‘O, tell me of the wilderness of this world!’ the blind Kaurava king Dhritarashtra cries when he learns his hundred sons have all been butchered in battle. It had been an apocalyptic struggle: the field was ‘strewn with bones and hair, overflowing with torrents of blood, covered on every side with thousands upon thousands of corpses, littered with the blood-smeared remains of elephants, horses, chariots and warriors, and with headless bodies and bodiless heads … swarming with jackals, jungle crows, ravens, storks and crows’.1 Dhritarashtra had been warned against this carnage. The gods had counselled him to negotiate a truce and share his territory with his rivals. The queen had told him to defend his kingdom’s prosperity by mild means, not by force. It was to no avail. The monarch underestimated the threat of war, the resentment between the Kauravas and the enemy Pandava tribe, and the boundless ambitions of his own belligerent son.

Thus concludes the tragic episode at the heart of the Mahabharata: the power brokers have overruled the voices of peace and evil has prevailed over good. One of the oldest known works of literature to address the struggle between the ideal of peace and the reality of war, this anonymous epic poem can be traced back to origins in North India in around 1000 BCE. Although the actual conflicts from that era were fought between tiny kingdoms, and with relatively rudimentary weapons, it is no surprise that war in the Mahabharata appears as a form of universal deluge, as mass destruction. Even spears and arrows, clubs and axes, can wipe out entire communities, raze farms and settlements – to all intents and purposes destroying the victims’ entire world.

The Mahabharata, though, is not unique, as the rest of this chapter will reveal. There are other representations of foreign relations to be found in the art and literature, the archives and inscriptions, prior to the first millennium BCE. This period, commonly referred to as the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, is the earliest to leave us sufficiently widespread written evidence from around the world to understand how foreign relations were organized and how people thought about them.

This chapter begins, though, with the geographical context. It explains where on the globe the first polities were established. It clarifies the importance of both natural barriers, such as mountains, and natural junctures, such as plains and valleys. Having set the scene, it goes on to discuss foreign relations in their most primitive incarnation, among tribes and wandering peoples – the so-called ‘natural state’. Subsequently, its focus shifts towards the first cities and kingdoms. We end in the four chief centres of political power in that time: Egypt; the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia; the North China Plain; and the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

Worlds Apart

Before we can make sense of the politics of the ancient world, it is crucial to appreciate its geography. As many features will recur throughout this book, let us sketch a mental map. The world can be divided into two main geopolitical complexes: the Eastern Hemisphere, comprising Africa, Asia, and Europe; and the Western Hemisphere, consisting of the Americas. These two hemispheres can be regarded as discrete entities until the establishment of permanent long-distance maritime trade routes between them at the beginning of the sixteenth century CE.

In the Eastern Hemisphere – which was the ‘cradle of civilization’ – human settlement is conditioned by the vast band of mountain ranges running from west to east, sometimes referred to as the Alpide Belt. It includes the Pyrenees, Alps, Balkans, Caucasus, Zagros, Hindu Kush, Tian Shan, and the Himalaya. Along this chain, one finds temperate and subtropical climate zones in the presence of rivers, ideal for permanent human settlement, unlike the regions of snow, desert, or tropical forest found further to the north or south. The most attractive areas are the North China Plain and the Western European Coastal Plain, followed by vast stretches of flat land both in much warmer areas, like the Mekong Delta, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, Mesopotamia, and the valley of the River Nile, and also in colder ones, like the grasslands of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchuria. Smaller, but similarly promising for human development, are the coastal plains in today’s Japan, Korea, Oman, Kenya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Greece, Italy, and Senegal, as well as the fertile plateaus of Afghanistan, Armenia, and Macedonia. In addition to the connections provided by overland routes and rivers, seas (the Baltic, Mediterranean, Black and Red Seas, and so on) formed crucial strategic interfaces, with narrows such as the Kattegat, Gibraltar, the Bab-el-Mandeb, and the Strait of Malacca proving of particular significance.

In the Western Hemisphere – which was occupied by humans far later – it is hard to find any substantial region that matched those of the Eastern Hemisphere as an incubator of power. The east coast of North America does enjoy a temperate climate, but these littoral flatlands are less than half the size of the North China Plain or the Western European Coastal Plain. The Mississippi and Amazon rivers have wide deltas, like the Nile, but their discharge is so unpredictable that it discourages farming. What comes nearest to the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia are the middle reaches of the Mississippi, where there are large plateaus right in between the subtropical and moderate continental climate zones. The narrow coastal plains south of the Gulf of Mexico and along the Pacific Coast of South America also benefited from fertile soil and abundant water. These areas are mostly tropical and again lacked the scale necessary to generate great agricultural centres like those in the Eastern Hemisphere. Natural potential was not turned effectively into prosperity everywhere. One of the chief reasons for this was the astounding emptiness of the world. Only about 60 million people – the equivalent of the population of Italy today – inhabited the planet at the dawn of the first millennium BCE, and their distribution was very uneven. In most regions of the globe, communities existed from day to day entirely independently of each other. ‘Abroad’ was the next village. Family clans were the main social unit. Sometimes they coalesced into tribes – in defence of land and other natural resources for instance – but even the very largest cities had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants.2

Nevertheless, the world’s political map was fundamentally determined by how generously geography had distributed a holy trinity of natural resources: water, fertile soil, and a temperate climate. In places where all three were bountiful, ploughs, shovels, and bare hands slowly pushed the frontier of civilization forward: villages evolved into cities, cities into kingdoms, and kingdoms into empires.

