The Making of the West

About the Cover Image

The Feast of Saint George, (oil on panel), Marten van Cleve (1527–81) Van Cleve was one of several Flemish painters from the time known for their depictions of peasant life, especially feast days, weddings and festivals. He established a major workshop in Antwerp, one of the major commercial centers of the time. He and his family were most likely in Antwerp during the religious conflicts of the 1560s and 1570s but he chose to depict mainly peaceful scenes.

VALUE EDITION

The Making of the West Peoples and Cultures

Sixth Edition

Volume I: To 1750

Lynn Hunt University of California, Los Angeles

Thomas R. Martin College of the Holy Cross Barbara H. Rosenwein

Loyola University Chicago Bonnie G. Smith

Rutgers University

FOR BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill Senior Program Director for History: Michael Rosenberg Senior Program Manager for History: William J. Lombardo History Marketing Manager: Melissa Rodriguez Director of Content Development, Humanities: Jane Knetzger Senior Developmental Editor: Leah R. Strauss Senior Content Project Manager: Kendra LeFleur Senior Workflow Project Supervisor: Jennifer Wetzel Production Coordinator: Brianna Lester Editorial Assistant: Belinda Huang Media Project Manager: Michelle Camisa Project Management: Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Editorial Services: Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Composition: Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Cartographer: Mapping Specialists, Ltd. Photo Editor: Jennifer MacMillan Photo Researcher: Bruce Carson Permissions Editor: Kalina Ingham Design Director, Content Management: Diana Blume Text Design: Lisa Buckley Cover Design: William Boardman Cover Art: The Feast of Saint George, (oil on panel), Cleve, Marten van (1527–81)/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

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Preface Why This Book This Way We are delighted to present the Value Edition of The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, Sixth Edition. With this edition, The Making of the West combines the best of the print and digital platforms while staying true to the fundamental approach that has made this book a popular choice for both instructors and students. We continue to link the history of the West to wider developments in the world. We continue to offer a synthetic approach to history — from military to gender — that integrates different approaches rather than privileging one or two. And we continue to believe that students benefit from a solid chronological framework when they are trying to understand events of the past. This new edition is priced affordably, to save students money and keep the overall course budget manageable. Bedford’s learning platform, known as LaunchPad, is loaded with the full-color e-book including two primary source features per chapter plus LearningCurve, an adaptive learning tool; the popular Sources of The Making of the West documents collection; additional primary sources; a wealth of assessment tools; chapter summative quizzes; and more.

Helping Instructors Teach with Digital Resources We are pleased to offer The Making of the West in LaunchPad, Macmillan’s premier learning platform that offers an intuitive, interactive e-book and course space. Free when packaged with a bound text or available at a low price when used alone, LaunchPad is ready to use as is, or it can be edited and customized with your own material and assigned right away.

Developed with extensive feedback from history instructors and students, LaunchPad for The Making of the West includes the

complete narrative of the print book, the companion reader Sources of The Making of the West by Katharine Lualdi, and LearningCurve adaptive quizzing that is designed to get students to read before they come to class. With new source-based questions in the test bank and in LearningCurve and the ability to sort test bank questions by chapter learning objectives, instructors now have more ways to test students on their understanding of sources and narrative in the book. The LaunchPad e-book features three skill-building features in every chapter. In LaunchPad, there is an autograded multiple-choice quiz for the primary source features.

Primary Source Analysis gives students a more direct experience of the past through original voices. Whether it is an excerpt from an anonymous Sophist’s handbook of the late fifth century B.C.E. (Chapter 3), twelfth-century letters between two anonymous lovers (Chapter 11), or Marie de Sévigné’s description of the French court (Chapter 16), primary documents offer windows into the thoughts and actions of the past. Each document is introduced by a headnote and followed by Questions to Consider. Contrasting Views compares two or more conflicting primary sources focused on a central event, person, or development — such as the Roman attitudes toward Cleopatra (Chapter 4), the Mongols (Chapter 12), and the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century (Chapter 17) — enabling students to understand history from a variety of contemporaneous perspectives. Each document pairing is introduced with a headnote and is followed by Questions to Consider. NEW! Terms of History, now in every chapter, looks not only at the origin of a term — such as democracy (Chapter 3), barbarian (Chapter 7), and gothic (Chapter 11) — but also at the changing meaning of the term over time, which further underscores historical skill building.

For instructors who need a mobile and accessible option for delivering adaptive quizzing with the narrative alone, Macmillan’s

Achieve Read & Practice e-book platform offers an exceptionally easy-to-use and affordable option. This simple product pairs the Value Edition with the power of LearningCurve’s quizzing, all in a format that students can use wherever they go. Available for the first time with this edition, Achieve Read & Practice’s interactive e-book, adaptive quizzing, and gradebook are built with an intuitive interface that can be read on mobile devices and are fully accessible and available at an affordable price.

To learn more about the benefits of LearningCurve, LaunchPad, Achieve Read & Practice, and the difference versions to package with these digital tools, see the Versions and Supplements section.

About The Making of the West Even with all the exciting digital alternatives now available, our primary goal remains the same: to demonstrate that the history of the West is the story of an ongoing process, not a finished result with one fixed meaning. There is not one Western people or culture that has existed from the beginning until now. Instead, the history of the West includes many different peoples and cultures. To convey these ideas, we have written a sustained story of the West’s development in a broad, global context that reveals the cross-cultural interactions fundamental to the shaping of Western politics, societies, cultures, and economies. To highlight the importance of this broad notion of the West, the first chapter opens with a section on the origins and contested meaning of the term Western civilization.

New Coverage and Current Scholarship As always, we have also incorporated the latest scholarly findings throughout the book so that students and instructors have a text on which they can confidently rely, including updated Suggested References at the end of each chapter. In the sixth edition, we have included new and updated discussions of topics such as the agency of women in ancient Greece, the structures of Islamic societies in the Middle Ages, the growth of the European slave trade in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, and a host of new developments in the past few years. The final chapter now includes a discussion of the economic, technological, and cultural changes since the downturn of 2008 that have shaped the rise of populism, including rising immigration, the increasingly interventionist policies of Russia, and the unraveling of the “Arab Spring” with the catastrophe of the Syrian civil war and the continuing threat of ISIS.

Chronological Framework We know from our own teaching that introductory students need a solid chronological framework, one with enough familiar benchmarks to make the material easy to grasp. Each chapter is organized around the main events, people, and themes of a period in which the West significantly changed; thus, students learn about political and military events and social and cultural developments as they unfolded. This chronological integration also makes it possible for students to see the interconnections among varieties of historical experience — between politics and cultures, between public events and private experiences, between wars and diplomacy and everyday life. For teachers, our chronological approach ensures a balanced account and provides the opportunity to present themes within their greater context. But perhaps best of all, this approach provides a text that reveals history as a process that is constantly alive, subject to pressures, and able to surprise us.

An Expanded Vision of the West Cultural borrowing between the peoples of Europe and their neighbors has characterized Western civilization from the beginning. Thus, we have insisted on an expanded vision of the West that includes the United States and fully incorporates Scandinavia, eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire. Now this vision encompasses an even wider global context than before, as Latin America, Africa, China, Japan, and India also come into the story. We have been able to offer sustained treatment of crucial topics such as Islam and to provide a more thorough examination of globalization than any

competing text. Study of Western history provides essential background to today’s events, from debates over immigration to conflicts in the Middle East. Instructors have found this synthesis essential for helping students understand the West amid today’s globalization.

Study Aids to Support Active Reading and Learning We know from our own teaching that students need all the help they can get to absorb and make sense of information, to think analytically, and to understand that history itself is often debated and constantly revised. With these goals in mind, we retained the class- tested learning and teaching aids that worked well in the previous editions, but we have also done more to help students distill the central story of each age.

Focused Reading Each chapter begins with a vivid anecdote that draws readers into the atmosphere of the period and introduces the chapter’s main themes, accompanied by a full-page illustration. The Chapter Focus poses an overarching question at the start of the narrative to help guide students’ reading. Strategically placed at the end of each major section, a Review Question helps students assimilate core points in digestible increments. Key Terms and names that appear in boldface in the text have been updated to concentrate on likely test items; these terms are defined in the Glossary of Key Terms and People at the end of the book.

Reviewing the Chapter At the end of each chapter, the Conclusion further reinforces the central developments covered in the chapter. The Chapter Review begins by asking students to revisit the key terms, identifying each and explaining its significance. Review Questions are also presented again so that students can revisit the chapter’s core points. Making Connections questions then follow and prompt students to think across the sections of a given chapter. A chronology of Important

Events enables students to see the sequence and overlap of important events in a given period and asks students a guiding question that links two or more events in the chapter.

Geographic Literacy The map program of The Making of the West has been praised by reviewers for its comprehensiveness. In each chapter, we offer two types of maps: full-size maps show major developments and a Mapping the West summary map at the end of each chapter provides a snapshot of the West at the close of a transformative period and helps students visualize the West’s changing contours over time. All of these maps — plus up to four “spot” maps per chapter that are positioned within the discussion right where students need them — appear in full color in LaunchPad.

Images and Illustrations We have integrated art as fully as possible into the narrative. Over 100 images and illustrations were carefully chosen to reflect this edition’s broad topical coverage and geographic inclusion, reinforce the text, and show the varieties of visual sources from which historians build their narratives and interpretations. All artifacts, illustrations, paintings, and photographs are contemporaneous with the chapter; there are no anachronistic illustrations. The captions for the maps and art help students learn how to read visuals, and we have frequently included specific questions or suggestions for comparisons that might be developed.

Acknowledgments In the vital process of revision, the authors have benefited from repeated critical readings by many talented scholars and teachers. Our sincere thanks go to the following instructors, whose comments often challenged us to rethink or justify our interpretations and who always provided a check on accuracy down to the smallest detail: David S. Bachrach, University of New Hampshire; Robert Bond, Mira Costa College; Curtis Bostick, Southern Utah University; Trevor

Corless, Cégep Heritage College; Michael Frassetto, University of Delaware; William L. Grose, Wytheville Community College; Joanne Klein, Boise State University; Rosemary Moore, University of Iowa; Lisa Payne Ossian, Des Moines Area Community College; Svanur Petursson, Rutgers University, Newark; David Pizzo, Murray State University; Allison E. Stein, Pellissippi State Community College; Kathryn Steinhaus, Seminole State College; Erin W. Stone, University of West Florida; Sarah L. Sullivan, McHenry County College; Nancy Vavra, University of Colorado at Boulder; and Mirna Zakic, Ohio University, Main Campus.

Many colleagues, friends, and family members have made contributions to this work. They know how grateful we are. We also wish to acknowledge and thank the publishing team at Bedford/St. Martin’s who did so much to bring this revised edition to completion: editorial director Edwin Hill; publisher for history Michael Rosenberg; program manager for history Bill Lombardo; developmental editor Leah Strauss; media editor Tess Fletcher; editorial assistant Belinda Huang; marketing manager Melissa Rodriguez; content production manager Kendra LeFleur; project manager, Andrea Stefanowicz; art researcher Bruce Carson; and cover designer Billy Boardman.

Our students’ questions and concerns have shaped much of this work, and we welcome all our readers’ suggestions, queries, and criticisms. Please contact us at our respective institutions or via [email protected].

Lynn Hunt Thomas Martin Barbara Rosenwein Bonnie Smith

Versions and Supplements Adopters of The Making of the West and their students have access to abundant print and digital resources and tools, including documents, assessment and presentation materials, the acclaimed Bedford Series in History and Culture volumes, and much more. The LaunchPad course space for The Making of the West provides access to the narrative as well as a wealth of primary sources and other features, along with assignment and assessment opportunities at the ready. Achieve Read & Practice supplies adaptive quizzing and our mobile, accessible Value Edition e-book, in one easy-to-use, affordable product. See the following text for more information, visit the book’s catalog site at macmillanlearning.com, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative.

Get the Right Version for Your Class To accommodate different course lengths and course budgets, The Making of the West is available in several different formats to best suit your course needs. The comprehensive The Making of the West includes a full-color art program and a robust set of features. The Making of the West Value Edition offers a trade-sized two-color option with the unabridged narrative and selected art and maps at a steep discount. The Value Edition is also offered at the lowest price point in loose-leaf format, and these versions are available as e- books. To get the best value of all, package a new print book with LaunchPad or Achieve Read & Practice at no additional charge to get the best that each format offers. LaunchPad users get a print version for easy portability with an interactive e-book for the full-feature text and course space, along with LearningCurve and loads of additional assignment and assessment options; Achieve Read & Practice users get a print version with a mobile, interactive Value Edition e-book plus LearningCurve adaptive quizzing in one exceptionally

affordable, easy-to-use product.

Combined Volume (Chapters 1–29): available in paperback, Value, loose-leaf, and e-book formats and in LaunchPad and Achieve Read & Practice Volume 1: To 1750 (Chapters 1–17): available in paperback, Value, loose-leaf, e-book formats and in LaunchPad and Achieve Read & Practice Volume 2: Since 1500 (Chapters 14–29): available in paperback, Value, loose-leaf, and e-book formats and in LaunchPad and Achieve Read & Practice

As noted in the following text, any of these volumes can be packaged with additional titles for a discount. To get ISBNs for discount packages, visit macmillanlearning.com or contact your Bedford/St. Martin’s representative.

Assign LaunchPad — An Assessment-Ready Interactive E-book and Course Space Available for discount purchase on its own or for packaging with new books at no additional charge, LaunchPad is a breakthrough solution for history courses. Intuitive and easy to use for students and instructors alike, LaunchPad is ready to use as is and can be edited, customized with your own material, and assigned quickly. LaunchPad for Making of the West includes Bedford/St. Martin’s high-quality content all in one place, including the full interactive e- book and companion reader, Sources of The Making of the West, plus LearningCurve adaptive quizzing; guided reading activities designed to help students read actively for key concepts; autograded quizzes for primary sources, and chapter summative quizzes. Through a wealth of adaptive and summative assessment, including the adaptive learning program of LearningCurve (see the full description ahead), students gain confidence and get into their reading before class. These features, plus additional primary source documents, video tools for making video assignments, map activities, flashcards, and

customizable test banks, make LaunchPad an invaluable asset for any instructor.

LaunchPad easily integrates with course management systems, and with fast ways to build assignments, rearrange chapters, and add new pages, sections, or links, it lets teachers build the courses they want to teach and to hold students accountable. For more information, visit launchpadworks.com or to arrange a demo, contact us at [email protected].

Assign LearningCurve So Your Students Come to Class Prepared Students using LaunchPad receive access to LearningCurve for The Making of the West. Assigning LearningCurve in place of reading quizzes is easy for instructors, and the reporting features help instructors track overall class trends and spot topics that are giving students trouble so they can adjust their lectures and class activities. This online learning tool is popular with students because it was designed to help them rehearse content at their own pace in a nonthreatening, gamelike environment. The feedback for wrong answers provides instructional coaching and sends students back to the book for review. Students answer as many questions as necessary to reach a target score, with repeated chances to revisit material they haven’t mastered. When LearningCurve is assigned, students come to class better prepared.

Assign Achieve Read & Practice So Your Students Can Read and Study Wherever They Go Available for discount purchase on its own or for packaging with new books at no additional charge, Achieve Read & Practice is Bedford/St. Martin’s most affordable digital solution for history courses. Intuitive and easy to use for both students and instructors, Achieve Read & Practice is ready to use as is, and can be assigned quickly. Achieve Read & Practice for The Making of the West includes the Value

Edition interactive e-book, LearningCurve formative quizzing, assignment tools, and a gradebook. All this is built with an intuitive interface that can be read on mobile devices and is fully accessible and available at a discounted price so anyone can use it. Instructors can set due dates for reading assignments and LearningCurve quizzes in just a few clicks, making it a simple and affordable way to engage students with the narrative and hold students accountable for course reading so they will come to class better prepared. For more information, visit macmillanlearning.com/ReadandPractice or to arrange a demo, contact us at [email protected].

iClicker, Active Learning Simplified iClicker offers simple, flexible tools to help you give students a voice and facilitate active learning in the classroom. Students can participate with the devices they bring to class using our iClicker Reef mobile apps (which work with smartphones, tablets, or laptops) or iClicker remotes. We’ve now integrated iClicker with Macmillan’s LaunchPad to make it easier than ever to synchronize grades and promote engagement — both in and out of class. iClicker Reef access cards can also be packaged with LaunchPad or your textbook at a significant savings for your students. To learn more, talk to your Macmillan Learning representative or visit us at www.iclicker.com.

Take Advantage of Instructor Resources Bedford/St. Martin’s has developed a rich array of teaching resources for this book and for this course. They range from lecture and presentation materials and assessment tools to course management options. Most can be found in LaunchPad or can be downloaded or ordered at macmillanlearning.com.

Bedford Coursepack for Blackboard, Canvas, Brightspace by D2L, or Moodle. We can help you integrate our rich content into your course management system. Registered instructors can download coursepacks that include our popular free resources and book-

specific content for The Making of the West. Visit macmillanlearning.com to find your version or download your coursepack.

Instructor’s Resource Manual. The instructor’s manual offers both experienced and first-time instructors tools for presenting textbook material in engaging ways. It includes content learning objectives, annotated chapter outlines, and strategies for teaching with the textbook, plus suggestions on how to get the most out of LearningCurve and a survival guide for first-time teaching assistants.

Guide to Changing Editions.

Designed to facilitate an instructor’s transition from the previous edition of The Making of the West to this new edition, this guide presents an overview of major changes as well as of changes in each chapter.

Online Test Bank. The test bank includes a mix of fresh, carefully crafted multiple- choice, matching, short-answer, and essay questions for each chapter. Many of the multiple-choice questions feature a map, an image, or a primary source excerpt as the prompt. All questions appear in easy-to-use test bank software that allows instructors to add, edit, resequence, and print questions and answers. Instructors can also export questions into a variety of course management systems.

The Bedford Lecture Kit: Lecture Outlines, Maps, and Images. Observe carefully and save time with The Bedford Lecture Kit. These presentation materials are downloadable individually from the Instructor Resources tab on macmillanlearning.com. They include fully customizable multimedia presentations built around chapter outlines that are embedded with maps, figures, and images from the textbook and are supplemented by more detailed instructor notes on

key points and concepts.

Print, Digital, and Custom Options for More Choice and Value For information on free packages and discounts up to 50%, visit macmillanlearning.com, or contact your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative.

Sources of The Making of the West, Sixth Edition. Thoroughly revised, this companion reader provides written and visual sources to accompany each chapter of The Making of the West. A broad range of source types and themes illuminate historical experience from a diversity of perspectives. Now with a visual source as well as a comparative source pairing in every chapter, this reader offers instructors even more opportunities to promote classroom discussion of primary documents and to help students develop essential historical thinking skills. This companion reader is an exceptional value for students and offers plenty of assignment options for instructors. Available free when packaged with the bound text and included in the LaunchPad e-book with autograded quizzes for each source. In LaunchPad, each chapter of the reader includes special primary source online activities — self-graded exercises that challenge students to assess whether a specific piece of evidence drawn from the sources supports or challenges a conclusion related to a guiding question. Sources of The Making of the West is also available on its own as a downloadable e-book.

NEW Bedford Select for History. Create the ideal textbook for your course with only the chapters you need. Starting from one of our Value Edition history texts, you can rearrange chapters, delete unnecessary chapters, select primary sources from Sources of The Making of the West, Sixth Edition, and add document projects from the Bedford Document Collections, or choose to improve your students’s historical thinking skills with the Bedford Tutorials for History. In addition, you can add your own

original content to create just the book you’re looking for. With Bedford Select, students pay only for material that will be assigned in the course, and nothing more. Order your textbook every semester, or modify from one term to the next. It is easy to build your customized textbook, without compromising the quality and affordability you’ve come to expect from Bedford/St. Martin’s. For more information, visit macmillanlearning.com/bedfordselect.

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Brief Contents 1 Early Western Civilization, 400,000–1000 B.C.E. 2 Near East Empires and the Reemergence of Civilization in Greece, 1000–500 B.C.E. 3 The Greek Golden Age, c. 500–c. 400 B.C.E. 4 From the Classical to the Hellenistic World, 400–30 B.C.E. 5 The Rise of Rome and Its Republic, 753–44 B.C.E. 6 The Creation of the Roman Empire, 44 B.C.E.–284 C.E. 7 The Transformation of the Roman Empire, 284–600 C.E. 8 The Heirs of Rome: Islam, Byzantium, and Europe, 600–750 9 From Centralization to Fragmentation, 750–1050 10 Commercial Quickening and Religious Reform, 1050–1150 11 The Flowering of the Middle Ages, 1150–1215 12 The Medieval Synthesis — and Its Cracks, 1215–1340 13 Crisis and Renaissance, 1340–1492 14 Global Encounters and the Shock of the Reformation, 1492–1560 15 Wars of Religion and the Clash of Worldviews, 1560–1648 16 Absolutism, Constitutionalism, and the Search for Order, 1640– 1700 17 The Atlantic System and Its Consequences, 1700–1750

Contents Preface: Why This Book This Way Versions and Supplements Brief Contents Maps and Figures Authors’ Note: The B.C.E./C.E. Dating System CHAPTER 1 Early Western Civilization, 400,000–1000 B.C.E.

From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000– 1000 B.C.E.

Life and Change in the Stone Age The Emergence of Cities in Mesopotamia, 4000–2350 B.C.E. Metals and Empire Making: The Akkadians and the Ur III Dynasty, C. 2350–C. 2000 B.C.E. The Achievements of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Canaanites, 2000–1000 B.C.E.

Egypt, the First Unified Nation, 3050–1000 B.C.E. From the Unification of Egypt to the Old Kingdom, 3050–2190 B.C.E.

The Middle and New Kingdoms in Egypt, 2061–1081 B.C.E. The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 B.C.E.

The Hittites, 1750–1200 B.C.E. The Minoans, 2200–1400 B.C.E. The Mycenaeans, 1800–1000 B.C.E. The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 B.C.E.

Conclusion Chapter 1 Review

CHAPTER 2 Near East Empires and the Reemergence of

Civilization in Greece, 1000–500 B.C.E. From Dark Age to Empire in the Near East, 1000–500 B.C.E.

The New Empire of Assyria, 900–600 B.C.E. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, 600–539 B.C.E. The Persian Empire, 557–500 B.C.E. The Israelites, Origins to 539 B.C.E.

The Reemergence of Greek Civilization, 1000–750 B.C.E. The Greek Dark Age The Values of the Olympic Games Homer, Hesiod, and Divine Justice in Greek Myth

The Creation of the Greek City-State, 750–500 B.C.E. The Physical Environment of the Greek City-State Trade and “Colonization,” 800–580 B.C.E. Citizenship and Freedom in the Greek City-State

New Directions for the Greek City-State, 750–500 B.C.E. Oligarchy in the City-State of Sparta, 700–500 B.C.E. Tyranny in the City-State of Corinth, 657–585 B.C.E. Democracy in the City-State of Athens, c. 700–500 B.C.E. New Ways of Thought and Expression in Greece, 630–500 B.C.E.

Conclusion Chapter 2 Review

CHAPTER 3 The Greek Golden Age, C. 500–C. 400 B.C.E. Wars between Persia and Greece, 499–479 B.C.E.

From the Ionian Revolt to the Battle of Marathon, 499–490 B.C.E.

The Great Persian Invasion, 480–479 B.C.E. Athenian Confidence in the Golden Age, 478–431 B.C.E.

The Establishment of the Athenian Empire Radical Democracy and Pericles’ Leadership, 461–431 B.C.E. The Urban Landscape in Athens

Tradition and Innovation in Athens’s Golden Age Religious Tradition in a Period of Change Women, Slaves, and Metics Innovative Ideas in Education, Philosophy, History, and Medicine The Development of Greek Tragedy The Development of Greek Comedy

The End of Athens’s Golden Age, 431–403 B.C.E. The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 B.C.E. Athens Defeated: Tyranny and Civil War, 404–403 B.C.E.

Conclusion Chapter 3 Review

CHAPTER 4 From the Classical to the Hellenistic World, 400–30 B.C.E.

Classical Greece after the Peloponnesian War, 400–350 B.C.E. Athens’s Recovery after the Peloponnesian War The Execution of Socrates, 399 B.C.E. The Philosophy of Plato Aristotle, Scientist and Philosopher Greek Political Disunity

The Rise of Macedonia, 359–323 B.C.E. Macedonian Power and Philip II, 359–336 B.C.E. The Rule of Alexander the Great, 336–323 B.C.E.

The Hellenistic Kingdoms, 323–30 B.C.E. Creating New Kingdoms The Layers of Hellenistic Society The End of the Hellenistic Kingdoms

Hellenistic Culture The Arts under Royal Support Philosophy for a New Age

Scientific Innovation Cultural and Religious Transformations

Conclusion Chapter 4 Review

CHAPTER 5 The Rise of Rome and Its Republic, 753–44 B.C.E. Roman Social and Religious Traditions

Roman Moral Values The Patron-Client System The Roman Family Education for Public Life Public and Private Religion

From Monarchy to Republic Roman Society under the Kings, 753–509 B.C.E. The Early Roman Republic, 509–287 B.C.E.

Roman Imperialism and Its Consequences Expansion in Italy, 500–220 B.C.E. Wars with Carthage and in the East, 264–121 B.C.E. Greek Influence on Roman Literature and the Arts Stresses on Society from Imperialism

Civil War and the Destruction of the Republic The Gracchus Brothers and Violence in Politics, 133–121 B.C.E. Marius and the Origin of Client Armies, 107–100 B.C.E. Sulla and Civil War, 91–78 B.C.E. Julius Caesar and the Collapse of the Republic, 83–44 B.C.E.

Conclusion Chapter 5 Review

CHAPTER 6 The Creation of the Roman Empire, 44 B.C.E.–284 C.E. From Republic to Empire, 44 B.C.E.–14 C.E.

Civil War, 44–27 B.C.E.

The Creation of the Principate, 27 B.C.E.–14 C.E. Daily Life in the Rome of Augustus Changes in Education, Literature, and Art in Augustus’s Rome

Politics and Society in the Early Roman Empire The Perpetuation of the Principate after Augustus, 14–180 C.E. Life in the Roman Golden Age, 96–180 C.E.

The Emergence of Christianity in the Early Roman Empire Jesus and His Teachings Growth of a New Religion Competing Religious Beliefs

From Stability to Crisis in the Third Century C.E. Threats to the Northern and Eastern Frontiers of the Early Roman Empire Uncontrolled Spending, Natural Disasters, and Political Crisis, 193–284 C.E.

Conclusion Chapter 6 Review

CHAPTER 7 The Transformation of the Roman Empire, 284–600 C.E.

From Principate to Dominate in the Late Roman Empire, 284– 395

The Political Transformation and Division of the Roman Empire The Social Consequences of Financial Pressures From the Great Persecution to Religious Freedom

The Official Christianization of the Empire, 312–C. 540 Polytheism and Christianity in Competition The Struggle for Clarification in Christian Belief The Emergence of Christian Monks

Non-Roman Kingdoms in the Western Roman Empire, C. 370–

550s Non-Roman Migrations into the Western Roman Empire Social and Cultural Transformation in the Western Roman Empire

The Roman Empire in the East, C. 500–565 Imperial Society in the Eastern Roman Empire The Reign of Emperor Justinian, 527–565 The Preservation of Classical Traditions in the Late Roman Empire

Conclusion Chapter 7 Review

CHAPTER 8 The Heirs of Rome: Islam, Byzantium, and Europe, 600–750

Islam: A New Religion and a New Empire Nomads and City Dwellers The Prophet Muhammad and the Faith of Islam Growth of Islam, C. 610–632 The Caliphs, Muhammad’s Successors, 632–750 Peace and Prosperity in Islamic Lands

Byzantium Besieged Wars on the Frontiers, C. 570–750 From an Urban to a Rural Way of Life New Military and Cultural Forms Religion, Politics, and Iconoclasm

Western Europe: A Medley of Kingdoms Frankish Kingdoms with Roman Roots Economic Activity in a Peasant Society The Powerful in Merovingian Society Christianity and Classical Culture in the British Isles Unity in Spain, Division in Italy

Political Tensions and the Power of the Pope Conclusion Chapter 8 Review

CHAPTER 9 From Centralization to Fragmentation, 750–1050 The Byzantine Emperor and Local Elites

Imperial Power The Macedonian Renaissance, C. 870–C. 1025 The Dynatoi: A New Landowning Elite The Formation of Eastern Europe and Kievan Rus

The Rise and Fall of the Abbasid Caliphate The Abbasid Caliphate, 750–936 Regional Diversity in Islamic Lands Unity of Commerce and Language The Islamic Renaissance, C. 790–C. 1050

The Carolingian Empire The Rise of the Carolingians Charlemagne and His Kingdom, 768–814 The Carolingian Renaissance, C. 790–C. 900 Charlemagne’s Successors, 814–911 Land and Power Viking, Muslim, and Magyar Invasions, C. 790–955

After the Carolingians: The Emergence of Local Rule Public Power and Private Relationships Warriors and Warfare Efforts to Contain Violence Political Communities in Italy, England, and France Emperors and Kings in Central and Eastern Europe

Conclusion Chapter 9 Review

CHAPTER 10 Commercial Quickening and Religious Reform, 1050–1150

The Commercial Revolution Fairs, Towns, and Cities Organizing Crafts and Commerce Communes: Self-Government for the Towns The Commercial Revolution in the Countryside

Church Reform Beginnings of Reform The Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Conflict, 1075–1122 The Sweep of Reform New Monastic Orders of Poverty

The Crusades Calling the Crusade The First Crusade The Crusader States The Disastrous Second Crusade The Long-Term Impact of the Crusades

The Revival of Monarchies Reconstructing the Empire at Byzantium England under Norman Rule Praising the King of France Surviving as Emperor

Conclusion Chapter 10 Review

CHAPTER 11 The Flowering of the Middle Ages, 1150–1215 New Schools and Churches

The New Learning and the Rise of the University Architectural Style: From Romanesque to Gothic

Governments as Institutions England: Unity through Common Law France: Consolidation and Conquest Germany: The Revived Monarchy of Frederick Barbarossa Eastern Europe and Byzantium: Fragmenting Realms

The Growth of a Vernacular High Culture The Troubadours: Poets of Love and Play The Birth of Epic and Romance Literature

Religious Fervor and Crusade New Religious Orders in the Cities Disastrous Crusades to the Holy Land Victorious Crusades in Europe and on Its Frontiers

Conclusion Chapter 11 Review

CHAPTER 12 The Medieval Synthesis — and Its Cracks, 1215–1340 The Church’s Mission

Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council Inquisition Lay Piety Jews as Outcasts

Reconciling This World and the Next The Achievements and Failures of Scholasticism New Syntheses in Writing and Music Gothic Art

The Politics of Control The Weakening of the Empire Louis IX and a New Ideal of Kingship The Birth of Representative Institutions The Weakening of the Papacy

The Rise of the Signori The Mongol Takeover The Great Famine

Conclusion Chapter 12 Review

CHAPTER 13 Crisis and Renaissance, 1340–1492 Crisis: Disease, War, and Schism

The Black Death, 1346–1353 The Hundred Years’ War, 1337–1453 The Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople, 1453 The Great Schism, 1378–1417

Renaissance: New Forms of Thought and Expression Renaissance Humanism The Arts

Consolidating Power New Political Formations in Eastern Europe Powerful States in Western Europe Republics The Tools of Power

Conclusion Chapter 13 Review

CHAPTER 14 Global Encounters and the Shock of the Reformation, 1492–1560

The Discovery of New Worlds Portuguese Explorations The Voyages of Columbus A New Era in Slavery Conquering the New World The Columbian Exchange

The Protestant Reformation The Invention of Printing Popular Piety and Christian Humanism Martin Luther’s Challenge Protestantism Spreads and Divides The Contested Church of England

Reshaping Society through Religion Protestant Challenges to the Social Order New Forms of Discipline Catholic Renewal

Striving for Mastery Courtiers and Princes Dynastic Wars Financing War Divided Realms

Conclusion Chapter 14 Review

CHAPTER 15 Wars of Religion and the Clash of Worldviews, 1560–1648

Religious Conflicts Threaten State Power, 1560–1618 French Wars of Religion, 1562–1598 Dutch Revolt against Spain Elizabeth I’s Defense of English Protestantism The Clash of Faiths and Empires in Eastern Europe

The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648 Origins and Course of the War The Effects of Constant Fighting The Peace of Westphalia, 1648

Economic Crisis and Realignment

From Growth to Recession Consequences for Daily Life The Economic Balance of Power

The Rise of Science and a Scientific Worldview The Scientific Revolution The Natural Laws of Politics The Arts in an Age of Crisis Magic and Witchcraft

Conclusion Chapter 15 Review

CHAPTER 16 Absolutism, Constitutionalism, and the Search for Order, 1640–1700

Louis XIV: Absolutism and Its Limits The Fronde, 1648–1653 Court Culture as an Element of Absolutism Enforcing Religious Orthodoxy Extending State Authority at Home and Abroad

Constitutionalism in England England Turned Upside Down, 1642–1660 Restoration and Revolution Again Social Contract Theory: Hobbes and Locke

Outposts of Constitutionalism The Dutch Republic Freedom and Slavery in the New World

Absolutism in Central and Eastern Europe Poland-Lithuania Overwhelmed Brandenburg-Prussia: Militaristic Absolutism An Uneasy Balance: Austrian Habsburgs and Ottoman Turks Russia: Setting the Foundations of Bureaucratic Absolutism

The Search for Order in Elite and Popular Culture Freedom and Constraint in the Arts and Sciences Women and Manners Reforming Popular Culture

Conclusion Chapter 16 Review

CHAPTER 17 The Atlantic System and Its Consequences, 1700– 1750

The Atlantic System and the World Economy Slavery and the Atlantic System World Trade and Settlement The Birth of Consumer Society

New Social and Cultural Patterns Agricultural Revolution Social Life in the Cities New Tastes in the Arts Religious Revivals

Consolidation of the European State System A New Power Alignment British Rise and Dutch Decline Russia’s Emergence as a European Power Continuing Dynastic Struggles The Power of Diplomacy and the Importance of Population

The Birth of the Enlightenment Popularization of Science and Challenges to Religion Travel Literature and the Challenge to Custom and Tradition Raising the Woman Question

Conclusion Chapter 17 Review

Glossary of Key Terms and People Index About the Authors

Maps and Figures MAPS

Chapter 1 MAP 1.1 The Ancient Near East, 4000–3000 B.C.E. MAP 1.2 Ancient Egypt MAP 1.3 Greece and the Aegean Sea, 1500 B.C.E. MAPPING THE WEST The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 B.C.E.

Chapter 2 MAP 2.1 Expansion of the Persian Empire, C. 550–490 B.C.E. MAP 2.2 Phoenician and Greek Expansion, 750–500 B.C.E. MAPPING THE WEST Mediterranean Civilizations, C. 500 B.C.E.

Chapter 3 MAP 3.1 The Persian Wars, 499–479 B.C.E. MAP 3.2 Fifth-Century B.C.E. Athens MAP 3.3 The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 B.C.E. MAPPING THE WEST Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean, 400 B.C.E.

Chapter 4 MAP 4.1 Conquests of Alexander the Great, r. 336–323 B.C.E. MAP 4.2 Hellenistic Kingdoms, 240 B.C.E. MAPPING THE WEST Roman Takeover of the Hellenistic World, to 30 B.C.E.

Chapter 5 MAP 5.1 Ancient Italy, 500 B.C.E. MAP 5.2 The City of Rome during the Republic

MAP 5.3 Roman Expansion, 500–44 B.C.E. MAPPING THE WEST The Roman World at the End of the Republic, 44 B.C.E.

Chapter 6 MAP 6.1 The Expansion of the Roman Empire, 30 B.C.E.–117 C.E. MAP 6.2 Natural Features and Languages of the Roman World MAP 6.3 Christian Populations in the Late Third Century C.E. MAPPING THE WEST The Roman Empire in Crisis, 284 C.E.

