its region and was without serious rivals for centuries. Teotihuacan is an extreme example of “urban primacy,” since its countryside became depopulated as the growth of the city “ruralized” the countryside in which many villages had existed. This phenomenon of ruralization characterizes the growth of cities also in Andean South America (for example, in the growth of the city of Wari, which was the capital of an expansionist state in the late first millennium CE). Thus, the countryside of the first cities and states was quite unlike the countryside before the evolution of the first cities. In the earliest states, villages had become dependent on the goals of political leaders in cities, supplying produce and labor for urban projects. As the cities grew, the countryside – which had at first been depopulated, for example in Mesopotamia, where archaeological surveys have been systematically accomplished – was repopulated in order to supply the needs of the early cities. Although I could continue with observations of similarities and differences among the earliest cities and states of the world,4 I must conclude this section of the comparative study of the ancient world with a subject that has taken on new and considerable meaning in the modern world, namely how and why the first cities and states collapsed. This subject is of interest today precisely because of claims by Jared Diamond (2005) and others that the leaders of ancient states destroyed their own environments.5 Diamond’s message is clear: if ancient states fell because they mismanaged environmental resources, then in our modern world we must learn the lessons of history and not mismanage our own resources. The history of the collapse of ancient states, however, is not one of environmental mismanagement.6 In Mesopotamia, cities and Mesopotamian culture, especially as denoted by the use of Mesopotamian languages, flourished from the mid-fourth millennium BCE to the first centuries CE. Writing first appeared about 3200 BCE, and the last dated text in the cuneiform script (used to write Sumerian and Akkadian) was written in 75 CE. Of course, there were various “collapses” of Mesopotamian states and dynasties, and the longest-lived city of all, Uruk, was itself abandoned for a short time around 1600 BCE, only to be repopulated and flourish into the first centuries CE. When one state collapsed, another took its place. The historical record is one of substantial instability of states and internal struggle among various social groups in Mesopotamia that led alternately to collapse and reformulation. In the northern part of Mesopotamia, Assyria, there was the largest state and empire in Mesopotamian history. It grew at the end of the DEEP PASTS 165 second millennium BCE until it reached its apogee around 660 BCE. But its enemies soon put the Assyrian state to the sword, burned its cities, and killed many people. The Assyrian state and also Assyrian culture, that is, language, religion, literature, disappeared at a stroke at 610 BCE. However, the story of the fall of Assyria was not as simple as new and old enemies allying to destroy the state (Yoffee 2009). In fact, the very success of the expansionist and militaristic state of Assyria was the main reason why the Assyrian state, like other Mesopotamian cities and states, did not regenerate. In order to control much of West Asia from Iran to Egypt in the first half of the first millennium BCE, Assyrian kings progressively transformed Assyrian society into an efficient fighting machine. In addition to disenfranchising the old-line nobility and gentry and rewarding generals, Assyrians increasingly deported conquered peoples (like the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel,” whom the Assyrian army defeated) throughout the Assyrian realm in order to increase agricultural production and to build new capitals for Assyrian kings. Thus, when Assyria was defeated, as all militaristic and imperial ancient states were fated to be, there was no way for the Assyrian state to be rebuilt along the Assyrian template of state. That is, there were no natural Assyrian hierarchies of villagers, gentry, nobles, and so forth left in Assyria. These ranks of Assyrians, which had existed before the transformation of the Assyrian state into a military machine, were destroyed by the most successful Assyrian kings themselves. In the countryside lived mainly people who were not Assyrians, did not worship the Assyrian gods, did not speak Assyrian (a dialect of Akkadian), or who had no attachment to Assyrian history. In the south of Mesopotamia, Babylonia, the situation of collapse was quite different. Babylonia had been made subject to the Assyrian state and was one of the enemies of Assyria who allied with others (chiefly Medes and Persians from Iran) to defeat Assyria. The Babylonian state rushed to emulate the Assyrian empire, but its last king was defeated by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BCE. Although the cities and people of Babylonia survived this conquest, thereafter no king of Babylonia was Babylonian. Persians ruled the country for about two centuries, after which Alexander the Great of Macedon/Greece conquered them, and Greeks (called Seleucids) ruled Babylonia. Progressively, citizens of Babylonia naturally found it advantageous to speak, write, and learn non-Babylonian languages and learn non-Babylonian cultures and, in effect, to abandon their identities as Babylonian. In the end, when the last dated tablet in Babylonian was written, only a few temples (and associated landholdings) clawed precariously for existence. Naturally, this rather detailed account of the last days of Mesopotamia has nothing to do with the catastrophist scenarios of popular writers who create convenient histories about environmental mismanagement. The histories of other early states similarly show varieties of political struggles, abandonments of cities, and social and political changes, often dramatic in nature. For examples, in the Maya region (McAnany and Negrón 2009; Webster 2002) most of the extremely large Maya cities in the Petén region in Guatemala were abandoned over a century (roughly from 800 to 900 CE). Other Maya cities, especially in the north (e.g., in the Yucatán of Mexico), however, flourished as the nature of Maya culture was transformed as the result of contact with Mexican cultures. Whereas the Maya landscape was certainly transformed by intensive agricultural practices needed to support the large populations and ceremonials in Maya cities, human mismanagement of the environment (and a possible regionwide drought) does not explain why some cities were abandoned and others weren’t. Rather, it seems that in the Yucatán, Maya society in an amalgam of sorts with Mexican cultures was resilient and 166 NORMAN YOFFEE survived. Indeed today there are about 5 million modern Maya who celebrate the continuities of their past in modern Hispanic societies. Whereas there is a large