The earliest imperial powers were the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. By the beginning of the first millennium BCE, they had known well over a thousand years of uninterrupted development in agriculture, of high population density, complex social and administrative structures, and political unity of some sort. Numerous smaller kingdoms existed in the North China and Indo-Gangetic Plains, in the oases and fertile valleys of Central Asia, in Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as in Central America. Powerful federations of nomadic peoples had emerged on the steppes of Mongolia and Central Asia. Small tribes inhabited most of the rest of the globe.

The Natural State

How did the majority of the world’s population that lived in simple tribal cultures at the dawn of the first millennium conduct political relations and exchanges with other groups? Was there ever an ‘age of innocence’ or ‘natural state’ in international relations before the evolution of kingdoms and empires? This question goes right to the heart of the age-old debate over whether humans’ natural state is one of peace or war. The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78 CE) famously asserted that primitive people needed to cooperate. Consider, he said, a group of hungry men hoping to bring home the large amount of meat provided by a stag. If they are to succeed, the first condition is that they do not prey on each other. The second condition is that they track the stag together, and resist the temptation to go after smaller quarry by themselves.3

To some extent, Rousseau’s theory has been borne out by modern anthropologists, who affirm that tribal peoples are generally less inclined to fight than those from more developed societies, precisely because the strength of the entire group together is required to survive in the natural environment. Human life is also more precious. The loss of an able-bodied man means fewer hands to help hunt, till the land, or keep predators away. The loss of a father renders a family at the mercy of other men. The loss of a son means no protection for his parents when they grow old. The more tribes are separated from each other, therefore, the less contact there is and so less risk of conflict. This is certainly the case in environments where there is no real scarcity, but where it just takes a long time to forage and to track game, and where it is difficult to hoard foodstuffs.

We know that traditional societies today – such as tribes in the Amazon forest – have a clear understanding of borders and employ rituals involving drugs and gifts to avoid conflict and reinforce good relations. Friendship between tribes is cultivated through marriage. Messengers enjoy special rights to enter alien territory. Agreements exist about the responsibility to maintain trails. But this is only one side of the picture: even the remotest tribes today indulge in bloody conflicts.

Archaeological evidence for tribal diplomacy before the Iron Age is scarce. We know from excavations that goods were exchanged; and markers hint at an effort to delineate territory.4 But the fact that the archaeological layers before the Iron Age are strewn with flints, axes, daggers, and crushed skulls suggests that these peoples did not escape the anguish of war. The rock carvings of Tanumshede in Sweden, for example, include a depiction of a man peacefully tilling his land. But, adjacent to him, men brandish spears, and crush heads, and attack ships with battering rams; while nearby, a woman grieves over a dead body.⁵ In 2006, archaeologists discovered an even older mass grave near Frankfurt in Germany. It contained the remains of at least twenty-six people: victims of torture.⁶ The absence of the remains of young women and teenagers suggests that they were carried away as slaves. Comparable mass graves have been found in Austria and Hungary, confirming that warfare before the Iron Age often led to the extermination of entire communities. It is also telling that primitive people first used the demanding process of metal casting for weapons. Swords, halberds, and axes – not to mention the rare examples of helmets with huge horns that have been found from the period – were symbols of masculinity and of the readiness to fight. We can, however, only guess at the causes of early wars. Archaeologists and historians generally assume they were caused by issues such as the theft of livestock or crops, attempts to abduct women, competition over water wells and other natural resources, feuds, and rivalry for leadership and status.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this backdrop of violence, early peoples clearly understood the value of life and cherished it. There is plentiful archaeological evidence proving they liked to dress up in finery, play music, and make toys for their children. They also cared for the weaker members of society. In the Bronze Age cemetery at Man Bac in Vietnam, for example, archaeologists discovered the body of a man whose bones were so fragile that he must have been cared for throughout his life before his relatives buried him with great care and affection.

Bringer of Spoils

The picture we gain of the minor kingdoms and trading cities of the late second millennium in many ways is similar to that of its tribal peoples, although the nature of the evidence is often far more plentiful and sophisticated. The remains of one such community were discovered by farmers in the north of present-day Afghanistan, near the Amu Darya (Oxus River), when they unearthed a series of silver cups. The images decorating these cups display almost exactly the same dichotomy between war and peace as the Tanumshede rock carvings in Sweden. On one cup we see men leisurely sipping from goblets, a basket of fruit between them, while dancing or ploughing takes place beneath them.7 On another, a muscleman – who could have escaped from a Hollywood action movie – shoots an arrow into the spine of his rival.8 The people who crafted these cups lived in a city surrounded by lush, well-irrigated fields. They were part of a trade network that reached as far as the Persian Gulf and brought great wealth to the city by exporting lapis lazuli from its only known source in the ancient world. But despite these trading ties, their city was well fortified. When archaeologists excavated, they found a vast rectangular clay wall, within which broad concentric rings of buildings surrounded the circular citadel where the inhabitants placed their gods and hoarded their grain.⁹