Chapter 7 MAP 7.1 Diocletian’s Reorganization of 293 MAP 7.2 The Spread of Christianity, 300–600 MAP 7.3 Migrations and Invasions of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries MAPPING THE WEST Western Europe and the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, C. 600

Chapter 8 MAP 8.1 Expansion of Islam to 750 MAP 8.2 Byzantine and Sasanid Empires, C. 600 MAP 8.3 The Merovingian Kingdoms in the Seventh Century MAPPING THE WEST Rome’s Heirs, C. 750

Chapter 9 MAP 9.1 The Byzantine Empire, 1025 MAP 9.2 Islamic States, C. 1000 MAP 9.3 Expansion of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne MAPPING THE WEST Europe and the Mediterranean, C. 1050

Chapter 10 MAP 10.1 The First Crusade, 1096–1099 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and the Mediterranean, C. 1150

Chapter 11

MAP 11.1 Europe in the Age of Henry II and Frederick Barbarossa, 1150–1190 MAP 11.2 Crusades and Anti-heretic Campaigns, 1150–1215 MAP 11.3 The Reconquista, 1150–1212 MAPPING THE WEST Europe and Byzantium, C. 1215

Chapter 12 MAP 12.1 France under Louis IX, r. 1226–1270 MAP 12.2 The Mongol Khanates after 1260 MAPPING THE WEST Europe, C. 1340

Chapter 13 MAP 13.1 Advance of the Black Death, 1346–1353 MAP 13.2 The Hundred Years’ War, 1337–1453 MAP 13.3 Ottoman Expansion in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries MAPPING THE WEST Europe, C. 1492

Chapter 14 MAP 14.1 Early Voyages of World Exploration MAP 14.2 The Peasants’ War of 1525 MAPPING THE WEST Reformation Europe, C. 1560

Chapter 15 MAP 15.1 The Empire of Philip II, r. 1556–1598 MAP 15.2 The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia, 1648 MAP 15.3 European Colonization of the Americas, C. 1640 MAPPING THE WEST The Religious Divisions of Europe, C. 1648

Chapter 16 MAP 16.1 Louis XIV’s Acquisitions, 1668–1697 MAP 16.2 Dutch Commerce in the Seventeenth Century MAP 16.3 State Building in Central and Eastern Europe, 1648– 1699

MAPPING THE WEST Europe at the End of the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 17 MAP 17.1 European Trade Patterns, C. 1740 MAP 17.2 Europe, c. 1715 MAP 17.3 Russia and Sweden after the Great Northern War, 1721 MAPPING THE WEST Europe in 1750

FIGURES

FIGURE 1.1 Cuneiform Writing FIGURE 1.2 Egyptian Hieroglyphs FIGURE 3.1 Triremes, the Foremost Classical Greek Warships FIGURE 3.2 Styles of Greek Capitals FIGURE 6.1 Cutaway Reconstruction of the Forum of Augustus FIGURE 9.1 Diagram of a Manor and Its Three-Field System FIGURE 10.1 Plan of Fountains Abbey FIGURE 11.1 Floor Plan of a Romanesque Church FIGURE 11.2 The Song “A chantar m’er de so” FIGURE 13.1 The Valois Succession FIGURE 17.1 African Slaves Imported into American Territories, 1701–1800

Authors’ Note The B.C.E./C.E. Dating System When were you born? What year is it? We customarily answer questions like these with a number, such as “1991” or “2008.” Our replies are usually automatic, taking for granted the numerous assumptions Westerners make about how dates indicate chronology. But to what do numbers such as 1991 and 2008 actually refer? In this book the numbers used to specify dates follow a recent revision of the system most common in the Western secular world. This system reckons the dates of solar years by counting backward and forward from the traditional date of the birth of Jesus Christ, more than two thousand years ago.

Using this method, numbers followed by the abbreviation B.C.E., standing for “before the common era” (or, as some would say, “before the Christian era”), indicate the number of years counting backward from the assumed date of the birth of Jesus Christ. The abbreviation B.C.E. therefore indicates the same chronology marked by the traditional abbreviation B.C. (“before Christ”). The larger the number preceding B.C.E. (or B.C.), the earlier in history is the year to which it refers. The date 431 B.C.E., for example, refers to a year 431 years before the birth of Jesus and therefore comes earlier in time than the dates 430 B.C.E., 429 B.C.E., and so on. The same calculation applies to numbering other time intervals calculated on the decimal system: those of ten years (a decade), of one hundred years (a century), and of one thousand years (a millennium). For example, the decade of the 440s B.C.E. (449 B.C.E. to 440 B.C.E.) is earlier than the decade of the 430s B.C.E. (439 B.C.E. to 430 B.C.E.). “Fifth century B.C.E.” refers to the fifth period of 100 years reckoning backward from the birth of Jesus and covers the years 500 B.C.E. to 401 B.C.E. It is earlier in history than the fourth century B.C.E. (400 B.C.E. to 301 B.C.E.), which followed the fifth century B.C.E. Because this system has no year “zero,” the first century

B.C.E. covers the years 100 B.C.E. to 1 B.C.E. Dating millennia works similarly: the second millennium B.C.E. refers to the years 2000 B.C.E. to 1001 B.C.E., the third millennium to the years 3000 B.C.E. to 2001 B.C.E., and so on.

To indicate years counted forward from the traditional date of Jesus’s birth, numbers are followed by the abbreviation C.E., standing for “of the common era” (or “of the Christian era”). The abbreviation C.E. therefore indicates the same chronology marked by the traditional abbreviation A.D., which stands for the Latin phrase anno Domini (“in the year of the Lord”). The abbreviation A.D. properly comes before the date being marked. The date A.D. 1492, for example, translates as “in the year of the Lord 1492,” meaning 1492 years after the birth of Jesus. Under the B.C.E./C.E. system, this date would be written as 1492 C.E. For dating centuries, the term “first century C.E.” refers to the period from 1 C.E. to 100 C.E. (which is the same period as A.D. 1 to A.D. 100). For dates C.E, the smaller the number, the earlier the date in history. The fourth century C.E. (301 C.E. to 400 C.E.) comes before the fifth century C.E. (401 C.E. to 500 C.E.). The year 312 C.E. is a date in the early fourth century C.E., while 395 C.E. is a date late in the same century. When numbers are given without either B.C.E. or C.E., they are presumed to be dates C.E. For example, the term eighteenth century with no abbreviation accompanying it refers to the years 1701 C.E. to 1800 C.E.

No standard system of numbering years, such as B.C.E./C.E., existed in antiquity. Different people in different places identified years with varying names and numbers. Consequently, it was difficult to match up the years in any particular local system with those in a different system. Each city of ancient Greece, for example, had its own method for keeping track of the years. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, therefore, faced a problem in presenting a chronology for the famous Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which began (by our reckoning) in 431 B.C.E. To try to explain to as many of his readers as possible the date the war had begun, he described its first year by three different local systems: “the year

when Chrysis was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthood at Argos, and Aenesias was overseer at Sparta, and Pythodorus was magistrate at Athens.”

A Catholic monk named Dionysius, who lived in Rome in the sixth century C.E., invented the system of reckoning dates forward from the birth of Jesus. Calling himself Exiguus (Latin for “the little” or “the small”) as a mark of humility, he placed Jesus’s birth 754 years after the foundation of ancient Rome. Others then and now believe his date for Jesus’s birth was in fact several years too late. Many scholars today calculate that Jesus was born in what would be 4 B.C.E. according to Dionysius’s system, although a date a year or so earlier also seems possible.

Counting backward from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth to indicate dates earlier than that event represented a natural complement to reckoning forward for dates after it. The English historian and theologian Bede in the early eighth century was the first to use both forward and backward reckoning from the birth of Jesus in a historical work, and this system gradually gained wider acceptance because it provided a basis for standardizing the many local calendars used in the Western Christian world. Nevertheless, B.C. and A.D. were not used regularly until the end of the eighteenth century; B.C.E. and C.E. became common in the late twentieth century.

The system of numbering years from the birth of Jesus is far from the only one in use today. The Jewish calendar of years, for example, counts forward from the date given to the creation of the world, which would be calculated as 3761 B.C.E. under the B.C.E./C.E. system. Under this system, years are designated A.M., an abbreviation of the Latin anno mundi, “in the year of the world.” The Islamic calendar counts forward from the date of the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca, called the Hijra, in what is the year 622 C.E. The abbreviation A.H. (standing for the Latin phrase anno Hegirae, “in the year of the Hijra”) indicates dates calculated by this system. Anthropology commonly reckons distant dates as “before the present” (abbreviated

B.P.).

History is often defined as the study of change over time; hence the importance of dates for the historian. But just as historians argue over which dates are most significant, they disagree over which dating system to follow. Their debate reveals perhaps the most enduring fact about history — its vitality.

C H A P T E R 1

Early Western Civilization

400,000–1000 B.C.E.

KINGS IN ANCIENT EGYPT BELIEVED THE GODS JUDGED THEM AFTER death. In Instructions for Merikare, written around 2100– 2000 B.C.E., a king advises his son: “Secure your place in the cemetery by being upright, by doing justice, upon which people’s hearts rely…. When a man is buried and mourned, his deeds are piled up next to him as treasure.” Being judged pure of heart led to an eternal reward: “abiding [in the afterlife] like a god, roaming [free] like the lords of time.”

Other Egyptians also believed they should live justly by worshipping the gods and obeying the king. A guidebook instructing mummies about the underworld, the Book of the Dead, explained the jackal-headed god Anubis would weigh the dead person’s heart against the goddess Maat and her feather of Truth, with the bird-headed god Thoth recording the result. Pictures in the book show the Swallower of the Damned — with a crocodile’s head, a lion’s body, and a hippopotamus’s hind end — crouching ready to eat the heart of anyone who failed. Egyptian mythology thus taught people that living a just life was their most important goal because it won them a blessed existence after they died.

This belief — that there are divine beings more powerful than humans — goes back to the time before civilization, when people in the Stone Age lived as hunter-gatherers. Ten to twelve thousand years ago, when global warming promoted the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, human life changed

in revolutionary ways that powerfully affect our lives today. Civilization first emerged around 4000–3000 B.C.E. in cities in Mesopotamia (the region between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, today Iraq). Historians define civilization as a way of life based on agriculture and trade, with cities containing large buildings for religion and government; technology to produce metals, textiles, pottery, and other manufactured objects; and knowledge of writing. Archaeological research indicates that those conditions first developed in Mesopotamia.

Civilization always arose with religion at its core. In Mesopotamian civilization, rulers believed they were judged for maintaining order on earth and honoring the gods. Egyptian civilization, which began about 3100–3000 B.C.E., built enormous temples and pyramids. Civilizations emerged starting about 2500 B.C.E. in India, China, and the Americas. By 2000 B.C.E., civilizations appeared in Anatolia (today Turkey), on islands in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and in Greece. The development of civilization produced intended and unintended consequences. The spread of metallurgy (using high heat to extract metals from ores), for example, created better tools and weapons but also increased preexisting social hierarchy (ranking people as superiors or inferiors).

The peoples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, and Greece created Western civilization by exchanging ideas, technologies, and objects through trade, travel, and war. Building on concepts from the Near East, Greeks originated the idea of the West as a separate region, identifying Europe as the West (where the sun sets) and different from the East (where the sun rises). The making of the West depended on cultural, political, and economic interaction among diverse groups. The West remains an evolving concept, not a fixed region with unchanging borders and members.

CHAPTER FOCUS What changes did Western civilization bring to human life?

From the Stone Age to Mesopotamian Civilization, 400,000–1000 B.C.E.

People in the Stone Age created patterns of life that still exist. The most significant of those early developments were (1) the

evolution of hierarchy in society and (2) the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, which allowed people to stay in one place and raise their own food instead of wandering around to find things to eat in the wild. This change in how human beings met their most basic need — nutrition — led them to settle down in permanent communities for the first time. Eventually, some of these communities grew large enough in population and area to be considered cities. The conditions of life in these populous settlements incubated civilization, beginning in the fertile plains of the two great rivers of the Near East, the Euphrates and the Tigris. There, the Mesopotamians learned to work metals, and their rulers’ desire to acquire and control the sources of these increasingly precious resources generated the drive to create empires. That drive in turn set the world on a course that extends to the modern age.

Life and Change in the Stone Age About four hundred thousand years ago, people whose brains and bodies resembled ours appeared first in Africa. Called Homo sapiens (“wise human beings”), they were the immediate ancestors of modern people. Spreading out from Africa, they gradually populated the rest of the earth. Anthropologists call this time the Stone Age because

people made tools and weapons from stone as well as from bone and wood; they did not yet know how to work with metals. The Stone Age is divided into an early part, the Paleolithic (“Old Stone”), and a later part, the Neolithic (“New Stone”).

In the Paleolithic Age, people existed as hunter-gatherers who originally lived in mostly egalitarian bands (meaning all adults enjoyed a rough equality in making group decisions). They roamed in groups of twenty to fifty, hunting animals, catching fish and shellfish, and gathering plants, fruits, and nuts. Women with young children foraged for plants close to camp; they provided the group’s most reliable supply of nourishment. Men did most of the hunting of wild animals far from camp, although archaeological evidence shows that women also participated, especially in hunting with nets. Objects from distant regions found in burial sites show that hunter-gatherer bands traded with one another. Trade spread knowledge — especially technology, such as techniques for improving tools, and art for creating beauty and expressing beliefs. The use of fire for cooking was a major innovation because it allowed people to obtain nourishment from wild grains that they could not digest if eaten raw.

Evidence from graves shows that hierarchy emerged in Paleolithic times. Some Paleolithic burial sites contain weapons, tools, animal figurines, ivory beads, seashells, and bracelets alongside the corpses; the objects indicate that certain dead persons had greater status and wealth than others. Hierarchy probably began when men acquired prestige from bringing back meat after long hunts and from fighting in wars. (The many traumatic wounds seen in male skeletons show warfare was frequent.) Older women and men also earned status from their experience and longevity, in an age when illness or accidents killed most people before age thirty. The decoration of corpses with red paint and valuable objects suggests that Paleolithic people thought about the mystery of death and perhaps believed in an afterlife. Paleolithic artists also sculpted statuettes of human figures, probably for religious purposes.

Climate and geography — the fundamental features of our natural environment — defined a new way of life for human beings beginning about 10,000 B.C.E. A slow process of transformation started when climate change in the late Paleolithic period brought warmer temperatures and more rainfall at higher elevations. This weather increased the amount of wild grains people could gather in the foothills of the Near East’s Fertile Crescent, an arc of territory extending up from the Jordan valley in Israel, through eastern Turkey, and down into the foothills and plains of Iraq and Iran (Map 1.1).* Paleolithic hunter-gatherers came to settle where wild grains grew abundantly and game animals grazed. Recent archaeological excavation in Turkey suggests that around eleven thousand years ago, groups organized to erect stone monuments to worship gods who they believed helped them to survive, and they started growing food nearby. A more reliable food supply allowed people to raise more children, and increased social organization promoted larger settlements. More people being born, however, in turn, created a greater need for food.

*In this book, we observe the common usage of the term Near East to mean the lands of southwestern Asia and Egypt.

MAP 1.1 The Ancient Near East, 4000–3000 B.C.E. The diverse region we call the ancient Near East included many different landscapes, climates, peoples, and languages. Kings ruled its independent city-states, the centers of the world’s first civilizations, beginning around 4000–3000 B.C.E. Trade by land and sea for natural resources, especially metals, and wars of conquest kept the peoples of the region in constant contact and conflict with one another. How did geography facilitate — or hinder — the development of civilization in the Near East?

After thousands of years of trial and error, people in the Fertile Crescent invented reliable agriculture by sowing seeds from wild grains to produce harvests year after year. This marked the start of the Neolithic Age. Since women had the most experience gathering plants, they probably played the major role in developing farming, while men continued to hunt. Archaeology shows that people learned to domesticate animals about the same time. By nine thousand years ago, keeping herds for food was widespread in the Near East, which was home to wild animals that could be domesticated, such as sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle.

Historians call agriculture and the domestication of animals the “farming package,” which created the Neolithic Revolution. The farming package had revolutionary effects because it produced many permanent settlements and food surpluses. Some Neolithic people lived as pastoralists (herders moving around to find grazing land for their animals), while others were farmers who had to reside in a settled location to raise crops. Fixed settlements marked a turning point in the relationship between human beings and the environment, as farmers increasingly channeled streams for irrigation. DNA evidence from ancient bones and modern populations shows that by 4000 B.C.E., immigrants and traders from the Fertile Crescent had helped spread knowledge of agriculture and domestication as far as the European shores of the Atlantic Ocean. When farmers began producing more food than they needed, the surpluses allowed other people in the community to specialize in architecture, arts, crafts, metalwork, textile production, and trade.

The Neolithic Revolution generated more hierarchy because positions of authority were needed to allow some people to supervise the complex irrigation systems that supported agricultural surpluses, and because greater economic activity created a stricter division of labor by gender. Men began to dominate agriculture after the invention of heavy wooden plows pulled by oxen, sometime after 4000 B.C.E. Not having to bear and nurse babies, men took over long- distance trade. Women and older children mastered new domestic tasks such as turning milk from domesticated animals into cheese and yogurt and making clothing for themselves and their families. This gendered division of labor arose as an efficient response to the conditions and technologies of the time, but it had the unintended consequence of increasing men’s status.

The Emergence of Cities in

Mesopotamia, 4000–2350 B.C.E. Significant changes in human society took place when the first cities — and therefore the first civilization — emerged in Mesopotamia about 4000–3000 B.C.E. on the plains bordering the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (see Map 1.1). Cities developed there because the climate and the soil could support large populations. Mesopotamian farmers operated in a challenging environment; temperatures soared to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and little rain fell in the low-lying plains, yet the rivers flooded unpredictably. The farmers maximized agricultural production by devising the technology and administrative arrangements necessary to irrigate the arid flatlands with water diverted from the rivers. A vast system of canals controlled flooding and made the desert fertile with food crops. The need to construct and maintain a system of irrigation canals in turn led to the centralization of authority in Mesopotamian cities, whose rulers took control of the farmland and irrigation systems outside their fortified walls. This political arrangement — an urban center exercising control over the surrounding countryside — is called a city-state. Mesopotamian city-states were independent communities competing with each other for land and resources.

The people of Sumer (southern Mesopotamia) established the earliest city-states. Unlike other Mesopotamians, the Sumerians did not speak a Semitic language (the group of languages from which Hebrew and Arabic came); the origins of the Sumerians’ language remain a mystery. By 3000 B.C.E., the Sumerians had created twelve independent city-states, including Uruk, Eridu, and Ur, which repeatedly battled each other for territory. By 2500 B.C.E., most of the cities had expanded to twenty thousand residents or more. The rooms in Sumerians’ mud-brick houses surrounded open courts. Large homes had a dozen rooms or more.

The Sumerian city-states became prosperous from agricultural surpluses and trade in commodities and manufactured goods. Their

residents bartered grain, vegetable oil, woolens, and leather with one another, and they acquired metal, timber, and precious stones from foreign trade. The invention of the wheel for use on transport wagons around 3000 B.C.E. strengthened the Mesopotamian economy. Traders traveled as far as India, where the cities of Indus civilization emerged about 2500 B.C.E. Two groups dominated the Sumerian economy: religious officials controlled the temples, and ruling families controlled large farms and gangs of laborers. Some private households also became rich.

Increasingly rigid forms of hierarchy evolved in Sumerian society. Slaves, owned by temple officials and by individuals, had the lowest status. People were enslaved by being captured in war, being born to slaves, voluntarily selling themselves or their children (usually to escape starvation), or being sold by their creditors when they could not repay loans (debt slavery). Children whose parents dedicated them as slaves to the gods could rise to prominent positions in temple administration. In general, however, slaves existed in near-total dependence on other people and were excluded from normal social relations. They usually worked without pay and lacked almost all legal rights. Considered as property, they could be bought, sold, beaten, or even killed by their masters.

Slaves worked in domestic service, craft production, and farming, but historians dispute whether slaves or free laborers were more important to the economy. Free persons performed most government labor, paying their taxes with work rather than with money, which was measured in amounts of food or precious metal (monetary currency was not invented until much later). Although some owners liberated slaves in their wills and a few allowed slaves to keep enough earnings to purchase their freedom, most slaves had little chance of becoming free.

Hierarchy became so strong in Mesopotamian society that it led to monarchy — the political system that became the most common form of government in the ancient world. In a monarchy, the king was at

the top of the hierarchy, like the ruler of the gods. If he had male descendants, they inherited his position, sometimes competing violently to become the king. Royal families lived in elaborate palaces that served as administrative centers and treasure houses. Archaeologists excavating royal graves in Ur have revealed the rulers’ dazzling riches — spectacular possessions crafted in gold, silver, and precious stones. These graves also have yielded grisly evidence of the top-ranking status of the king and queen: servants who were killed to care for their royal masters after death.

Patriarchy, the domination by men in political, social, and economic life already existed in Mesopotamian city-states, probably as an inheritance from the development of hierarchy in Paleolithic times. A Sumerian queen was respected because she was the king’s wife and the mother of the royal children, but her husband held supreme power. The king formed a council of older men as his advisers but acknowledged the gods as his rulers; this concept made the state a theocracy (government by gods) and gave priests and priestesses public influence. The king’s greatest responsibility was to please the gods and to defeat attacks from rival cities. The king collected taxes from the working population to support his family, court, palace, army, and officials. The kings, along with the priests of the large temples, regulated most of the economy in their kingdoms by controlling the exchange of food and goods between farmers and craft producers in a system known as a redistributive economy.

In religion, Mesopotamians continued earlier traditions by practicing polytheism, worshipping many gods thought to control different aspects of life, including the weather, fertility, and war. People believed that their safety depended on the goodwill of the gods, and each city-state honored a deity as its special protector. To please the gods, city dwellers offered sacrifices and built ziggurats (temple towers) soaring as high as ten stories. Mesopotamians believed that if human beings angered the gods, divinities such as the sky god, Enlil, and the goddess of love and war, Inanna (also called Ishtar), would punish them by sending disease, floods, famine, and

defeats in war.

Myths related in long poems such as the Epic of Creation and the Epic of Gilgamesh expressed Mesopotamian ideas about the challenges and violence that human beings faced in struggling with the natural environment and creating civilization. Gilgamesh was a legendary king of Uruk who forced the young men of Uruk to labor like slaves and the young women to sleep with him. When his subjects begged the mother of the gods to grant them a protector, she created Enkidu, “hairy all over … dressed as cattle are.” A week of sex with a prostitute tamed this brute, preparing him for civilization: “Enkidu was weaker; he ran slower than before. But he had gained judgment, was wiser.” After wrestling to a draw, Gilgamesh and Enkidu became friends; together they defeated Humbaba (the ugly giant of the Pine Forest) and the Bull of Heaven. The gods doomed Enkidu to die soon after these triumphs. Depressed about the human condition and longing to cheat death, Gilgamesh sought the secret of immortality, but a thieving snake ruined his quest. He decided that the only immortality for mortals was winning fame for deeds. Only memory and gods could live forever.

Mesopotamian myths recounted in poetry, song, and art greatly influenced other peoples. A version of the Gilgamesh story recounted how the gods sent a flood over the earth. They warned one man, instructing him to build a boat. He loaded his vessel with his relatives, workers, and possessions; domesticated and wild animals; and “everything there was.” After a week of torrential rains, they left the boat to repopulate the earth and regenerate civilization. This story recalled the frequent floods of the Mesopotamian environment and was echoed later in the biblical account of a global flood and Noah’s ark.

The Ziggurat at Ur in Sumer Sumerian royalty built this massive temple (called a ziggurat) in the twenty-first century B.C.E. To construct its three huge terraces (connected with stairways), workers glued bricks together with tar around a central core. The walls had to be more than seven feet thick to hold the weight of the building, whose original height is uncertain. The first terrace reached forty-five feet above the ground. Still, the Great Pyramid in Egypt dwarfed even this large monument.

The invention of writing in Mesopotamia transformed the way people exchanged stories and ideas. Sumerians originally invented this new technology to do accounting. Before writing, people drew small pictures on clay tablets to keep count of objects or animals. Writing developed when people created symbols to represent the sounds of speech instead of pictures to represent concrete things. Sumerian writing did not use an alphabet (a system in which each symbol represents the sound of a letter), but rather a system of wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets to represent the sounds of syllables and entire words (Figure 1.1). Today this form of writing is called cuneiform (from cuneus, Latin for “wedge”). For a long time, writing was a professional skill for accounting mastered by only a few men and women known as scribes.

FIGURE 1.1 Cuneiform Writing The earliest known form of writing developed in different locations in Mesopotamia in 4000– 3000 B.C.E., when people began linking meaning and sound to signs such as those shown in the chart. Some scribes who mastered the system used sticks or reeds to press dense rows of small wedge-shaped marks into damp clay tablets; others used chisels to engrave them on stone. Cuneiform was used for at least fifteen Near Eastern languages and continued to be written for three thousand years.

The possibilities for communication over time and space exploded when people began writing down nature lore, mathematics, foreign languages, and literature. In the twenty-third century B.C.E., Enheduanna, the daughter of King Sargon of the city of Akkad, composed the oldest written poetry whose author is known. Written in Sumerian, her poetry praised the life-giving goddess of love, Inanna: “The great gods scattered from you like fluttering bats, unable to face your intimidating gaze, … knowing and wise queen of all the lands, who makes all creatures and people multiply.” Later princesses who wrote love songs, lullabies, dirges, and prayers continued the Mesopotamian tradition of royal women becoming authors.

Metals and Empire Making: The Akkadians and the Ur III Dynasty, c. 2350–c. 2000 B.C.E. The riches for which people now fought had a new component — metal. Early metallurgy demonstrates how technological innovation can generate social and political change. Pure copper, which people had long been using, lost its shape and edge quickly, so craftsmen were motivated to invent ways to smelt ore and to make metal alloys at high temperatures. The invention of bronze, a copper-tin alloy hard enough to hold a razor edge, enabled metalsmiths to produce durable and deadly swords, daggers, and spearheads. The period from about 4000 to 1000 B.C.E. is called the Bronze Age because at this time bronze was the most important metal for weapons and tools; iron was not yet commonly used. The ownership of metal objects strengthened status divisions in society between men and women and rich and poor. This technology allowed the Mesopotamian social elite to acquire new luxury goods in metal, improved tools for agriculture and construction, and bronze weapons. The desire to accumulate wealth and status symbols stimulated demand for decorated weapons and elaborate jewelry. Rich men ordered bronze swords and daggers with expensive inlays. Such weapons increased visible social differences between men and women because they marked the status of the masculine roles of hunter and warrior.

Mesopotamian rulers fought to capture territory containing ore mines. The desire to acquire metals led the kings of Akkad to create by force the world’s first empire (a political state in which a single power rules formerly independent peoples). It began around 2350 B.C.E., when Sargon, king of Akkad, launched invasions north and south of his central Mesopotamian homeland. He conquered Sumer and the regions all the way westward to the Mediterranean Sea, creating the Akkadian Empire. A poet living around 2000 B.C.E.

credited Sargon’s success to the favor of the god Enlil: “To Sargon the king of Akkad, from below to above, Enlil had given him lordship and kingship.” Sargon’s grandson Naram-Sin also conquered distant places to gain resources and glory. By around 2250 B.C.E., he had reached Ebla, a large city in Syria. Discoveries of cuneiform tablets there reveal it was a center for learning and trade.

The process of building an empire by force had the unintended consequence of spreading Mesopotamian literature and art and promoting cultural interaction. The Akkadians spoke a language unrelated to Sumerian, but in conquering Sumer they adopted much of that region’s religion, literature, and culture. Other peoples conquered by the Akkadians were then exposed to Sumerian beliefs and traditions, which they in turn adapted to suit their own purposes.

Civil war ended the Akkadian Empire. A newly resurgent Sumerian dynasty called Ur III (2112–2004 B.C.E.) seized power in Sumer. The Ur III rulers created a centralized economy, presided over a flourishing of Sumerian literature, published the earliest preserved law code, and justified their rule by proclaiming their king to be divine. The best- preserved ziggurat was built in their era. Royal hymns, a new literary form, glorified the king; one example reads: “Your commands, like the word of a god, cannot be reversed; your words, like rain pouring down from heaven, are without number.”

Mesopotamia remained politically unstable, however. When civil war weakened the Ur III kingdom, nearby Amorite marauders conducted damaging raids. The Ur III dynasty collapsed after only a century of rule.

The Achievements of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the

Canaanites, 2000–1000 B.C.E. New kingdoms emerged in Assyria and Babylonia in the second millennium B.C.E. At the time, Mesopotamia was experiencing extended economic troubles caused by climate change and agricultural pollution. By around 2000 B.C.E., intensive irrigation had unintentionally raised the soil’s salt level so high that crop yields declined. When decreased rainfall made the situation worse, economic stress generated political instability lasting for centuries.

The Assyrians, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia, took advantage of their geography to create a kingdom whose rulers permitted long-distance trade conducted by private entrepreneurs. Assyrians became prosperous by acting as intermediaries in the trade for wood and metals between Anatolia and Mesopotamia. They exported woolen textiles to Anatolia in exchange for raw materials, which they sold to the rest of Mesopotamia.

Centralized state monopolies in which the government controlled international trade and redistributed goods dominated the Mesopotamian economy. This kind of redistributive economy persisted in Mesopotamia, but by 1900 B.C.E., Assyrian kings were allowing individuals to transact commerce. This market-based system let private entrepreneurs maximize profits in successful ventures. Private Assyrian investors, for example, financed traders to export cloth. The traders formed donkey caravans to travel hundreds of miles to Anatolia, where, if they survived the dangerous journey, they could make huge profits, split with their investors. Royal regulators settled any complaints of trader fraud or losses in transit.

To maintain social order, Mesopotamians established written laws made known to the people. Private commerce and property created a need to guarantee fairness in contracts. Mesopotamians believed that the king had a sacred duty to make divine justice known to his subjects by rendering judgments in all sorts of cases, from commercial disputes to crime. Once written down, the record of the

king’s decisions became what historians call a law code. Hammurabi, king of Babylon (r. c. 1792–c. 1750 B.C.E.), became the most famous lawgiver in Mesopotamia. His laws for his kingdom straddling the Euphrates River drew on earlier Mesopotamian codes, such as that of the Ur III dynasty, and reveal details on city life in particular.

Hammurabi proclaimed that he was supporting “the principles of truth and equity” and protecting the weak. His law code was based on an ideal of justice. Its eye-for-an-eye principle matched the crime and punishment as literally as possible. The code punished fraudulent prosecutions by imposing the death penalty on anyone failing to prove a serious accusation. It also relied on “nature-decided justice” by allowing accused persons to leap into a river: if they sank, they were guilty; if they floated, they were innocent. King Hammurabi emphasized relieving the poor’s burdens as crucial to royal justice. His laws divided society into free persons, commoners, and slaves. These categories reflected a social hierarchy in which some people were assigned a higher value than others. An attacker who caused a pregnant woman of the free class to miscarry, for example, paid twice the fine for the same offense against a commoner. Between social equals, the code specified an eye for an eye. A member of the free class who killed a commoner, however, was not executed, only fined.

Many of Hammurabi’s laws concerned the king’s interests as a property owner leasing land to tenants. His laws were harsh for offenses against property, including mutilation or a gruesome death for crimes ranging from theft to wrongful sales and careless construction. Women had limited legal rights, but they could make contracts and appear in court. Marriages were arranged between the bride’s father and the groom and sealed with a legal contract. A wife could divorce her husband for cruelty; a husband could divorce his wife for any reason. The law protected the wife’s interests by requiring a husband to restore his divorced wife’s property.

Hammurabi’s laws were not always strictly followed, and penalties

were often less severe than specified. The people themselves assembled in courts to determine most cases by their own judgments. Why, then, did Hammurabi have his laws written down? He explained that it was to show Shamash, the Babylonian sun god and god of justice, that he had fulfilled his responsibility as a divinely installed king — to ensure justice and the moral and material welfare of his people: “So that the powerful may not oppress the powerless, to provide justice for the orphan and the widow … let the victim of injustice see the law which applies to him, let his heart be put at ease.”

Hammurabi’s laws for physicians reveal that there were doctors in the cities. Because people believed that angry gods or evil spirits caused serious diseases, Mesopotamian medicine included magic: a doctor might prescribe an incantation along with potions and diet recommendations. Magicians or exorcists offered medical treatment that depended on spells and interpreting signs, such as the patient’s dreams or hallucinations.

Babylonian cities had many taverns and wine shops, often run by women proprietors. Contaminated drinking water caused many illnesses because sewage disposal was rudimentary. Citizens found relief from a city’s odors and crowding in its open spaces. The world’s oldest known map, an inscribed clay tablet showing the outlines of the city of Nippur about 1500 B.C.E., indicates a large park.

Cities allowed large numbers of people from different places to interact, which stimulated intellectual developments. Mesopotamian achievements in mathematics and astronomy had an enduring effect. Mathematicians devised algebra, including the derivation of roots of numbers. They invented place-value notation, which makes a numeral’s position in a number indicate ones, tens, hundreds, and so on. The system of reckoning based on sixty, still used in the division of hours and minutes and in the degrees of a circle, also comes from Mesopotamia. Mesopotamian expertise in recording the paths of the stars and planets probably arose from the desire to make predictions

about the future, following the astrological belief that the movement of celestial bodies directly affects human life. The charts and tables compiled by Mesopotamian stargazers underlay later advances in astronomy.

In Canaan (ancient Palestine), west of Mesopotamia, the population grew by absorbing foreign merchants. The interaction of traders and travelers from many different cultures encouraged innovation in recording business transactions. This multilingual business environment produced the alphabet about 1600 B.C.E. In this new writing system, a simplified picture — a letter — stood for only one sound in the language, a large change from cuneiform. The Canaanite alphabet later became the basis for the Greek and Roman alphabets and therefore of modern Western alphabets.

REVIEW QUESTION How did life change for people in and nearby Mesopotamia, first after the Neolithic Revolution and then when they began to live in cities?

Egypt, the First Unified Nation, 3050–1000 B.C.E. The other earliest example of Western civilization arose in Egypt, in northeastern Africa. The Egyptians built a wealthy, profoundly religious, and strongly centralized society ruled by kings. Unlike the separate Mesopotamian city-states, Egypt became unified. Its prosperity and stability depended on the king maintaining strong central authority and defeating enemies. Egypt was located close enough to Mesopotamia to learn from peoples there but was geographically separate enough to develop its own distinct culture, which Egyptians believed was superior to any other. The Egyptians believed that a just society respected the gods, preserved hierarchy, and obeyed the king. The Egyptian rulers’ belief in the soul’s immortality and a happy afterlife motivated them to construct the largest tombs in history, the pyramids. Egyptian architecture, art, and religious ideas influenced later Mediterranean peoples, especially the Greeks.

From the Unification of Egypt to the Old Kingdom, 3050–2190 B.C.E. When climate change dried up the grasslands of the Sahara region of Africa about 5000–4000 B.C.E., people slowly migrated from there to the northeast corner of the continent, settling along the Nile River. Recent radiocarbon dating of skeletons, hair, and plants has confirmed that Egypt became a united political state by about 3050 B.C.E., when King Narmer (also called Menes)* united the previously separate territories of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt. (Upper and Lower refer to the direction of the Nile River, which

begins south of Egypt and flows northward to the Mediterranean.) The Egyptian ruler therefore referred to himself as King of the Two Lands. By around 2687 B.C.E., Egypt’s monarchs had created a large centralized state, called the Old Kingdom. It lasted until around 2190 B.C.E. (Map 1.2). Egyptian kings built only a few large cities. The first capital, Memphis (south of modern Cairo), grew into a metropolis packed with mammoth structures.

*Since the Egyptians did not include vowel sounds in their writing, we are not sure how to spell their names. The spelling of names here is taken from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald B. Redford (2001), with alternate names given in cases where they seem more familiar. Dates are approximate and uncertain, and scholars bitterly disagree about them. (For an explanation of the problems, see Redford, “Chronology and Periodization,” The Oxford Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 264–268.) The dates appearing in this book are compiled with as much consistency as possible from articles in The Oxford Encyclopedia and in the “Egyptian King List” given at the back of each of its volumes.

