Notes

Notes are keyed to phrases in the text, listed by page numbers below. For a full bibliography, consult the author’s website, www.davidfrye.org, which also contains resources for educators wishing to assign the text in their classes.

Introduction: A Wall against the Wasteland

“What is the theme of my song?”: Ars Amatoria 1.34, in Ovid: The Art of Love, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 106.

“played to the moon”: Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC–AD 2000 (London: Grove Press, 2006), 152.

Midwife to Civilization: Wall Builders at the Dawn of History

“Wall of the Land Was Built”: The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative has made available a full list of Shulgi’s year names at cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=year_names_Shulgi.

three successive sets of walls: Builders of walls for Ur include Ur-Nammu, Ibbi-Sin, Warad-Sin, and Samsu-iluna. Kings who provided walls for Babylon include Sumuabum, Sumulael, Apil-Sin, Yawium, and, much later, Nebuchadnezzar. Three consecutive kings—Izbi-Irra, Szu-liliszu, and Bur-Sin—constructed walls at Isin, shortly to be followed by Damiq-liszu and Samsu-iluna.

lifted it out of the mold: D. O. Edzard, “Deep-Rooted Skyscrapers and Bricks: Ancient Mesopotamian Architecture and Its Imaging,” in Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East, ed. M. Minndlin, M. J. Geller, and J. Wansbrough (London: University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, 1987), 16–17. The source is from the reign of Gudea.

inhabited Mesopotamia in great numbers: Judging from the numbers of animals, the territory around cities must have swarmed with sheep. At Ebla the king alone possessed flocks numbering more than eighty thousand. A city the size of Ur—which processed 421 tons of wool in a single year—probably maintained over half a million sheep. Weaving was done on an industrial scale in factories. Lagash employed some six thousand women and children in a single mill and an estimated fifteen thousand workers in all its mills combined. Alfonso Archi, “The Royal Archives at Ebla,” in Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Syria: An Exhibition from the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, Syrian Arab Republic, ed. H. Weiss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 1985), 146; D. T. Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 43–44; Robert McC. Adams, “Shepherds at Umma in the Third Dynasty of Ur: Interlocutors with a World Beyond the Scribal Field of Ordered Vision,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49/2 (2006): 163.

hardly kept track of them: Adams, “Shepherds at Umma,” 151, 157.

“vitality ebbs away”: Glenn Schwartz, “Pastoral Nomadism in Ancient Western Asia,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack Sasson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), 251.

sheep-stealing carnivores: The Puzrish-Dagan (Drehem) archives record sheep lost to lions—Adams, “Shepherds at Umma,” 156. Babylonian lions still stalked Mesopotamian sheep in the late nineteenth century AD. Lions only became extinct in the Zagros in the twentieth century. See John Ure, In Search of Nomads: An Anglo-American Obsession from Hester Stanhope to Bruce Chatwin (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003), 44, 100.

temptation to drift away: Adams, “Shepherds at Umma,” 149, 152, and 155, where he notes that only eight of seventeen shepherds recorded in one set of accounts were still on the rolls after five years.

she prefers a bad boy: The courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi has been synthesized into a single poem in Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 29–49.

“I am a shepherd!”: For the praise poem of Shulgi, see J. A. Black et al., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (hereafter abbreviated ETCSL) (Oxford, 1998–2006), c.2.4.2.03, http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/. The equation of kings with shepherds was formulaic in the ancient Near East. Artists perennially depicted shepherd-kings hunting, killing, or wrestling with dangerous animals. Deviations from the formula are exceedingly rare—and probably deserving of more attention. Lipit-Eštar briefly added farmers to the formula with royal inscriptions beginning, “I, Lipit-Eštar, humble shepherd of Nippur, true farmer of Ur, unceasing [provider for Eridu], en priest suitable for Uruk, king of Isin, king of the lands of Sumer and Akkad.” His successors dropped the reference to farming and returned to identifying themselves as shepherds of Nippur and herdsmen of Ur. Rīm-Sīn is one of the few later kings to adopt the formula identifying with farmers. The inscriptions are in Douglas Frayne, The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Early Periods, vol. 3/2: Ur III Period (2112–2004 BC) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 64–105, 289.

digging of wells: In the Sumerian myth “Gilgamesh and Aga,” the elders of Uruk advise Gilgamesh against going to war because wells need to be dug. “Gilgamesh and Aga,” ETCSL, 1.08.01.01.