Similar walled trading cities from that era are scattered across the mountain ranges and valleys of Eurasia. Perhaps the best-known example remains Mycenae, the citadel that looms over a wide valley in the Greek Peloponnese. It was almost entirely built from colossal stones, and visitors entered it via the famous Lion Gate. Mycenae was part of the world described by the great poet Homer and characterized by anarchy. In his Iliad, an epic that takes place against the backdrop of the Trojan War, he presents numerous kingdoms, all ruled from walled cities, and in almost perpetual competition for wealth, power, and honour. Their kings were called wanakes, which it is thought originally meant ‘bringers of spoils’. The story of Helen, the most beautiful woman in Greece, introduces an important element in early interstate relations; the use of marriages to establish and strengthen diplomatic partnerships. The Iliad gives a glimpse of the role of messengers, who race back and forth between cities, and of treaties and alliances based on oaths. We do not know a lot about the life of Homer, whether he might have witnessed the Trojan War himself, or even whether he existed at all. Still, his work expresses his longing for peace and good kings who understand the limits of force, and so does this hymn to the god of war, Ares:

Shed down a kindly ray from above upon my life … that I may be able to drive away bitter cowardice from my head and crush down the deceitful impulses of my soul. Restrain also the keen fury of my heart which provokes me to tread the ways of blood-curdling strife. Rather, O blessed one, give you me boldness to abide within the harmless laws of peace, avoiding strife and hatred and the violent fiends of death.10

We can also scrutinize the international relations of the Eastern Mediterranean world at this time more directly, through the archives of the small but wealthy kingdom of Ugarit. From the ruins of this walled city, located in present-day Syria, archaeologists have recovered hundred of clay tablets. These record not only how its inhabitants made their fortunes from agriculture, crafts, and trade, but also how its rulers conducted diplomatic relations. Squeezed between the powerful states of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Ugarit tried to gain influence by controlling trade in the Levant: a first wave of merchants would be followed by soldiers and conquest. Ugarit also formed alliances with similar neighbouring states, in order to counterbalance the great powers: solemn oaths were sworn, sumptuous gifts exchanged, and envoys called akero (angels) by the Greeks shuttled back and forth with letters and dispatches. One tablet from around 1200 describes how Ugarit worked with its allies to strangle the economy of Assyria, the leading power in Mesopotamia at that time. ‘Since the king of Assyria is my majesty’s enemy, he shall be your enemy,’ it read. ‘Your merchant shall not go to Assyria and you shall not allow his merchants into your land.’11 This was economic warfare avant la lettre.

But even shrewd diplomacy could not save Ugarit from disaster in the end. During the early years of the twelfth century mysterious invaders – referred to by later historians as ‘the Sea Peoples’ – wrought havoc across the Eastern Mediterranean. When they reached the Levant, they sacked one city after another. The despairing king of Ugarit found himself overstretched: ‘The enemy’s ships came here, my cities were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the land of Lukka? … Thus, the country is abandoned to itself.’¹² The ruined city was left forsaken by its inhabitants; the kingdom of Ugarit was never revived. These were the Dark Ages of the Eastern Mediterranean, the beginning of the Bronze Age Collapse.

The Dark Ages (roughly 1200–1000 BCE) resulted from a combination of environmental crisis, growing drought as a result of deforestation, mass migration-turned-invasion, the advance of iron working techniques at the expense of bronze making, and the collapse of trade networks. Ugarit was not the only city to succumb. Hattusha, the capital of the kingdom of the Hittites, was far greater than Ugarit. Its ruins, which lie in the heart of Anatolia, share similarities with those of Mycenae. Its citadel overlooked a large fertile plateau, pasturelands, woods, and important trade routes connecting the Aegean, the Black Sea, and Mesopotamia. Its walls were built with similar gigantic masonry blocks; a pair of lions even flanked one of its main gates. In the thirteenth century, the Hittites controlled Anatolia. In 1274, they even defeated the Egyptian armies at the Battle of Kadesh.

The surviving diplomatic correspondence from the time shows that the Hittite kings demanded to be treated as the equals of the rulers of Assyria and Egypt: if the Hittite king addressed the pharaoh respectfully as ‘the king of the sun’, he expected to be called the ‘king of the storm’ in return. From less powerful peoples, the Hittite kings demanded tribute. Advanced iron weapons and fast chariots enabled them to enforce their will. But civil war weakened the kingdom at a moment when the Assyrians were on the rise in Mesopotamia.