MAP 1.2 Ancient Egypt Large deserts enclosed the Nile River on the west and the east. The Nile provided Egyptians with water to irrigate their fields and a highway for traveling north to the Mediterranean Sea and south to Nubia. The only easy land route into and out of Egypt lay through the northern Sinai peninsula into the coastal area of the eastern Mediterranean; Egyptian kings always fought to control this region to secure their land.

The most spectacular — and mysterious — of the Old Kingdom architectural marvels is the so-called Great Sphinx. The world’s oldest monumental sculpture, this stone statue has a human head on the body of a lion lying on its four paws. It is nearly 250 feet long and

almost 70 feet high. A temple was built in front of it, perhaps to worship the sun as a god. The Sphinx’s purpose and date remain hotly debated. No records exist to explain its original meaning. Most scholars believe that it was erected sometime in the Old Kingdom. A few, however, citing its weathering and erosion patterns, argue that it is as old as 5000 B.C.E. If this date is ever confirmed, then the history of early Egypt will have to be rewritten. This is just one of the many controversies about ancient Egypt that archaeology may someday settle.

The Old Kingdom’s costly architecture demonstrates the prosperity and power of Narmer’s unified state. Its territory consisted of a narrow strip of fertile land running along both sides of the Nile River. This ribbon of green fields zigzagged for seven hundred miles southward from the Mediterranean Sea. The deserts flanking the fields on the west and the east protected Egypt; invasion was possible only through the northern Nile delta and from Nubia in the south. The deserts also were sources of wealth because they contained large deposits of metal ores. Egypt’s geography also contributed to its prosperity by supporting seaborne commerce in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, as well as overland trade with central Africa.

Agriculture was Egypt’s most important economic resource. Usually, the Nile River overflowed its channel for several weeks each year, when melting snow from central African mountains swelled its waters. This predictable annual flood enriched the soil with nutrients from the river’s silt and diluted harmful mineral salts, thereby making farming more productive and supporting strong population growth. Unlike the unpredictable floods that harmed Mesopotamia, the regular flooding of the Nile benefited Egyptians. Trouble came in Egypt only if the usual flood did not take place, as happened when too little winter precipitation fell in the mountains.

The plants and animals raised by Egypt’s farmers fed a fast-growing population. Egypt’s population totaled several million people by

around 1500 B.C.E. Date palms, vegetables, grass for pasturing animals, and grain grew in abundance. The Egyptians loved beer, which people of all ages consumed. Thicker and more nutritious than modern brews, Egyptian beer was such an important food that it could be used to pay workmen’s wages. Egyptians, like other ancient societies, often flavored their beer with fruits.

Egypt’s population included people whose skin color ranged from light to dark. Although many ancient Egyptians would be regarded as black by modern racial classification, ancient peoples did not observe such distinctions. The modern controversy over whether Egyptians were people of color is therefore not an issue that ancient Egyptians would have considered. If asked, they would probably have identified themselves by geography, language, religion, or traditions rather than skin color. Like many other ancient groups, the Egyptians called themselves simply The People. Later peoples, especially the Greeks, recognized the ethnic and cultural differences between themselves and the Egyptians, but they deeply admired Egyptian civilization for its long history and strongly religious character.

Although Egyptians absorbed knowledge from both the Mesopotamians and the Nubians, their African neighbors to the south, they developed their own written scripts. For official documents they used a pictographic script known as hieroglyphic (Figure 1.2). They developed other, simpler scripts for everyday purposes.

FIGURE 1.2 Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Ancient Egyptians used pictures such as these to develop their own system of writing around 3000 B.C.E. Egyptian hieroglyphs include around seven hundred pictures in three categories: ideograms (signs indicating things or ideas), phonograms (signs indicating sounds), and determinatives (signs clarifying the meaning of the other signs). Because Egyptians employed this formal script mainly for religious inscriptions on buildings and sacred objects, Greeks referred to it as ta hieroglyphica (“the sacred carved letters”), from which comes the modern word hieroglyphic, used to designate this system of writing. Eventually, Egyptians also developed the handwritten cursive script called demotic (Greek for “of the people”), a much simpler and quicker form of writing. The hieroglyphic writing system continued until about 400 C.E., when it was replaced by the Coptic alphabet. Compare hieroglyphs with cuneiform shapes.

Some scholars believe that Nubian society was the outside influence that most deeply affected early Egypt. A Nubian social elite lived in dwellings much grander than the small huts housing most of the population. Egyptians interacted with Nubians while trading for raw materials such as gold, ivory, and animal skins, and Nubia’s hierarchical political and social organization possibly influenced the development of Egypt’s politically centralized Old Kingdom. Eventually, however, Egypt’s greater power led it to dominate its southern neighbor.

Keeping Egypt unified and stable was difficult. When the kings were strong, as during the Old Kingdom, the country was peaceful, with flourishing international trade. Regional governors rebelling against weak kings, however, could create political turmoil. Kings gained strength by fulfilling their public religious obligations. Egyptians worshipped a great variety of gods, often shown in paintings and sculptures as creatures with both human and animal features, such as the head of a jackal or a bird atop a human body. These images reflected the belief that the gods each had a particular animal through which they revealed themselves to human beings. Egyptian gods were associated with powerful natural objects, emotions, qualities, and technologies — examples are Re, the sun god; Isis, the goddess of love and fertility; and Thoth, the god of wisdom and the inventor of writing. People worshipped the gods with rituals, prayers, and festivals that expressed their respect and devotion to these divine powers.

Egyptians regarded their king as a helpful divinity in human form, identified with the hawk-headed god Horus. They saw the king’s rule as divine because he helped generate maat (“what is right”), the supernatural force that brought order and harmony to human beings if they maintained a stable hierarchy. The goddess Maat — the embodiment of the divine force of justice — therefore oversaw a society that the Egyptians believed would fall apart violently if the king ruled unjustly. The king therefore had the duties of pleasing the gods, making law, and waging war on enemies.

Art expressed the king’s legitimacy as ruler by representing him doing his religious and military duties. The requirement to show piety (proper religious belief and behavior) demanded strict regulation of the king’s daily activities; he had specific times to take a bath, go for a walk, and make love to his wife. Most important, he had to ensure the country’s fertility and prosperity. If the Nile flood failed to occur, this was seen as the king’s fault and weakened his authority by leaving many people hungry and angry, thus encouraging rebellions by rivals.

Successful Old Kingdom rulers used expensive building programs to demonstrate their piety and status. They erected their huge tombs — pyramids — in the desert outside Memphis. Temples and halls accompanied the tombs for religious ceremonies and royal funerals. Although the pyramids were not the first monuments built from enormous worked stones (the temples, admittedly much smaller in scale, on the Mediterranean island of Malta are earlier), they rank as the grandest, much larger even than the Great Sphinx.

Old Kingdom rulers spent vast resources on these giant complexes to proclaim their divine status and protect their mummified bodies for existence in the afterlife. King Khufu (r. 2609–2584 B.C.E.; also known as Cheops) commissioned the hugest monument of all — the Great Pyramid at Giza. Taller than a forty-story skyscraper at 480 feet high, it covered thirteen acres and stretched 760 feet long on each side. It required more than two million blocks of limestone, some

weighing fifteen tons. Its exterior blocks were quarried along the Nile, floated down the river on barges, and pulled to the site on sleds over sand dampened to reduce friction. Free workers then dragged the blocks up ramps into position using rollers and wooden pads.

The Old Kingdom rulers’ expensive preparations for death reflected their belief in the afterlife. One text says: “O [god] Atum, put your arms around King Neferkare Pepy II [r. c. 2300–2206 B.C.E.], around this construction work, around this pyramid…. May you guard lest anything happen to him evilly throughout the course of eternity.” The royal family equipped their tombs with many comforts to use in the underworld. The kings had gilded furniture, sparkling jewelry, and precious objects placed alongside the coffins holding their mummies. Archaeologists have even uncovered two full-sized cedar ships buried next to the Great Pyramid, meant to carry King Khufu on his journey into eternity.

The Old Kingdom ranked Egyptians in a strict hierarchy to preserve their kings’ authority and support what they regarded as the proper order of a just society. Egyptians, believing their ordered society was superior to any other, despised foreigners. The king and queen headed the hierarchy. Brothers and sisters in the royal family could marry each other, perhaps because such matches were thought to preserve the purity of the royal line and imitate the gods’ marriages. The priests, royal administrators, provincial governors, and army commanders ranked second. Then came the free common people, who mostly worked in agriculture. Free workers had heavy obligations to the state. In a system called corvée labor, the kings commanded commoners to work on the pyramids during slack times in farming. The state fed, housed, and clothed the workers while they performed this seasonal work; their labor was a way of paying taxes. Taxation reached 20 percent on the farmers’ produce. Slaves captured in foreign wars served the royal family and the priests; privately owned slaves became numerous only after the Old Kingdom. The king hired mercenaries, many from Nubia, to form the majority of the army.

Egyptians preserved more of the gender equality of the early Stone Age than did their neighbors. Women generally enjoyed the same legal rights as free men. They could own land and slaves, inherit property, pursue lawsuits, transact business, and initiate divorces. Portrait statues show the equal status of wife and husband; each figure is the same size and sits on the same kind of chair. Men dominated public life, while women devoted themselves mainly to private life, managing their households and property. When their husbands went to war or were killed in battle, however, women often took on men’s work. Women could serve as priestesses, farm managers, or healers in times of crisis.

The formal style of Egyptian art illustrates the high value placed on order and predictability. Statues represent the subject either standing stiffly with the left leg advanced or sitting on a chair or throne, stable and poised. The concern for decorum (suitable behavior) also appears in the Old Kingdom literature called wisdom literature — texts giving instructions for appropriate behavior. One text instructs a young man to seek advice from ignorant people as well as the wise and to avoid arrogant overconfidence. This kind of literature had a strong influence on later civilizations, especially the ancient Israelites.

The Middle and New Kingdoms in Egypt, 2061–1081 B.C.E. The Old Kingdom began to disintegrate in the late third millennium B.C.E. Climate change perhaps caused the annual Nile flood to shrink, making people believe the kings had betrayed Maat. Rivalry for power erupted among leading families, and civil war between a northern dynasty and a southern dynasty ripped the country apart. This disunity allowed regional governors to increase their power, and some now seized independence for their regions. Famine and civil

unrest during the so-called First Intermediate Period (2190–2061 B.C.E.) prevented the reestablishment of political unity.

The kings of the Middle Kingdom (2061–1665 B.C.E.) restored the strong central authority their Old Kingdom predecessors had lost. They waged war to extend Egypt’s southern boundaries, and they expanded diplomatic and trade contacts in the eastern Mediterranean region and with the island of Crete. Middle Kingdom literature reveals that restored unity contributed to a deeply felt pride in the homeland. The Egyptian narrator of The Story of Sinuhe, for example, reports that he lived luxuriously during a forced stay in Syria but still longed to return: “Whichever god you are who ordered my exile, have mercy and bring me home! Please allow me to see the land where my heart dwells! Nothing is more important than that my body be buried in the country where I was born!” For this lonely man, love for Egypt outranked personal riches and comfort in a foreign land.

The Middle Kingdom lost its unity during the Second Intermediate Period (1664–1570 B.C.E.), when the kings proved too weak to control foreign migrants who had established independent communities in Egypt. By 1664 B.C.E., diverse bands of a Semitic people originally from the eastern Mediterranean coast seized power. The Egyptians called these foreigners Hyksos (“rulers of the foreign countries”). Hyksos settlers transplanted foreign cultural elements to Egypt; their capital, Avaris, boasted wall paintings done in the Minoan style of the island of Crete. The Hyksos promoted frequent contact between Egypt and other Near Eastern states and apparently introduced bronze-making technology, new musical instruments, humpbacked cattle, and olive trees. Hyksos rulers strengthened Egypt’s military capacity by increasing the use of war chariots and more powerful bows.

The leaders of Thebes, in southern Egypt, reunited the kingdom after long struggles with the Hyksos. The series of dynasties they founded is called the New Kingdom (1569–1081 B.C.E.). Thebes drew strength from its connections with prosperous settlements that

emerged far out in the western desert, such as at Kharga Oasis. Oases featured abundant water from underground aquifers in the middle of a scorching environment. Oasis settlements flourished by providing stopping points for the caravans of merchants who crossed harsh deserts to profit from commerce. Thebes’s expansion of contact with the western desert settlements reveals that Egyptian society did not remain unchanged by completely shutting itself off behind its natural boundaries along the Nile. Similarly, contacts with peoples to the east across the Red Sea and along the Indian Ocean expanded in the New Kingdom.

The kings of the New Kingdom, known as pharaohs, rebuilt central authority by restricting the power of regional governors and promoting national identity. To prevent invasions, the pharaohs created a standing army, another significant change in Egyptian society. These kings still employed mercenaries, but they formed an Egyptian military elite as commanders. Recognizing that knowledge of the rest of the world was necessary for safety, the pharaohs promoted diplomacy with neighboring monarchs to increase their international contacts. The pharaohs exchanged official letters with their “brother kings,” as they called them, in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the eastern Mediterranean region.

The New Kingdom pharaohs sent their army into foreign wars to gain territory and show their superiority. Their imperialism has earned them the title “warrior pharaohs.” They waged many campaigns abroad and presented themselves in official propaganda and art as the incarnations of warrior gods. They invaded lands to the south to win access to gold and other precious materials, and they fought up and down the eastern Mediterranean coast to control that crucial land route into Egypt.

Massive riches supported the power of these aggressive pharaohs. Egyptian traders exchanged local fine goods, such as ivory, for foreign luxury goods, such as wine and olive oil transported in painted pottery from Greece. Egyptian rulers displayed their wealth

most conspicuously in the enormous sums spent to build stone temples. Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1502–1482 B.C.E.), for example, built her massive mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes, including a temple dedicated to the god Amun (or Amen), to express her claim to divine birth and the right to rule. After her husband (who was also her half-brother) died, Hatshepsut proclaimed herself “female king” as co-ruler with her young stepson. In this way, she sidestepped the restrictions of Egyptian political tradition, which did not recognize the right of a queen to reign by herself. Hatshepsut also had herself represented in official art as a king, with a royal beard and male clothing. Hatshepsut succeeded in her unusual rule because she demonstrated that a woman could ensure safety and prosperity by maintaining the goodwill of the gods toward the country and its people.

Egyptians believed that the gods oversaw all aspects of life and death, and therefore they built large temples and held festivals to honor their deities. A calendar based on the moon governed the dates of religious ceremonies. (The Egyptians also developed a calendar for administrative and fiscal purposes that had 365 days, divided into 12 months of 30 days each, with the extra 5 days added before the start of the next year. Our modern calendar follows their invention.) The early New Kingdom pharaohs promoted their state god Amun-Re (a combination of Thebes’s patron god and the sun god) so energetically that he became far more important than the other gods. This Theban cult subordinated the other gods, without denying their existence or the continued importance of their priests. The pharaoh Akhenaten (r. 1372–1355 B.C.E.) went a step further, however; he proclaimed that official religion would concentrate on worshipping Aten, who represented the pure power of the sun. Akhenaten made the king and the queen the only people with direct access to the cult of Aten, excluding commoners. Some scholars identify Akhenaten’s religious reform as a step toward monotheism, with Aten meant to be the state’s sole god.

Hatshepsut’s Temple at Deir el Bahri The massive mortuary temple of the famous Egyptian New Kingdom Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1502–1482 B.C.E.) was built as a series of terraces at the base of a looming rock cliff near Thebes in southern Egypt. Statues and gardens decorated the wide terraces, and a temple to the god Amun (or Amen) proclaimed the special relationship to the divine that Hatshepsut enjoyed as royalty. This visually impressive stone monument proclaimed her glory and perpetuated the memory of her having ruled essentially on her own.

To showcase the royal family and the concentration of power that he desired, Akhenaten moved 40,000 Egyptians from their original locations to construct a new capital for Aten at Tell el-Amarna (Map 1.2). Archaeology shows that the workers had very hard lives, suffering from poor nutrition and dangerous labor conditions. The pharaoh tried to force his revised religion on the priests of the old cults, who resisted fiercely. Historians have blamed Akhenaten’s religious zeal for leading him to neglect his kingdom’s defense, but international correspondence found at Tell el-Amarna has shown that the pharaoh tried to use diplomacy to turn foreign enemies against

one another so that they would remain too weak to threaten Egypt. His policy failed, however, when the Hittites from Anatolia defeated the Mitanni, Egypt’s allies in eastern Syria. Akhenaten’s religious reform also died with him. During the reign of his successor, Tutankhamun (r. 1355–1346 B.C.E.) — famous today through the discovery in 1922 of his rich, unlooted tomb — the cult of Amun-Re reclaimed its leading role. The crisis created by Akhenaten’s attempted reform emphasizes the overwhelming importance of religious conservatism in Egyptian life and the control of religion by the rulers and priests.

Most New Kingdom Egyptians’ lives revolved around their labor and the annual flood of the Nile. During the months when the river stayed between its banks, they worked the fields, rising early in the morning to avoid the searing heat. When the flooding halted agricultural work, the king required laborers to work on his building projects. They lived in workers’ quarters erected next to the construction sites. Although slaves became more common as household workers in the New Kingdom than they had been before, free workers — who were obliged to perform a certain amount of labor for the king — did most of the work on this period’s mammoth royal construction projects. Workers lightened their burden by singing songs, telling adventure stories, and drinking a lot of beer. They accomplished a great deal; the majority of the ancient temples remaining in Egypt today were built during the New Kingdom.

Egyptians worshipped many different gods, especially those believed to protect them in their daily existence. They venerated Bes, for instance, a dwarf with the features of a lion, as a protector of the household. They carved his image on amulets, beds, headrests, and mirror handles. By this time, people believed that they could have a blessed afterlife and put great effort into preparing for it. Those who could afford it arranged to have their tombs outfitted with all the goods needed for the journey in the underworld. Most important, they paid burial experts to turn their corpses into mummies so that they could have a complete body for eternity. Making a mummy

required removing the brain (through the nose with a long-handled spoon), cutting out the internal organs to store separately in stone jars, drying the body with mineral salts to the consistency of old leather, and wrapping the shrunken flesh in linen soaked with ointments.

Every mummy had to go to the afterlife with a copy of the Book of the Dead, which included magic spells for avoiding dangers along the way, as well as instructions on how to prepare for the judgment-day trial before the gods. To prove that they deserved a good fate, the dead had to convincingly recite claims such as the following: “I have not committed crimes against people; I have not mistreated cattle; I have not robbed the poor; I have not caused pain; I have not caused tears.”

Magic played a significant role in Egyptians’ beliefs. Professional magicians sold spells and charms, both written and oral, which the buyers used to promote eternal salvation, protect against demons, smooth the rocky course of love, exact revenge on enemies, and find relief from disease and injury. Egyptian doctors treated patients with medicinal herbs (knowledge passed on to later civilizations) and performed major surgeries, including opening the skull. Still, no doctor could cure severe infections, and the sick continued to ask supernatural beings for help through prayers and spells.

REVIEW QUESTION How did religion guide the lives of both rulers and ordinary people in ancient Egypt?

The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans, 2200–1000 B.C.E. The first societies of Western civilization in the central Mediterranean region were located in Anatolia, dominated by the warlike Hittite kingdom (Map 1.1); on the large island of Crete and nearby islands, home to the Minoans; and on the Greek mainland, where the Mycenaeans grew rich from raiding and trade. As early as 6000 B.C.E., people from southwestern Asia, especially Anatolia, began migrating westward and southward across the sea to inhabit islands in the Mediterranean. From this migration, the rich civilization of the Minoans gradually emerged on Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea by around 2200 B.C.E. In mainland Greece, civilization eventually arose among peoples who had moved into the area perhaps as early as 8000 B.C.E., again most likely from southwestern Asia.

The Hittites, the Minoans, and the Mycenaeans had advanced military technologies, elaborate architecture, striking art, a desire for luxury, and extensive trade contacts with Egypt and the Near East. The Hittites, like the Egyptians, created a unified state under a single central authority. The Minoans and the Mycenaeans, like the Mesopotamians, established separate city-states. All three peoples inhabited a dangerous world in which repeated raids and violent disruptions lasting from around 1200 to 1000 B.C.E. ultimately destroyed their prosperous cultures. Nevertheless, their accomplishments paved the way for the later civilization of Greece, which greatly influenced Western civilization.

The Hittites, 1750–1200 B.C.E. By around 1750 B.C.E., the Hittites had made themselves the most powerful people of central Anatolia. Having migrated from the

Caucasus area, between the Black and Caspian Seas, they defeated indigenous Anatolian peoples to found their centralized kingdom. It flourished because they inhabited a fertile upland plateau in the peninsula’s center, excelled in war and diplomacy, and controlled trade in their region and southward. The Hittites’ military campaigns eventually threatened Egypt’s possessions on the eastern Mediterranean coast, creating conflict with the New Kingdom pharaohs.

Since the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, they belonged to the linguistic family that over time populated most of Europe. The original Indo-European speakers, who were pastoralists and raiders from western Asia, migrated as separate groups into Anatolia and Europe, including Greece. Archaeological discoveries in that region have revealed graves of women buried with weapons. These burials suggest that women in these groups originally occupied positions of leadership in war and peace alongside men; the prominence of Hittite queens in documents, royal letters, and foreign treaties sprang from that tradition.

As in other early civilizations, rule in the Hittite kingdom based its legitimacy on religion. Hittite religion combined worship of Indo- European gods with worship of deities inherited from the original Anatolian population. The king served as high priest of the storm god, and Hittite belief demanded that he maintain a strict purity in his life as a demonstration of his justice and guardianship of social order. His drinking water, for example, always had to be strained. The king’s water carrier was executed if so much as one hair was found in the liquid. Like Egyptian kings, Hittite rulers felt responsible for maintaining the gods’ goodwill toward their subjects. King Mursili II (r. 1321–1295 B.C.E.), for example, issued a set of prayers begging the gods to end a plague: “What is this, o gods, that you have done? Our land is dying…. We have lost our wits, and we can do nothing right. O gods, whatever sin you behold, either let a prophet come forth to identify it … or let us see it in a dream!”

The kings conducted many religious ceremonies in their capital, Hattusas. Ringed by massive defensive walls and stone towers, it featured huge palaces aligned along straight, gravel-paved streets. Sculptures of animals, warriors, and, especially, the royal rulers decorated public spaces. Hittite kings maintained their rule by forging personal alliances — cemented by marriages and oaths of loyalty — with the noble families of the kingdom.

These rulers aggressively employed their troops to expand their power. In periods when ties between kings and nobles remained strong and the kingdom preserved its unity, they launched far- reaching military campaigns. In 1595 B.C.E., for example, the royal army raided as far southeast as Babylon in Mesopotamia, destroying that kingdom. Although Hittite craftsmen knew how to smelt iron, from which they made ceremonial implements, scholars no longer accept the idea that the kingdom owed its success in war to a special knowledge of making weapons from iron. Weapons made from iron did not become common in the Mediterranean world until well after 1200 B.C.E., at the end of the Hittite kingdom. The Hittite army excelled in the use of chariots, a tactic that gave it an edge on the battlefield.

The economic strength of the Hittite kingdom came from control over long-distance trade routes for raw materials, especially metals. The Hittites dominated the lucrative trade moving between the Mediterranean coast and inland northern Syria, despite the New Kingdom pharaohs’ resistance against Hittite expansion to the south toward the Mediterranean coast and the benefits that access to the sea brought. In the bloody battle of Kadesh, around 1274 B.C.E., the Hittites fought the Egyptians to a standstill in Syria, leading to a political stalemate in the eastern Mediterranean. Fear of neighboring Assyria eventually led the Hittite king to negotiate with his Egyptian rival, and the two war-weary kingdoms became allies sixteen years after the battle of Kadesh by agreeing to a treaty that is a landmark in the history of international diplomacy. In it, the two monarchs pledged to be “at peace and brothers forever.” The alliance lasted;

thirteen years later the Hittite king gave his daughter in marriage to his Egyptian “brother.”

The Minoans, 2200–1400 B.C.E. Study of early Greek civilization traditionally begins with the people today known as Minoans, who inhabited Crete and other islands in the Aegean Sea by the late third millennium B.C.E. The word Minoan comes from the archaeologist Arthur Evans (1851–1941), who was searching the island for traces of King Minos, famous in Greek myth for building the first great navy and keeping the half-human/half-bull Minotaur in a labyrinth at his palace. Scholars today, however, are not sure whether to count the Minoans as the earliest Greeks because they are uncertain whether the Minoan language, written in a script called Linear A that is not fully deciphered, was related to Greek or belongs to another linguistic tradition. If research confirms that Minoan was a member of the Indo-European family of languages (the ancestor of many languages, including Greek, Latin, and, much later, English), then, based on the criterion of language, Minoans can be seen as the earliest Greeks. In any case, Minoans’ interactions with the mainland deeply influenced later Greek civilization.

By around 2200 B.C.E., Minoans on Crete and nearby islands had created a palace society, a name pointing to its sprawling multichambered buildings housing not only the rulers, their families, and their servants, but also the political, economic, and religious administrative offices of the state. Minoan rulers combined the functions of ruler and priest, dominating both politics and religion. The palaces seem to have been independent, with no single Minoan community imposing unity on the others. The general population clustered around each palace in houses adjacent to one another; some of these settlements reached the size and density of small cities. The Cretan site Knossos is the most famous such palace complex. Other, smaller settlements dotted outlying areas of the island,

especially on the coast. The Minoans’ numerous ports supported extensive international trade, above all with the Egyptians and the Hittites.

The most surprising feature of Minoan communities is their lack of strong defensive walls. Palaces, towns, and even isolated country houses had no fortifications. The remains of the newer palaces — such as that at Knossos, with its hundreds of rooms in five stories, indoor plumbing, and colorful scenes painted on the walls — have led some historians to the controversial conclusion that Minoans avoided war among themselves, despite their having no single central authority over their independent settlements. Others reject this hypothesis of peaceful Minoans, arguing that the most powerful Minoans on Crete dominated neighboring islands. Recent discoveries of tombs on Crete have revealed weapons caches, and a find of bones cut by knives has even raised the possibility of human sacrifice. The prominence of women in palace frescoes and the numerous figurines of large-breasted goddesses found on Minoan sites have also prompted speculation that women dominated Minoan society, but no Linear A texts verify this. Minoan art certainly depicts women prominently and respectfully, but the same is true of other civilizations of the time controlled by men. More research is needed to resolve the controversies concerning gender roles in Minoan civilization.

Scholars do agree that the development of Mediterranean polyculture — the cultivation of olives, grapes, and grains in a single, interrelated agricultural system — greatly increased the health and wealth of Minoan society. This innovation made the most efficient use of a farmer’s labor by combining crops that required intense work at different seasons. This system of farming, which still characterizes Mediterranean agriculture, had two major consequences. First, the combination of crops provided a healthy way of eating (the “Mediterranean diet”), which in turn stimulated population growth. Second, agriculture became both more diversified and more specialized, increasing production of the valuable products

olive oil and wine.

Agricultural surpluses on Crete and nearby islands spurred the growth of specialized crafts. To store and transport surplus food, Minoan artisans manufactured huge storage jars (the size of a modern refrigerator) and in the process created another specialized industry. Craft workers, producing sophisticated goods using time- consuming techniques, no longer had time to grow their own food or make the things, such as clothes and lamps, they needed for everyday life. Instead, they exchanged the products they made for food and other goods. In this way, Minoan society experienced increasing economic interdependence.

The vast storage areas in their palaces suggest that the Minoan rulers, like some Mesopotamian kings before them, controlled their society’s exchanges through a redistributive economic system. The Knossos palace, for example, held hundreds of gigantic jars capable of storing 240,000 gallons of olive oil and wine. Bowls, cups, and dippers crammed storerooms nearby. Palace officials decided how much each farmer or craft producer had to contribute to the palace storehouse and how much of those contributions would then be redistributed to each person in the community for basic subsistence or as an extra reward. In this way, people sent the products of their labor to the central authority, which redistributed them according to its own priorities.

The Mycenaeans, 1800–1000 B.C.E. Ancestors of the Greeks had moved into the mainland region of Greece by perhaps 8000 B.C.E., yet the first civilization definitely identified as Greek because of its Indo-European language arose only in the early second millennium B.C.E. These first Greeks are called Mycenaeans, a name derived from the hilltop site of Mycenae, famous for its many-roomed palace, rich graves, and massive

fortification walls. Located in the Peloponnese (the large peninsula forming southern Greece, Map 1.3), Mycenae dominated its local area, but no one settlement ever ruled all of Bronze Age Greece. Instead, the independent communities of Mycenaean civilization vied with one another in a fierce competition for natural resources and territory.

MAP 1.3 Greece and the Aegean Sea, 1500 B.C.E.

A varied landscape of mountains, islands, and seas defined the geography of Greece. The distances between settlements were mostly short, but rough terrain and seasonally stormy sailing made travel a chore. The distance from the mainland to the largest island in this region, Crete, where Minoan civilization arose, was long enough to keep Cretans isolated from the wars of most of later Greek history.

The nineteenth-century German millionaire Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) was the first to discover treasure-filled graves at

Mycenae; he was on a self-financed personal quest to prove that the poems of Homer, Greece’s first and most famous poet, were not just fiction. The burial objects he found revealed a warrior culture organized in independent settlements and ruled by aggressive kings. Constructed as stone-lined shafts, the graves contained entombed dead who had taken hordes of valuables with them: golden jewelry, including heavy necklaces loaded with pendants; gold and silver vessels; bronze weapons decorated with scenes of wild animals inlaid in precious metals; and delicately painted pottery.

In his excitement at finding treasure, Schliemann proudly announced that he had found the grave of Agamemnon, the legendary king who commanded the Greek army against Troy, a city in northwestern Anatolia, in the Trojan War. Homer had based his epic poem The Iliad on this war. Archaeologists now know the shaft graves date to around 1700–1600 B.C.E., long before the Trojan War could have taken place. Still, Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycenae, which had followed his excavations at Troy done to prove that the city had really existed, provided spectacular evidence for mainland Greece’s earliest civilization.

Since the hilly terrain of Greece had little fertile land but many useful ports, settlements tended to spring up near the coast. Mycenaean rulers enriched themselves by dominating local farmers, conducting naval raids, and participating in seaborne trade. Palace records inscribed on clay tablets reveal that the Mycenaeans operated under a redistributive economy. On the tablets, scribes made detailed lists of goods received and goods paid out, recording everything from chariots to livestock, landholdings, personnel, and perfumes, even broken equipment taken out of service. Like the Minoans, the Mycenaeans did not use writing to record the oral literature that scholars believe they created.

Tholos tombs — massive underground burial chambers built in beehive shapes with closely fitted stones — reveal that by about 1500 B.C.E. some Mycenaeans had become very rich. The architecture of

these tombs and the style of the burial goods in them testify to the far- flung expeditions for trade and war that Mycenaean rulers conducted throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Above all, their many decorative patterns clearly inspired by Minoan art indicate a close connection with that civilization on Crete.

Underwater archaeology has revealed the influence of international commerce during this period in promoting cultural interaction as a by-product of trade. Divers have discovered, for example, that a late- fourteenth-century B.C.E. shipwreck off Uluburun in Turkey carried a mixed cargo and varied personal possessions from many locations in the eastern Mediterranean, including Canaan, Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, and Babylon. The variety confirms that merchants and consumers involved in this sort of long-distance trade were exposed directly to the goods produced by others and indirectly to their ideas.

The sea brought the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations into close contact, but they remained different in significant ways. The Mycenaeans spoke Greek and made burnt offerings to the gods; the Minoans did neither. The Minoans extended their religious worship outside their centers, establishing sacred places in caves, on mountaintops, and in country villas, while the mainlanders concentrated the worship of their gods inside their walled communities. When the Mycenaeans started building palaces in the fourteenth century B.C.E., they (unlike the palace-society Minoans) designed them around megarons — rooms with prominent ceremonial hearths and thrones for the rulers. Some Mycenaean palaces had more than one megaron, which could soar two stories high with columns to support a roof above the second-floor balconies.

Inscribed clay tablets found in the palace at Knossos reveal that by around 1400 B.C.E. the Mycenaeans had acquired dominance over Crete, possibly in a war over commerce in the Mediterranean. The documents were written in Linear B, a pictographic script based on Linear A. The architect Michael Ventris (1922–1956) proved that

Linear B was used to write Greek, not Minoan. Because these tablets date from before the final destruction of Knossos in about 1370 B.C.E., they reveal that the palace administration had been keeping its records in this foreign language for some time and therefore that Mycenaeans were controlling Crete well before the end of Minoan civilization. By the middle of the fourteenth century B.C.E., then, the Mycenaeans had displaced the Minoans as the Aegean region’s preeminent civilization.

By the time Mycenaeans took over Crete, war at home and abroad was the principal concern of well-off Mycenaean men, a tradition that they passed on to later Greek civilization. Contents of Bronze Age tombs in Greece reveal that no wealthy man went to his grave without his war equipment. Armor and weapons were so central to a Mycenaean man’s identity that he could not do without them, even in death. Warriors rode into battle on revolutionary transport — lightweight two-wheeled chariots pulled by horses. These expensive vehicles, perhaps introduced by Indo-Europeans migrating from Central Asia, first appeared in various Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies not long after 2000 B.C.E.; the first picture of such a chariot in the Aegean region occurs on a Mycenaean grave marker from about 1500 B.C.E. Wealthy people evidently desired this new and costly equipment not only for war but also as proof of their social status.

The Mycenaeans apparently spent more on war than religion. They did not construct any giant religious buildings like Mesopotamia’s ziggurats or Egypt’s pyramids. Their most important deities were male gods concerned with war. The names of gods found in the Linear B tablets reveal that Mycenaeans passed down many divinities to later Greeks, for example Dionysus, the god of wine.

Decorated Dagger from Mycenae The hilltop fortress and palace at Mycenae was the capital of Bronze Age Greece’s most famous kingdom. The picture of a lion hunt inlaid in gold and silver on this sixteenth-century B.C.E. dagger expressed how wealthy Mycenaean men saw their roles in society: as courageous hunters and warriors overcoming the hostile forces of nature. The nine-inch blade was found in a circle of graves inside Mycenae’s walls, where the highest-ranking people were buried with their treasures as evidence of their status.

The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 B.C.E.

A state of political equilibrium, in which kings corresponded with one another and traders traveled all over the area, characterized the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world around 1300 B.C.E. Within a century, however, violence and, perhaps, climate change had destroyed or weakened almost every major political state in the region, including Egypt, some kingdoms of Mesopotamia, and the Hittite and Mycenaean kingdoms. Neither the civilizations united under a single central authority nor the ones with independent states survived. Understanding this period of destruction from about 1200 to 1000 B.C.E. remains one of the most difficult puzzles in the history of Western civilization.

Research on fossilized pollen suggests that a prolonged period of severe drought at this time weakened the civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean by drastically reducing food production. Egyptian and Hittite records also reveal international military conflict. They document many invasions in this period, especially from the sea. According to one inscription, in about 1190 B.C.E. a warrior pharaoh defeated a powerful coalition of seaborne invaders from the north, who had fought their way to the edge of Egypt. These Sea Peoples, as historians call them, were made up of many different groups operating separately. No single, unified group of peoples originated the tidal wave of violence starting around 1200 B.C.E. Rather, many different bands devastated the region. A chain reaction of attacks causing their victims to flee seeking safety put even more bands on the move in a recurring and expanding cycle. Some attackers were mercenary soldiers who had deserted the rulers who had employed them; some were raiders by profession; some were displaced refugees. Many were probably Greeks. The story of the Trojan War recalls this period of violent, long-range attacks; it portrays an army from Greece crossing the Aegean Sea to attack and plunder Troy and the surrounding coastal region. The attacks also reached far inland. As a result, the Babylonian kingdom collapsed, the Assyrians were confined to their homeland, and much of western Asia and Syria was devastated.