literature on the “Maya collapse,” the story of Maya survival is at least as interesting, and certainly more important to the Maya of today. The stories of social and political change can similarly be told of the earliest states and dynasties of ancient China, in which continuity to the present is a common theme. In South Asia, there are similarly continuities from the early Harappan cities to later cities and states in India, even as new languages, peoples, and beliefs were the result of migrations into the land. Other cases of collapse, resilience, and reformulation can be told. There are two morals to these studies of collapse in the ancient world. First, ancient states were fragile, subject to decomposition either from external or internal stresses, or usually, a combination of both. Second, stories of environmental mismanagement in ancient states are gross exaggerations. Humans have altered their environments since the time one can speak of humans, and usually these anthropogenic environmental changes have not been happy ones. But in no instance in the deep past did human-caused environmental change result in the collapse of an entire state and certainly not an entire culture. If one considers that we must learn from history – and all historians believe this to some degree – the lesson is that ancient states, fragile as they were, did not have the power to destroy their environments, as we today in fact have. Global warming and environmental destruction of today have no parallels, no models in the past. Therefore, we must be the more vigilant and increasingly active in confronting the threats to our environment today. The Verticality of Global History in the Ancient World In the studies sketched in the preceding pages I have discussed a variety of interregional interactions in the ancient world and also aspects of the comparative study of the earliest cities and states. These are, for lack of a better term, “horizontal” components of ancient world history, but there are also “vertical” matters that require at least brief notice. In my portrayal of the collapse of Assyria, the northern part of Mesopotamia, I noted that when the Assyrian state and empire were defeated, there could rightly be called the collapse of Assyrian civilization. To repeat: not only were the Assyrian kings and army defeated and cities destroyed, but also there was no regeneration of the Assyrian state or Assyrian culture. The Assyrian culture, that is, the beliefs and languages of Assyria, disappeared because the transformations of Assyria into a military machine reduced the traditional social system in Assyria, and then the inhabitants of Assyria, both in cities and in the countryside, were significantly composed of people conquered by the Assyrian army and deported into Assyria. They had no interest in rebuilding an Assyrian state on the template of Assyrian cultural norms. This summary of the collapse of Assyria, insisting that Assyria disappeared from world history, is, however, wrong. As a result of the nineteenth-century excavations of Iraq, Assyrian palaces, buried for about 2,600 years, were brought to the light of day. Assyrian art – reliefs of battles and gardens, gigantic figures, part lion, bull, and man – fascinated the West and led to more excavations. Clay tablets in cuneiform script, preserved especially well in levels of fiery destruction, were soon deciphered, and the culture of the Assyrians, which had been only minimally described by biblical and classical writers, and for their own purposes (mainly to show how decadent Assyrians were in comparison to themselves), took on new meaning. DEEP PASTS 167 Although we mainly think of ancient Assyrians giving their name to the academic field of study “Assyriology,” and becoming subjects of study by modern scholars, the meaning of ancient Assyrian civilization that was resurrected by archaeologists was deeply significant to a group of people who called their religion “the Church of the East.” These were Nestorian Christians, a group of Aramaic-speaking Christians whose faith was one of the “heresies” of the mid-first millennium CE. These Christians, who lived in northern Iraq, Syria, southern Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere also called themselves “Assyrians.” Indeed, they trace their origin to the region of ancient Assyria. The Assyrian minorities in the Middle East have in the twentieth century largely migrated to Europe and North America. Whether the modern Assyrians are genetically connected to ancient Assyrians is perhaps a question for biological research. Their use of Aramaic in ritual may well connect them to those Aramaic-speaking peoples whom the Assyrians conquered and deported into Assyria. In Assyria itself, after the defeat of the last kings and capitals, the remaining Assyrians must have adopted Aramaic, which was the majority language of West Asia, the language of Jesus of Nazareth, for example. There is no question that modern Assyrians consider themselves descendants of ancient Assyrians, and they are proud of their long history as one of the major powers of the ancient Near East. This story can be repeated in almost every area of the world, with appropriate variations. In India, certain political parties regard themselves as descendants of ancient Harappans. In Mexico and Guatemala ancient Maya are certainly part of the history of their countries, and as I mentioned, there are millions of Maya today. In sum, the history of the ancient world is not an abstraction to many modern folk. The past is today hotly contested, its meaning debated. The past serves as means by which modern people partly form their self-identification, usually in opposition to other people who are the dominant element in their countries. It is impossible to study the modern world, the agendas of parties and leaders, allies and enemies, without an understanding of their deep pasts. Notes 1 The section in this chapter follows my narrative in the referenced book. 2 Further information on these social evolutionary processes, including discussions of the debated terms “evolution” and “civilization,” are found in Yoffee (2005). I provide here newer references to the development (and collapse) of the first cities and states. 3 Such as at Göbekli Tepe in eastern Anatolia (Schmidt 2006) or Poverty Point in Louisiana (Sassaman 2010). 4 One subject of modern cross-cultural interest is the origin, distribution, and demise of ancient languages and scripts; see Houston (2004) and Baines et al. (2008). 5 Diamond also claimed that a variety of societies, as in Easter Island, Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest, Norse Greenland, and others, destroyed their environments and so collapsed. 6 McAnany and Yoffee (2009). The collection of essays in this book also show that the other societies Diamond cities did not collapse because their leaders had ruined their environments. 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