The new Hittite ruler, Hattushili III, went all out to gain diplomatic recognition from Egypt and to secure an anti-Assyrian alliance. After lengthy negotiations, delegations from the two sides finally signed the Treaty of Kadesh in 1259. It remains as the world’s oldest completely preserved peace treaty.13 Diplomatic tensions were renewed, however, when Hattushili deferred the marriage of his daughter to the pharaoh. The Hittites also complained that Egyptian propaganda belittled the Hittite victory of 1274. In the end, they never obtained the promised Egyptian support to repel the Assyrian advance and the invasion of the so-called Sea Peoples. It was probably this coalition of Northern and Western Mediterranean peoples – emboldened to attack the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean by climatic change, migration pressures, and the richness of Egypt, Anatolia, and the Levant – that finally burned Hattusha to the ground in around 1180.¹⁴

Egypt

The cities of Ugarit and Hattusha existed on the fringes of the mighty agricultural centres of Egypt and Mesopotamia. These great societies had mastered the art of taming rivers through countless dikes, basins, and irrigation canals. Rivers carried fertile silt from the mountains to the plains. Here, once the irrigation canals were in place, farmers could have two harvests per year; and high agricultural productivity allowed populations to flourish. Flash floods still frequently erased the maze of locks and mud ditches and embankments, but surpluses of grain could be stocked in abundant years. Whoever held the granaries held political power: the power to arm soldiers, to erect monuments, and to buy luxury goods, for surpluses allowed for specialization in different crafts, and grain was traded up and down the River Nile. Cities like Memphis, Thebes, and Amarna in Egypt counted 50,000 inhabitants or more. About 3 to 4 million people lived around the River Nile and its delta.15

Despite their prosperity, even these rich agricultural centres remained unsentimental places. People usually did not live beyond the age of thirty. They shared their short stay on earth in damp settlements with flies, lice, fleas, mosquitos, and dangerous predators; disease often meant death. Toil was unrelenting. A story from the Mesopotamian state of Akkad conveys the anguish of a citizen of Nippur. Despite hard work, he complains, his storage bin is empty, his insides ‘burn’ from hunger; worst of all, he cannot even afford some mediocre beer. But the art and literature of Egypt and Mesopotamia also reveal another side of daily life. They attest to the remarkable phlegmatism of peoples reconciled to their fate of hard work and the premature loss of loved ones. ‘Seize the day! hold holiday,’ an Egyptian poem from about 1160 advised:

Be unwearied, unceasing, alive,

you and your own true love;

let not your heart be troubled during your

sojourn on Earth,

But seize the day as it passes.16

The ideal world of the early Iron Age was a verdant garden, a paradise of abundance. Wall paintings and relief carvings depict gracefully flowing rivers, bountiful grain fields, palms with sweet dates, reed beds full of fat ducks, ponds abundant with fish, and perfumed lotus blossoms. In this world of sodden or dusty mud shacks, the lotus was a universal symbol of purity.

Egypt enjoyed a unique geopolitical position. From the Great Lakes in Central Africa, the River Nile flows thousands of kilometres to the Mediterranean Sea. But only over the last thousand kilometres or so has the presence of soft sandstone allowed it to wear out the well-known wide valley and delta: the ancient world’s largest oasis. Already, by around 3150, the lands adjacent to these stretches of the Nile – Upper and Lower Egypt – were unified by a pharaoh named Menes. Over the 2,000 years that followed, twenty different dynasties ruled the territory. This characterized the frequent periods of instability, division, and subjugation by foreign invaders. Egypt, however, was never a political monolith, and the major cities, like Memphis and Thebes, frequently competed to be the centre of power.

Upstream, towards what is now Sudan, geological formations of hard granite prevented the valley from widening, and created cataracts that were often impassable by boat. This was the land of the Nubians. Their settlements grew up in places where the Nile valley became wider, but these oases were never large enough to support significant populations. As a result, Nubia was often too weak to repel the Egyptian troops that sought to take control of its abundant gold mines and the trade routes that gave access to the ivory, ebony, and spices of the Horn of Africa.

In the north of Egypt, around the Nile Delta, the Mediterranean coast was still partially forested in the early Iron Age and suitable for dry farming. From the coastal oases around present-day Benghazi, Libyan warlords repeatedly tried to take advantage of weak Egyptian rulers. The pharaohs also had to guard against incursions across the Sinai Desert – which formed the land bridge to Mesopotamia and the Levant – and sporadic raids from the sea.

In a quiet corner of the Egyptological section of the Musée du Louvre sits a simple wooden burial sculpture: a farmer, with his ankles in the mud, guides a primitive plough pulled by two fat oxen and gazes towards a granary.17 Tilling, sowing, harvesting, and waiting for the next flood season in order to begin again – these determined the rhythm of life for most ancient Egyptians. Above all, they desired peace – both political stability and secure borders. But for outsiders, Egypt was the ultimate trophy. Just as commoners were required to protect their homes against thieves, kings had to defend their realms from foreign predators. Like jackals in their lairs, they lay continuously on the watch for even the slightest opportunity as Egypt sat like a fat goose on its nest.