It remains mysterious how so many attackers traveling great distances could be so destructive over such a long time, but the consequences for the eastern Mediterranean region are clear. The once mighty Hittite kingdom collapsed around 1200 B.C.E., when raiders cut off its trade routes for raw materials. Invaders razed its capital city, Hattusas, which never revived. Egypt’s New Kingdom turned back the Sea Peoples after a strenuous military effort, but the raiders destroyed the Egyptian long-distance trade network. By the end of the New Kingdom, around 1081 B.C.E., Egypt had shrunk to its original territorial core along the Nile’s banks. These problems ruined the Egyptian state’s credit. For example, when an eleventh- century B.C.E. Theban temple official traveled to Phoenicia to buy cedar for a ceremonial boat, the city’s ruler demanded cash in advance. Although the Egyptian monarchy hung on, power struggles between pharaohs and priests, made worse by frequent attacks from abroad, prevented the reestablishment of centralized authority. No Egyptian dynasty ever again became an expansionist international power.

In Greece, homegrown conflict apparently generated a tipping point for Mycenaean civilization at the time when the Sea Peoples became a threat. The Mycenaeans reached the zenith of their power around 1400–1250 B.C.E. The enormous domed tomb at Mycenae called the Treasury of Atreus testifies to the riches of this period. The tomb’s elaborately decorated front and soaring roof reveal the pride and wealth of the Mycenaean warrior princes. The last phase of the extensive palace at Pylos on the west coast of the Peloponnese also dates from this time. It boasted vivid wall paintings, storerooms bursting with food, and a royal bathroom with a built-in tub and intricate plumbing. But these prosperous Mycenaeans did not escape the widespread violence that began around 1200 B.C.E. Linear B tablets record the disposition of troops to the coast to guard the palace at Pylos from raids from the sea. The palace inhabitants of eastern Greece constructed defensive walls so massive that the later Greeks said giants had built them. These fortifications protected coastal palaces against seafaring attackers, who could have been either

outsiders or Greeks. The wall around the inland palace at Gla in central Greece, however, which foreign raiders could not easily reach, confirms that Mycenaean communities also had to defend themselves against other Mycenaean communities.

The internal conflict probably did more damage to Mycenaean civilization than the raids of the Sea Peoples. Major earthquakes also struck at this time, spreading further destruction among the Mycenaeans. Archaeology offers no evidence for the ancient tradition that Dorian Greeks invading from the north caused this damage. Rather, near-constant civil war by jealous local Mycenaean rulers overburdened the intricate administrative balancing system of the palaces’ redistributive economies and hindered recovery from earthquake damage. The violence killed many Mycenaeans, and the disappearance of the palace-based redistributive economy put many others on the road to starvation. The rulers’ loss of power left most Mycenaean Greeks with no organized way to defend or feed themselves, forcing them to find new places to settle and to learn to farm on their own. Like people from the earliest times, they had to move to build a better life.

REVIEW QUESTION How did war determine the fate of early Western civilization in Anatolia, Crete, and Greece?

MAPPING THE WEST The Violent End to Early Western Civilization, 1200–1000 B.C.E.

Bands of wandering warriors and raiders set the eastern Mediterranean aflame at the end of the Bronze Age. This violence displaced many people and ended the power of the Egyptian, Hittite, and Mycenaean kingdoms. Even some of the Near Eastern states well inland from the eastern Mediterranean coast felt the effects of this period of unrest, whose causes remain mysterious. The Mediterranean Sea was a two-edged sword for the early civilizations that grew up around and near it: as a highway for transporting goods and ideas, it was a benefit; as an easy access corridor for attackers, it was a danger. The raids of the Sea Peoples smashed the prosperity of the eastern Mediterranean region around 1200–1000 B.C.E. and set in motion the forces that led to the next step in our story, the reestablishment of civilization in Greece. Internal conflict among Mycenaean rulers turned the regional unrest of those centuries into a local catastrophe; fighting each other for dominance, they so weakened their monarchies that their societies could not recover from the effects of battles and earthquakes.

Conclusion The best way to create a meaningful definition of Western civilization is to study its history, which begins in Mesopotamia and Egypt; early societies there influenced the later civilization of Greece. Cities first arose in Mesopotamia around 4000–3000 B.C.E. Hierarchy had characterized society from the very beginning, and along with patriarchy it grew more prominent once civilization, larger populations, and political states with centralized authority became widespread.

Trade and war were constants, both aiming at profit and glory. Indirectly, they generated cultural interaction by putting civilizations into close contact. Technological innovation was also a prominent characteristic of this long period. The invention of metallurgy, monumental architecture, mathematics, and alphabetic writing changed people’s ways of life. Religion was at the center of society; people believed that the gods demanded everyone, from king to worker, to display just and righteous conduct. But their faith did not protect the people of the early civilizations of the Mediterranean from the destruction inflicted by the Sea Peoples and from their own internal conflicts. Neither hierarchy nor central authority could preserve their prosperity, and so a Dark Age began around 1000 B.C.E.

Chapter 1 Review

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance.

civilization hierarchy hunter-gatherers city-state patriarchy redistributive economy polytheism cuneiform empire Hammurabi hieroglyphic Maat wisdom literature palace society Mediterranean polyculture Linear B Sea Peoples

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. How did life change for people in and nearby Mesopotamia, first

after the Neolithic Revolution and then when they began to live in cities?

2. How did religion guide the lives of both rulers and ordinary

people in ancient Egypt? 3. How did war determine the fate of early Western civilization in

Anatolia, Crete, and Greece?

MAKING CONNECTIONS 1. Compare and contrast how the environmental factors in

Mesopotamia and Egypt affected the emergence of the world’s first civilizations.

2. What were the advantages and disadvantages of living in a unified country under a single central authority compared to living in a region with separate city-states?

3. Which was more important in influencing the development of early Western civilization: the intentional or the unintentional consequences of change?

IMPORTANT EVENTS 50,000–45,000 B.C.E. Homo sapiens migrate from Africa into southwest Asia and Europe

10,000–8000 B.C.E. Neolithic Revolution in Fertile Crescent and Sahara

4000–3000 B.C.E. Mesopotamians invent writing and establish first cities

4000–1000 B.C.E. Bronze Age in southwestern Asia, Egypt, and Europe

3050 B.C.E. Narmer (Menes) unites Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom

2687–2190 B.C.E. Old Kingdom in Egypt

2350 B.C.E. King Sargon of Akkad establishes world’s first empire

2300–2200 B.C.E. Enheduanna, princess of Akkad, composes poetry

2200 B.C.E. Minoans build their first palaces

2061–1665 B.C.E. Middle Kingdom in Egypt

1792–1750 B.C.E. Hammurabi rules Babylon and issues his law code

1569–1081 B.C.E. New Kingdom in Egypt

1400 B.C.E. Mycenaeans build their first palaces in Greece and take over Minoan Crete

1200–1000 B.C.E. Period of violence ends many kingdoms

C H A P T E R 2

Near East Empires and the Reemergence of Civilization in Greece

1000–500 B.C.E.

IN THE ILIAD, THE EIGHTH-CENTURY B.C.E. GREEK POET HOMER NARRATES bloody tales of the Trojan War. The story is rich with legends born from Greek and Near Eastern traditions, such as that of the Greek hero Bellerophon. Driven from his home by a false charge of sexual assault, Bellerophon has to serve as an enforcer for a foreign king, fighting his most dangerous enemies. In his most famous combat, Bellerophon is pitted against “the Chimera, an inhuman freak created by the gods, horrible with its lion’s head, goat’s body, and dragon’s tail, breathing fire all the time.” Bellerophon triumphs by mounting the winged horse Pegasus and swooping down on the Chimera for the attack. To reward such heroics, the king gives Bellerophon his daughter in marriage and half his kingdom.

Homer’s story provides evidence for the intercultural contact between the Near East and Greece that helped Greek civilization reemerge after 1000 B.C.E. Greece’s geography included many ports, which promoted contacts by sea through trade, travel, and war with the Near East. From 1000 to 500 B.C.E., these contacts — combined with the Greeks’ value of competitive individual excellence, their sense of a communal identity, the contributions to the flourishing of families made by women and men alike, and their belief that people in their communities were responsible for

maintaining justice and the goodwill of the gods toward them — aided Greeks in reinventing their civilization.

Western peoples’ desire for trade and cross-cultural contact increased as conditions improved after 1000 B.C.E. The Near East, which retained monarchy as its traditional form of government, recovered more quickly than Greece. Near Eastern kings extracted surpluses from subject populations to fund their palaces and armies. They also pursued new conquests to win glory, exploit the labor of conquered peoples, seize raw materials, and conduct long- distance trade.

During Greece’s initial recovery from poverty and depopulation from 1000 to 750 B.C.E., new political and social traditions arose that rejected the rule of kings. In this period, Greeks maintained trade and cross-cultural contact with the Near East. Their mythology, as in Homer, and their art, which influenced Greek images of the Chimera, reveal that Greeks imported ideas and technology from their Near Eastern neighbors. By the eighth century B.C.E., however, Greeks had begun to create their own kind of city-state, the polis. The polis was a radical innovation because it made citizenship — not subjection to kings — the basis for society and politics, and included the poor as citizens. Women in the polis had legal, though not political, rights; slaves still had neither. With the exception of occasional tyrannies, Greek city-states governed themselves by having male citizens share political rights. In some places, small groups of upper-class men dominated, but many city-states were governed by all the free men, even the poor, eventually creating the world’s first democracies. The Greeks’ invention of a form of democratic political association, seriously incomplete though it was by incorporating gender inequality, represents a turning point in the history of Western civilization.

New ways of belief and thought also developed in the Near East and Greece that deeply influenced Western civilization. In religion, the Persians developed beliefs that saw human life as a struggle

between good and evil, and the Israelites evolved their monotheism. In philosophy, the Greeks began to use reason and logic to supplement mythological explanations of nature.

CHAPTER FOCUS How did the forms of political and social organization that Greece developed after 1000 B.C.E. differ from those of the Near East?

From Dark Age to Empire in the Near East, 1000–500 B.C.E.

The widespread violence in 1200–1000 B.C.E. had devastated many communities and populations in the eastern Mediterranean. Historians have traditionally used the term Dark Age to refer to the times following this period of violence, both because economic conditions were so gloomy for so many people and because the surviving evidence is so limited.

By 900 B.C.E., the Neo-Assyrian Empire had emerged in Mesopotamia. It inspired first the Babylonians and then the Persians to form empires after Assyrian power collapsed. By comparison, the Israelites had little military power, but they established a new path for civilization during this period by changing their religion. They developed monotheism and produced the Hebrew Bible (as it is known today), later called the Old Testament by Christians.

The New Empire of Assyria, 900–600 B.C.E. By 900 B.C.E., Assyrian armies had punched westward all the way to the Mediterranean coast. The Neo-Assyrian kings conquered Babylon and then Egypt. Foot soldiers were the Assyrians’ main strike force. They deployed siege towers and battering rams, while chariots carried archers. Foreign wars brought in revenues to supplement

agriculture, herding, and long-distance trade.

Neo-Assyrian kings treated conquered peoples brutally. Those allowed to stay in their homelands had to make annual payments to the Assyrians. The kings also deported many defeated people to Assyria for work on huge building projects. One unexpected consequence of this policy was pressure on the kings’ native language; so many Aramaeans, for example, were deported from Canaan to Assyria that Aramaic had largely replaced Assyrian as the land’s everyday language by the eighth century B.C.E.

Neo-Assyrian men displayed their status and masculinity in waging war and hunting wild animals. The king hunted lions to demonstrate his vigor and power and thus his capacity to rule. Practical technology and knowledge also mattered to the kings. One boasted that he invented new irrigation equipment and a novel method of metal casting. Another one proclaimed, “I have read complicated texts, whose versions in Sumerian are obscure and in Akkadian hard to understand. I do research on the cuneiform texts on stone from before the Flood.” Women of the social elite could become literate, but they were excluded from the male dominions of war and hunting.

Public religion reflected the prominence of war in Assyrian culture: the cult of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, glorified warfare. The Neo-Assyrian rulers’ desire to demonstrate their respect for the gods motivated them to build huge temples. These shrines’ staffs of priests and slaves grew so large that the revenues from temple lands became insufficient; the kings had to supply extra funds from the spoils of conquest.

The Neo-Assyrian kings’ harsh rule and demand for revenue made their own people resentful, especially the social elite whose riches were at risk. Rebellions therefore occurred, and a seventh-century B.C.E. revolt finally undid the kingdom. The Medes, an Iranian people, and the Chaldeans, a Semitic people who had driven the Assyrians from Babylonia, combined forces to defeat the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire, 600– 539 B.C.E. The Chaldeans seized the lion’s share of territory. Originating among semi-nomadic herders along the Persian Gulf, by 600 B.C.E. the Chaldeans had established the Neo-Babylonian Empire. They made Babylon a spectacular sight, rebuilding the great temple of Marduk, the chief god, and constructing an elaborate city gate dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. Blue-glazed bricks and lions molded in yellow, red, and white decorated the gate’s walls, which soared thirty-six feet high.

The Neo-Babylonians preserved much Mesopotamian literature, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. They also created many works of prose and poetry, which the educated minority would read aloud publicly to the illiterate. Particularly popular were fables, proverbs, essays, and prophecies teaching morality and proper behavior. This so-called wisdom literature, a tradition going back at least to the Egyptian Old Kingdom, was a Near Eastern tradition that also became prominent in the religious writings of the Israelites.

The Neo-Babylonians passed their knowledge to others outside their region. Their advances in astronomy became so influential that the Greeks later used the word Chaldean to mean “astronomer.” The primary motivation for observing the stars was the belief that the gods communicated their will to humans through natural phenomena like the movements of celestial bodies and eclipses. (Other signs included abnormal births, patterns of smoke curling upward, and the trails of ants.)

The Persian Empire, 557–500 B.C.E.

Cyrus (r. c. 557–530 B.C.E.) founded the Persian Empire in what is today Iran through his skills as a general and a diplomat who saw respect for others’ religious practices as advantageous imperial policy. He conquered Babylon in 539 B.C.E. Cyrus won support by proclaiming himself the restorer of traditional religion.

Cyrus’s successors expanded Persian rule on the same principles of military strength and cultural tolerance. At its height, the Persian Empire extended on the west from Anatolia (today Turkey), the eastern Mediterranean coast, and Egypt, to present-day Pakistan on the east (Map 2.1). Believing they had a divine right to rule everyone in the world, Persian kings continually tried to expand their empire.

MAP 2.1 Expansion of the Persian Empire, c. 550–490 B.C.E.

Cyrus founded the Persian Empire, which his successors expanded to be even larger than the Neo-Assyrian Empire that it replaced. The Persian kings made war outward from their inland center to gain coastal possessions for access to seaborne trade and naval bases. By late in the reign of Darius I, the Persian Empire had expanded eastward as far as the western edge of India, while to the west it reached Thrace, the eastern edge of Europe. Unlike their imperial predecessors, the Persian kings won their subjects’ loyalty with tolerance of local customs and religion, although they treated rebels harshly.

Everything about the Persian king emphasized his magnificence. His robes of purple outshone everyone else’s; only he could step on the red carpets spread for him; his servants held their hands before their mouths so that he would not have to breathe the same air. As in other Near Eastern royal art, the Persian king was shown as larger than any other person in the sculpture adorning his immense palace at Persepolis. To display his concern for his loyal subjects and the gigantic scale of his resources, the king provided meals for fifteen thousand nobles and other guests every day — although he ate hidden from their view. The king punished criminals by mutilating their bodies and executing their families.

So long as his subjects — numbering in the millions and of many different ethnicities — remained peaceful, the king let them live and worship as they pleased. The empire’s satraps (regional governors) ruled enormous territories with little interference from the king. In this decentralized system, the governors’ duties included keeping order, enrolling troops when needed, and sending revenues to the royal treasury.

Darius I (r. 522–486 B.C.E.) extended Persian power eastward to westernmost India and westward to Thrace, northeast of Greece, creating the Near East’s greatest empire. Darius assigned each region taxes payable in precious metals, grain, horses, and slaves. Royal roads and a courier system provided communication among the far- flung provincial centers. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor darkness slowed the couriers from completing their routes as swiftly as possible.

Persian kings ruled as the agents of Ahura Mazda, the supreme god

of Persia. Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, made Ahura Mazda the center of its devotion and took its doctrines from the teachings of the legendary prophet Zarathustra. Zarathustra taught that Ahura Mazda demanded purity from his worshippers and helped people who lived truthfully and justly. The most important doctrine of Zoroastrianism was moral dualism, which saw the world as a battlefield between the divine forces of good and evil. Ahura Mazda, the embodiment of good and light, struggled against the evil darkness represented by the Satan-like figure Ahriman. Human beings had to choose between the way of the truth and the way of the lie, between purity and impurity. Only those judged righteous after death made it across “the bridge of separation” to heaven and avoided falling from its narrow span into hell. Persian religion’s emphasis on ethical behavior and on a supreme god had a lasting influence on others, especially the Israelites.

The Israelites, Origins to 539 B.C.E. The Israelites never rivaled the political and military power of the great empires in the Near East. Their influence on Western civilization comes from their religion, Judaism. It originally reflected influences from the Israelites’ polytheistic neighbors in Canaan (ancient Palestine), but the Israelites’ development of monotheism became a turning point in the history of religions. The Israelites’ scripture, the Hebrew Bible, was significant not only for Judaism but also later for Christianity and then for Islam.

No source provides definitive evidence for the historical background of the Israelites. According to the Bible’s account, Abraham and his followers migrated from the Mesopotamian city of Ur to Canaan, perhaps around 1900 B.C.E. Traditionally believed to have been divided into twelve tribes, the Israelites never formed a political state in this period. The Canaanites remained the political and military power in the region.

Abraham’s grandson Jacob, the story continues, moved to Egypt when his son Joseph brought his family there to escape famine. Joseph had previously used his intelligence and charisma to rise to an important position in the Egyptian administration. In fact, Israelites had probably drifted into Egypt during the seventeenth or sixteenth century B.C.E. as part of the movement of peoples there under Hyksos rule. By the thirteenth century B.C.E., the pharaohs had forced the Israelite men into slave-labor gangs.

According to the biblical Book of Exodus, the Israelite deity, Yahweh, instructed Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt against the will of the pharaoh, perhaps around the mid- thirteenth century B.C.E. Yahweh sent ten plagues to compel the Egyptian king to free the Israelites, but he still tried to recapture them during their flight. Yahweh therefore miraculously parted the sea to allow them to escape eastward; the water swirled back together and drowned the pharaoh’s army as it tried to follow.

Next in the biblical narrative comes the crucial event in the history of the Israelites: the formalizing of a contractual agreement (a covenant) between them and their deity, who revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai in the desert northeast of Egypt. This contract between the Israelites and Yahweh specified that, in return for their worshipping him exclusively as their only god and living by his laws, Yahweh would make them his chosen people and lead them into a promised land of safety and prosperity. The form of the covenant with Yahweh followed the ancient Near Eastern tradition of treaties between a superior and subordinates, but its content differed from that of other ancient Near Eastern religions because it made Yahweh the exclusive deity of his people.

This binding agreement demanded human obedience to divine law and promised punishment for unrighteousness. Yahweh described himself to Moses as “compassionate and gracious, patient, ever constant and true … forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin,” but he also declared that he was “one who punishes sons and grandsons to

the third and fourth generation for their fathers’ iniquity” (Exod. 34:6–7).

The Hebrew Bible sets forth the religious and moral code the Israelites had to follow. The Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, called the Pentateuch by Christians) recorded laws for righteous living. Most famous are the Ten Commandments, which required Israelites to worship Yahweh exclusively; make no idols; keep from misusing Yahweh’s name; honor their parents; refrain from work on the seventh day of the week (the Sabbath); and abstain from murder, adultery, theft, lying, and covetousness. Many of the Israelites’ laws shared the traditional form and content of earlier Mesopotamian laws, such as those of Hammurabi. Like his code, Israelite law protected the lower classes and people without power, including strangers, widows, and orphans.

Israelite law and thus Israelite justice differed significantly from their Mesopotamian precedents, however, in applying the same rules and punishments to everyone regardless of social rank. Israelite law also eliminated eye-for-an-eye punishment — the Mesopotamian legal tradition discussed in Chapter 1. Crimes against property did not carry the death penalty in Israelite jurisprudence, as in other Near Eastern societies. Israelite laws also protected slaves against flagrant mistreatment. Slaves who lost an eye or a tooth from a beating were to be freed. Like free people, slaves enjoyed the right to rest on the Sabbath. Israelite women and children, however, had fewer legal rights than men did.

According to the Bible, the Israelites who fled from Egypt with Moses made their way back to Canaan, joining their relatives who had remained there and somehow carving out separate territories for themselves. The twelve Israelite tribes remained politically distinct under the direction of separate leaders, called judges, until the eleventh century B.C.E., when according to tradition their first monarchy emerged. Their monotheism gradually developed over the succeeding centuries.

Controversy rages about the historical accuracy of the biblical account, which reports that the Israelites created a monarchy in the late eleventh century B.C.E., when Saul became the Israelites’ first king. His successors David (r. 1010–970 B.C.E.) and Solomon (r. c. 961– 922 B.C.E.) brought the Israelite kingdom to the height of its prosperity. The kingdom’s wealth, based on international commerce, supported the great temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem as the house of Yahweh. The temple, richly decorated with gold leaf, and the daily animal sacrifices to God that priests performed on the altar there became the center of the Israelites’ religion.

After Solomon’s death, the monarchy split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The Assyrians destroyed Israel in 722 B.C.E. and deported its population to Assyria. In 597 B.C.E., the Babylonians conquered Judah and captured its capital, Jerusalem. In 586 B.C.E., they destroyed the temple to Yahweh and banished the Israelite leaders, along with much of the population, to Babylon. In exile, the Israelites learned about Persian religion. Zoroastrianism and Judaism came to share ideas, such as the existence of God and Satan, angels and demons, God’s day of judgment, and the arrival of a messiah (an “anointed one,” that is, a divinely chosen leader with special powers).

When the Persian king Cyrus overthrew the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., he permitted the Israelites to return to their part of Canaan. The Bible proclaimed Cyrus a messiah of the Israelites chosen by Yahweh as his “shepherd … to accomplish all his purpose” in restoring his people to their previous home (Isa. 44:28–45:1). This region was called Yehud, from the name of the southern Israelite kingdom, Judah. From this geographical term came the word Jew, a designation for the Israelites after their Babylonian exile. Cyrus allowed them to rebuild their main temple in Jerusalem and to practice their religion.

Jewish prophets, both men and women, preached that their defeats were divine punishment for neglecting the Sinai covenant and mistreating their poor. Some prophets also predicted the end of the

present world following a great crisis, a judgment by Yahweh, and salvation leading to a new and better world. This apocalypticism (“uncovering,” or revelation), recalling Babylonian prophetic wisdom literature, would later inspire the worldview of Christianity.

Jewish leaders developed complex religious laws to maintain ritual and ethical purity. Marrying non-Jews and working on the Sabbath were forbidden. Fathers had legal power over the household, subject to intervention by the male elders of the community; women gained honor as mothers. Only men could initiate divorce proceedings. Jews had to pay taxes and offerings to support and honor the sanctuary of Yahweh, and they had to forgive debts every seventh year.

Gradually, Jews created their monotheism by accepting that Yahweh was the only god and that they had to obey his laws. Jews retained their identity by following this religion regardless of their personal fate or their geographical location. Therefore, Jews who did not return to their homeland could maintain their Jewish identity by following Jewish law while living among foreigners. In this way, the Diaspora (“dispersion of population”) came to characterize the history of the Jewish people.

Goddess Figurines from Judah These figurines perhaps represent Astarte, a goddess of Canaan, or related female deities. Archaeologists have found many small statues of this kind in private houses in Judah. They appear to date from about 800 to 600 B.C.E. Israelites probably kept them in their homes as religious objects promoting fertility and prosperity. The Israelites’ prophets fiercely condemned the worship of images such as these as part of their support of the development of monotheism and the abandonment of polytheism, the long-established type of religion in the ancient world.

Israelite monotheism made the preservation and understanding of a sacred text, the Hebrew Bible, the center of religious life. Making scripture the focus of religion proved the most crucial development for the history not only of Judaism but also of Christianity and Islam, because these later religions made their own sacred texts — the Christian Bible and the Qur’an, respectively — the centers of their belief and practice. Through the continuing vitality of Judaism and its impact on the doctrines of Christianity and Islam, the early Jews passed on ideas — chiefly monotheism and the notion of a covenant bestowing a divinely ordained destiny on a people if they obey divine

will — whose effects have endured.

REVIEW QUESTION In what ways was religion important in the Near East from c. 1000 B.C.E. to c. 500 B.C.E.?

The Reemergence of Greek Civilization, 1000–750 B.C.E. The period of violence in 1200–1000 B.C.E. destroyed the prosperous large settlements of the Greeks and erased their knowledge of how to write. They therefore had to remake their civilization in Greece’s Dark Age (c. 1000–750 B.C.E.). Trade, cultural interaction, and technological innovation led to recovery; contact with the Near East promoted intellectual, artistic, and economic revival, while the introduction of metallurgy for making iron made farming more efficient. As conditions improved, an elite distinguished by wealth and the competitive pursuit of individual excellence revived a social hierarchy like that of Mycenaean times. However, communal values helped create a radically new form of political organization in which shared authority was based on citizenship beginning in the eighth century B.C.E.

The Greek Dark Age Greeks apparently lost their knowledge of writing when Mycenaean civilization fell. The Linear B script they had used was probably known only by a few scribes, who used writing to track the redistribution of goods. When the Mycenaean palaces collapsed, scribes and writing disappeared. Only oral transmission kept Greek cultural traditions alive.

Compared with their forebears, Greeks in the early Dark Age cultivated much less land and had many fewer settlements. There was no redistributive economy. The number of ships carrying Greek adventurers, raiders, and traders dwindled. Most people scratched out an existence as herders, shepherds, and subsistence farmers bunched in tiny settlements as small as twenty people. As agriculture

declined, more Greeks than ever before made their living by herding animals. In this transient lifestyle, people built only simple huts and kept few possessions. Unlike their Bronze Age ancestors, Greeks in the Dark Age had no monumental architecture. They also stopped painting people and animals on their ceramics (their principal art form), instead putting only abstract designs on their pots.

Dark Age Greece did, however, retain a small but wealthy social elite. On the island of Euboea, for example, archaeologists have discovered the tenth-century B.C.E. grave of a couple who took such enormous riches with them to the next world that the woman’s body was covered in gold ornaments. While the couple had done well in the competition for prestige and wealth, most people of the time were, by comparison, desperately poor.

Geography allowed the Greeks to continue seaborne trade with the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean even during their Dark Age. Trade promoted cultural interaction, and the Greeks learned to write again about 800 B.C.E., adopting and adapting an alphabet from the Phoenicians, seafaring traders from Canaan. Near Eastern art inspired Greeks to resume the production of ceramics with figural designs (as on the vase in the chapter-opening illustration). International commerce encouraged better-off Greeks to produce agricultural surpluses and goods they could trade for luxuries, such as gold jewelry and gems from Egypt and Syria.

Most importantly, trade brought the new technology of iron metallurgy. Greeks learned this skill through their eastern trade contacts and mined their own iron ore, which was common in Greece. Iron eventually replaced bronze in agricultural tools, swords, and spear points. The Greeks still used bronze for shields and armor, however, because it was easier to shape into thin, curved pieces, such as for helmets. The iron tools’ lower cost allowed more people to acquire them. Because iron is harder than bronze, implements kept their sharp edges longer. Better and more plentiful farming implements of iron helped increase food production, which sustained

population growth. In this way, technology imported from the Near East improved people’s chances for survival and thus helped Greece recover from the Dark Age’s depopulation.

With the Mycenaean rulers long gone, leadership became an open competition in Dark Age Greece. Individuals who proved themselves excellent in action, words, charisma, and religious knowledge joined the social elite, enjoying higher prestige and authority in society. Excellence — aretê (ah-re-TAY) in Greek — was earned in competition. Men competed with others for aretê as warriors and persuasive public speakers. Women won their highest aretê by managing a household of children, slaves, and storerooms. Members of the elite accumulated wealth by controlling agricultural land, and people of lower status worked for them as tenants or slaves.

The Iliad and The Odyssey, the eighth-century B.C.E. poems of Homer, reflect the social elite’s ideals. Homer was the last in a long line of poets who, influenced by Near Eastern mythology, had been singing these stories for centuries, orally transmitting cultural values from one generation to the next. In telling the story of the Greek army in the Trojan War, The Iliad focuses on the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles, who proves his aretê by choosing to die in battle rather than accept the gods’ offer to return home safely but without glory. The Odyssey recounts not only the hero Odysseus’s ten-year adventure sailing home after the fall of Troy but also emphasizes the struggle of his wife, Penelope, to protect their household from the schemes of rivals.

Homer reveals that the white-hot emotions inflamed by the competition for excellence could provoke a disturbing level of inhumanity. Achilles, in preparing to duel Hector, the prince of Troy, brutally rejects the Trojan’s proposal that the winner return the loser’s corpse to his family and friends: “Do wolves and lambs agree to cooperate? No, they hate each other to the roots of their being.” The victor, Achilles, mutilates Hector’s body. When Hecuba, the queen of Troy and Hector’s mother, sees this outrage, she bitterly

shouts, “I wish I could sink my teeth into his liver to eat it raw.” Homer’s poems suggest that the gods could sometimes help people achieve reconciliation after violent conflict, but the human suffering described in his stories shows that the pursuit of excellence was painful.

The Values of the Olympic Games Greece had recovered enough population and prosperity by the eighth century B.C.E. to begin creating new forms of social and political organization. The most vivid evidence is the founding of the Olympic Games, traditionally dated to 776 B.C.E. This international religious festival showcased the competitive value of aretê.

Every four years, the games took place in a huge sanctuary dedicated to Zeus, the king of the gods, at Olympia, in the northwestern Peloponnese. Male athletes from elite families vied in sports, imitating the aretê needed for war: running, wrestling, jumping, and throwing. Horse and chariot racing were added to the program later, but the main event remained a two-hundred-yard sprint, at the stadion (the origin of the word stadium). The athletes competed as individuals, not on national teams. Winners received only a garland made from wild olive leaves to symbolize the prestige of victory.

The Olympics illustrate Greek notions of proper behavior for each gender: crowds of men flocked to the games, but women were prohibited on pain of death. Women had their own separate Olympic festival on a different date in honor of Hera, queen of the gods. Only unmarried women could compete. In later times, professional athletes dominated the Olympics, earning their living from appearance fees and prizes at games held throughout the Greek world.

Once every four years an international truce of several weeks was declared so that competitors and fans from all Greek communities could safely travel to and from Olympia. The games were open to any socially elite Greek male. These rules represented beginning steps toward a concept of collective Greek identity. The Olympics helped channel the competition for individual excellence into a new context of social cooperation and community values, essential preconditions for the creation of Greece’s new political form, the city-state ruled by citizens.

Homer, Hesiod, and Divine Justice in Greek Myth The Greeks’ belief in divine justice inspired them to develop the cooperative values that remade their civilization. This idea came not from scripture — Greeks had none — but from poetry that told myths about the gods and goddesses and their relationships to humans. Different myths often provided different lessons, teaching that human beings could not expect to have a clear understanding of the gods and had to make their own choices about how to live — and take the consequences.

Homer’s poems reveal that the gods had plans for human existence but did not guarantee success. Bellerophon, for example, the hero whose brave efforts won him a princess bride and a kingdom, ended up losing everything. He became, in Homer’s words, “hated by the gods and wandering the land alone, eating his heart out, a refugee fleeing from the haunts of men.” The poem gives no explanation for this tragedy.

Hesiod’s poetry from the eighth century B.C.E., by contrast, reveals how other myths describing divine support for justice contributed to the Greek feeling of community. Hesiod’s vivid stories, which

originated in Near Eastern creation myths, show that deities experienced struggle, sorrow, and violence but that the divine order of the universe included a concern for justice.

Hesiod’s epic poem Theogony (whose title means “genealogy of the gods”) recounted the birth of the race of gods — including Sky and numerous others — from the intercourse of primeval Chaos and Earth. Hesiod explained that when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth persuaded her fiercest son, Kronos, to overthrow him violently because “Sky first schemed to do shameful things.” When Kronos later began to swallow his own children to avoid sharing power with them, his wife, Rhea (who was also his sister), had their son Zeus violently force his father from power.

In Works and Days, Hesiod’s poem on conditions in his own time, he identified Zeus as the source of justice in human affairs: “Zeus commanded that fishes and wild beasts and birds should eat each other, for they have no justice; but to human beings he has given justice, which is far the best.” People were responsible for administering justice, and in the eighth century B.C.E. this meant the male social elite. They controlled their family members and household servants. Hesiod insisted that a leader should demonstrate aretê by employing persuasion instead of force: “When his people in their assembly get on the wrong track, he gently sets matters right, persuading them with soft words.”

Hesiod complained that many elite leaders in his time failed to exercise their power “gently,” instead creating conflict between themselves and the peasants — free proprietors of small farms owning a slave or two, oxen to work their fields, and a limited amount of goods acquired by trading the surplus of their crops. Peasants’ outrage at unjust treatment helped push the gradual movement toward a new form of social and political organization in Greece.

REVIEW QUESTION

What factors proved most important in the Greek recovery from the troubles of the Dark Age?

The Creation of the Greek City- State, 750–500 B.C.E. The Archaic Age (c. 750–500 B.C.E.) saw the creation of the Greek city- state — the polis — an independent community of citizens inhabiting a city and the countryside around it. Greece’s geography, dominated by mountains and islands, promoted the creation of hundreds of independent city-states around the Aegean Sea. From there, Greeks dispersed around the Mediterranean to settle hundreds more trading communities that often grew into new city-states. Individuals’ drive for profit from trade, especially in raw materials, and for farmland in foreign territories started this process of founding new settlements.

Though it took varying forms, the Greek polis differed from the Mesopotamian city-state, primarily in being a community of citizens making laws and administering justice among themselves instead of being the subjects of a king. Another difference was that poor citizens of Greek city-states enjoyed a rough legal and political equality with the rich. Not different, however, were the subordination of women and the subjugation of slaves.

The Physical Environment of the Greek City-State Culturally, Greeks identified with one another because they spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods. Still, the ancient Greeks never unified into a single political state. Mountains separated independent and often mutually hostile Greek communities. Because few city-states had enough farmland to support many people, most of them had populations of only several hundred to several thousand. A few, prosperous from international trade, grew to have a hundred

thousand or more inhabitants.

Long-distance transportation in Greece overwhelmingly occurred by sea. Land travel was slow and expensive because roads were mostly just dirt paths. The most plentiful resource was timber from the mountains for building houses and ships. Deposits of metal ore were scattered throughout Greek territory, as were clays suitable for pottery and sculpture. Various quarries of fine stone such as marble provided materials for special buildings and works of art.

Only 20 to 30 percent of Greece’s mountainous terrain could be farmed, making it difficult to raise large herds of cattle and horses. Pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens were the common livestock. Because the amount of annual precipitation varied greatly, farming was a precarious business of boom and bust. People preferred to eat wheat, but since that grain was expensive to cultivate, the cereal staple of the Greek diet became barley. Wine grapes and olives were the other most important crops.

Trade and “Colonization,” 800–580 B.C.E. Greece’s jagged coastline made sea travel feasible; almost every community lay within forty miles of the Mediterranean Sea. But seaborne commerce faced dangers from pirates and, especially, storms. As Hesiod commented, merchants took to the sea, “because an income means life to poor mortals, but it is a terrible fate to die among the waves.”

The Odyssey describes the strategy of Greek long-distance trade in commodities, when the goddess Athena appears disguised as a metal trader: “I am here … with my ship and crew on our way across the wine-dark sea to foreign lands in search of copper; I am carrying iron now.” By 800 B.C.E., the Mediterranean swarmed with entrepreneurs

of many nationalities. The Phoenicians established settlements as far west as Spain’s Atlantic coast to gain access to inland mines there. Their North African settlement at Carthage (modern Tunis) would become one of the Mediterranean’s most powerful cities.