“What I need are soldiers”: Paraphrased from ETCSL, t.3.1.15.31–33.

“birds in a cage”: The king of Gubla, Rib-Hadda, frequently complained of being trapped behind his city walls “like a bird in a cage.” See, for example, EA 74, 13–19; EA 78, 7–16; EA 79, 34–37, in William Moran, ed. and trans., The Armana Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

“like a throw stick!”: Jeremy Black, “The Sumerians in Their Landscape,” in Riches Hidden in Secret Places: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Memory of Thorkild Jacobsen, ed. Tzvi Abusch (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 54–55.

An Egyptian writer: The unknown author of the Papyrus Anastasi I. An English translation is available in Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Hieratic Texts, Series I: Literary Texts of the New Kingdom. Part I: The Papyrus Anastasi I and the Papyrus Koller Together with the Parallel Texts (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 1964).

“acted with violence against the gods”: Victory of Utu-hegal, ETCSL, t.2.1.6.

the so-called Cuthean Legend: O. R. Gurney, “The Sultantepe Tablets (Continued). IV. The Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin,” Anatolian Studies 5 (1955): 93–113; Michael Astour, “Ezekiel’s Prophecy of Gog and the Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin,” Journal of Biblical Literature 95/4 (1976): 576–79.

Umman Manda: As late as the mid-first millennium, it was still being applied to Cimmerians, Medes, or any “ferocious enemies ignorant of moral rules.” Florence Malbran-Labat, “Le nomadisme à l’époque néo-assyrienne,” in Nomads and Sedentary Peoples, XXX International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa, ed. Jorge Silva Castillo (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1981), 60.

“come down on my people”: A. Kirk Grayson and Donald Redford, Papyrus and Tablet (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 89.

“killer out of the highlands”: Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps That Once . . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 233–72; William Hamblin, Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC: Holy Warriors at the Dawn of History (New York: Routledge, 2006), 122–25.

“like a net”: Jacobsen, Harps That Once, 252.

ancient wall of King Lugalbanda: Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird, ETCSL, t.1.8.22.

peaceful dwelling places: Letter from Shulgi to Puzur-Sulgi about the Fortress Igi-huraga (version B), ETCSL, t.3.1.08.

Shulgi’s surviving correspondence: Letter from Aagdu to Shulgi about the Fortress Igi-huraga, ETCSL, t.3.10.6; letter from Puzur-Sulgi to Shulgi about the advance of the enemy, ETCSL, t.3.1.07; letter from Shulgi to Puzur-Sulgi about the Fortress Igi-huraga (version B), ETCSL, t.3.1.08.

Word soon arrives: Letter from Sarrum-bani to Su-Suen about keeping the Martu at bay, ETCSL, t.3.1.15.

heads like clay pots: The Lament for Sumer and Urim, ETCSL, 2.2.3.

Egyptian cities were not open: Nadine Moeller, “Evidence for Urban Walling in the Third Millennium BC,” in Barry Kemp et al., “Egypt’s Invisible Walls,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 14/2 (2004): 259–88. The earliest Egyptian cities possessed mud-brick walls even during the allegedly safe Old Kingdom period—a time (roughly 2686–2181 BC) when Egypt was politically unified and any military threat could only have come from outside. There is evidence for the walled cities at Elephantine, Edfu, Dendara, Kom Ombo, and Elkab. See Barry Kemp, “Unification and Urbanization of Ancient Egypt,” in Sasson, Civilizations, 687.

maintained a careful watch: As early as the Old Kingdom, pharaohs appointed officers styled as “overseer[s] of the barriers, the deserts, and the royal fortresses of Heliopolis.” James Hoffmeier, “ ‘The Walls of the Ruler’ in Egyptian Literature and the Archaeological Record: Investigating Egypt’s Eastern Frontier in the Bronze Age,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 343 (2006): 1–20, 2.