The most important role for Egyptian rulers, therefore, was to provide security, stability, and, ideally, harmony. The Egyptians called this Maat. The divine force that prevailed in times of prosperity, it regulated the stars, the floods, and the seasons, and represented obedience, order, justice, and morality in people and nations. Isfet, or chaos, was the alternative. If ideas of just war, proportionality, and arbitration in the Mahabharata and other Indian epics reflected the anarchical context of multiple competing kingdoms, Egyptian writings exemplify the imperial tradition. Harmony meant hierarchy. This was made clear in every possible way. In the relief carvings on temples, the pharaoh towered high above long lines of obedient Egyptian subjects and subservient foreign envoys.

The Amarna Tablets offer a fascinating window on this thinking. These diplomatic letters from the fourteenth century depict the Egyptian pharaoh as the supreme leader among the kings of Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites, and many others.18 His official in charge of relations with these realms was called the ‘overseer of all northern lands’.¹⁹ Court protocol helped affirm the idea of Egyptian supremacy. ‘At the feet of the king my lord,’ a delegate testified, ‘seven times and again seven times I prostrate myself upon my back and upon my breast.’²⁰ Envoys were made to linger for hours in the scorching sun before presenting their sumptuous gifts of horses, chariots, gems, slave girls, and exotic woods. One unfortunate ambassador was kept waiting four years for an audience. The pharaoh expected inferior kings to send their daughters to his palace, but dispatching an Egyptian princess abroad was considered a humiliation. Such marriage alliances were sealed when Egypt was weak and needed support. But the great rulers of the New Kingdom era (1550–1069), such as Tuthmosis III (1479–1425) and Ramesses II (1279–1213), expanded the realm far into Nubia and into the Levant, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers in their campaigns. Their preferred tools of propaganda included ostentatious displays of gold – jewellery, weapons, and regalia – and the construction of vast temple complexes, like that of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, where imposing victory scenes adorned almost every wall.

Fortunes turned, and the splendour of the New Kingdom gradually dissolved into anarchy. Already, early in the reign of Ramesses II, there were signs of war fatigue. ‘Peace is better than fighting. Give us breath!’ we read in the Poem of Pentaur.21 The real descent from the golden age began at the end of the thirteenth century.²² The death of Ramesses II in 1213 sparked a succession struggle, harem conspiracies, and civil war. Politically weakened, Egypt struggled with a violent influx of immigrants and raiders from the Mediterranean. The impact of these Sea Peoples seems to have been traumatic. On one of the walls of Ramesses III’s temple at Medinet Habu, near Luxor, an epic sea battle dominates the representations of his military campaigns. The drama and dynamism of the relief – the hundreds of wrestling bodies, the bristling forests of oars and spears – encapsulate the sense of shock and awe felt by the Egyptians. The Sea Peoples could be defeated, but only at the cost of thousands of lives, famine, inflation, and social upheaval. Meanwhile, Libyan raiders continued to lurk on the borders. Eventually, in 1107, the high priests of Thebes seized control of Upper Egypt, dividing the kingdom, and prompting the Nubians to cast off the Egyptian yoke. But the fatal blow came only in the tenth century, when the Great Chief of the Libyan Meshwesh, Shoshenq I (943–922), became pharaoh. A foreign dynasty ruled over Egypt.

Once again, poetry gives us a vivid impression of how such turmoil was experienced by the common people:

A strange bird will breed in the Delta marsh,

Having made its nest beside the people,

The people having let it approach by default …

All happiness has vanished,

The land is bowed down in distress,

Owing to those feeders,

Asiatics who roam the land.

Foes have risen in the East,

Asiatics have come down to Egypt …

Men will seize weapons of warfare,

The land will live in uproar.

Men will make arrows of copper,

Will crave blood for bread,

Will laugh aloud at distress.

None will weep over death,

None will wake fasting for death,

Each man’s heart is for himself.

Mourning is not done today,

Hearts have quite abandoned it.

A man sits with his back turned,

While one slays another.

I show you the son as enemy, the brother as foe,

A man slaying his father.23

Egypt owed its power to the large fertile valley of the Nile, which enabled it to become one of the first regions in the world to develop an imperial tradition. Within this, the political manifestation of Maat took the form of hierarchy: the gods supported the pharaoh’s efforts to preserve harmony, and the pharaoh demanded obeisance not only from his subjects but also from lesser kings in the Egyptian sphere of influence. In the then ideal incarnation of international politics, those lesser kings brought tribute, sent their daughters to the palace, and dispatched delegates to prostrate themselves at the feet of the pharaoh. The reality, however, was far more turbulent. Even within Egypt, the Nile Valley could form an arena of competition between cities. And the country’s prosperity always made it an attractive target for predators. Any moment of weakness could therefore trigger invasion by one of the powers lurking on its fringes. But most conquerors, like the Libyan warlord Shoshenq, preferred to adopt the Egyptian imperial tradition and its symbols wholesale instead of destroying them. Despite changing overlords, the imperial interpretation of Maat always lived on.

Mesopotamia

Compared to Egypt, the geography and environment of Mesopotamia are rather more complex. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates – from which Mesopotamia (Greek for the land ‘between the rivers’) takes its name – run roughly parallel for almost 2,000 kilometres, cutting the area into a patchwork of valleys and oases that are difficult for a single power to control. The first to impose an empire on this area was the central city state of Akkad in around 2300. Over the centuries the Akkadians were succeeded by other indigenous states: the Sumerians, who ruled from the city of Ur in the south; the Babylonians, in the centre; and the Assyrians, whose ancestral capital was Assur, in the north.