The scale of trade soared near the end of the Dark Age; archaeologists have found only two tenth-century B.C.E. Greek pots that were carried abroad, but eighth-century pottery has turned up at more than eighty foreign sites. By 750 B.C.E., Greeks were settling far from home, sometimes living in others’ settlements, especially those of the Phoenicians, and sometimes establishing trading posts of their own, as the Euboeans did on an island in the Bay of Naples. Everywhere they traded with the local populations, such as the Etruscans in central Italy, who imported large amounts of Greek goods. Traders were not the only Greeks to emigrate. As the population expanded following the Dark Age, a shortage of farmland in Greece drove some poor farmers abroad to find fields they could work. Apparently, only males left home on trading and land-hunting expeditions, so they had to find wives wherever they settled, either through peaceful negotiation or by kidnapping.

By about 580 B.C.E., Greek settlements had spread westward to Spain, present-day southern France, southern Italy, and Sicily, and southward to North Africa and eastward to the Black Sea coast (Map 2.2). The settlements in southern Italy and Sicily, such as Naples and Syracuse, eventually became so large and powerful that this region was called Magna Graecia (“Great Greece”).

MAP 2.2 Phoenician and Greek Expansion, 750–500 B.C.E. The Phoenicians were early explorers and settlers of the western Mediterranean. By 800 B.C.E., they had already founded the city of Carthage, which would become the main commercial power in the region. During the Archaic Age, groups of adventurous Greeks followed the Phoenicians’ lead and settled all around the Mediterranean, hoping to improve their economic prospects by trade and farming. Sometimes they moved into previously established Phoenician settlements; sometimes they founded their own. Some Greek city-states established formal ties with new settlements or sent out their own expeditions to try to establish loyal colonies. Where did Phoenicians predominantly settle, and where did Greeks?

A Greek trading station had sprung up in Syria by 800 B.C.E., and in the seventh century B.C.E. the Egyptians permitted Greek merchants to settle in a coastal town. These close contacts with eastern Mediterranean peoples paid cultural as well as economic dividends. Near Eastern art inspired Greeks to reintroduce figures into their painting and provided models for statues that stood stiffly and stared straight ahead. When the improving economy of the later Archaic Age allowed Greeks again to afford monumental architecture in stone, their rectangular temples on platforms with columns reflected Egyptian architectural designs.

Historians have traditionally called the Greeks’ settlement process in this era colonization, but recent research questions this term’s accuracy because the word colonization implies the process by which modern European governments officially installed dependent settlements and regimes abroad. The evidence for these Greek settlements suggests rather that private entrepreneurship created most of them. Official state involvement was minimal, at least in the beginning.

Citizenship and Freedom in the Greek City-State The creation of the polis filled the political vacuum left by Mycenaean civilization’s fall. The Greek city-state was unique because it was based on the concept of citizenship for all its free inhabitants, rejected monarchy as its central authority, and made justice the responsibility of the citizens. Moreover, except in tyrannies, in which one man seized control of the city-state, at least some degree of shared governing was normal.

Power sharing reached its widest form in democratic Greek city- states. The philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), Greece’s most famous analyst of politics and society, asserted “Humans are beings who by nature live in a city-state.” Anyone who existed outside such a community, Aristotle remarked, must be either a simple fool or superhuman. The polis’s innovation in making shared power the basis of government did not immediately change the course of history — monarchy later became once again the most common form of government in ancient Western civilization — but it was important as proof that power sharing was a workable system of political organization.

Greek city-states were officially religious communities. As well as

worshipping many deities, each city-state honored a particular god or goddess as its special protector, such as Athena at Athens. Different communities could choose the same deity; Sparta, Athens’s chief rival in later times, also chose Athena as its defender. Greeks envisioned the twelve most important gods banqueting atop Mount Olympus, the highest peak in mainland Greece. Zeus headed this pantheon; the others were Hera, his wife; Aphrodite, goddess of love; Apollo, sun god; Ares, war god; Artemis, moon goddess; Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; Demeter, earth goddess; Dionysus, god of pleasure, wine, and disorder; Hephaestus, fire god; Hermes, messenger god; and Poseidon, sea god. The Greeks believed that their gods were immortal, occasionally experiencing temporary pain or sadness but immune to permanent suffering.

Most Greeks believed that humans must honor the gods to thank them for blessings received and to receive more blessings in return, and that the gods sent both good and bad into the world. Gods could punish offenders by sending disasters such as floods, famines, earthquakes, epidemic diseases, and defeats in battle. The relationship between gods and humans generated sorrow as well as joy, but with hope for favored treatment in this life and in the underworld after death for those who lived justly. An inscription on a seventh-century B.C.E. bronze statuette sums up the reciprocity that characterized these standard Greek religious ideas: “Mantiklos gave this from his share to [the god Apollo] the Far Darter of the Silver Bow; now you, Apollo, do something for me in return.”

Mythology hinted at the gods’ expectations of proper human behavior. For example, gods demanded hospitality for strangers, proper burial for family members, and participation in divine worship. Actions such as performing a sacrifice improperly, violating the sanctity of a temple area, or breaking an oath or sworn agreement counted as disrespect for the gods. Humans had to police most crimes themselves. Homicide was such a serious offense, however, that the gods were thought to punish it by casting a miasma (ritual contamination) on the murderer and on all those around. Unless the

members of the affected group purified themselves by punishing the murderer, they could all expect to suffer divine punishment, such as bad harvests or disease.

A Greek Woman at an Altar

This red-figure vase painting from the center of a large drinking cup shows a woman in rich clothing pouring a libation to the gods onto a flaming altar. In her other arm, she carries a religious object that has not been securely identified. This scene illustrates the most important and frequent role of women in Greek public life: participating in religious ceremonies, both at home and in community festivals. Greek women (and men) commonly wore sandals; why do you think they are usually depicted without shoes in vase paintings?

Oracles, dreams, divination, and the interpretations of prophets provided clues about what humans might have done to anger the gods. The most important oracle was at Delphi, in central Greece,

where a priestess in a trance provided Apollo’s answers — in the form of riddles that had to be interpreted — to questions posed by city- states as well as individuals.

City-states honored gods by sacrificing animals such as cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs; decorating their sanctuaries with works of art; and celebrating festivals with songs, dances, prayers, and processions. Both city-states and individuals worshipped each god and goddess through a cult, a set of publicly funded religious activities overseen by citizens serving as priests and priestesses. People prayed, sang hymns of praise, offered sacrifices, and presented gifts at the deity’s sanctuary. In these holy places a person could honor and thank the deities for blessings and beg them for relief when misfortune struck the community or the individual. People could also offer sacrifices at home with the household gathered around; sometimes the family’s slaves were allowed to participate.

Priests and priestesses chosen from the citizen body performed the sacrifices of public cults; they did not use their positions to influence political or social matters. They were not guardians of correct religious thinking, because Greek polytheism had no scripture or a uniform set of beliefs and practices. It required its worshippers only to support the community’s local rituals and to avoid religious pollution.

The concept of citizenship in the Greek city-state meant free people agreeing to form a political community that was a partnership of privileges and duties in common affairs under the rule of law. Citizenship was a remarkable political concept because, even in Greek city-states organized as tyrannies or oligarchies (rule by a small group), it meant a basic level of political equality among citizens. Most important, it carried the expectation of equal treatment under the law for male citizens regardless of their social status or wealth. The degree of power sharing varied. In oligarchic city-states, small groups from the social elite or even a single family could dominate

the process of legislating. Women had the protection of the law, but they were barred from participation in politics on the grounds that female judgment was inferior to male. Regulations governing sexual behavior and control of property were stricter for women than for men.

In democratic city-states, all free adult male citizens shared in governing by attending and voting in a political assembly, where the laws and policies of the community were decided, and by serving on juries. Citizens did not enjoy perfect political equality. The right to hold office, for example, could be restricted to citizens possessing a certain amount of property. Equality prevailed most often in the justice system, in which usually all male citizens were treated the same, regardless of wealth or status. Making equality of male citizens the principle for the reorganization of Greek society and politics in the Archaic Age was a radical innovation. The polis — with its emphasis on equal protection of the laws for rich and poor alike — remained the preeminent form of political and social organization in Greece until the beginning of Roman control six centuries later.

How the poor originally gained the privileges of citizenship remains a mystery. The population increase in the late Dark Age and the Archaic Age was greatest among the poor. These families raised more children to help farm more land, which had been vacant after the depopulation brought on by the worst of the Dark Age. There was no precedent in earlier Western civilization for extending political and legal equality to the poor.

Historians have customarily believed that a hoplite revolution was the reason for expanded political rights. A hoplite was an infantryman who wore metal body armor and attacked with a thrusting spear. Hoplites formed the basis of the citizen militias that defended Greek city-states. Staying in line and working together were the secrets to successful hoplite tactics. In the eighth century B.C.E., a growing number of men became prosperous enough to buy metal weapons and train as hoplites, especially because the use of iron had

made such weapons more readily available.

According to the hoplite revolution theory, these new hoplites — feeling that they should enjoy political rights in exchange for buying their own equipment and training hard — forced the social elite to share political power by threatening to refuse to fight, which would have crippled military defense. This interpretation correctly assumes that the hoplites had the power to demand and receive a voice in politics but ignores that hoplites were not poor. Furthermore, archaeology shows that not many men were wealthy enough to afford hoplite armor until the middle of the seventh century B.C.E., well after the earliest city-states had emerged. How then did poor men, too, win political rights?

The most likely explanation is that the poor earned respect by fighting to defend the community, just as hoplites did. Fighting as lightly armed troops, poor men could disrupt an enemy’s line by slinging rocks and shooting arrows. It is also possible that tyrants — sole rulers who seized power for their families in some city-states — boosted the status of poor men. Tyrants may have granted greater political rights to poor men as a means of gathering popular support.

The growth of freedom and equality for citizens in Greece produced a corresponding expansion of slavery, as free citizens protected their status by establishing clear distinctions between themselves and slaves. Many slaves were war captives. Pirates or raiders also seized people from non-Greek regions to sell into slavery. Rich families prized educated Greek-speaking slaves, who could tutor their children (no public schools existed yet).

City-states as well as individuals owned slaves. Publicly owned slaves enjoyed limited independence, living on their own and performing specialized tasks. In Athens, for example, special slaves were trained to detect counterfeit coinage. Temple slaves belonged to the deity of the sanctuary, for whom they worked as servants.

Slaves made up about one-third of the total population in some city-

states by the fifth century B.C.E. They became cheap enough to buy that even middle-class people could afford one or two. Still, small landowners and their families continued to do much work themselves. Not even wealthy Greek landowners acquired large numbers of agricultural slaves because maintaining gangs of hundreds of enslaved workers year-round was too expensive. Most crops required short periods of intense labor punctuated by long stretches of inactivity, and owners did not want to feed slaves who had no work.

Slaves did all kinds of jobs. Household slaves, often women, cleaned, cooked, fetched water from public fountains, helped the wives with the weaving, watched the children, accompanied the husbands as they did the marketing, and performed other domestic chores. Neither female nor male slaves could refuse if their masters demanded sexual favors. Owners often labored alongside their slaves in small manufacturing businesses and on farms. Slaves toiling in the narrow, landslide-prone tunnels of Greece’s silver and gold mines had the most dangerous work.

Since slaves existed as property, not people, owners could legally beat or even kill them. But injuring or executing slaves made no economic sense — masters would have been damaging or destroying their own property. Under the best conditions, household workers could live free of violent punishment. They sometimes were allowed to join their owners’ families on excursions and attend religious rituals. However, without families of their own, without property, and without legal or political rights, slaves remained alienated from regular society. Sometimes owners freed their slaves, and some promised freedom at a future date to encourage their slaves to work hard. Those slaves who gained their freedom did not become citizens in Greek city-states but instead mixed into the population of noncitizens officially allowed to live in the community.

Since they were usually of too many different origins and nationalities and too scattered to organize, Greek slaves rarely

rebelled, except in Sparta, where they were local Greeks. The expansion of slavery in the Archaic Age reduced more and more people to a state of absolute dependence, and no Greeks ever called for the abolition of slavery.

Although only free men had the right to participate in city-state politics and to vote, free women counted as citizens legally, socially, and religiously. Citizenship gave women security and status because it guaranteed them access to the justice system and a respected role in a cult. Free women had legal protection against being kidnapped for sale into slavery and access to the courts in disputes over property, although they usually had to have a man speak for them. The traditional paternalism of Greek society required that all women have male guardians to regulate their lives and safeguard their interests (as defined by men). Before a woman’s marriage, her father served as her legal guardian; after marriage, her husband took over that duty.

The expansion of slavery added new responsibilities for women. While their husbands farmed, participated in politics, and met with their male friends, well-off wives managed the household: raising the children, supervising the preservation and preparation of food, keeping the family’s financial accounts, weaving fabric for clothing, directing the work of the slaves, and tending to household members, including slaves, when they were ill. Poor women worked outside the home, laboring in the fields or selling produce and small goods such as ribbons and trinkets in the market. Women’s labor ensured the family’s economic self-sufficiency and allowed male citizens the time to participate in public life.

Women’s religious functions gave them prestige and freedom of movement. Women left the home to attend funerals, state festivals, and public rituals. They had access, for example, to the initiation rites of the popular cult of Demeter at Eleusis, near Athens. Women had control over cults reserved exclusively for them and also performed important duties in other official cults. In fifth-century B.C.E. Athens,

for example, women officiated as priestesses for more than forty different deities, with benefits including salaries paid by the state.

Marriages were arranged by families and were not a concern of the state. Everyone was expected to marry. A woman’s guardian would often engage her to another man’s son while she was still a child, perhaps as young as five. The engagement was a public event conducted in the presence of witnesses. The guardian on this occasion repeated the statement that expressed the primary aim of the marriage: “I give you this woman for the plowing [procreation] of legitimate children.” The actual marriage usually took place when the girl was in her early to mid-teens and the groom ten to fifteen years older.

A wedding consisted of the bride moving to her husband’s dwelling; the procession to his house served as the ceremony. The bride’s father bestowed on her a dowry (a certain amount of family property a daughter received at marriage); if she was wealthy, this could include land yielding an income as well as personal possessions that formed part of her new household’s assets and could be inherited by her children. The husband was legally obliged to preserve the dowry, use it to support his wife and their children, and return it in case of a divorce.

Except in certain cases in Sparta, monogamy was the rule, as was a nuclear family (husband, wife, and children living together without other relatives in the same house). Citizen men, married or not, were free to have sexual relations with slaves, foreign concubines, female prostitutes, or willing pre-adult citizen males. Citizen women, single or married, lacked this freedom. Sex between a wife and anyone other than her husband carried harsh penalties for both parties.

Greek citizen men placed Greek citizen women under their guardianship, both to regulate marriage and procreation and to maintain family property. According to Greek mythology, women were a necessary evil. Zeus supposedly ordered the creation of the first woman, Pandora, as a punishment for men in retaliation against

Prometheus, who had stolen fire from Zeus and given it to humans. To see what was in a container that had come as a gift from the gods, Pandora lifted its lid and accidentally released into a previously trouble-free world the evils that had been locked inside. When she finally slammed the lid back down, only hope still remained in the container. Hesiod described women as “big trouble” but thought any man who refused to marry to escape the “troublesome deeds of women” would come to “destructive old age” alone, with no heirs. In other words, a man needed a wife so that he could father children who would later care for him and preserve the family property after his death. This paternalistic attitude allowed Greek men to control human reproduction and consequently the distribution of property.

REVIEW QUESTION How did the physical, social, and intellectual conditions of life in the Archaic Age promote the emergence of the Greek city-state?

New Directions for the Greek City- State, 750–500 B.C.E. Greek city-states developed three forms of social and political organization based on citizenship: oligarchy, tyranny, and democracy. Sparta provided Greece’s most famous example of an oligarchy, in which a small number of men dominated policymaking in an assembly of male citizens. For a time Corinth had the best- known tyranny, in which one man seized control of the city-state, ruling it for the advantage of his family and loyal supporters, while acknowledging the citizenship of all — thereby distinguishing a tyrant from a king, who ruled over subjects. Athens developed Greece’s best-known democracy.

Greeks in the Archaic Age also created new forms of artistic expression and new ways of thought. In this period they developed innovative ways of using reason to understand the physical world, their relations to it, and their relationships with one another. This intellectual innovation laid the foundation for the gradual emergence of scientific thought and logic in Western civilization.

Oligarchy in the City-State of Sparta, 700–500 B.C.E. Sparta organized its society for military readiness. This oligarchic city-state developed the mightiest infantry force in Greece during the Archaic Age. Its citizens were famous for their militaristic self- discipline. Sparta’s urban center was nestled in an easily defended valley on the Peloponnesian peninsula twenty-five miles from the Mediterranean coast. This separation from the sea kept the Spartans focused on being a land power.

The Spartan oligarchy included three components of rule. First came the two hereditary, prestigious military leaders called kings, who served as the state’s religious heads and the generals of its army. Despite their title, they were not monarchs but just one part of the ruling oligarchy. The second part was a council of twenty-eight men over sixty years old (the elders), and the third part consisted of five annually elected officials called ephors (“overseers”), who made policy and enforced the laws.

In principle, legislation had to be approved by an assembly of all Sparta’s free adult males, who were called the “Alike” to stress their common status and purpose. The assembly had only limited power to amend the proposals put before it, however, and the council would withdraw a proposal when the assembly’s reaction proved negative. Spartan society demanded strict obedience to all laws. When the ephors took office, they issued an official proclamation to Sparta’s males: “Shave your mustache and obey the laws.” Unlike other Greeks, the Spartans never wrote down their laws. Instead, they preserved their system with a unique, highly structured way of life. All Spartan citizens were expected to put service to their city-state before personal concerns because their state’s survival was continually threatened by its own economic foundation: the great mass of Greek slaves, called helots, who did almost all the work for Spartan citizens.

A helot was a slave owned by the Spartan city-state. Helots were Greeks captured in neighboring parts of Greece that the Spartans defeated in war. Most helots lived in Messenia, to the west, which Sparta had conquered by around 700 B.C.E. The helots outnumbered Sparta’s free citizens. Harshly treated by their Spartan masters, helots constantly looked for chances to revolt.

Helots had some family life because they were expected to produce children to maintain their population, and they could own some personal possessions and practice their religion. They labored as farmers and household slaves so that Spartan citizens would not have

to do nonmilitary work. Spartan men wore their hair very long to show they were warriors rather than laborers.

Helots lived under the constant threat of officially approved violence by Spartan citizens. Every year the ephors formally declared war between Sparta and the helots, allowing any Spartan to kill a helot without legal penalty or fear of offending the gods. By beating the helots frequently, forcing them to get drunk in public as an object lesson to young Spartans, and humiliating them by making them wear dog-skin caps, the Spartans emphasized their slaves’ “otherness.” In this way Spartans created a justification for their harsh abuse of fellow Greeks. A later Athenian observed, “Sparta is the home of the freest of the Greeks, and of the most enslaved.”

With helots to work the fields, male citizens devoted themselves full-time to preparation for war and training to protect their state from both hostile neighbors and its own slaves. Boys lived at home until their seventh year, when they were sent to live in barracks with other males until they were thirty. They spent most of their time exercising, hunting, practicing with weapons, competing to excel physically, and learning Spartan values by listening to tales of bravery and heroism at shared meals, where adult males in groups of about fifteen usually ate instead of at home. Discipline was strict, and the boys were purposely underfed so that they would learn stealth tactics by stealing food. If they were caught, punishment and disgrace followed immediately. One famous Spartan tale reported that a boy hid a stolen fox under his clothing and let the panicked animal rip out his insides rather than allow himself to be detected in the theft. A Spartan male who could not survive the tough training was publicly disgraced and denied the status of being an Alike.

Spending so much time in shared quarters schooled Sparta’s young men in their society’s values. The community took the place of a Spartan boy’s family when he was growing up and remained his main social environment even after he reached adulthood. There he learned to call all older men “Father,” to emphasize that his primary

loyalty was to the group instead of his biological family. This way of life trained him for the one honorable occupation for Spartan men: obedient soldier. A seventh-century B.C.E. poet expressed the Spartan male ideal: “Know that it is good for the city-state and the whole people when a man takes his place in the front row of warriors and stands his ground without flinching.”

An adolescent boy’s life often involved what in today’s terminology would be called a homosexual relationship, although the ancient concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality do not match modern notions. An older male would choose a teenager as a special favorite, in many cases engaging him in sexual relations. Their bond was meant to make each ready to die for the other in battle. Numerous Greek city-states included this form of sexuality among their customs, although some thought it disgraceful and made it illegal. The Athenian author Xenophon (c. 430–355 B.C.E.) wrote a work on the Spartan way of life denying that sex with boys existed there because he thought it a stain on the Spartans’ reputation for virtue. However, other sources testify that such relationships did exist in Sparta and elsewhere.

In such relationships the elder partner (the “lover”) was supposed to help educate the young man (the “beloved”) in politics and community values, and not just exploit him for physical pleasure. Once they became adults, beloveds were expected to find a wife to start a family; they could also at that point become the “lover” of an adolescent “beloved.” Sex between adult males was considered disgraceful, as was sex between females of all ages (at least according to men).

Bronze Sculpture of a Spartan Youth This sculpted handle of a bronze water jar from sixth-century B.C.E. Sparta shows a young male holding two lions by the tail on his shoulders. That spectacular pose portrayed the fearlessness and control over fierce nature that Sparta expected of its citizens. His hair is long in the self-

conscious style of Spartan warriors, who prided themselves on not having the short hair that was common for laborers.

Spartan women were known throughout the Greek world for their personal freedom. Since their husbands were so rarely at home, women totally controlled the households, which included servants, daughters, and sons who had not yet left for their communal training. Consequently, Spartan women exercised even more power at home than did women elsewhere in Greece. They could own property, including land. Wives were expected to stay physically fit so that they could bear healthy children to keep up the population. They were also expected to drum Spartan values into their children. One mother became legendary for handing her son his shield on the eve of battle and sternly telling him, “Come back with it or [lying dead] on it.”

Demographics determined Sparta’s long-term fate. The population of Sparta was never large. Adult males — who made up the army — numbered between eight and ten thousand in the Archaic period. Over time, the problem of producing enough children to keep the Spartan army from shrinking became desperate, probably because losses in war far outnumbered births and regulations on the timing of intercourse in marriage had the opposite of the intended effect, reducing instead of increasing fertility. Men became legally required to marry, with bachelors punished by fines and public ridicule. A woman could legitimately have children by a man other than her husband, if all three agreed.

Because the Spartans’ survival depended on the exploitation of enslaved Greeks, they believed they had to avoid change in their way of life because it might make them vulnerable to internal revolts. Some Greeks criticized the Spartan way of life as repressive and monotonous, but the Spartans’ discipline and respect for their laws also gained them widespread admiration.

Tyranny in the City-State of Corinth, 657–585 B.C.E. In some city-states, competition among the social elite became so bitter that a single family would suppress all its rivals and establish itself in rule. The family’s leader thus became a tyrant, a dictator who gained political dominance by force. Tyrants usually rallied support by promising support for poor citizens, such as public employment schemes. Since few tyrants successfully passed their dominance on to their heirs, tyrannies tended to be short-lived.

Tyrants usually preserved their city-states’ existing laws and political institutions. If a city-state had a legislative assembly, for example, the tyrant would allow it to continue to meet, expecting it to follow his direction. Although today the word tyrant indicates a brutal or unwanted leader, tyrants in Archaic Greece did not always fit that description. Greeks evaluated tyrants according to their behavior, opposing the ruthless and violent ones but accepting the fair and generous ones.

The most famous early tyranny arose at Corinth in 657 B.C.E., when the family of Cypselus rebelled against the city’s harsh oligarchic leadership. Corinth’s location on the isthmus controlling land access to the Peloponnese and a huge amount of seaborne trade made it the most prosperous city-state of the Archaic Age. Cypselus “became one of the most admired of Corinth’s citizens because he was courageous, prudent, and helpful to the people, unlike the oligarchs in power, who were insolent and violent,” according to a later historian. Cypselus’s son succeeded him at his death in 625 B.C.E. and aggressively continued Corinth’s economic expansion by founding colonies to increase trade. He also pursued commercial contacts with Egypt. Unlike his father, the son lost popular support by ruling harshly. He held on to power until his death in 585 B.C.E., but the hostility he had provoked soon led to the overthrow of his own heir.

The social elite, to prevent tyranny, then installed an oligarchic government based on a board of officials and a council.

Democracy in the City-State of Athens, c. 700–500 B.C.E. Athens, located at the southeastern corner of central Greece, became the most famous of the democratic city-states because its government gave political rights to the greatest number of people, financed magnificent temples and public buildings, and, in the fifth century B.C.E., became militarily strong enough to induce numerous other city- states to follow Athenian leadership in a maritime empire. Athenian democracy did not reach its full development until the mid-fifth century B.C.E., but its first steps in the Archaic Age from around 700 B.C.E. allowed all male citizens to participate in making laws and administering justice.

Athens’s early development of a large middle class was a crucial factor in opening this new path for Western civilization. The Athenian population apparently expanded at a phenomenal rate when economic conditions improved rapidly from about 800 to 700 B.C.E. The ready availability of good farmland in Athenian territory and opportunities for seaborne trade allowed many families to improve their standing. These hardworking entrepreneurs felt that their self-won economic success entitled them to a say in government.

By the seventh century B.C.E., all freeborn adult Athenian male citizens had the right to vote on public matters in the assembly. They also elected officials called archons, who ran the judicial system by rendering verdicts in disputes and criminal accusations. Members of the elite dominated these offices; because archons received no pay, poor men could not afford to serve. The democratic unity forged by

the Athenian masses was demonstrated in 632 B.C.E., when the people rallied to block an elite Athenian’s attempt to install a tyranny.

An extended economic crisis beginning in the late seventh century B.C.E. almost destroyed Athens’s infant democracy. The first attempt to solve the crisis was the emergency appointment around 621 B.C.E. of a man named Draco to revise the laws. Draco’s changes, which made death the penalty for even minor crimes, proved too harsh to work. Later Greeks said Draco (whose harshness inspired the word draconian) had written his laws in blood, not ink. By 600 B.C.E., economic conditions had become so terrible that poor farmers had to borrow constantly from richer neighbors and deeply mortgage their land. As the crisis grew worse, impoverished citizens were sold into slavery to pay off debts.

Desperate, Athenians appointed another emergency official in 594 B.C.E., a war hero named Solon. To head off violence, Solon gave both rich and poor something of what they wanted, a compromise called the “shaking off of obligations.” He canceled private debts, which helped the poor but displeased the rich; he decided not to redistribute land, which pleased the wealthy but disappointed the poor. He banned selling citizens into slavery to settle debts and liberated citizens who had become slaves in this way. His elimination of debt slavery was a significant recognition of citizen rights.

Solon balanced political power between rich and poor by reordering Athens’s traditional ranking of citizens into four groups based on annual income. This change eliminated inherited aristocracy at Athens. The groupings did not affect a man’s treatment at law, only his eligibility for government office. The higher a man’s ranking, the higher the post to which he could be elected, but higher also was the contribution he was expected to make to the community with his service and his money. Men at the poorest level, called laborers, were not eligible for any office. Solon did, however, confirm the laborers’ right to vote in the legislative assembly. His classification scheme was consistent with democratic principles

because it allowed for upward social mobility; a man who increased his income could move up the scale of eligibility for office.

The creation of a smaller council to prepare the agenda for the assembly that voted on laws and policy was a crucial development in making Athenian democracy efficient. Four hundred council members were chosen annually from the adult male citizenry by lottery — the most democratic method possible — which prevented the social elite from capturing too many seats.

Solon’s two reforms in the judicial system promoted democratic principles of equality. First, he directed that any male citizen could start a prosecution on behalf of any crime victim. Second, he gave people the right to appeal an archon’s judgment to the assembly. With these two measures, Solon empowered ordinary citizens in the administration of justice. Characteristically, he balanced these democratic reforms by granting broader powers to the Areopagus Council (“council that meets on the hill of the god of war Ares”). This select body, limited to ex-archons, held great power because its members judged the most important cases — accusations against archons themselves.

Solon’s reforms extended power through the citizen body and created a system of law that applied more equally than before to all the community’s free men. A critic once challenged Solon, “Do you actually believe your fellow citizens’ injustice and greed can be kept in check this way? Written laws are more like spiders’ webs than anything else: they tie up the weak and the small fry who get stuck in them, but the rich and the powerful tear them to shreds.” Solon replied that communal values ensure the rule of law: “People abide by their agreements when neither side has anything to gain by breaking them. I am writing laws for the Athenians in such a way that they will clearly see it is to everyone’s advantage to obey the laws rather than to break them.”

Some elite Athenians wanted oligarchy and therefore bitterly disagreed with Solon. The unrest they caused opened the door to

tyranny at Athens. Peisistratus, helped by his upper-class friends and the poor whose interests he championed, made himself tyrant in 546 B.C.E. Like the Corinthian tyrants, he promoted the economic, cultural, and architectural development of Athens and bought the masses’ support. He helped poorer men, for example, by hiring them to build roads, a huge temple to Zeus, and fountains to increase the supply of drinking water. He boosted Athens’s economy and its image by minting new coins stamped with Athena’s owl (a symbol of the goddess of wisdom; see the illustration) and organizing a great annual festival honoring the god Dionysus that attracted people from near and far to see its musical and dramatic performances.

Peisistratus’s eldest son, Hippias, ruled harshly and was denounced as unjust by a rival elite family. These rivals convinced the Spartans, the self-proclaimed champions of Greek freedom, to liberate Athens from tyranny by expelling Hippias and his family in 510 B.C.E.

Peisistratus’s support of ordinary people evidently had the unintended consequence of making them think that they deserved political equality. Tyranny at Athens thus opened the way to the most important step in developing Athenian democracy, the reforms of Cleisthenes. A member of the social elite, Cleisthenes found himself losing against rivals for election to office in 508 B.C.E. He turned his electoral campaign around by offering more political participation to the masses; he called his program “equality through law.” Most people so strongly favored his plan that they spontaneously rallied to repel a Spartan army that Cleisthenes’ bitterest rival had convinced Sparta’s leaders to send to block his reforms.

By about 500 B.C.E., Cleisthenes had engineered direct participation in Athens’s democracy by as many adult male citizens as possible. First he created constituent units for the city-state’s new political organization by grouping country villages and urban neighborhoods into units called demes. The demes chose council members annually by lottery in proportion to the size of their populations. To allow for greater participation, Solon’s Council of Four Hundred was expanded

to five hundred members. Finally, Cleisthenes required candidates for public office to be spread widely throughout the demes.

The creation of demes suggests that Greek democratic notions stemmed from traditions of small-community life, in which each man was entitled to his say in running local affairs and had to persuade — not force — others to agree. It took another fifty years of political struggle, however, before Athenian democracy reached its full development with the democratization of its judicial system.

New Ways of Thought and Expression in Greece, 630–500 B.C.E. The idea that persuasion, rather than force or status, should drive political decisions matched the spirit of intellectual change rippling through Greece in the late Archaic Age. In city-states all over the Greek world, artists, poets, and philosophers pursued new ways of thought and new forms of expression. Through their contacts with the Near East, the Greeks encountered traditions to learn from and alter for their own purposes.

By the sixth century B.C.E., Greeks were introducing innovations of their own into art. In ceramics, painters experimented with different clays and colors to depict vivid scenes from mythology and daily life. Sculptors gave their statues balanced poses and calm, smiling faces. Women were sculpted as wearing brightly decorated clothing, while men were represented nude to display their physiques.

Building on the Near Eastern tradition of poetry expressing personal emotions, Greeks created a new poetic form. This poetry, which sprang from popular song, was performed to the accompaniment of a lyre (a kind of harp) and thus called lyric poetry. Greek lyric poems were short, rhythmic, and diverse in subject. Lyric

poets wrote songs both for choruses and for individual performers. Choral poems honored gods on public occasions, celebrated famous events in a city-state’s history, praised victors in athletic contests, and enlivened weddings.

Some lyric poems generated controversy because the ideas expressed in them valued individual expression and opinion over conventional views. Solon wrote poems justifying his reforms. Other poets criticized traditional values, such as strength in war. Sappho, a lyric poet from Lesbos born about 630 B.C.E. and famous for her poems on love, wrote, “Some would say the most beautiful thing on our dark earth is an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, but I say it’s whatever a person loves.” In this poem Sappho was expressing her longing for a woman she loved, who was now far away. Archilochus of Paros, who probably lived in the early seventh century B.C.E., became famous for poems mocking militarism, lamenting friends lost at sea, and regretting love affairs gone wrong. He became infamous for his lines about throwing away his shield in battle so that he could run away to save his life: “Oh, the hell with it; I can get another one just as good.” When he taunted a family in verse after the father had ended Archilochus’s affair with one of his daughters, the power of his ridicule reportedly caused the father and his two daughters to commit suicide.

The study of philosophy (“love of wisdom”) began in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., when some Greek thinkers created prose writing to express their innovative ideas, above all their new explanations of the human world and its relation to the gods. Some also composed poetry to explain their theories. Most of these philosophers lived in Ionia, on Anatolia’s western coast, where they came in contact with Near Eastern knowledge in astronomy, mathematics, and myth. Because there were no formal schools, philosophers communicated their ideas by teaching privately and giving public lectures. People who studied with these philosophers or heard their presentations helped spread the new ideas.

Working from Babylonian discoveries about the regular movements of the stars and planets, Ionian philosophers such as Thales (c. 625–545 B.C.E.) and Anaximander (c. 610–540 B.C.E.), both of Miletus, reached the revolutionary conclusion that unchanging laws of nature (rather than gods’ wishes) governed the universe. Pythagoras, who emigrated from the island of Samos to the Greek city-state Croton in southern Italy about 530 B.C.E., taught that numerical relationships explained the world. He began the Greek study of high-level mathematics and the numerical aspects of musical harmony.

Ionian philosophers insisted that natural phenomena were neither random nor arbitrary. They applied the word cosmos — meaning “an orderly arrangement that is beautiful” — to the universe. The cosmos included not only the motions of heavenly bodies but also the weather, the growth of plants and animals, and human health. Because the universe was ordered, it was knowable; because it was knowable, thought and research could explain it. Philosophers therefore looked for the first or universal cause of all things, a quest that scientists still pursue. These first philosophers believed they needed to give reasons for their conclusions and to persuade others by arguments based on evidence. That is, they believed in logic. This new way of thought, called rationalism, became the foundation for the study of science and philosophy. This rule-based view of the causes of events and physical phenomena contrasted sharply with the traditional mythological view. Many people had difficulty accepting such a startling change in their understanding of the world, and the older tradition of explaining events as the work of deities lived on alongside the new approach.

The early Greek philosophers deeply influenced later times by being the first to clearly separate scientific thinking from myth and religion. Their idea that people must give reasons to justify their beliefs, rather than simply make assertions that others must accept without evidence, was their most important achievement. This insistence on rationalism, coupled with the belief that the world

could be understood as something other than the plaything of the gods, gave people hope that they could improve their lives through their own efforts. Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–c. 478 B.C.E.) concluded, “The gods have not revealed all things from the beginning to mortals, but, by seeking, human beings find out, in time, what is better.” This saying expressed the value Archaic Age philosophers gave to intellectual freedom, corresponding to the value that citizens gave to political freedom in the city-state.

REVIEW QUESTION What were the main differences among the various forms of government in the Greek city- states?

MAPPING THE WEST

Mediterranean Civilizations, c. 500 B.C.E.

At the end of the sixth century B.C.E., the Persian Empire was by far the most powerful civilization touching the Mediterranean. Its riches and its unity gave it resources that no Phoenician or Greek city could match. The Phoenicians dominated economically in the western Mediterranean, while the Greek city-states in Sicily and southern Italy rivaled the power of those

in the heartland. In Italy, the Etruscans were the most powerful civilization; the Romans were still a small community struggling to replace monarchy with a republic.

Conclusion After its Dark Age, the Near East revived its traditional pattern of social and political organization: empire under a strong central authority. The Neo-Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians, and the Persians succeeded one another as imperial powers. The moral dualism of Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, influenced later religions. The Israelites’ development of monotheism based on scripture changed the course of religious history in Western civilization.