“teams as they ploughed” . . . “I must stay awake!”: James Pritchard, trans. and ed., The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (hereafter abbreviated ANE), 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 1:252; William Hallo and K. Younger, eds., The Context of Scripture (hereafter abbreviated COS), 3 vols. (New York: Brill, 1997–2002), 1:93–98, 1:106–10.

Pyramid texts speak of defenses: Hamblin, Warfare, 361.

Wall of the Ruler: James Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, Collected, Edited, and Translated with Commentary, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906–7; repr. 1988), 1:493; ANE, 1:5.

circuit around an entire country: On these walls, see Rocío Da Riva, “BM 67405 and the Cross Country Walls of Nebuchadnezzar II,” in The Perfumes of Seven Tamarisks: Studies in Honour of Wilfred G. E. Watson, ed. N. Wyatt, G. del Olmo, and J. Vidal (Münster, Germany: Ugarit Verlag, 2012); Rocío Da Riva, “Just Another Brick in the Median Wall,” Aramzid: Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies 5/1 (2010): 55–65; and R. G. Killick, “Northern Akkad Project: Excavations at abl s-Sar,” Iraq 46/2 (1984): 125–29.

long walls to the north and south: Killick, “Northern Akkad Project,” 125, calculates the distance as 47 km. Da Riva, “Just Another Brick,” prefers 54 km.

“made Babylon a mountain of life”: IM 516231, quoted in Da Riva, “Just Another Brick,” 61.

“fuel for flames”: Jeremiah 51:58.

so-called Umm Rus wall: The Umm Rus wall cannot be definitively dated, and scholars have placed it anywhere from 401 BC to AD 363. Julian Reade, “El-Mutabbaq and Umm Rus,” Sumer 20 (1964): 83–89, at 87.

defended the Tigris plain against bedouins: Reade, “El-Mutabbaq and Umm Rus,” 83–87. For the suggestion of a later date and attribution to the Caliph Ma’mun, see R. D. Barnett, “Xenophon and the Wall of Media,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 83 (1963): 1–26, at 6.

one-sixteenth their former size: Robert McC. Adams, “Contexts of Civilizational Collapse: A Mesopotamian View,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. N. Yoffee and G. Cowgill (Tucson, AZ, 1988), 37–38.

To Wall or Not to Wall?

In the late thirteenth century BC: Oscar Broneer, “The Cyclopean Wall on the Isthmus of Corinth, Addendum,” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 37/1 (1968): 25–35.

securing their water supplies: Nancy Demand, The Mediterranean Context of Early Greek History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 198, 204.

do away with it all: This material transformation has been described by many scholars, including E. N. Tigerstedt, The Legend of Sparta in Classical Antiquity, 3 vols. (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1965–78), 1:40, 1:44; Paul MacKendrick, The Greek Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in Greek Lands, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 166; Oswyn Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 171–73; Paul Cartledge, Spartan Reflections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 182.

been a city at all: Thucydides 1.10.

golden hair clasps: Ibid., 1.6–7.

Athenian men underwent: The evidence has been collected in W. Kendrick Pritchett, The Greek State at War, pt. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 209ff. See also Everett L. Wheeler, “Hoplomachia and Greek Dances in Arms,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 23/3 (1982): 229; and Jason Crowley, The Psychology of the Athenian Hoplite: The Culture of Combat in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 81: “The Athenian hoplite did not receive any military training, basic or otherwise, and so he arrived on the battlefield, for better or worse, exactly as his society had made him.”