And those were not the only contenders for power in the region. The tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates led into the Taurus Mountains, the Armenian Highlands, and the Zagros Mountains. Advantageously located high above the plains of Mesopotamia, these ranges formed strategic bridgeheads – locations that were close to water, rich in farmland, gateways to trade, and well defended by rock formations – and gave rise to ambitious kingdoms, such as Mitanni, Uratu, Elam, and Media. The hills of the Levant too offered sanctuary to kingdoms, but these were too small to threaten the Mesopotamian plains.

Archaeological traces of thinking about governance lead us deep into the history of Mesopotamia. Clay tablets from the kingdom of Ur promulgate laws to curb violence, tax abuse, income inequality, and mistreatment of women. Displayed in the Musée du Louvre is the oldest complete code of law, issued by the Babylonian king Hammurabi in around 1750. The Code of Hammurabi contains detailed stipulations concerning property, the treatment of prisoners, and the rights of women in divorce. There are representations of Shamash, the popular Babylonian god of justice, who bestowed authority and wisdom on the kings. There is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes a ruler who oppresses his people and sleeps with their brides on the nights of their weddings, but then finds friendship and becomes a good king who digs wells, tames floods, builds walls that gleam like copper – a king, so the story goes, who is righteous, beautiful, and perfect. ‘There is no rival who can raise his weapon against him.’24

All these elements add up to what can be thought of as a Mesopotamian imperial culture. Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice, was also embraced by the Assyrian kings, as were the Code of Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Even the Assyrian kings’ robes, magnificent beards, and regalia were inherited in part from Babylon. And, just like the Babylonians, the Assyrians also depicted their king as a gardener, surrounded by paradisiacal landscapes, as a metaphor for peace and prosperity. ‘I dug out a canal from the Upper Zab, cutting through a mountain peak, and called it Abundance Canal,’ boasted one Assyrian king.

I watered the meadows of the Tigris and planted orchards with all kinds of fruit trees in the vicinity. I planted seeds and plants that I had found in the countries through which I had marched and in the highlands which I had crossed: pines of different kinds, cypresses and junipers of different kinds, almonds, dates, ebony, rosewood, olive, oak, tamarisk, walnut, terebinth and ash, fir, pomegranate, pear, quince, fig, grapevine …²⁵

But, as the texts and artworks also attest, for paradise to reign at home, the king had to be strong abroad – subduing other kings, and receiving their tribute and homage.

As in Egypt, the Iron Age in Mesopotamia originated in turmoil. The climate became drier, so that plants no longer grew.26 This drove the Cimmerians from the plains around the Black Sea to the Caucasus; the semi-nomadic Arameans from Anatolia into Mesopotamia; several other peoples, such as the Dorians, towards the Mediterranean; and the Sea Peoples towards the Levant and Egypt. This period of mass migration was an age of darkness, unrest, and destruction, in which the walled cities of the periphery – such as Ugarit and Mycenae – succumbed first.

In Mesopotamia, Babylon was a shadow of its former great imperial self. It had never really recovered from the turmoil that followed the death of the great King Hammurabi in 1699. Now it was invaded by the Hittites, the Kassites, the Elamites, and the Assyrians. In 1082, the region was afflicted by famine and Aramean attacks. In 1025, the native Babylonian king was deposed. Chronicles state that important religious processions were suspended, there was famine once again, and lions, wolves, and panthers roamed the streets. Assyria too trembled before the onslaught of the Aramean hordes from the north. Destruction, murder, and slavery, later kings recorded, fell upon the people of Assyria.²⁷ Just before the dawn of the first millennium, the whole of the Middle East was in flames.

China

Another region with the potential to form an imperial heartland was located in the North China Plain.28 This vast flat and fertile land of over 400,000 square kilometres is the work of the Yellow River. It stretches from present-day Beijing in the north to Shanghai in the south and extends over 1,000 kilometres inland to the mountain ranges of Yanshan and Taihang. It comprises about 5 per cent of the territory of modern China.

By the beginning of the Iron Age, most of the forest that once covered this plain had disappeared and made way for farmland. The centre was inhabited by several societies, like the Wei and the Qi. They were surrounded by societies that had their power bases in the valleys that gave on to the plains, like the Qin and the Zhou. Further out lived barbarian peoples like the Xirong, the Beidi, and the Nanman. We often praise China for its long imperial history, but for long periods it has been fragmented and ravaged by war. Indeed, the territory that we know as China today would not finally be united until the eighteenth century CE.