Greece’s recovery from its Dark Age produced a new form of political and social organization: the polis, a city-state based on citizenship and shared governance. The growing population of the Archaic Age developed a communal sense of identity, personal freedom, and justice administered by citizens. The degree of power sharing varied in the Greek city-states. Some, like Sparta, were oligarchies; in others, like Corinth, rule was by tyranny. Over time, Athens developed the most extensive democracy, in which political power extended to all male citizens.

Greeks in the Archaic Age also developed new methods of artistic expression and new ways of thought. Building on Near Eastern traditions, Greek poets created lyric poetry to express personal emotion. Greek philosophers argued that laws of nature controlled the universe and that humans could discover these laws through reason and research, thereby establishing rationalism as the conceptual basis for science and philosophy.

Chapter 2 Review

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance.

Cyrus moral dualism Torah Diaspora aretê Homer polis cult hoplite helot Solon demes Sappho rationalism

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. In what ways was religion important in the Near East from c.

1000 B.C.E. to c. 500 B.C.E.? 2. What factors proved most important in the Greek recovery from

the troubles of the Dark Age? 3. How did the physical, social, and intellectual conditions of life in

the Archaic Age promote the emergence of the Greek city-state? 4. What were the main differences among the various forms of

government in the Greek city-states?

MAKING CONNECTIONS 1. What characteristics made the Greek city-state differ in political

and social organization from the Near Eastern city-state? 2. How were the ideas of the Ionian philosophers different from

mythic traditions? 3. To what extent were the most important changes in Western

civilization in this period intentional or unintentional?

IMPORTANT EVENTS 1000–750 B.C.E. Greece experiences Dark Age

900 B.C.E. Neo-Assyrian Empire emerges

800 B.C.E. Greeks learn to write with an alphabet

776 B.C.E. Olympic Games are founded in Greece

750 B.C.E. Greeks begin to create the polis

700 B.C.E. Spartans conquer Messenia, enslave its inhabitants as helots

700–500 B.C.E. Ionian philosophers develop rationalism

657 B.C.E. Cypselus becomes tyrant in Corinth

630 B.C.E. The lyric poet Sappho is born

597 and 586 B.C.E. Israelites are exiled to Babylon

594 B.C.E. Solon’s reforms promote early democracy in Athens

546–510 B.C.E. Peisistratus’s family rules Athens as tyrants

539 B.C.E. Persian king Cyrus captures Babylon, permits Israelites to return to Canaan

508–500 B.C.E. Cleisthenes’s reforms extend democracy in Athens

C H A P T E R 3

The Greek Golden Age

C. 500–C. 400 B.C.E.

FEARING AN ATTACK TO OVERTHROW THEIR DEMOCRACY BY THE Spartans, the Athenians in 507 B.C.E. dispatched ambassadors to the Persian king Darius I (r. 522–486 B.C.E.) to request military assistance. Athens and Sparta so mistrusted each other that the Athenians chose to appeal to a foreign superpower for help against fellow Greeks. Darius’s representative asked, “But who in the world are these people, and where do they live that they are begging for an alliance with the Persians?” Even so, the Persian king offered the Athenians help on his standard terms: that they acknowledge his superiority. Darius was eager to dominate more Greek city- states because their trade and growing wealth made them desirable prizes. The voters in the Athenian democratic assembly rejected the deal, unwilling to become Persian subjects.

This incident provides the background for the wars that dominated Greece’s history throughout the fifth century B.C.E., first with Greeks fighting Persians and then with Greeks fighting Greeks. Conflicting interests and misunderstandings between Persia and Greece at the start of the century ignited a great conflict: the Persian Wars (499–479 B.C.E.), culminating in a massive Persian invasion of mainland Greece. Thirty-one Greek states united to defeat the Persians, surprising the world. After their victory, however, they once again began fighting one another. Despite nearly constant warfare, fifth-century B.C.E. Greeks, especially Athenians, created their most famous innovations in architecture, art, and theater. This Golden Age, as historians later named it, is

the first part of the period called the Classical Age of Greece, which extends from around 500 B.C.E. to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E.

New ideas in education and philosophy that became deeply controversial in the fifth century B.C.E. have had a lasting influence on Western civilization. The controversies arose because many people saw the changes as attacks on ancient traditions, especially religion; they feared the gods would punish their communities for abandoning ancestral beliefs. Political change also characterized the Athenian Golden Age. First, Athenian citizens made their city- state government more democratic than ever. Second, Athens grew internationally powerful by using its navy to establish dominance over other Greek city-states in a system criticized as “empire” by modern scholars. Athens’s naval power also promoted seaborne trade, and the profits from its commerce and international power generated unprecedented revenue for the city-state. Athenians voted to use this money to finance new public buildings, art, and theater festivals, and to pay for poorer men to serve as officials and jurors in an expanded democratic government.

The Golden Age ended when Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.) and the Athenians subsequently fought a brief but bloody civil war (404–403 B.C.E.). The Peloponnesian War and its aftermath bankrupted and divided Athens.

CHAPTER FOCUS Did war bring more benefit or more harm — politically, socially, and intellectually — to Golden Age Athens?

Wars between Persia and Greece, 499–479 B.C.E.

When the envoys from Athens met with the Persian king’s representative in 507 B.C.E., they submitted to the monarch’s demand: to present tokens of earth and water as symbolic acknowledgment of their city-state’s submission to the Persian king. When the Athenian assembly subsequently repudiated their representatives’ acceptance of these terms, it failed to inform King Darius. He therefore continued to believe that Athens had agreed to obey him in return for his support. This misunderstanding planted the seed for two Persian attacks on Greece. Since the Persian Empire dwarfed the Greek city- states in size and strength, the conflict pitted the equivalent of a huge bear against a pack of undersized dogs.

From the Ionian Revolt to the Battle of Marathon, 499–490 B.C.E. In 499 B.C.E., the Greek city-states in Ionia rebelled against their Persian-installed tyrants. The Athenians sent troops because they saw the Ionians as close kin. By 494 B.C.E., a Persian counterattack had crushed the revolt (Map 3.1). Darius exploded in anger when he learned that the Athenians had helped the Ionian rebels. He ordered a slave to repeat three times at every meal, “Lord, remember the Athenians.”

MAP 3.1 The Persian Wars, 499–479 B.C.E. Following the example of King Cyrus (r. 557–530 B.C.E.), who founded the Persian Empire, his successors on the throne expanded the empire eastward and westward. King Darius I invaded Thrace (in southeastern Europe) more than fifteen years before the conflict against the Greeks that we call the Persian Wars. The Persians’ unexpected defeat in Greece put an end to their attempt to extend their power into Europe.

In 490 B.C.E., Darius sent a force to punish Athens and install a

puppet ruler. The Athenians confronted the invaders near the town of Marathon on their eastern coast. The Athenian soldiers were stunned by the Persians’ strange garb — colorful pants instead of the short tunics and bare legs that Greeks regarded as proper dress — but the Greek commanders had their infantry charge the enemy at a dead run. The soldiers in their heavy armor clanked across the plain through a hail of Persian arrows. In the hand-to-hand combat, the Greek hoplites used their long spears to overwhelm the Persian infantry.

The Athenian infantry then hurried the twenty-six miles to Athens to guard the city against the Persian navy. (Today’s marathon races commemorate the legend of a runner speeding ahead to announce the victory, and then dropping dead.) The unexpected success of the Athenians strengthened their sense of community. When a rich strike was made in Athens’s publicly owned silver mines in 483 B.C.E., Themistocles (c. 524–c. 460 B.C.E.) convinced the assembly to spend the windfall to double the size of the navy instead of dividing it among the citizens.

The Great Persian Invasion, 480–479 B.C.E. Themistocles’ foresight proved valuable when Darius’s son Xerxes I (r. 486–465 B.C.E.) assembled an immense invasion force to avenge the loss at Marathon and add the mainland city-states to the lands paying him taxes. So vast was Xerxes’ army, the Greeks claimed, that when the invaders began marching on Greece in 480 B.C.E. it took them seven days and seven nights to cross the strip of sea between Asia and Europe.

A Signet of Persia’s King Darius Like other kings in the ancient Mediterranean region, the Persian king hunted lions to show his courage and his ability to overcome nature’s threats. In this scene from a signet, used to impress the royal seal into wet clay to verify documents, Darius I shoots arrows from a chariot driven for him by a charioteer. He is depicted wearing his crown so that his status as ruler would be obvious. The symbol of Ahura Mazda, the chief god of Persian religion, hovers in the sky to indicate that the king enjoys divine favor.

The thirty-one states that allied to defend their freedom represented only a small portion of the Greek world. This coalition desperately wanted the rich Greek city-states in Italy and Sicily to join. Syracuse, for example, the most powerful Greek state at the time, controlled a regional empire built on agriculture in Sicily’s plains and seaborne commerce on the Mediterranean’s western trading routes. The tyrant ruling Syracuse rejected the allies’ appeal for help because he was fighting his own war against Carthage, a Phoenician city in North Africa, over control of this lucrative trade. None of the western Greeks aided their mainland compatriots.

So, left on their own, the allies chose Sparta as leader because of its military excellence. The Spartans demonstrated their courage in 480

B.C.E. when three hundred of their infantry (and a few thousand fighters from other city-states) blocked Xerxes’ army for several days at the pass called Thermopylae in central Greece. Told the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows darkened the sun, one Spartan reportedly remarked, “That’s good news; we’ll get to fight in the shade.” They did — to the death. Their tomb’s memorial proclaimed, “Go tell the Spartans that we lie buried here obedient to their orders.”

When the Persians marched south, the Athenians evacuated their homeland rather than surrender. The Persians burned Athens. Themistocles and his political rival Aristides (c. 530–c. 468 B.C.E.) cooperated to convince the other allies’ generals to fight a naval battle. Themistocles tricked the Persian king into attacking the Greek fleet in the narrow channel between the island of Salamis and the west coast of Athens, where Xerxes could not send all his fleet (twice the size of the Greeks’) into battle simultaneously. The heavier Greek warships won the battle by ramming the flimsier Persian craft. The battle of Salamis induced Xerxes to return home. In 479 B.C.E., the Spartans commanded victories over the Persian land forces.

The Greeks won these epochal battles against the Persians because their generals had better strategic foresight, their soldiers had stronger weapons, and their warships were more effective. Above all, the Greeks won the war because enough of them took the innovative step of uniting to fight for freedom. Because the Greek forces included both the social elites and the poorer men who rowed the warships, their success showed that rich and poor Greeks alike treasured political independence.

REVIEW QUESTION How did the Greeks overcome the dangers of the Persian invasions?

Athenian Confidence in the Golden Age, 478–431 B.C.E. Victory fractured the Greek alliance because the allies resented the harshness of the Spartans as commanders, and the Athenians now competed with them for leadership. This competition created the so- called Athenian Empire. The growth of Athens’s power inspired its citizens to broaden their democracy and spend vast amounts to fund officials and jurors, public buildings, art, and religious festivals.

The Establishment of the Athenian Empire Sparta and Athens built up separate alliances to strengthen their own positions, believing that their security depended on winning a competition for power. Sparta led strong infantry forces from the Peloponnese region, and its ally Corinth had a sizable navy. The Spartan alliance had an assembly to decide policy, but Sparta dominated.

Athens allied with city-states in northern Greece, on the islands of the Aegean Sea, and along the Ionian coast — the places most threatened by Persia. This alliance, the Delian League, was built on naval power. It began as a democratic alliance, but Athens soon controlled it because the allies allowed the Athenians to command and to oversee the financing of the league’s fleet. At its height, the league included some three hundred city-states. Each paid dues according to its size; Athens determined how the dues were spent. Larger city-states paid their dues by sending triremes — warships propelled by 170 rowers on three levels and equipped with a battering ram at the bow (Figure 3.1) — complete with trained crews and their

pay. Smaller states could share in building one ship or contribute money instead of ships and crews.

FIGURE 3.1 Triremes, the Foremost Classical Greek Warships

Innovations in military technology and training propelled a naval arms race in the fifth century B.C.E. when Greek shipbuilders designed larger and faster ramming ships powered by 170 rowers seated in three rows, each above the other. (See the line illustration of the rowers from behind.) Called triremes, these ships were expensive to build and required extensive crew training. Only wealthy and populous city-states such as Athens could afford to build and man large fleets of triremes. The relief sculpture found on the Athenian acropolis and dating from about 400 B.C.E. gives a glimpse of what a trireme looked like from the side when being rowed into battle. (Sails were used for power only when the ship was not in combat.)

Over time, more and more Delian League members voluntarily paid cash because it was easier. Athens used this money to construct triremes and pay men to row them; oarsmen who brought a slave to row alongside them earned double pay. Drawn primarily from the poorest citizens, rowers gained both income and also political influence in Athenian democracy because the navy became the city- state’s main force. These benefits made poor citizens eager to expand Athens’s power over other Greeks. The increase in Athenian naval power thus promoted the development of a wider democracy at home, but it undermined the democracy of the Delian League.

The Athenian assembly could use the league fleet to force disobedient allies to pay cash dues. Athens’s dominance of the Delian League has led historians to label it Athenian Empire. By about 460 B.C.E., the Delian League’s fleet had expelled all Persian garrisons from northern Greece and driven the enemy fleet from the Aegean Sea. This sweep eliminated the Persian threat for the next fifty years.

Military success made Athens prosperous by bringing in spoils and cash dues from the Delian League and making seaborne trade safe. The prosperity benefited rich and poor alike — the poor with good pay, the elite commanders by enhancing their chances for election to high office if they spent their war spoils on public festivals and buildings. In this way, the democracy of Golden Age Athens benefited from what modern scholars often call imperialism.

Radical Democracy and Pericles’ Leadership, 461–431 B.C.E. In the late 460s B.C.E., the trireme rowers decided that in their own interest they should make Athens’s court system as democratic as its legislative assembly, in which all free adult male citizens participated. They wanted to prevent the elite from rendering unfair

verdicts in legal cases. Members of the elite pushed this judicial reform, to win popular support for election to high office; the measure passed in 461 B.C.E. Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.E.), from one of Athens’s most distinguished families, became Golden Age Athens’s dominant politician by spearheading reforms to democratize its judicial system and provide pay for most public offices.

Historians have labeled the changes to Athenian democracy in the 460s and 450s B.C.E. radical (“from the roots”) because the new system gave political and judicial power to all adult male citizens (the “roots” of democracy, in the Greek view). This direct democracy consisted of the assembly, the Council of Five Hundred chosen annually by lottery, nine archons (higher-level officials) chosen by lottery, the Council of the Areopagus of ex-archons serving for life, an executive board of ten “generals” elected annually with political and military responsibilities, hundreds of other annual minor officials (most chosen by lottery), and the court system.

Athens’s radical democracy balanced two competing goals: (1) wide participation by as many male citizens as possible through attendance at the assembly and service in official positions filled by lottery, and (2) effective political and military leadership in elective positions by citizens with education and international experience. These highest-level officials received no pay, only public acclaim — or criticism. All public offices had an annual term limit, but a successful “general” could be reelected indefinitely. Officials exercised power as members of committees, never as sole operators.

The changes in the judicial system strongly supported radical democracy. Previously, archons and the Council of the Areopagus had decided most legal cases. Reform happened when, as with Cleisthenes before (see Chapter 2), an elite man proposed it in support of greater political influence for poorer citizens — to win their votes against his rivals. In 461 B.C.E., it was Ephialtes who convinced the assembly to establish a new system taking jurisdiction from the archons and giving it to courts manned by citizen jurors. To

increase participation and prevent bribery, jurors were selected by lottery from male citizens over thirty years old. They received pay to serve on juries numbering from several hundred to several thousand members. No judges or lawyers existed, and jurors voted by secret ballot after hearing speeches from the persons involved, with every trial completed in a single day. As in the assembly, a majority vote decided; no appeals of verdicts were allowed.

In Athenian radical democracy, the majority could overrule legal protections for individuals. In ostracism, all male citizens could cast a ballot on which they scratched the name of one man they thought should be exiled for ten years. If at least six thousand ballots were cast, the man whose name appeared on the greatest number was expelled from Athens. He suffered no other penalty; his family and property remained undisturbed. Usually a man was ostracized because a majority feared he would overthrow the democracy to rule as a tyrant. There was, however, no guarantee of motives in an ostracism, as a story about Aristides illustrates. He was nicknamed “the Just” because he had proved himself so fair-minded in setting the original level of dues for Delian League members. On the day of an ostracism, an illiterate citizen handed him a pottery fragment and asked him to scratch a name on it:

“Certainly,” said Aristides. “What name shall I write?” “Aristides,” replied the man. “All right,” said Aristides as he inscribed his own name, “but why do you want to ostracize Aristides? What has he done to you?” “Oh, nothing,” the man muttered, “I don’t even know him I just can’t stand hearing everybody call him ‘the Just.’ ”

True or not, this tale demonstrates that most Athenians believed the best way to support democracy was to trust majority vote.

Some socially elite citizens bitterly criticized Athens’s democracy for giving political power to the poor. These critics insisted that oligarchy — the rule of the few — was morally superior to radical

democracy because they believed that the poor lacked the education and moral values needed for leadership and would use majority rule to strip the rich of their wealth by making them provide benefits to poorer citizens.

Pericles convinced the assembly to pass reforms to strengthen citizens’ equality, making him the most influential leader of his era. He introduced pay for all offices filled by lottery and for jury service, so that the poor could afford to serve. In 451 B.C.E., Pericles sponsored a law restricting citizenship to those whose mother and father were both Athenian by birth. Previously, wealthy men had often married foreign women from elite families. This change increased the status of Athenian women, rich or poor, as potential mothers of citizens, and it made Athenian citizenship more valuable by reducing the number of people eligible for its legal and financial benefits.

Pericles convinced the assembly to launch naval campaigns when war with Sparta broke out in the 450s B.C.E. The assembly was so eager to compete for power and plunder against other Greeks and against Persians in the eastern Mediterranean that it voted for up to three major expeditions at once. These efforts slowed in the late 450s B.C.E., after a large naval force sent to aid an Egyptian rebellion against Persian rule suffered a horrendous defeat, losing tens of thousands of oarsmen. In 446–445 B.C.E., Pericles arranged a peace treaty with Sparta for thirty years, to preserve Athenian control of the Delian League.

The Urban Landscape in Athens Golden Age Athens prospered from Delian League dues, war spoils, and profits and taxes from seaborne trade. Its artisans produced goods traded far and wide; the Etruscans in central Italy, for example, imported countless painted vases. All these activities boosted Athens to its greatest prosperity.

Athenians spent their public resources on pay for citizens participating in its democracy and on public buildings, art, and religious festivals. In private life, rich urban dwellers splurged on luxury goods influenced by Persian designs, but most houses remained modest and plain. Archaeology at the city of Olynthus in northeastern Greece has revealed typical homes grouping bedrooms, storerooms, and dining rooms around open-air courtyards. Poor city residents rented small apartments. Toilets consisted of pots indoors and a pit outside the front door. The city paid collectors to dump the waste in the countryside.

Generals won votes by spending their war spoils on public running tracks, shade trees, and buildings. The super-rich commander Cimon (c. 510–c. 450 B.C.E.), for example, paid for the Painted Stoa to be built on the edge of Athens’s agora, the central market square. There, shoppers could admire the building’s paintings commemorating the military achievements of the family of Cimon. This sort of financial contribution was voluntary, but the city-state also required wealthy citizens to pay for festivals and warship equipment. This obligation on the rich was essential because Athens, as usual in ancient Greece, had no regular property or income taxes.

On Athens’s acropolis (the rocky hill at the city’s center, Map 3.2), Pericles had the most famous buildings of Golden Age Athens erected during the 440s and 430s B.C.E.: a mammoth gateway and also an enormous marble temple of Athena called the Parthenon (“virgin goddess’s house”). These two buildings cost well more than the equivalent of a billion dollars today, a phenomenal sum for even a large Greek city-state. Pericles’ political rivals slammed him for spending too much public money on the project and diverting Delian League funds to beautify Athens. Research in surviving financial records reveals this accusation was false: Athens’s own revenues financed the building program.

MAP 3.2 Fifth-Century B.C.E. Athens The urban center of Athens, with the agora and acropolis at its heart, measured about one square mile; it was surrounded by a stone wall with a circuit of some four miles. Gates guarded by towers and various smaller entries allowed traffic in and out of the city. Much of the Athenian population lived in the many demes (villages) of the surrounding countryside. Most of the city’s water supply came from wells and springs inside the walls, but, unlike some Greek cities, Athens also had water piped in from outside. The Long Walls provided a protected corridor connecting the city to its harbor at Piraeus, where the Athenian navy was anchored and grain was imported to feed the people.

The Parthenon is the foremost symbol of Athens’s Golden Age. It honored Athena, the city’s chief deity. Inside the temple, a gold-and- ivory statue nearly forty feet high depicted the goddess in armor, holding a six-foot-tall statue of Nike, the goddess of victory. Like all other Greek temples, the Parthenon was a divinity’s residence, not a hall for worshippers. Its design was standard: a rectangular box on a raised platform lined with columns, a plan probably taken from Egypt. The Parthenon’s soaring columns fenced in a porch surrounding the interior chamber. They were carved in the simple

style called Doric, in contrast to the more elaborate Ionic and Corinthian styles (Figure 3.2).

FIGURE 3.2 Styles of Greek Capitals

The Greeks decorated the capitals, or tops, of columns in these three styles to fit the different architectural “canons” (their word for precise mathematical systems of proportions) that they devised for designing buildings. These styles were much imitated in later times, as on many U.S. state capitols and the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

The Parthenon’s massive size and innovative style proclaimed the self-confidence of Golden Age Athens and its competitive drive to build a monument more spectacular than any other in Greece. Constructed from twenty thousand tons of local marble, the temple stretched 230 feet long and 100 feet wide. Its complex architecture demonstrated the Athenian ambition to use human skill to improve nature: because perfectly rectilinear architecture appears curved to the human eye, subtle curves and inclines were built into the Parthenon to produce an illusion of completely straight lines and emphasize its massiveness.

The Parthenon’s many sculptures communicated confident messages: the gods ensure triumph over the forces of chaos, and Athenians enjoy the gods’ goodwill more than anyone else. The sculptures in each pediment (the triangular space atop the columns at either end of the temple) portrayed Athena as the city-state’s benefactor. The metopes (panels sculpted in relief above the outer

columns around all four sides) portrayed victories over hostile centaurs (creatures with the body of a horse but torso and head of a man) and other enemies of civilization. Most strikingly of all, a frieze (a continuous band of figures carved in relief) ran around the top of the walls inside the porch and was painted in bright colors to make it more visible. The Parthenon’s frieze was special because usually only Ionic-style buildings had one. The frieze showed Athenian men, women, and children parading before the gods, the procession shown in motion like the pictures in a graphic novel today.

No other Greeks had ever adorned a temple with representations of themselves. The Parthenon staked a claim of unique closeness between the city-state and the gods, reflecting the Athenians’ confidence after helping turn back the Persians, achieving leadership of a powerful naval alliance, and accumulating great public wealth. Their city-state’s success, the Athenians believed, proved that the gods were on their side, and their fabulous buildings displayed their gratitude.

Like the unique Parthenon frieze, the innovations that Golden Age artists made in representing the human body shattered tradition. By the time of the Persian Wars, Greek sculptors had begun replacing the stiffly balanced style of Archaic Age statues with statues in motion in new poses. This style of movement in stone expressed an energetic balancing of competing forces, echoing radical democracy’s principles. Sculptors began carving anatomically realistic but perfect- looking bodies, suggesting that humans could be confident about achieving beauty and perfection. Female statues now displayed the shape of the curves underneath clothing, while male ones showed athletic muscles. The faces showed a more relaxed and self-confident look in place of the rigid smiles of Archaic Age statues.

Freestanding Golden Age statues, whether paid for with private or government funds, were erected to be seen by the public. Privately commissioned statues of gods were placed in sanctuaries as symbols of devotion. Wealthy families paid for statues of their deceased

relatives, especially if they had died young in war, to be placed above their graves as memorials of their excellence and signs of the family’s social status.

REVIEW QUESTION What factors produced political change in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens?

Tradition and Innovation in Athens’s Golden Age Golden Age Athens’s prosperity and international contacts created unprecedented innovations in architecture, art, drama, education, and philosophy, but the drive to innovate conflicted with traditional ways. In keeping with tradition, women were expected to limit their public role to participation in religious ceremonies. The controversial ideas of philosophers and teachers called Sophists and the Athenian philosopher Socrates’ views on personal morality and responsibility upset many people, who feared the gods would become angry at the community for harboring these nontraditional thinkers. The tragic and comic plays presented in publicly funded drama festivals reflected the clash between innovation and tradition by examining problems in city-state life.

Religious Tradition in a Period of Change Greeks maintained religious tradition as protection against life’s dangers. They participated in the city-state’s sacrifices and festivals and also worshipped privately. Different gods were worshipped with different rituals, from animal sacrifices to offerings of fruits, vegetables, and pastries. State-funded sacrifices of large animals gathered the community to reaffirm its ties to the divine world and to feast on roasted meat from the sacrificed beast. For poor people, the free food provided at religious festivals was often the only meat they ever tasted.

The biggest festivals featured parades and contests in music, dancing, poetry, and athletics. Laborers’ contracts specified how

many days off they received to attend such ceremonies. Some festivals were for women only, such as the three-day festival for married women in honor of Demeter, goddess of agriculture and fertility.

Families marked significant events such as birth, marriage, and death with prayers, rituals, and sacrifices. They honored their ancestors with offerings made at their tombs, consulted seers about the meanings of dreams and omens, and paid magicians for spells to improve their love lives or curses to harm their enemies. Hero cults included rituals performed at the tomb of an extraordinarily famous man or woman because their remains were thought to retain special power to provide oracles, heal sickness, and protect the army. The strongman Herakles (or Hercules, as the Romans spelled his name) had cults all over the Greek world because his superhuman reputation gave him international appeal. Mystery cults initiated members into “secret knowledge” about the divine and human worlds. Initiates believed that they gained divine protection both while alive and after death.

The Athenian mystery cult of Demeter and her daughter Persephone was internationally famous. The cult’s central rite was the Mysteries, a series of initiation ceremonies. They were so popular that an international truce — as with the Olympic Games — allowed people to travel from distant places to participate. The Mysteries were open to any free Greek-speaking individuals — women and men, adults and children — if they were clear of ritual pollution (for example, if they had not committed sacrilege, been convicted of murder, or had recent contact with a corpse or blood from a birth). Some slaves who worked in the sanctuary were also eligible to participate. The main stage of initiation took more than a week. A sixth-century B.C.E. poem explained the initiation’s benefits: “Richly blessed is the mortal who has seen these rites; but whoever is not an initiate and has no share in them, that one never has an equal portion after death, down in the gloomy darkness.”

Women, Slaves, and Metics Women, slaves, and metics (foreigners granted permanent residence status in return for taxes and military service) made up the majority of Athens’s population, but they lacked political rights. Citizen women enjoyed legal privileges and social status, earning respect through their family roles and religious activities. Upper-class women managed their households, visited female friends, and participated in religious cults. Poor women worked as small-scale merchants, crafts producers, and agricultural laborers. Slaves and metics performed a variety of jobs in agriculture and commerce; some metics started their own successful businesses.

Bearing children in marriage earned women public and family status. Men were expected to respect and support their wives. Childbirth was dangerous under the medical conditions of the time. In Medea, a play of 431 B.C.E. by Euripides (c. 480–406 B.C.E.), the heroine shouts in anger at her husband, who has selfishly betrayed their marriage: “People say that we women lead a safe life at home, while men have to go to war. What fools they are! I would much rather fight in battle three times than give birth to a child even once.”

Wives were partners with their husbands in owning and managing the household’s property. Rich women acquired property, including land — the most valued possession in Greek society because it could be farmed or rented out for income — through inheritance and dowry. A husband often had to put up valuable land of his own as collateral to guarantee repayment to his wife of the amount of her dowry if he squandered it.

Like fathers, mothers were expected to hand down property to their children to keep it in the family through male heirs, since only sons could maintain their father’s family line; married daughters became members of their husband’s family. The goal of keeping property in the possession of male heirs shows up most clearly in Athenian law about heiresses (daughters whose fathers died without any sons,

which happened in about one of every five families): the closest male relative of the heiress’s father — her official guardian after her father’s death — was required to marry her. The goal was to produce a son to inherit the father’s property. This rule applied regardless of whether either party was already married (unless the heiress had sons); the heiress and the male relative were both supposed to divorce their present spouses and marry each other. In real life, however, people often used legal technicalities to get around this requirement so that they could remain with their chosen partners.

Tradition restricted women’s freedom of movement to protect them, men said, from seducers and rapists. Men wanted to ensure that their family property went only to their biological children. Well- off city women were expected to avoid contact with male strangers. Research has discredited the idea that Greek homes had a defined “women’s quarter” to which women were confined. Rather, women were granted privacy in certain rooms under their control. In their homes women would spin wool for clothing, converse with visiting friends, direct their children, supervise the slaves, and express opinions on everything, including politics, to their male relatives. Poor women had to leave the house, usually a crowded rental apartment, to sell vegetables, bread, cloth, or decorative objects they had made.

An elite woman left home for religious festivals, funerals, childbirths at the houses of relatives and friends, and shopping. Often her husband escorted her, but sometimes she took only a slave, setting her own itinerary. Most upper-class women probably viewed their limited contact with men as a badge of superior social status. For example, a pale complexion, from staying inside much of the time, was much admired as a sign of an enviable life of leisure and wealth.

Women who bore legitimate children gained increased respect and freedom, as an Athenian man explained in his speech defending himself for having killed his wife’s lover:

After my marriage, I at first didn’t interfere with my wife very much, but neither did I allow her too much independence. I kept an eye on her. … But after she had a baby, I started to trust her more and put her in charge of all my things, believing we now had the closest of relationships.

Bearing male children brought a woman special honor because sons meant security. Sons could appear in court to support their parents in lawsuits and protect them in the streets of Athens, which for most of its history had no regular police force. By law, sons were required to support elderly parents.

Some women escaped traditional restrictions by working as a hetaira (“companion”). Hetairas, usually foreigners, were unmarried, physically attractive, witty in speech, and skilled in music and poetry. Men hired them to entertain at a symposium (a drinking party to which wives were not invited). Their skill at clever teasing and joking with men gave hetairas a freedom of speech that “proper” women did not exercise in public. Hetairas nevertheless lacked the social status and respectability that married women possessed.

Sometimes hetairas sold sex for high prices; they could control their own sexuality by choosing their clients. Athenian men (but not women) could buy sex as they pleased without legal hindrance. Men (but not women) could also have sex freely with female or male slaves, who could not refuse their masters.

The most skilled hetairas earned enough to live in luxury on their own. The most famous hetaira in Athens was Aspasia from Miletus, who became Pericles’ lover and bore him a son. She dazzled men with her brilliant talk and wide knowledge of society and politics. Pericles fell so deeply in love with her that he wanted to marry her, despite his own law of 451 B.C.E. restricting citizenship to the children of two Athenian parents.

Great riches freed a woman from traditional restrictions. The most outspoken rich Athenian woman was Elpinike. She once criticized

Pericles to his face by sarcastically remarking in front of a group of women who were praising him for an attack on a rebellious Delian League ally, “This really is wonderful, Pericles. … You have caused the loss of many good citizens, not in battle against Phoenicians or Persians … but in suppressing an allied city of fellow Greeks.”

Slaves and metics were considered outsiders. Both individuals and the city-state owned slaves, who could be purchased from traders or bred in the household. Some people picked up unwanted newborns abandoned by their parents (in an accepted practice called infant exposure) and raised them as slaves. Athens’s commercial growth increased the demand for slaves, who in Pericles’ time made up around 100,000 of the city-state’s total of perhaps 250,000 inhabitants. Slaves worked in homes, on farms, and in crafts shops; rowed alongside their owners in the navy; and toiled in Athens’s dangerous silver mines. Unlike those in Sparta, slaves in Athens almost never rebelled, probably because they originated from too many different places to be able to unite.

Golden Age Athens’s wealth and cultural activities attracted metics from all around the Mediterranean. By the late fifth century B.C.E., they constituted perhaps 50,000 to 75,000 of the estimated 150,000 free men, women, and children in the city-state. Metics paid for the privilege of living and working in Athens through a special foreigners’ tax and army service, but they could not usually become citizens.

Innovative Ideas in Education, Philosophy, History, and Medicine Thinkers in the Greek Golden Age developed innovative ideas in education, philosophy, history, and medicine. These innovations angered some people, who worried that these departures from tradition would undermine society, especially in religion, thereby

provoking punishment from angry gods. Eventually, these changes promoted the development of scientific study as an enduring characteristic of Western civilization.

Education and philosophy provided the hottest battles between tradition and innovation. Parents had traditionally controlled their children’s education, which occurred in the home and included hired tutors (there were no public schools). Controversy erupted when men known as Sophists appeared in the mid-fifth century B.C.E. and offered, for pay, classes to young males on nontraditional philosophy and religious doctrines as well as new techniques for public speaking. Some philosophers’ ideas challenged traditional religious views. The philosopher Socrates’ views on personal morality provoked another fierce controversy. In writing history, innovators created novel models of interpretation to explore human experience; medical specialists developed scientific methods to investigate the human body.

Disagreement over whether these intellectual changes were dangerous for Athenian society added to the political tension that had arisen at Athens by the 430s B.C.E. concerning Athens’s harsh treatment of its own allies and its economic sanctions against Sparta’s allies. Athenians connected philosophic ideas about the nature of justice with their decisions about the city-state’s domestic and foreign policy, while also experiencing anxiety concerning the gods’ attitude toward the community.

Wealthy families sent their sons to private teachers to learn to read, write, play a musical instrument or sing, and to develop athletic skills. Physical training was considered vital because it made men’s bodies handsome and prepared them to fight in the city-state’s army and navy (all males from eighteen to sixty could be summoned to war anytime). Men exercised nude every day in gymnasia, public open-air facilities paid for by wealthy families. The daughters of wealthy families usually received instruction at home from educated slaves. Young girls learned reading, writing, and arithmetic to be able to help

their future husbands by managing the household.

Poor girls and boys learned a trade and perhaps a little reading, writing, and arithmetic by assisting their parents in their daily work or by serving as apprentices to skilled craft workers. Most people probably were weak readers, but they could always find someone to read written texts aloud. Oral communication remained central to Greek life, in political speeches, songs, plays, and stories about the past.

Rich young men learned to participate in public life by observing their fathers, uncles, and other older men as they debated in the Council of Five Hundred and the assembly, served in public office, and spoke in court. Often an older man would choose an adolescent boy as his special favorite to educate. The teenager would learn about public life by spending time with the older man. During the day the boy would listen to his mentor talking politics in the agora, help him perform his duties in public office, and work out with him in a gymnasium. They would spend their evenings at a symposium, whose agenda could range from serious political and philosophical discussion to riotous partying.

This older mentor/younger favorite relationship could lead to sexual relations between the youth and the older (married) male. Sex between mentors and favorites was considered acceptable in elite circles in many city-states, including Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. Some city-states banned this behavior, believing it reflected an adult man’s shameful inability to control his lustful desires.

By the time radical democracy emerged in Athens, young men could obtain higher education in a new way: paying expensive professional teachers called Sophists (“men of wisdom”). Sophists challenged tradition by teaching new skills of persuasion in speaking and new ways of thinking based on rational arguments. Sophists became notorious for using complex reasoning to make what many people considered deceptive arguments.

By 450 B.C.E., Athens was attracting Sophists from around the Greek world. These entrepreneurs competed with one another to attract students able to pay a high tuition. Sophists strove for excellence by offering specialized training in rhetoric — the skill of speaking persuasively. Every ambitious man wanted rhetorical training because it promised power in Athens’s assembly, councils, and courts. The Sophists alarmed those who feared their teachings would destroy the tradition that preserved democracy. Speakers trained by silver-tongued Sophists, they believed, might be able to mislead the assembly while promoting their personal interests.

Vase Painting of a Symposium

Upper-class Greek men often spent their evenings at a symposium, a drinking party that always included much conversation and usually featured music and entertainers. Wives were not included. The discussions could range widely, from literature to politics to philosophy. The man on the right is about to fling the dregs of his wine, playing a messy game called kottabos. The nudity of the female musician indicates she is a hired prostitute.

The most notorious Sophist was Protagoras (c. 490–c. 420 B.C.E.), a contemporary of Pericles. Emigrating to Athens from Abdera, in northern Greece, around 450 B.C.E., Protagoras expressed views on the nature of truth and morality that outraged many Athenians. He argued that there could be no absolute standard of truth because every issue had two irreconcilable sides. For example, if one person feels a breeze is warm but another person finds it cool, neither judgment can be absolutely correct because the wind simply is warm to one and cool to the other. Protagoras summed up this subjectivism — the belief that there is no absolute reality behind and independent of appearances — in his work Truth: “The human being is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are not.”

The subjectivism of Protagoras and other Sophists contained two main ideas: (1) human institutions and values are matters of nomos (“statute law, tradition, or convention”) and not creations of physis (“nature”), and (2) since truth is subjective, speakers should be able to argue either side of a question with equal persuasiveness and rationality. The first view implied that traditional human institutions were arbitrary and changing rather than natural and permanent, while the second seemed to make questions of right and wrong irrelevant.

The Sophists’ critics accused them of teaching moral relativism that threatened the shared values of the democratic city-state. Aristophanes (c. 446–c. 386 B.C.E.), author of comic plays, satirized Sophists for harming Athens by instructing students in persuasive techniques “to make the weaker argument the stronger.” Protagoras energetically responded that his doctrines were not hostile to democracy, arguing that every person had a natural capability for excellence and that human society depended on the rule of law based on a sense of justice. Members of a community, he explained, must be persuaded to obey the laws, not because laws were based on absolute truth, which did not exist, but because rationally it was advantageous for everyone to be law-abiding. A thief, for example,

who might claim that stealing was a part of nature, would have to be persuaded by reason that a man-made law forbidding theft was to his advantage because it protected his own property and the community in which he, like all humans, had to live to survive.

Even more disturbing to Athenians than the Sophists’ ideas about truth were their ideas about religion. Protagoras angered people with his agnosticism (the belief that supernatural phenomena are unknowable): “Whether the gods exist I cannot discover, nor what their form is like, for there are many impediments to knowledge, [such as] the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.” He upset those who thought he was saying that conventional religion had no meaning. They worried that his words would provoke divine anger against the community where he now resided.

Other fifth-century B.C.E. philosophers and thinkers also proposed controversial new scientific theories about the nature of the cosmos and the origin of religion. A philosopher friend of Pericles, for example, argued that the sun was a lump of flaming rock, not a god. Democritus, who visited Athens, invented an atomic theory of matter to explain how change was constant in the universe. Everything, he argued, consisted of tiny, invisible particles in eternal motion. Their random collisions caused them to combine and recombine in an infinite variety of forms, with no divine purpose guiding their collisions and combinations. These ideas seemed to invalidate traditional religion, which explained events as governed by the gods’ will. Even more provocative was a play written by the wealthy Athenian aristocrat Critias that denounced religion as a clever but false system invented by powerful men to fool ordinary people into obeying moral standards through fear of divine punishment.

Many poorer citizens saw the Sophists and the philosophers as threats to Athenian democracy because only wealthy men could afford their classes or spend time conversing with them, thereby gaining yet more advantages by learning to speak persuasively in the assembly’s debates or in court speeches. Moral relativism and the

physical explanation of the universe struck many Athenians as especially dangerous to religion. These ideas so infuriated some Athenians that in the 430s B.C.E. they sponsored a law allowing citizens to bring charges of impiety against “those who fail to respect divine things or teach theories about the cosmos.” Not even Pericles could prevent his philosopher friend from being convicted on this charge and expelled from Athens.

Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.), the most famous philosopher of the Golden Age, became well-known during this troubled time of the 430s, when people were anxious not just about new ways of thinking but also about war with Sparta. Socrates devoted his life to questioning people about their beliefs, but he insisted he was not a Sophist because he took no pay. Above all, he rejected the view that justice in fact amounted to power over others. Insisting that true justice was always better than injustice, he created an emphasis on ethics (the study of ideal human values and moral duties) in Greek philosophy.

Socrates lived an eccentric life attracting constant attention. Sporting a stomach that he called “a bit too big to be convenient,” he wore the same cheap cloak summer and winter and always went barefoot no matter how cold the weather. His physical stamina — including both his tirelessness as a soldier and his ability to outdrink anyone — was legendary. He lived in poverty and disdained material possessions, though he supported a wife and several children by accepting gifts from wealthy admirers.

Socrates spent his time in conversations all over Athens: participating in a symposium with friends, strolling in the agora, or watching young men exercise in a gymnasium. He wrote nothing. Our knowledge of his ideas comes from others’ writings, especially those of his famous follower Plato (c. 428–348 B.C.E.). Plato portrays Socrates as a relentless questioner of his fellow citizens, foreign friends, and leading Sophists. Socrates pushed his conversational partners to examine their basic assumptions about life. Giving few

answers, Socrates never directly instructed anyone. Instead, he led people to draw conclusions in response to his probing questions and refutations of their unexamined beliefs. Today this procedure is called the Socratic method.

Socrates frequently outraged people because his method made them feel ignorant and baffled. His questions forced them to admit that they did not in fact know what they had assumed they knew very well. Even more painful to them was Socrates’ fiercely argued view that the way they lived their lives — pursuing success in politics or business or art — was merely an excuse for avoiding the hard work of understanding and developing genuine aretê (“excellence”). Socrates insisted that he was ignorant of the definition of excellence and what was best for human beings, but that his wisdom consisted of knowing that he did not know. He vowed he wanted to improve, not undermine, people’s ethical beliefs, even though, as a friend put it, a conversation with Socrates made a man feel numb — as if a jellyfish had stung him.

Socrates especially wanted to use reasoning to discover universal, objective standards for individual ethics. He attacked the Sophists for their relativistic claim that conventional standards of right and wrong were merely “the chains that handcuff nature.” This view, he protested, equated human happiness with power and “getting more.”

Socrates insisted that the only way to achieve true happiness was to behave according to a universal, transcendent standard of just behavior that people could understand rationally. He argued that just behavior and excellence were identical to knowledge, and that true knowledge of justice would inevitably lead people to choose good over evil. They would therefore have truly happy lives, regardless of how rich or poor they were. Since Socrates believed that ethical knowledge was all a person needed for the good life, he argued that no one knowingly behaved unjustly and that behaving justly was always in the individual’s interest. It was simply ignorant to believe that the best life was the life of unlimited power to pursue whatever

one desired. The most desirable human life was concerned with excellence and guided by reason, not by dreams of personal gain.

Though very different from the Sophists’ doctrines, Socrates’ ideas proved just as disturbing to the masses because they rejected the Athenians’ traditional way of life. His ridicule of commonly accepted ideas about the importance of wealth and public success angered many people. Unhappiest of all were the fathers whose sons, after listening to Socrates’ questions reduce someone to utter bewilderment, came home to try the same technique on their parents, employing the Socratic method to criticize their parents’ values as old-fashioned and worthless. Men who experienced this reversal of the traditional educational hierarchy — the father was supposed to educate the son — felt that Socrates was undermining the stability of society by making young men question Athenian traditions. Socrates evidently did not teach women, but Plato portrays him as ready to learn from exceptional women, such as Pericles’ companion Aspasia.

The worry that Socrates’ ideas presented a danger to conventional society inspired Aristophanes to write his comedy The Clouds (423 B.C.E.). This play portrays Socrates as a cynical Sophist who, for a fee, offers instruction in Protagoras’s technique of making the weaker argument the stronger. When Socrates’ school transforms a youth into a public speaker arguing persuasively that a son has the right to beat his parents, his father burns the place down. None of these plot details was real, but people did have a genuine fear that Socrates’ radical views on individual morality endangered the city-state’s traditional practices.

Just as the Sophists and Socrates antagonized many people with their new ideas, the men who first wrote Greek history created controversy because they took a critical attitude in their descriptions of the past. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485–425 B.C.E.) and Thucydides of Athens (c. 455–399 B.C.E.) became Greece’s most famous historians and established Western civilization’s tradition of writing

history. The fifth century B.C.E.’s unprecedented events — a coalition Greek victory over the world’s greatest power and then the longest war ever between Greeks — inspired them to create history as a subject based on strenuous research. They explained that they wrote histories because they wanted people to remember the past and to understand why wars had taken place.

Herodotus’s long, groundbreaking work The Histories (“Inquiries” in Greek) explained the Persian Wars as a clash between the cultures of the East and West. A typically competitive Greek intellectual, Herodotus — who by Roman times had become known as the Father of History — made the justifiable claim that he surpassed all those who had previously recorded the past by taking an in-depth and investigative approach to evidence, examining the culture of non- Greeks as well as Greeks, and expressing explicit and implicit judgments about people’s actions. Because Herodotus recognized the necessity (and the delight) of studying other cultures with respect, he pushed his inquiries deep into the past, looking for long-standing cultural differences to help explain the Persian-Greek conflict. He showed that Greeks and non-Greeks were equally capable of good and evil. Unlike poets and playwrights, he focused on human psychology and interactions, not the gods, as the driving forces in history.

Thucydides innovated — and competed with Herodotus — by writing contemporary history and creating the kind of analysis of power that today underlies political science. His History of the Peloponnesian War made power politics, not divine intervention, history’s primary force. Deeply affected by the war’s brutality, Thucydides used his experiences as a politician and failed military commander (he was exiled for losing a key outpost) to make his narrative vivid and frank in describing human moral failings. His insistence that historians should energetically seek out the most reliable sources and evaluate their testimony with objectivity set a high standard for later writers. Like Herodotus, he challenged tradition by revealing that Greek history included not just glorious achievements but also some share of shameful acts (such as the

Athenian punishment of the Melians in the Peloponnesian War).

Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.E.) of Cos, a contemporary of Thucydides, challenged tradition by grounding medical diagnosis and treatment in clinical observation. His fame continues today in the oath bearing his name (the Hippocratic oath), which doctors swear at the beginning of their professional careers. Previously, medicine had depended on magic and ritual. People believed that evil spirits caused diseases, and various cults offered healing to patients through divine intervention. Competing to refute these earlier doctors’ theories, Hippocrates insisted that only physical factors caused illnesses. He may have been the author of the view, dominant in later medicine, that four humors (fluids) made up the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Health depended on keeping the proper balance among them; being healthy was to be “in good humor.” This system for understanding the body corresponded to the division of the inanimate world into four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.

Hippocrates taught that the physician’s most important duty was to base his knowledge on careful observation of patients and their responses to different treatments. Clinical experience, not abstract theory or religious belief, was the proper foundation for establishing effective cures. By putting his innovative ideas and practices to the test in competition with those of traditional medicine, Hippocrates established the truth of his principle, which later became a cornerstone of scientific medicine.

The Development of Greek Tragedy Ideas about the problematic relationship between gods and humans inspired Golden Age Athens’s most prominent cultural innovation: tragic drama. Plays called tragedies were presented in a contest for playwrights held before large audiences as part of multiday festivals for the god Dionysus. Most Greek plays have not survived: only thirty-

three still exist of the hundreds of tragedies produced at Athens.

Public revenues and mandatory contributions by the rich paid for Athenian dramas. The competition in this public art began with an official choosing three authors from a pool of applicants. Each of the finalists presented four plays in one day: three tragedies in a row (a trilogy), followed by a semicomic play featuring satyrs (mythical half- man, half-animal beings) to end the day on a lighter note. Tragedies were written in verses of solemn language, and many were based on stories about the violent possibilities when gods and humans interacted. The plots often ended with a resolution to the trouble — but only after enormous suffering and loss.

At Athens, as in many other cities in Greece, plays were presented during the daytime in an outdoor theater. The one at Athens was built into the southern slope of the acropolis and held about fourteen thousand spectators overlooking an open, circular area in front of a slightly raised stage. A tragedy had eighteen cast members, all of whom were men: three actors to play the speaking roles (both male and female characters) and fifteen chorus members. Although the chorus leader sometimes engaged in dialogue with the actors, the chorus primarily performed songs and dances in the circular area in front of the stage, called the orchestra.

A successful tragedy offered a vivid spectacle. The chorus wore elaborate costumes and performed intricate dance routines. The actors, who wore masks, used broad gestures and booming voices to reach the upper tier of seats. A powerful voice was crucial to a tragic actor because words represented the heart of the plays, which featured extensive dialogue and long speeches. Special effects were popular. Actors playing the roles of gods swung from a crane to fly suddenly onto the stage. Actors playing lead roles, called the protagonists (“first competitors”), competed to win the “best actor” award. A skilled protagonist was so important to a play’s success that actors were assigned by lottery to the competing playwrights so that all three had an equal chance to have a winning cast. Great actors

became enormously popular.

Theater of Dionysus at Athens

Around 14,000 spectators packed this theater in Athens on the southern side of the acropolis as the audience for plays (tragedies and comedies) presented as part of multiday festivals honoring the god Dionysus. Originally the theater had only a few permanent seats in the front rows for VIPs, but eventually stone seating was built on the slope of the hill, curving around the flat circular area down front where the chorus would dance and sing; the actors appeared on a temporary stage set up at the edge of this area.

Playwrights came from the social elite because only men with wealth could afford the amount of time and learning this work demanded. They served as authors, directors, producers, musical composers, choreographers, and occasionally actors for their own plays. As citizens, playwrights fulfilled the military and political obligations of Athenian men. The best-known Athenian tragedians — Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.E.), Sophocles (c. 496–406 B.C.E.), and Euripides (c. 485–406 B.C.E.) — all served in the army, and Sophocles was elected

to Athens’s board of “generals.” Authors of plays competed from a love of honor, not money. The prizes, determined by a board of judges, awarded high prestige but little cash. The competition was regarded as so important that any judge who took a bribe in awarding prizes was put to death.

Tragedy’s plots set out the difficulties of telling right from wrong when humans came into conflict and the gods became involved. Even though most tragedies were based on stories that referred to a legendary time before city-states existed, such as the period of the Trojan War, the plays’ moral issues were relevant to the society and obligations of citizens in a city-state. The plays suggest that human beings learn only by suffering but that the gods could, if they wished, provide justice in the long run. For example, Aeschylus’s trilogy Oresteia (458 B.C.E.) explains the divine origins of democratic Athens’s court system through the story of the gods finally stopping the murderous violence in the family of Orestes, son of King Agamemnon, the Greek leader against Troy.

Sophocles’ Antigone (441 B.C.E.) presents the story of the cursed family of Oedipus of Thebes as a drama of harsh conflict between a courageous woman, Antigone, and the city-state’s stern male leader, her uncle Creon. After her brother dies in a failed rebellion, Antigone insists on her family’s moral obligation to bury its dead in obedience to divine command. Creon, however, takes harsh action to preserve order and protect community values by prohibiting the burial of his traitorous nephew. In a horrifying story of raging anger and suicide that features one of the most famous heroines of Western literature, Sophocles exposes the right and wrong on each side of the conflict. His play offers no easy resolution of the competing interests of divinely sanctioned moral tradition and the state’s political rules.

By basing their plots on difficult moral dilemmas, authors of tragedies stimulated spectators to consider the dangers to democracy from ignorance, arrogance, and violence. Audiences reacted strongly to the messages of these tragedies. For one thing, spectators realized

that the plays’ central characters were people who experienced disaster even though they held positions of power and prestige. The characters’ reversals of fortune came about not because they were absolute villains but because, as humans, they were susceptible to a lethal mixture of error, ignorance, and hubris (violent arrogance that transformed one’s competitive spirit into a self-destructive force). The Athenian Empire was at its height when audiences at Athens attended the tragedies written by competing playwrights. Thoughtful playgoers could reflect on the possibility that Athens’s current power and prestige, managed as they were by humans, might fall victim to the same kinds of mistakes and conflicts that brought down the heroes and heroines of tragedy. Thus, these publicly funded plays both entertained through their spectacle and educated through their stories and words. In particular, they reminded male citizens — who governed the city-state in its assembly, council, and courts — that success created complex moral problems that self-righteous arrogance turned into community-wide catastrophes.

The Development of Greek Comedy Golden Age Athens developed comedy as its second distinctive form of public theater. Like tragedies, comedies were written in verse, performed in festivals honoring the god Dionysus, and subsidized with public funds and contributions from the rich. Unlike tragedies, comedies commented directly on public policy and bluntly criticized current politicians and intellectuals. They also portrayed women as powerfully concerned with the fate of their city-state. The plots and casts of comedies presented outrageous fantasies of contemporary life. Comic choruses, which had twenty-four dancing singers, could be colorfully costumed as talking birds or dancing clouds, or an actor could fly on a giant dung beetle to visit the gods.

Authors competed to win the award for the festival’s best comedy by creating beautiful poetry, raising laughs with constant jokes and

puns, and mocking self-important citizens and political leaders. The humor, delivered in a stream of imaginative profanity full of “dirty words,” frequently concerned sex and bodily functions. Well-known men of the day were targets for insults as cowards or weaklings. Women characters when portrayed as figures of fun and ridicule seem to have been fictional, to protect the dignity of actual female citizens.

Athenian comedies often made fun of political leaders. As the leading politician of radical democracy, Pericles was the subject of fierce criticism in comedy. Comic playwrights ridiculed his policies, his love life, even the shape of his skull (“Old Turnip Head” was a favorite insult). Aristophanes (c. 455–385 B.C.E.), Athens’s most famous comic playwright, so fiercely satirized Cleon, the city’s most prominent leader early in the Peloponnesian War, that Cleon sued him. A citizen jury ruled in Aristophanes’ favor, upholding the Athenian tradition of free speech.

In several of Aristophanes’ comedies, the main characters are powerful women who force the men of Athens to change their policy to preserve family life and the city-state. These plays even criticize the assembly’s policy during wartime. Most famous is Lysistrata (411 B.C.E.), named after the female lead character of the play. In this fantasy, the women of Athens and Sparta unite to force their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War. To make the men agree to a peace treaty, they first seize the acropolis, where Athens’s financial reserves are kept, to prevent the men from squandering them further on the war. They then use sarcasm and pitchers of cold water to beat back an attack on their position by the old men who have remained in Athens while the younger men are away at war with Sparta. Above all, the women steel themselves to refuse to sleep with their husbands returning from battle. The effects of their sex strike on the men, portrayed in a series of explicit episodes, finally drive the warriors to make peace.

Lysistrata presents women acting bravely and aggressively against

men who seem bent on destroying traditional family life — the men are absent from home for long stretches while on military campaigns and ruin the city-state by prolonging a pointless war. Lysistrata insists that women have the intelligence and judgment to make political decisions: “I am a woman, and, yes, I have brains. And I’m pretty good in my judgment. My education hasn’t been bad: it came from my listening often to the conversations of my father and the elders among the men.” Lysistrata’s old-fashioned training and good sense allow her to see what needs to be done to protect the community. Like the heroines of tragedy, Lysistrata is a conservative, even a reactionary. She wants to put things back the way they were before the war fractured family life. To do that, she has to act like an impatient revolutionary. That irony sums up the challenge that fifth- century B.C.E. Athens faced in trying to resolve the tension between the dynamic innovation of its Golden Age and the importance of tradition in Greek life. At the same time, the plot of this comic play, like that of others by Aristophanes such as Women at the Assembly, reveals that men in fact recognized the political capability of women.

The remarkable freedom of speech of Athenian comedy allowed frank, even brutal, commentary on current issues and personalities. It is significant that this energetic, critical drama emerged in Athens at the same time as radical democracy, in the mid-fifth century B.C.E. The feeling that all (male) citizens should have a stake in determining their government’s policies evidently fueled a passion for using biting humor to keep the community’s (male) leaders from becoming arrogant and aloof.

REVIEW QUESTION How did new ways of thinking in the Golden Age change traditional ways of life?

The End of Athens’s Golden Age, 431–403 B.C.E. A war between Athens and Sparta (431–404 B.C.E.) ended the Golden Age. This long conflict is called the Peloponnesian War because it matched Sparta’s Peloponnese-based alliance against Athens and the Delian League. The war started, according to Thucydides, because the growth of Athenian power alarmed the Spartans, who feared that their interests and allies would fall to the Athenians’ restless energy. Pericles, who deeply distrusted the Spartans, persuaded Athens’s assembly to take a hard line when Sparta demanded that Athens ease restrictions on city-states allied with Sparta. Corinth and Megara, crucial Spartan allies, complained bitterly to Sparta about Athens. Finally, Corinth told Sparta to attack Athens, or else Corinth and its navy would change sides to the Athenian alliance. Sparta’s leaders therefore gave Athens an ultimatum — stop mistreating our allies. Pericles convinced the Athenian voters to reject the ultimatum on the grounds that Sparta had refused to settle the dispute through the third-party arbitration process called for by the 446–445 B.C.E. treaty. Pericles’ critics claimed he was insisting on war against Sparta to revive his fading popularity. His supporters replied that he was defending Athenian honor and protecting foreign trade, a key to the economy. By 431 B.C.E., these disputes had shattered the peace treaty between Athens and Sparta that Pericles had negotiated fifteen years before.

The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 B.C.E. Lasting longer than any previous war in Greek history, the Peloponnesian War (Map 3.3) took place above all because Spartan

leaders believed they had to fight now to keep the Athenians from using their superior long-distance offensive power — the Delian League’s naval forces — to destroy Sparta’s control of their Peloponnesian League. Sparta made the first strike of the war, but the conflict dragged on so long because the Athenian assembly failed to negotiate peace with Sparta when it had the chance and because the Spartans were willing to make a deal with Persia to secure money to build a fleet to win the war.

MAP 3.3 The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 B.C.E.

For the first ten years, the Peloponnesian War’s battles took place largely in mainland Greece. Sparta, whose armies usually avoided distant campaigns, shocked Athens when its general Brasidas led successful attacks against Athenian forces in northeast Greece. Athens stunned the entire Greek world in the war’s next phase by launching a huge naval expedition against Spartan allies in far-off Sicily. The last ten years of the war saw the action move to the east, on and along the western coast of Anatolia and its islands, on the boundary of the Persian Empire. Feeling threatened, the Persian king helped the Spartans build a navy there to defeat the famous Athenian fleet. Look at the route of Athens’s expedition to Sicily; why do you think the Athenians took this longer voyage, rather than a more direct route?

Dramatic evidence for the anger that fueled the war comes from Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ stern oration to the Athenian assembly about not yielding to Spartan pressure:

If we do go to war, have no thought that you went to war over a trivial affair. For you this trifling matter is the assurance and the proof of your determination. If you yield to their demands, they will immediately confront you with some larger demand, since they will think that you only gave way on the first point out of fear. But if you stand firm, you will show them that they have to deal with you as equals. … When our equals, without agreeing to arbitration of the matter under dispute, make claims on us as neighbors and state those claims as commands, it would be no better than slavery to give in to them, no matter how large or how small the claim may be.

When Sparta invaded Athenian territory, Pericles advised a two- pronged strategy to win what he saw would be a long war: (1) use the navy to raid the lands of Sparta and its allies; and (2) avoid large infantry battles with the superior land forces of the Spartans, even when the enemy hoplites plunder the Athenian countryside outside the city. Athens’s citizens could retreat to safety behind the city’s impregnable walls, massive barriers of stone that encircled the city and the harbor, with the fortification known as the Long Walls protecting the land corridor between the urban center and the port (Map 3.2). He insisted that Athenians should sacrifice their vast and valuable country property to save their population. In the end, he predicted, Athens, with its superior resources, would win a war of attrition, especially because the Spartans, lacking a base in Athenian territory, could not support long invasions.

Pericles’ strategy and leadership might have made Athens the winner in the long run, but an epidemic struck Athens in 430 B.C.E., killing Pericles the next year and depriving Athens of his leadership. This plague ravaged Athens’s population for four years, killing

thousands among the people packed in behind the walls to avoid Spartan attacks. Despite their losses and their fears that the gods had sent the disease to punish them, the Athenians fought on. Over time, however, they abandoned the disciplined strategy that Pericles’ prudent plan had required. The generals elected after his death, especially Cleon, pursued a much more aggressive strategy. At first this succeeded, especially when a group of Spartan hoplites laid down their arms after being blockaded by Cleon’s forces at Pylos in 425 B.C.E. Their surrender shocked the Greek world and led Sparta to ask for a truce, but the Athenian assembly refused, believing their army could now crush their enemy. When the daring Spartan general Brasidas captured Athens’s possessions in northern Greece in 424 and 423 B.C.E., however, he turned the tide of war in the other direction by crippling the Athenian supply of timber and precious metals from this crucial region. When Brasidas and Cleon were both killed in 422 B.C.E., mutual exhaustion made Sparta and Athens agree to a peace treaty in 421 B.C.E.

Athens’s most innovative and confident new general, Alcibiades, soon persuaded the assembly to reject the peace and to attack Spartan allies in 418 B.C.E. In 416–415 B.C.E., the Athenians and their allies overpowered the tiny and strategically meaningless Aegean island of Melos because it refused to abandon its allegiance to Sparta. Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, dramatically represents Athenian messengers telling the Melians they had to be conquered to show that Athens permitted no defiance to its dominance. Following their victory, the Athenians executed the Melian men, sold the women and children into slavery, and colonized the island.

The turning point in the war came soon thereafter, when, in 415 B.C.E., Alcibiades persuaded the Athenian assembly to launch the greatest and most expensive campaign in Greek history. The expedition of 415 B.C.E. was directed against Sparta’s allies in Sicily, far to the west. Alcibiades had dazzled his fellow citizens with the dream of conquering that rich island and especially its greatest city,

Syracuse. Alcibiades’ political rivals had him removed from his command, however, and the other generals blundered into catastrophic defeat in Sicily in 413 B.C.E. (see Map 3.3). The victorious Syracusans destroyed the allied invasion fleet and packed the survivors like sardines into quarries under the blazing sun, with no toilets and only half a pint of drinking water and a handful of food a day.

On the advice of Alcibiades, who had deserted to their side in anger at having lost his command, the Spartans in 413 B.C.E. seized a permanent base of operations in the Athenian countryside for year- round raids, now that Athens was too weak to drive them out. Constant Spartan attacks devastated Athenian agriculture, and twenty thousand slave workers crippled production in Athens’s silver mines by deserting to the enemy. The democratic assembly became so upset over these losses that in 411 B.C.E. it voted itself out of existence in favor of an emergency government run by the wealthier citizens. When an oligarchic group illegally took charge, however, the citizens restored the radical democracy and kept fighting for another seven years. They even recalled Alcibiades, seeking better generalship, but the end came when Persia gave the Spartans money to build a navy. The Persian king thought it served his interests to have Athens defeated. Aggressive Spartan naval action forced Athens to surrender in 404 B.C.E. After twenty-seven years of near-continuous war, the Athenians were at their enemy’s mercy.

Athens Defeated: Tyranny and Civil War, 404–403 B.C.E. Following Athens’s surrender, the Spartans installed a regime of antidemocratic Athenians known as the Thirty Tyrants, who collaborated with the victors. The collaborators were members of the social elite; some, including the violent leader Critias, infamous for

his criticism of religion, had been well-known pupils of the Sophists. Brutally suppressing democratic opposition, these oligarchs embarked on an eight-month period of murder and plunder in 404– 403 B.C.E. The speechwriter Lysias, for example, reported that Spartan henchmen murdered his brother to steal the family’s valuables, even ripping the gold rings from the ears of his brother’s wife. Outraged at the violence and greed of the Thirty Tyrants, citizens who wanted to restore democracy banded together outside the city to fight to regain control of Athens. A feud between Sparta’s two most important leaders paralyzed the Spartans, and they failed to send decisive help to the Athenian collaborators. The democratic rebels defeated the forces of the Thirty Tyrants in a series of bloody street battles in Athens.

Democracy was thereby restored, but the citizens still seethed with anger and unrest. To settle the internal strife that threatened to tear Athens apart, the newly restored democratic assembly voted the first known amnesty in Western history, a truce agreement forbidding any official charges or recriminations from crimes committed in 404–403 B.C.E. Agreeing not to pursue grievances in court was the price of peace. As would soon become clear, however, some Athenians harbored grudges that no amnesty could dispel. In addition, Athens’s financial and military strength had been shattered. At the end of the Golden Age, Athenians worried about how to remake their lives and restore the reputation that their city-state’s innovative accomplishments had produced.

REVIEW QUESTION What factors determined the course of the Peloponnesian War?

MAPPING THE WEST Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean, 400 B.C.E.

No single power controlled the Mediterranean region at the end of the fifth century B.C.E. In the west, the Phoenician city of Carthage and the Greek cities on Sicily and in southern Italy were rivals for the riches to be won by trade. In the east, the Spartans, confident after their recent victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian War, tried to become an international power outside the mainland for the first time in their history by sending campaigns into Anatolia. This aggressive action aroused stiff opposition from the Persians because it threatened their westernmost imperial provinces. There was to be no peace and quiet in the Mediterranean, even after the twenty-seven years of the Peloponnesian War.

Conclusion The Greek city-states that united early in the fifth century B.C.E. to resist the Persian Empire surprised everyone by defeating the invaders and preserving their political independence. Following the unexpected Greek victory, Athens competed with Sparta for power. The Athenian Golden Age that followed was based on empire and trade, and the city’s riches funded the widening of democracy and famous cultural accomplishments.

As the money poured in, Athens built glorious and expensive temples, legislated pay for service in many government offices to strengthen democracy, and assembled the Mediterranean’s most powerful navy as leaders of the Delian League — called the Athenian Empire by its critics. The poor men who rowed the ships demanded greater democracy; such demands led to political and legal reforms that guaranteed fairer treatment for all. Pericles became the most famous politician of the Golden Age by leading the drive for radical democracy.

Religious practice and women’s lives reflected the strong grip of tradition on everyday life, but innovations in education and philosophy created social tension. The Sophists’ moral relativism disturbed tradition-minded people, as did Socrates’ definition of excellence, which questioned ordinary people’s love of wealth and success. Art and architecture broke out of old forms, promoting an impression of balanced motion rather than stability, while medicine gained a more scientific basis. Tragedy and comedy developed at Athens as competitive public theater commenting on contemporary social and political issues.

The Athenians’ harsh treatment of allies and enemies combined with Spartan fears about Athenian power to bring on the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Nearly three decades of battle brought the stars of the Greek Golden Age crashing to earth: by 400 B.C.E., the Athenians

found themselves in the same situation as in 500 B.C.E., fearful of Spartan power and worried whether the world’s most direct democracy could survive.

Chapter 3 Review

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE Be sure that you can identify the term or person and explain its historical significance.

Themistocles Delian League triremes Pericles radical democracy ostracism agora Parthenon mystery cults metic hetaira Sophists Socratic method hubris

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. How did the Greeks overcome the dangers of the Persian

invasions? 2. What factors produced political change in fifth-century B.C.E.

Athens? 3. How did new ways of thinking in the Golden Age change

traditional ways of life? 4. What factors determined the course of the Peloponnesian War?

MAKING CONNECTIONS 1. What were the most significant differences between Archaic Age

Greece and Golden Age Greece? 2. For what sorts of things did Greeks of the Golden Age spend

public funds? Why did they believe these things were worth the expense?

3. What price, in all senses, did Athens and the rest of Greece pay for the Golden Age? Was it worth it?

IMPORTANT EVENTS 500–323 B.C.E. Classical Age of Greece

499–479 B.C.E. Wars between Persia and Greece

490 B.C.E. Battle of Marathon

480 B.C.E. Battle of Salamis

480–479 B.C.E. Xerxes invades Greece

461 B.C.E. Ephialtes reforms Athenian court system

Early 450s B.C.E. Pericles introduces pay for officeholders in Athenian democracy

451 B.C.E. Pericles restricts Athenian citizenship to children whose parents are both citizens

450 B.C.E. Protagoras and other Sophists begin to teach in Athens

446–445 B.C.E. (winter) Peace treaty between Athens and Sparta, intended to last thirty years

441 B.C.E. Sophocles presents tragedy Antigone

431–404 B.C.E. Peloponnesian War

420s B.C.E. Herodotus finishes Histories

415–413 B.C.E. Enormous Athenian military expedition against Sicily

411 B.C.E. Aristophanes presents the comedy Lysistrata

404–403 B.C.E. Rule of Thirty Tyrants at Athens

403 B.C.E. Restoration of democracy in Athens

C H A P T E R 4

From the Classical to the Hellenistic World

400–30 B.C.E.

ABOUT 255 B.C.E., AN EGYPTIAN CAMEL TRADER FAR FROM HOME SENT a letter of complaint to his Greek employer back in Egypt:

You know that when you left me in Syria with Krotos I followed all your instructions concerning the camels and behaved blamelessly towards you. But Krotos has ignored your orders to pay me my salary; I’ve received nothing despite asking him for my money over and over. He just tells me to go away. I waited a long time for you to come, but when I no longer had life’s necessities and couldn’t get help anywhere, I had to run away … to keep from starving to death. … I am desperate summer and winter. … They have treated me like dirt because I am not a Greek. I therefore beg you, please, order them to pay me so that I won’t go hungry just because I don’t know how to speak Greek.

The trader’s plea for help from a foreigner living in his homeland reflects the changes in the eastern Mediterranean world during the Hellenistic Age (323–30 B.C.E.). The movement of Greeks into the Near East increased the cultural interaction between the Greek and the Near Eastern worlds and set a new course for Western civilization in politics, art, philosophy, science, and religion. Above all, Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.E.) changed the course of history by conquering the Persian Empire, leading an army of Greeks and Macedonians to the border of India, taking Near

Easterners into his army and imperial administration, and planting colonies of Greeks as far east as Afghanistan. His amazing expedition shocked the world and spurred great change in Western civilization by combining Near Eastern and Greek traditions as never before.

Politics changed in the Greek world when Alexander’s successors (who had been commanders in his army) created new kingdoms that became the dominant powers of the Hellenistic Age. The existing Greek city-states retained local rule but lost their independence in international affairs. The Hellenistic kings imported Greeks to fill royal offices, man their armies, and run businesses, generating tension with their non-Greek subjects. Egyptians, Syrians, or Mesopotamians who wanted to rise in Hellenistic society had to win the support of these Greeks and learn their language.

The Near East’s local cultures interacted with the Greek overlords’ culture to spawn a multicultural synthesis. Although Hellenistic royal society always remained hierarchical, its kings and queens financed innovations in art, philosophy, religion, and science that combined Near Eastern and Greek traditions. The Hellenistic kingdoms collapsed in the second and first centuries B.C.E., when the Romans overthrew them one by one. But the cultural interaction between diverse peoples and the emergence of new ideas — unintended consequences of Alexander’s military campaigns — would strongly influence Roman civilization.

CHAPTER FOCUS What were the major political and cultural changes in the Hellenistic Age?

Classical Greece after the Peloponnesian War, 400–350 B.C.E.

The Greek city- states regained political stability after the Peloponnesian

War (431–404 B.C.E.), but daily life remained financially hard for many. The war’s aftermath dramatically affected Greek philosophy. At Athens, citizens who blamed Socrates for inspiring the Thirty Tyrants’ crimes prosecuted him in court; the jury condemned him to death. His execution helped persuade the philosophers Plato and Aristotle to detest democracy and develop new ways of thinking about right and wrong and how human beings should live.

The Greek city-states’ continuing competition for power in the fourth century B.C.E. drained their resources. Sparta’s attempt to dominate central Greece and western Anatolia by collaborating with the Persians provoked violent resistance from Thebes and Athens. By the 350s B.C.E., the Greek city-states had so weakened themselves that they were unable to prevent the Macedonian kingdom from taking control of Greece.

Athens’s Recovery after the Peloponnesian War The devastation of Athens’s economy in the Peloponnesian War and overcrowding of refugees from the country in the wartime city produced social conflict. Life became difficult for middle-class women whose male relatives had been killed. With no man to provide

for them and their children, many war widows had to work outside the home. The only jobs open to them — such as wet-nursing, weaving, or laboring in vineyards — were low-paying.

Resourceful Athenians found ways to profit from women’s skills. The family of one of Socrates’ friends, for example, fell into poverty when several widowed sisters, nieces, and female cousins moved in. The friend complained to Socrates that he was too poor to support his new family of fourteen plus their slaves. Socrates replied that the women knew how to make clothing, so they should sell it. This plan succeeded financially, but the women then complained that Socrates’ friend was the household’s only member who ate without working. Socrates advised the man to reply that the women should think of him as sheep did a guard dog — he earned his share of the food by keeping the wolves away.