A large part of the North China Plain was unified for the first time in its history by the Shang kingdom in around 1600 BCE. Primary sources about the Shang are scarce. From the tomb of Fu Hao we know that the dynasty’s rulers were buried with only a handful of slaves, unadorned bronze vessels, and rather primitive jade sculptures.²⁹ Texts engraved on tortoise shells testify to a world of permanent war against the ‘devil’s lands’. The absence of any further shells after around 1200 could indicate that these precious tributary gifts from coastal states no longer reached the Shang capital. If so, this was perhaps an early sign of the decline of the Shang Dynasty, which was noticeable for more than a century before the Zhou state and its allies eventually overthrew it at the Battle of Muye in 1046. This was an event of cataclysmic proportions: records speak of a million fighters taking part.30 To the people of the North China Plain, the arrival of the Zhou from their stronghold deep in the Yellow River Valley must have been as perplexing as the Libyan putsch in Egypt or the entry of the Kassites into Babylon.

The Zhou’s rulers justified the overthrow of the Shang Dynasty as being mandated by heaven, because the latter had let the country slip into corruption, drunkenness, and insecurity. Duke Dan of Zhou, a powerful advisor to the first king of the Zhou Dynasty, refined this theory of legitimization down to its essence: the king was the son of heaven, and he ruled with the mandate of heaven (tian ming) the centre of the world under heaven.³¹ And thus the notion of China as ‘the Middle Kingdom’ was born.

An inscription on the Shi Qiang pan, a bronze basin, describes how the first kings of Zhou united 10,000 states and restored order. ‘Steadfast and at peace is the Son of Heaven,’ it goes. ‘Heavenly radiant and incorruptible, the Lord on High and the witch protectors give the Son of Heaven an extensive mandate, thick blessings, and abundant harvests. Among the borderland peoples and the man-savages, there are none who do not hasten to appear at court.’³² ‘Great peace’, that was the ultimate goal. ‘When the ruler, above, insists on wanting to conduct his affairs imperially, then he is submitting to upholding the way of heaven,’ the later Confucian scholar Shao Bowen asserted. ‘When, at the middling level, he conducts kingly affairs, then he is submitted to upholding the way of man. When, at the lowest level, he conducts affairs tyrannically, then he is submitting to upholding the way of earth. Among these three ways, only this first one ought to be raised.’33

China’s political landscape at the outset of the Iron Age, therefore, was in many ways comparable to the situation in Mesopotamia and Egypt. A large fertile plain allowed the population to expand – in the case of China probably to around 10 million – but it was divided between separate cities and kings that competed incessantly for influence.³⁴ The small city of Fenghao was located on the periphery of the North China Plain; but, as the capital of the Zhou kings, it became one of the first states to bring some degree of unity to the region and to establish an imperial ideology based on the mandate of heaven.

South Asia

The North China Plain was separated by almost 3,000 kilometres of forests, mountains, and glaciers from another important potential cradle of empire, the Indo-Gangetic Plain. For millions of years, the waters discharged by the monsoon against the southern slopes of the Himalaya ran south in hundreds of small rivers that fed the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra as they carved their way to the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. The plain they formed measures over 2.5 million square kilometres and is the most important food basket in the world. Like a horseshoe it bends around the hard rock formation of the Deccan Plateau to the south. To the north, it is bordered by the Hindu Kush, the Himalaya, and the Shan Hills of Myanmar. Until the arrival of European colonists in the sixteenth century CE, external threats were mostly limited to the nomadic people that dwelt along the Amu Darya in Central Asia, but they had to cross the long and dangerous mountain trails of the Hindu Kush before the Khyber Pass gave them entry to the plains of South Asia.

During the Bronze Age, the western half of the Indo-Gangetic Plain was dominated by the Indus Valley or Harappa Civilization (3000–1300 BCE). After its great mud-brick cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa were abandoned around 1900, there is no evidence of any new major polity filling the void in the centuries afterwards. Instead, when the so-called ‘Indo-Aryan Migration’ began to advance south, probably via the Hindu Kush in around 1500, it encountered a patchwork of tribes and little kingdoms. At first, these incomers developed a stronghold in the grasslands of the Swat Valley in the north of what is now Pakistan; but over the course of centuries they multiplied, gained influence over the existing inhabitants, and advanced on to the fertile plains of the Indus and the Ganges.35

Although this long process is probably more appropriately described as a ‘migration’ than an ‘invasion’, it caused a profound social transformation. This new culture is usually referred to as the Vedic Civilization, after the Vedas, or sacred texts written in Sanskrit, on which Hinduism is founded. The primitive painted greyware ceramics of the Vedic Civilization did not come close to the artistic splendours of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but it did leave a literature unparalleled for richness in that epoch. During this period, iron working was introduced, society was divided into castes, and new kingdoms were established. If we are to believe epics such as the Mahabharata, relations between these states seem to have been characterized by anarchy, as they formed alliances against one another, quarrelled, and fought almost endlessly. It was not until the fifth century that one state – the kingdom of Panchala – was able to create a kind of hegemony over its neighbours. And it was not until the fourth century that a large part of the Indian subcontinent fell under the control of a single empire, the Maurya.