Athens’s postwar economy recovered somewhat as international trade was revived once its Long Walls, which protected the transportation corridor from the city to the port, were rebuilt and mining for silver to produce the city’s coinage resumed. Greek businesses producing manufactured goods were small and usually family-run; the largest known was a shield-making company with 120 slave workers. Some changes occurred in occupations formerly defined by gender. For example, men began working alongside women in cloth production when the first commercial weaving shops outside the home sprang up. Some women made careers in the arts, especially painting and music, which men had traditionally dominated.

Silver Coins of Athens The city-state of ancient Athens owned rich silver mines that financed its silver coinage, famous around the Greek world for purity and reliability. This coin from the fifth century B.C.E. was a decadrachm (“ten drachmas”), which was the amount that a worker or rower in the Athenian navy earned in ten days. The images show Athena, the city-state’s main goddess, and an owl with an olive branch, also symbols of Athena. The style of the images was kept old-fashioned and mostly unchanging so as not to harm the trust that people in foreign lands had in accepting Athenian coins in trade and commerce as a form of international currency.

Making a living remained a struggle for working people. Most workers earned barely enough to feed and clothe their families. They ate two meals a day, with bread baked from barley as their main food; only rich people could afford wheat bread. A family bought bread from small bakery stands, often run by women, or made it at home, with the wife directing the slaves in grinding the grain, shaping the dough, and baking it in a clay oven heated by charcoal. People topped their bread with greens, beans, onions, garlic, olives, fruit, and cheese. The few households rich enough to afford meat, boiled or grilled it over a fire. Everyone of all ages drank wine, diluted with water, with every meal.

The Execution of Socrates, 399 B.C.E. Socrates, Athens’s best known philosopher in the Golden Age of the fifth century, fell victim to the bitterness many Athenians felt about the rule of the Thirty Tyrants following the Peloponnesian War. Some prominent Athenians hated Socrates because his follower Critias had been one of the Thirty Tyrants’ most violent leaders. These citizens charged Socrates with impiety, claiming he rejected the city-state’s gods, introduced new divinities, and lured young men away from Athenian moral traditions. Speaking to a jury of 501 male citizens, Socrates refused to beg for sympathy, as defendants customarily did, and repeated his dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining how to live justly. He vowed to remain their stinging gadfly.

When the jurors narrowly voted to convict Socrates, Athenian law required them to decide between the penalty proposed by the prosecutors and that proposed by the defendant. The prosecutors proposed death. Socrates dramatically rejected the tradition of proposing exile to escape execution, saying he deserved a reward for his conduct; horrified, his friends made him propose a fine as his penalty. The jury chose death, requiring him to drink a poison concocted from powdered hemlock. Socrates calmly accepted his sentence with the words, “No evil can come to a good man either in life or in death, and the gods do not fail to pay attention to what he does.” Many Athenians soon regretted Socrates’ execution as a tragic mistake and a severe blow to their reputation.

The Philosophy of Plato Socrates’ death helped make his follower Plato (429–348 B.C.E.) hate democracy. Plato, who became Greece’s most famous philosopher of all time, started out as a political consultant supporting philosopher- tyrants as the best rulers, but their misdeeds performed against his advice convinced him that politicians could never avoid violence and greed. So, he turned to talking and writing about philosophy as the guide to life, establishing a school in Athens around 386 B.C.E. Called the Academy, it was an association of apparently only men studying philosophy, mathematics, and theoretical astronomy under the leader’s guidance. It attracted intellectuals to Athens for the next nine hundred years, and Plato’s ideas about the nature of reality, ethics, and politics have remained central to philosophy and political science to this day.

Plato’s interests included astronomy, mathematics, political philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics (ideas about the ultimate nature of reality beyond the reach of the human senses). Plato wrote dialogues, to provoke readers into thoughtful reflection without prescribing definite beliefs. Nevertheless, he always maintained one

essential idea based on his view of reality: ultimate moral qualities are universal, unchanging, and absolute. He emphatically rejected the relativism espoused by the Sophists.

Plato’s dialogues explore his theory that justice, goodness, beauty, and equality exist on their own in a higher realm. He used the word Forms (or Ideas) to describe the abstract, invariable, and ultimate nature of these ethical qualities. Moreover, he argued that the Forms are the only genuine reality. All things that humans perceive with their senses are only dim and imperfect copies of these metaphysical absolutes.

Plato believed that humans possess immortal souls distinct from their bodies; this idea established the concept of dualism, a separation between soul (or mind) and body. Plato further explained that the human soul possesses preexisting knowledge put there by a god. Humans’ present, impure existence is only a temporary stage in cosmic existence because, while the body does not last, the soul is immortal. Plato argued that people must seek perfect order and purity in their souls by using rational thought to control thoughtless and therefore harmful desires. People who yield to such desires fail to consider the future of their body and soul. The desire to drink too much alcohol, for example, is flawed because the binge drinker fails to consider the painful hangover that will follow.

Plato presented his most famous ideas on politics and justice in his dialogue The Republic. This work, whose Greek title Politeia (pol-ee- TAY-uh) means “system of government,” discusses the nature of justice and the reasons people should never commit injustice. Democracy, Plato wrote, fails to produce justice because people cannot rise above their own self-interests to knowledge of the transcendent reality of universal truth. Justice can come only under the rule of an enlightened oligarchy or monarchy.

Plato’s Republic describes an ideal society with a hierarchy of three classes distinguished by their ability to grasp the truth of Forms. Plato did not think humans could actually create the model society

described in The Republic, but he did believe that imagining it was an important way to help people learn to live justly. The highest class in his envisioned hierarchy consists of the rulers, or “guardians,” who must be educated in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics. Next are the “auxiliaries,” who defend the community. “Producers” make up the bottom class; they grow food and make objects for the other classes. According to Plato’s Republic, women can be guardians because they possess the same virtues and abilities as men, except that the average woman has less physical strength than the average man. To minimize distraction, guardians have neither private property nor nuclear families. Male and female guardians live in houses shared in common, eat in the same dining halls, and exercise in the same gymnasia. They have sex with various partners so that the best women can mate with the best men to produce the best children. The children are raised together by special caretakers, not their parents. Guardians who achieve the highest level of knowledge can rule as philosopher-kings.

Aristotle, Scientist and Philosopher After studying with Plato, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens. He taught his own life-guiding philosophy, emphasizing practical reasoning. Like Plato, he thought Athenian democracy constituted bad government because it did not restrict decision making to the most educated and moderate citizens. His vast writings have made him one of the world’s most influential thinkers to this day.

Aristotle’s achievements included scientific investigation of the natural world, development of systems of logical argument, and practical ethics based on experience. He believed that the search for knowledge brought the good life and genuine happiness. His lectures covered biology, botany, zoology, medicine, anatomy, psychology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, music, metaphysics,

rhetoric, literary criticism, political science, and ethics. By creating a system of logic for precise argumentation, Aristotle also established grounds for determining whether an argument was logically valid. Aristotle’s thought process stressed rationality and common sense, not metaphysics. He rejected Plato’s theory of Forms and insisted that understanding depended on observation. He coupled detailed investigation with careful reasoning in biology, botany, and zoology. He collected information on more than five hundred different kinds of animals, including insects. His recognition that whales and dolphins are mammals was not rediscovered for another two thousand years.

Some of Aristotle’s observations justified inequalities characteristic of his time. He argued that some people were slaves by nature because their souls lacked the rationality to be fully human. Mistaken biological information led Aristotle to evaluate females as inferior on the grounds they were incomplete males. However, he also believed that human communities could be successful and happy only if women and men both contributed.

In ethics, Aristotle emphasized the need to develop practical habits of just behavior in order to achieve happiness. Ethics, he taught, cannot work if it consists only of abstract reasons for just behavior. People should achieve self-control by training their minds to overcome instincts and passions. Self-control meant finding “the mean,” or balance, between denying and indulging physical pleasures.

Greek Political Disunity During the period that Plato and Aristotle developed their philosophies as guides to life, the Greek city-states engaged in constant wars. Sparta, Thebes, and Athens competed to dominate Greece, but none succeeded. Their endless fighting drained their

finances and morale.

Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos formed an anti-Spartan coalition, but the Spartans checkmated the alliance by negotiating with the Persian king. Betraying their long-standing claim to be fighters for Greek freedom, the Spartans acknowledged the Persian ruler’s right to control the Greek city-states of Anatolia — in return for permission to wage war in Greece without Persian interference. This agreement of 386 B.C.E., called the King’s Peace, sold out the Greeks of Anatolia, returning them to submission to the Persian Empire. Athens rebuilt its navy, again becoming the leader of a naval alliance. In the 370s B.C.E., Thebes attacked Sparta and freed many helots to weaken the enemy. The Theban success alarmed the Athenians, who allied with their hated enemies, the Spartans. The allied armies confronted the Thebans in the battle of Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 B.C.E. Thebes won the battle but lost the war when its best general was killed with no capable replacement available. This stalemate left the Greek city-states disunited and weak. By the 350s B.C.E., no Greek city-state controlled anything except its own territory. By failing to cooperate with one another, the Greeks opened the way for yet more war linked to the rise of a new power — the kingdom of Macedonia.

REVIEW QUESTION How did daily life, philosophy, and the political situation change in Greece during the period 400–350 B.C.E.?

The Rise of Macedonia, 359–323 B.C.E. The kingdom of Macedonia’s rise to superpower status counts as one of the greatest surprises in ancient military and political history. Located north of central Greece, Macedonia rocketed from being a minor state to ruling the Greek and Near Eastern worlds. Two aggressive and charismatic Macedonian kings led this transformation: Philip II (r. 359–336 B.C.E.) and his son Alexander the Great. Their conquests ended the Greek Classical Age and set in motion the Hellenistic Age’s cultural changes.

Macedonian Power and Philip II, 359–336 B.C.E. Macedonian kings governed by maintaining the support of local leaders, who ranked as their social equals and controlled many followers. Men spent their time training for war, hunting, and drinking heavily. The king had to excel in these activities to show that he deserved to lead the state. Queens and royal mothers received respect because they came from powerful families or the ruling houses of neighboring regions.

Macedonian kings thought of themselves as ethnically Greek; they spoke Greek in addition to their native Macedonian. Macedonians as a whole looked down on Greeks as too soft to survive life in their northern region. The Greeks called Macedonians “barbarians,” regarding them as less civilized but brave.

In 359 B.C.E., the Illyrians, neighbors to the west, slaughtered Macedonia’s king and four thousand troops. Philip, the new king,

restored the Macedonians’ confidence by teaching them to use thrusting spears sixteen feet long. He trained them to maneuver in battle while maintaining formation. Deploying cavalry as a strike force, Philip routed the Illyrians. During the 340s B.C.E., Philip persuaded or forced most of northern and central Greece into alliance with him. Seeking glory for Greece and fearing the instability his strengthened army would create in his kingdom if the soldiers had nothing to do, he decided to lead a united Macedonian and Greek army to conquer the Persian Empire. He justified attacking Persia as revenge for its invasion of Greece 150 years earlier.

Athens and Thebes rallied a coalition of southern Greek city-states to combat Philip, but in 338 B.C.E. the Macedonian king and his Greek allies crushed this group’s forces at the battle of Chaeronea in central Greece. The defeated city-states retained their internal freedom, but Philip forced most of them to join his alliance. The battle of Chaeronea marked a turning point in Greek history: never again would the city-states of Greece be independent agents in international affairs.

The Rule of Alexander the Great, 336–323 B.C.E. Philip was murdered in 336 B.C.E. Some scholars think his son Alexander and his son’s mother, Olympias, arranged the killing to seize power for the twenty-year-old Alexander, but the murderer, one of Philip’s bodyguards, was probably motivated by personal anger at the king. Alexander secured his rule by eliminating rivals and defeating Macedonia’s enemies to the west and north with swift attacks. He forced the southern Greeks, who had defected from the alliance at the news of Philip’s death, to rejoin. To demonstrate the cost of disloyalty, in 335 B.C.E., Alexander destroyed Thebes for having rebelled.

In 334 B.C.E., Alexander launched the most astonishing military campaign in ancient history, leading a Macedonian and Greek army against the Persian Empire to fulfill Philip’s dream of avenging Greece. Alexander’s conquest of all the lands from Turkey to Egypt to the western edge of India while still in his twenties led later peoples to call him Alexander the Great. Alexander inspired his troops by leading charges against the enemy, riding his warhorse Bucephalas (“Oxhead”). Everyone saw him speeding ahead in his plumed helmet, polished armor, and vividly colored cloak. He was so intent on conquest that he rejected advice to delay the war until he had fathered an heir. He gave away nearly all of his land and property as gifts to strengthen ties with his army officers. Alexander aimed at becoming more famous even than Achilles; he always kept a copy of Homer’s Iliad under his pillow — along with a dagger.

Building on Near Eastern traditions of siege technology and Philip’s innovations, Alexander developed even better military technology. When Tyre, a heavily fortified city on an island off the eastern Mediterranean coast, refused to surrender to him in 332 B.C.E., he built a massive stone pier as a platform for artillery towers, armored battering rams, and catapults flinging boulders to breach Tyre’s walls. Knowing that Alexander could overcome their fortifications made enemies much readier to negotiate a deal.

In his conquest of Egypt and the Persian heartland, Alexander revealed his strategy for ruling a vast empire: keep an area’s traditional administrative system and religious practices in place while founding cities of Greeks and Macedonians in the conquered territory. In Egypt, he established his first new city, naming it Alexandria after himself. In Persia, he proclaimed himself the king of Asia and relied on Persian administrators.

Alexander led his army past the Persian heartland farther east into territory hardly known to the Greeks (Map 4.1). He aimed to outdo the heroes of legend by marching to the end of the world. Shrinking his army to reduce the need for supplies, he marched northeast into

what is today Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Unable to subdue the local guerrilla forces, Alexander settled for an alliance sealed by his marriage to the Bactrian princess Roxane.

MAP 4.1 Conquests of Alexander the Great, r. 336–323 B.C.E.

From the time Alexander led his army against Persia in 334 B.C.E. until his death in 323 B.C.E., he was continually fighting military campaigns. His charismatic and fearless generalship, combined with effective intelligence gathering about his targets, generated an unbroken string of victories and made him a legend. His founding of garrison cities and preservation of local governments kept his conquests largely stable during his lifetime.

Alexander then headed east into India. Seventy days of marching through monsoon rains extinguished his soldiers’ fire for conquest. In the spring of 326 B.C.E., they mutinied, forcing Alexander to turn back. The return journey through southeastern Iran’s deserts cost many casualties from hunger and thirst; the survivors finally reached safety in the Persian heartland in 324 B.C.E. Alexander immediately began planning an invasion of the Arabian peninsula and North Africa. He also announced that he wanted to receive the honors due a god. Most Greek city-states obeyed by sending religious delegations to

him. Personal motives best explain Alexander’s announcement: he had come to believe he was truly the son of Zeus and that his superhuman accomplishments demonstrated that he must himself be a god in a human body present among other human beings.

Alexander died from a fever in 323 B.C.E. Unfortunately for the stability of his immense conquests, he had no heir ready to take over his rule; Roxane gave birth to their son only after Alexander’s death. The story goes that, when at Alexander’s deathbed his commanders asked him to whom he left his kingdom, he replied, “To the most powerful.”

Modern scholars express different evaluations of Alexander, ranging from condemning him as a bloodthirsty warmonger to praising him as a visionary creating a multiethnic world encompassing all cultures. The ancient sources suggest that Alexander had interlinked goals reflecting his restless and ruthless nature: to conquer and administer the known world with a new ruling class mixing competent people from all ethnic groups, to outdo the exploits and glory of legendary heroes, and to earn the status no living human had ever achieved — that of a god-man on earth.

It is certain that Alexander’s explorations benefited scientific fields from geography to botany because he took along knowledgeable writers to collect and catalog new knowledge. He had vast quantities of scientific observations and money for research dispatched to his old tutor Aristotle. Alexander’s new cities promoted trade between Greece and the Near East. Most of all, his career brought the two cultures into closer contact than ever before. This contact represented his career’s most enduring impact.

REVIEW QUESTION What were the accomplishments of Alexander the Great, and what were their effects both for the ancient world and for later Western civilization?

The Hellenistic Kingdoms, 323–30 B.C.E. New kingdoms arose when Alexander’s empire fragmented after his death. The time from Alexander’s death in 323 B.C.E. to the death of Cleopatra VII, the last Macedonian queen of Egypt, in 30 B.C.E. is the Hellenistic Age. This period reintroduced monarchy into Greek culture for the first time in a thousand years. Commanders from Alexander’s army created the kingdoms by seizing portions of his empire and proclaiming themselves kings. This process of state formation took more than fifty years of war. The self-proclaimed kings — called Alexander’s successors — had to transform their families into dynasties and accumulate enough power to force the Greek city-states to obey them. In the second and first centuries B.C.E., the Romans overthrew the Hellenistic kingdoms.

Creating New Kingdoms Alexander’s successors divided his conquests among themselves. Antigonus (c. 382–301 B.C.E.) took over Anatolia, the Near East, Macedonia, and Greece; Seleucus (c. 358–281 B.C.E.) seized Babylonia and the East as far as India; and Ptolemy (c. 367–282 B.C.E.) took over Egypt. These successors had to create their own form of monarchy based on military power and personal prestige because they were self-proclaimed rulers with no connection to Alexander’s royal line.

The kingdoms’ territories were never completely stable because the Hellenistic monarchs never stopped competing (Map 4.2). Conflicts repeatedly arose over border areas. The Ptolemies and the Seleucids, for example, fought to control the eastern Mediterranean coast, just like the Egyptians and Hittites. The wars between the major kingdoms created openings for smaller kingdoms to establish

themselves. The most famous of these smaller kingdoms was that of the Attalids in western Anatolia, with the wealthy city of Pergamum as its capital. In Bactria in Central Asia, the Greeks — originally colonists settled by Alexander — broke off from the Seleucid kingdom in the mid-third century B.C.E. to found their own regional kingdom, which flourished for a time from the trade in luxury goods between India and China and the Mediterranean world.

MAP 4.2 Hellenistic Kingdoms, 240 B.C.E.

Monarchy became the dominant political system in the areas of Alexander’s conquests. By about eighty years after his death, the three major kingdoms established by his successors had settled their boundaries, after the Seleucids gave up their easternmost territories to an Indian king and the Attalids carved out their kingdom in western Anatolia.

The Hellenistic kingdoms imposed foreign rule by Macedonian kings and queens on indigenous populations, though the monarchies took over local traditions to build legitimacy. The Ptolemaic royal family, for example, observed the Egyptian royal tradition of brother- sister marriage and respected traditional Egyptian gods. Royal power was the ultimate source of control over the kingdoms’ subjects, in

keeping with the Near Eastern monarchical tradition that Hellenistic kings adopted. Seleucus justified his rule on what he claimed as a universal truth of monarchy: “It is not the customs of the Persians and other people that I impose upon you, but the law which is common to everyone, that what is decreed by the king is always just.” The survival of these dynasties depended on their ability to create strong armies, effective administrations, and close ties to urban elites. A letter from a Greek city summed up the situation while praising the Seleucid king Antiochus I (c. 324–261 B.C.E.): “His rule depends above all on his own excellence [aretê], and on the goodwill of his friends, and on his forces.”

Professional soldiers manned Hellenistic royal armies and navies. To develop their military might, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings encouraged immigration by Greeks and Macedonians, who received land grants in return for military service. When this source of manpower gave out, the kings had to employ local men as troops. Military competition put tremendous financial pressure on the kings to pay growing numbers of mercenaries and to purchase expensive new military technology. To compete effectively, a Hellenistic king had to provide giant artillery, such as catapults capable of flinging a 170-pound projectile up to two hundred yards. His navy cost a fortune because warships were now huge, requiring crews of several hundred men. War elephants became common after Alexander brought them back from India, but they were extremely costly to maintain.

Hellenistic kings needed effective administrations to collect revenues. Initially, they recruited mostly Greek and Macedonian immigrants to fill high-level posts. The Seleucids and the Ptolemies also employed non-Greeks for middle- and low-level positions, where officials had to be able to deal with the subject populations and speak their languages. Local men who wanted a government job bettered their chances if they could read and write Greek in addition to their native language. Bilingualism qualified them to fill positions communicating the orders of the Greek and Macedonian top officials to local farmers, builders, and crafts producers. Non-Greeks who had

successful government careers were rarely admitted to royal society, because Greeks and Macedonians saw themselves as too superior to mix with locals. Greeks and non-Greeks therefore tended to live in separate communities.

Administrators’ principal responsibilities were to maintain order and to direct the kingdoms’ tax systems. The Ptolemaic administration used methods of central planning and control inherited from earlier Egyptian history. Its officials continued to administer royal monopolies to maximize the king’s revenue. In the case of vegetable oil, widely used for cooking, cosmetics, and lubrication, they decided how much land farmers could sow in oil- bearing plants, supervised production and distribution of the oil, and set prices for every stage of the oil business. The king, through his officials, also often entered into partnerships with private investors to produce more revenue.

Cities were the Hellenistic kingdoms’ economic and social hubs. Many Greeks and Macedonians lived in new cities founded by Alexander and the Hellenistic kings in Egypt and the Near East, and they also immigrated to existing cities there. Hellenistic kings promoted this urban immigration by adorning their new cities with architectural features of classical Greek city-states, especially colonnaded streets, gymnasia, and theaters. Although these cities often retained the city-state’s political institutions such as councils and assemblies for citizen men, the need to follow royal policy limited their freedom; they made no independent decisions on foreign policy. The cities taxed their populations to send money demanded by the king.

The crucial element in the Hellenistic kingdoms’ political and social structure was the system of mutual rewards by which the kings and their leading urban subjects became partners in government and public finance. Wealthy people in the cities were responsible for collecting taxes from city dwellers and people in the countryside to send the money to the royal treasury. The kings honored and

flattered the cities’ social elites because they needed their cooperation to ensure a steady flow of tax revenues. When writing to a city’s council, a king would issue polite requests, but the recipients knew he was giving commands.

This system thus continued the Greek tradition of requiring the wealthy elite to contribute financially to the common good. Cooperative cities received gifts from the king to pay for expensive public works like theaters and temples or for reconstruction after natural disasters such as earthquakes. Wealthy men and women in turn helped keep the general population peaceful by subsidizing teachers and doctors, financing public works, and providing donations and loans to ensure a reliable supply of grain to feed the city’s residents.

To keep their vast kingdoms peaceful and profitable, the kings established relationships with well-to-do non-Greeks living in the old cities of Anatolia and the Near East. In addition, non-Greeks and non- Macedonians from eastern regions began moving westward to the new Hellenistic Greek cities in increasing numbers. Jews in particular moved from their ancestral homeland to Anatolia, Greece, and Egypt. The Jewish community eventually became an influential minority in Egyptian Alexandria, the most important Hellenistic city. In Egypt, as the Rosetta stone shows, the king also had to build good relationships with the priests who controlled the temples of the traditional Egyptian gods because the temples owned large tracts of rich land worked by tenant farmers.

The Layers of Hellenistic Society The royal family and the king’s friends had the highest social rank. The Greek and Macedonian elites of the major cities came next. Then came indigenous urban elites, leaders of large minority urban populations, and local lords in rural regions. Merchants, artisans, and

laborers made up the free population’s bottom layer. Slaves still lacked any social status.

The kingdoms’ growth increased the demand for slave labor throughout the eastern Mediterranean; a market on the island of Delos sold up to ten thousand slaves a day. The luckier ones were purchased as servants for the royal court or elite households and lived physically comfortable lives, so long as they pleased their owners. The luckless ones labored, and often died, in the mines. Enslaved children could be taken far from home to work. For example, a sales contract from 259 B.C.E. records that a Greek bought a seven-year-old girl named Gemstone to work in an Egyptian textile factory. Originally from an eastern Mediterranean town, she had previously labored as the slave of a Greek mercenary soldier employed by a Jewish cavalry commander in the Transjordan region.

Poor people — the majority of the population — mostly labored in agriculture, the foundation of the Hellenistic kingdoms’ economies. There were large cities, above all Alexandria in Egypt, but most people lived in country villages. Many of the poor were employed on the royal family’s huge estates, but free peasants still worked their own small fields in addition to laboring for wealthy landowners. Perhaps as many as 80 percent of all adult men and women had to work the land to produce enough food to sustain the population. In cities, poor women and men worked as small merchants, peddlers, and artisans, producing and selling goods such as tools, pottery, clothing, and furniture. Men could sign on as deckhands on the merchant ships that sailed the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.

Many country people in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms existed in a state of dependency between free and slave. The “peoples,” as they were called, were tenants who farmed the estates belonging to the king. Although they could not be sold like slaves, they were not allowed to move away or abandon their tenancies. They owed a large quota of produce to the king, a high compulsory rent that left these tenant farmers little chance to escape poverty.

Hellenistic queens had great social status and commanded enormous riches and honors. They exercised power as the representatives of distinguished families, as the mothers of a line of royal descendants, and as patrons of artists, thinkers, and even entire cities. Later Ptolemaic queens co-ruled with their husbands. Queens ruled on their own when no male heir existed. For example, Arsinoe II (c. 316–270 B.C.E.), the daughter of Ptolemy I, first married the Macedonian successor Lysimachus, who gave her four towns as her personal domain. After his death, she married her brother, Ptolemy II of Egypt, and was his partner in making policy. Public praise for a queen reflected traditional Greek values for women. A city decree from about 165 B.C.E. honored Queen Apollonis of Pergamum by praising her piety toward the gods, her reverence toward her parents, her distinguished conduct toward her husband, and her harmonious relations with her “beautiful children born in wedlock.”

Some queens paid special attention to the condition of women. About 195 B.C.E., for example, the Seleucid queen Laodice gave a ten- year endowment to a city to provide dowries for needy girls. Laodice’s gift shows that she recognized the importance to women of controlling property, which was the surest guarantee of respect.

Most women remained under the legal control of men. A common saying by men was, “Who can judge better than a father what is to his daughter’s interest?” Most of the time, elite women continued to be separated from men outside their families, while poor women worked in public. Greeks continued to abandon infants they did not want to raise — girls more often than boys — but other populations, such as the Egyptians and the Jews, did not practice infant exposure. Exposure differed from infanticide in that the parents expected someone to find the child and rear it, usually as a slave. A third- century B.C.E. comic poet was exaggerating by writing, “A son, one always raises even if one is poor; a daughter, one exposes, even if one is rich,” because daughters of wealthy parents were not usually abandoned; but probably up to 10 percent of other infant girls suffered that sorrowful fate.

A woman of exceptional wealth could enter public life by making donations or loans to her city and in return be rewarded with an official post in local government. In Egypt, women of all classes acquired greater say in married life as the marriage contract evolved from an agreement between the bride’s parents and the groom, to one in which the bride made her own arrangements with the groom.

Rich people showed increasing concern for the welfare of poorer people during the Hellenistic period. They were following the lead of the royal families, who emphasized philanthropy to build a reputation for generosity that would support their legitimacy in ruling. Sometimes wealthy citizens funded a foundation to distribute free grain to eliminate food shortages, and they also funded schools for children in various Hellenistic cities, the first public schools in the Greek world. In some places, girls as well as boys could attend school. Many cities also began sponsoring doctors to improve medical care: patients still had to pay, but at least they could count on finding a doctor.

The donors funding these services were repaid by the respect and honor they earned from their fellow citizens. When an earthquake devastated Rhodes, many cities joined kings and queens in sending donations to help the residents recover. In return, the city-state’s citizens showered honors on their benefactors by appointing them to prestigious municipal offices and erecting inscriptions expressing the city’s gratitude. In this system, the masses’ welfare depended more and more on the generosity of the rich. Lacking democracy, the poor had no political power to demand support.

The End of the Hellenistic Kingdoms All the Hellenistic kingdoms eventually lost their riches and power, mostly through internal rivalries in their ruling families. Thus weakened, they could not prevent takeovers by the Romans, who

over time intervened forcefully in conflicts among kingdoms and Greek city-states in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Roman interventions caused wars. Rome first established dominance over the Antigonid kingdom by the middle of the second century B.C.E. Next, the Seleucid kingdom fell to the Romans in 64 B.C.E. The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt survived until the 50s B.C.E., when its royal family split into warring factions; the resulting weakness forced the rivals for the throne to seek Roman support. The end came when the famous Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII, the last Macedonian to rule Egypt, chose the losing side in the civil war between Mark Antony and the future emperor Augustus in the late first century B.C.E. An invading Roman army ended her rule in 30 B.C.E.. Rome then became the heir to all the Hellenistic kingdoms (see Mapping the West).

Sculpture of Cleopatra This fragment of a sculpture in relief (that is, not in the round) shows Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt in the late first century B.C.E. Descended from the royal line called the Ptolemies, who were originally Macedonians, Cleopatra was famous for her intelligence, wit, and political ambition. She formed alliances — and initiated love affairs — with the Roman commanders Julius Caesar and Mark Antony to try to protect her kingdom. She committed suicide in 30 B.C.E. after Octavian (soon to become Augustus) defeated her army and converted Egypt into a Roman province. Why do you think Cleopatra is shown here in Egyptian clothing and in the style of Egyptian art?

REVIEW QUESTION How did the political and social organization of the new Hellenistic kingdoms compare with that of the earlier Greek city-states?

Hellenistic Culture Hellenistic culture reflected three principal influences: (1) the overwhelming impact of royal wealth, (2) increased emphasis on private life and emotion, and (3) greater interaction of diverse peoples. The kings drove developments in literature, art, science, and philosophy by deciding which scholars and artists to put on the royal payroll. The obligation of authors and artists to the kings meant that they did not have freedom to criticize public policy; their works mostly concentrated on everyday life and personal feelings.

Cultural interaction between Near Eastern and Greek traditions occurred most prominently in language and religion. These developments deeply influenced the Romans as they took over the Hellenistic world. The Roman poet Horace (65–8 B.C.E.) described the effect of Hellenistic culture on his own Roman culture by saying that “captive Greece captured its fierce victor.”

The Arts under Royal Support Hellenistic kings became the supporters of scholarship and the arts on a vast scale, competing with one another to lure the best scholars and artists to their capitals with lavish salaries. They funded intellectuals and artists because they wanted to boost their reputations by having these famous people produce books, poems, sculptures, and other prestigious creations at their courts.

The Ptolemies turned Alexandria into the Mediterranean’s leading arts and sciences center, establishing the world’s first scholarly research institute with its own massive library. The librarians were instructed to collect all the books in the world. The library grew to hold half a million scrolls, an enormous number for the time. Linked to it was the building in which the hired research scholars dined

together and produced encyclopedias of knowledge such as The Wonders of the World and On the Rivers of Europe. We still use the name of the research institute’s building, the Museum (“place of the Muses,” the Greek goddesses of learning and the arts), to designate institutions preserving knowledge.

The writers and artists paid by Hellenistic kings had to please their paymasters. The poet Theocritus (c. 300–260 B.C.E.) spelled out the deal underlying royal support in a poem flattering King Ptolemy II: “The spokesmen of the Muses [that is, poets] celebrate Ptolemy in return for his benefactions.” Poets such as Theocritus avoided political topics and exploited the social gap that existed between the intellectual elite — to which the kings belonged — and the uneducated masses. They filled their new poetry with erudite references to make it difficult to understand and therefore exclusive. Only people with a deep literary education could appreciate the mythological allusions that studded these authors’ elaborate poems.

No Hellenistic women poets seem to have enjoyed royal financial support; rather, they created their art independently. They excelled in writing epigrams, short poems in the style of those originally used on tombstones to remember the dead. Highly literary poems by women from diverse regions of the Hellenistic world still survive. Many epigrams were about women, from courtesans to respectable matrons, expressing the writer’s personal feelings. No other Hellenistic literature better conveys the depth of human emotion than the epigrams written by women poets.

Hellenistic comedies also emphasized stories about emotions and stayed away from politics. Comic playwrights presented plays concerning the troubles of fictional lovers. These comedies became enormously popular because, like modern situation comedies (sitcoms), they offered humorous views of daily life. Papyrus discoveries have restored previously lost comedies of Menander (c. 342–289 B.C.E.), the most famous Hellenistic comic poet, noted for his skill in depicting human personality. Hellenistic tragedy could take a

multicultural approach. Ezechiel, a Jew living in Alexandria, wrote Exodus, a tragedy in Greek about Moses leading the Hebrews out of captivity in Egypt.

Hellenistic sculptors and painters featured emotions in their works as well. Classical artists had given their subjects’ faces an idealized serenity, but now Hellenistic sculptures depicted intense personal feelings. Athletes, for example, could be shown realistically as exhausted and scarred by the exertion required to compete at a high level. The increasing diversity of subjects that emerged in Hellenistic art presumably represented a trend approved by kings, queens, and the elites. Sculpture best reveals this new preference for depicting people who had never before appeared in art: heartbreaking victims of war, drunkards, battered athletes, wrinkled old people. The female nude became common. A statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles, which portrayed the goddess completely naked for the first time, became renowned as a religious object and also a tourist attraction in the city of Cnidos, which had commissioned it. The king of Bithynia offered to pay off the citizens’ entire public debt if he could have the work of art. They refused.

Philosophy for a New Age New philosophies arose in the Hellenistic period, all asking the same question: “What is the best way to live?” They recommended different paths to the same answer: individuals must achieve inner personal tranquility to achieve freedom from the disruptive effects of outside forces, especially chance. These philosophies became popular because outside forces — the Hellenistic kings — had robbed the Greek city-states of their independence in foreign policy, with their citizens’ fates ultimately dependent on unpredictable monarchs. More than ever, human life seemed out of individuals’ control. It was therefore appealing to look to philosophy for personal solutions to the unsettling new conditions of Hellenistic life.

Hellenistic philosophers concentrated on materialism, the doctrine that only things made of matter truly exist. This idea corresponded to Aristotle’s teaching that only things identified through logic or observation exist. Hellenistic philosophy was divided into three areas: (1) logic, the process for discovering truth; (2) physics, the fundamental truth about the nature of existence; and (3) ethics, how humans should achieve happiness and well-being through logic and physics.

One of the two most significant new Hellenistic philosophies was Epicureanism, named for its founder, Epicurus (341–271 B.C.E.). He settled his followers around 307 B.C.E. in an Athenian house surrounded by greenery — hence, his school came to be known as the Garden. Epicurus broke tradition by admitting women and slaves to study philosophy in his group.

Epicurus’s key idea was that people should be free of worry about death. Because all matter consists of tiny, invisible, and irreducible pieces called atoms in random movement, as Democritus had argued (see Innovative Ideas in Education, Philosophy, History, and Medicine), death is nothing more than the painless separating of the body’s atoms. Moreover, all human knowledge must be empirical, that is, derived from experience and perception. Phenomena that most people perceive as the work of the gods, such as thunder, do not result from divine intervention in the world. The gods live far away in perfect tranquility, ignoring human affairs. People therefore have nothing to fear from the gods.

Epicurus believed people should pursue true pleasure, meaning an “absence of disturbance.” Thus, people should live free from the turmoil, passions, and desires of ordinary existence. A sober life spent with friends and separated from the cares of the common world provided Epicurean pleasure. Epicureanism thus challenged the Greek tradition of political participation by citizens.

The other most prominent Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism, prohibited an isolationist life. Its name derives from the Painted Stoa

in Athens, where Stoic philosophers discussed their ideas. Stoics believed that fate controls people’s lives but that individuals should still make the pursuit of excellence their goal and participate in public life. Stoic excellence meant putting oneself in harmony with the divine, rational force of universal nature by cultivating good sense, justice, courage, and temperance. These doctrines applied to women as well as men. Some Stoics advocated equal citizenship for women, unisex clothing, and abolition of marriage and families.

The Stoic belief in fate raised the question of whether humans have free will. Stoic philosophers concluded that purposeful human actions do have significance even if fate rules. Nature, itself good, does not prevent evil from occurring, because excellence would otherwise have no meaning. What matters in life is striving