In the Hindu tradition, harmony is represented by the goddess of fortune, Lakshmi, and her husband, Vishnu, the god of justice and peace. The ancient Sanskrit epics, like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, highlight the desire for peace and harmony – for parents to see their children grow up, farmers to bring in their harvest, and kings to rule justly. But they also stress how difficult it is to uphold. The concept of proportionality (desha dharma) is promulgated in order to avoid the excessive use of violence, only to be abandoned to the folly of hatred. Arbitration (panchayat) is introduced, but that too rarely prevents conflict. Emissaries are treated with contempt, and preparations for war continue regardless.

Even if the gods in the Mahabharata warned against war, cunning ministers knew how to play on the king’s pride and insecurity. ‘Kings should ever be ready with uplifted maces to strike when necessary and they should ever increase their prowess,’ the evil counsellor Kanika advises. ‘Carefully avoiding all faults themselves they should ceaselessly watch over the faults of their foes and take advantage of them.’36 Kanika goes on to explain that a king should behave like a wily jackal, and destroy his foes preferably without resorting to open warfare, through diplomacy, financial power, or provoking internal disunity. It is perhaps unsurprising that the ideal polity on earth, according to the Vedas, was a city of iron, well protected against the forces of nature and men.

Security and Power

Vice, virtue, and violence in international relations: at the dawn of the first millennium, these had already become important themes about which people reflected, wrote, painted, and sculpted. In modern terms, power distribution – the first historical layer to be studied in this book – depended on the holy trinity of natural resources. Even if the world was still sparsely populated and natural barriers slowed communication immensely, the Eastern Mediterranean, the North China Plain, and the Indo-Gangetic Plain had clearly transformed into restless arenas of power politics. Elsewhere, throughout the thick forest, the mountain ranges, and the grass plains that still covered much of the rest of the globe, power politics took place on a smaller scale. Its impact on human lives, however, was no less important.

The second historical layer we identified for consideration was the evolution in political organization. The late Bronze Age world was dotted with small cities and towns, seldom with more than a few thousand inhabitants. Many of these cities were ruled by kings and controlled a tract of surrounding territory, and were thus city states. Especially in the four regions of the globe where agriculture was most advanced – Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indo-Gangetic and North China Plains – the density of these city states was relatively high, enabling them to interact more intensively culturally, commercially – and militarily. They generally shared cultural, religious, and political customs, which in turn contributed to the birth of imperial traditions in the form of common symbols to legitimize hierarchy. Thus political reality in these regions was shaped by small city states vying for power and, ultimately, possession of the insignia of empire.

If there was a ‘natural state’ – that is, a primitive stage – of international relations, it was already characterized by the tension between the desire for peace and the failure to preserve it. Burial sites, the visual arts, and poetry all testify to the value attached to human life, the desire to live life to the fullest, even in very tough conditions, the anguish of losing loved ones, and the horror of war. Even for people living in the most primitive conditions, in temporary huts or tiny villages, war meant massacre, torture, abduction, and enslavement. It was little different for the farmers and craftsmen of the more developed states. Threats might be met on distant borders, but such wars still often resulted in higher taxes, the neglect of the irrigation infrastructure essential for agricultural surpluses, and conscription.

As a result, people everywhere dreamt of an ideal world of harmony. In Egypt, this was embodied in Maat; in China, in the ‘mandate of heaven’; in Mesopotamia, in the Code of Hammurabi; and in India, in the deities Vishnu and Lakshmi. The main tasks of the state and its ruler were to preserve peace internally and to provide security on the border. The ideal images of the polity, therefore, were those of a sanctuary against an evil world, a garden in the desert, a walled refuge, a city of iron. So, when we consider the fifth historical layer identified at the outset of this book – the evolution of thinking about the nature of world politics – the late Bronze Age already reveals a striking dichotomy. The ideal king was a fair-minded father to his own people, but a fearless fighter against foreign threats.

This brings us to an important aspect of the third historical layer identified earlier: namely, why was war more prevalent than peace? Paradoxically, it was the pursuit of security that caused so much misery. Borders were fluid, so that the scope of the pursuit of security was hard to define: any firm distinction between defensive and offensive wars could seldom be made. What one side saw as a just defensive war was, from the opposing viewpoint, brutal aggression. In the same vein, if a king from Egypt, Assyria, or China considered the establishment of an empire as the way to transform anarchy into stability, the subjugated parties saw it very differently. Any differentiation between a state’s search for security and its desire for power maximization could rarely be made.

Already, at the threshold of the first millennium, war could be immensely profitable, if not for the common people then certainly for the king and his court. Cities and temples were treasuries of gold and other luxuries; farmlands could generate large tax incomes, and so could the control of trade routes. The search for security and profit were thus inextricably entwined. The same was also true for the strength and weakness of states. The rise of a polity, its economic success, its political unity, or its technological progress could all spell war with jealous or frightened rivals. But a polity’s weakness could encourage predators to intervene, as happened to the New Kingdom in Egypt and the Shang Dynasty in China.

One final aspect merits mention: nature, which is the fourth historical layer considered in this book. Just before the first millennium, the world experienced a change of climate. It destabilized entire societies – especially those in the most precarious environments, like the steppes – and caused large-scale migration and strife. Fear, greed, power, and natural scarcity – these were the factors shaping early international relations.