brief period of mandatory exercise: When Plato, Republic 5.466e–467e, suggested that children should start being trained for war, he only proposed that they should attend battle as observers, carefully shielded from danger and mounted on horseback so that they could flee from peril. As regards the date of the ephebeia, which briefly provided military training for males who had turned eighteen, one of the few scholars to argue that the full institution existed earlier than the fourth century is Chrysis Pélékidis, Histoire de l’éphébie attique des origines à 31 avant Jésus-Christ (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1962), 50–79. Oscar Reinmuth, “The Genesis of the Athenian Ephebeia,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 82 (1952): 34–50, believes that particular elements of the institution existed in earlier times. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian Ephebeia,” in Structuralism in Myth: Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Dumezil, and Propp, ed. Robert Segal (London: Routledge, 1996), 277–98, compares the ephebeia to primitive initiation rituals, but does concede it is a fourth-century novelty. Peter Siewert, “The Ephebic Oath in Fifth-Century Athens,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977): 102–11, argues that the ephebic oath taken by Athenian citizens predated the system of training by at least a century.

fulfill all combat roles: For example, Plato, Timaeus 17c–18b; also Critias 110c–d, where Plato attributes such a system to a mythical, prehistoric Athens. At the time of Plato’s writing, a trend toward military professionalism was generally under way. See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “La tradition de l’hoplite athénien,” in Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne, ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (Paris: Mouton, 1968), 173ff.

physical education: Christian Laes and Johann Strubbe, Youth in the Roman Empire: The Young and the Restless Years? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 104ff; Nigel Kennell, “The Ephebeia in the Hellenistic Period,” in A Companion to Ancient Education, ed. Martin Bloomer (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 172–83.

supply their needs entirely by sea: Thucydides 1.143, 2.13.

“does not make us soft”: Ibid., 2.40; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 147.

“Not a man in the city was idle”: Lykourgos, Against Leokrates 44, cited in John Camp, The Archaeology of Athens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 143.

“Cries of Pain and Sadness”

“good at weeping”: Wilt Idema, Meng Jiangnu Brings Down the Great Wall: Ten Versions of a Chinese Legend (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 5.

“men and of mud”: Ibid., 10.

“cries of pain and sadness”: Lovell, Great Wall, 175.

“work without complaining”: Ibid., 109–11.

“simply exhaust them”: Ibid., 167.

width of eighty feet: Ralph Sawyer, Ancient Chinese Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 19–30; William Watson, “The City in Ancient China,” in The Origins of Civilization: Wolfson College Lectures, 1978, ed. P. R. S. Moorey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 54–56; Robin Yates, “Early China,” in War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 1999), 9.

towers of ice and snow: Ruth Meserve, “The Inhospitable Land of the Barbarian,” Journal of Asian History 16/1 (1982): 52–53.

“feared that royal decree”: The Shi King: The Old “Poetry Classic” of the Chinese, a Close Metrical Translation with Annotations, trans. W. Jennings (London: Routledge, 1891), 182–83. Nan-Chung is dated to around 800 BC in The Book of Songs, trans. Arthur Waley (1937; repr., London: Routledge, 2005), 122.

“the four ends of the earth”: René Groussett, The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 44.

“never reach them in time”: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, rev. ed., trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2:194.

“Chinese soldiers are not so good”: Cited in Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 203.

“grabbing at a shadow”: Sima, Records of the Grand Historian, 2:195.

forked over the tribute: A Hun king paid homage to the emperor in 51 BC and was given 5 kg of gold, 77 suits of clothes, 8,000 bales of silken fabric, 1,500 kg of silk floss, 15 horses, 680,000 liters of grain, and some cash. A half century later, “tributary” kings received up to 30,000 bales of fabric. Meanwhile, the Chinese court debated whether payments to tributary barbarians were bankrupting the state or were their only hope of preventing raids.

“rouge has melted from her cheek”: Po chu-I, cited in Stuart Legg, The Barbarians of Asia (New York: Dorset Press Reprints, 1990), 128–29.

Wallers and Warriors: Life outside the Walls

“live with birds and beasts”: Lovell, Great Wall, 112.

“die in a battle”: Ure, In Search of Nomads, 70.

“Raids are our agriculture”: Louise Sweet, “Camel Raiding of North Arabian Bedouin: A Mechanism of Ecological Adaptation,” American Anthropologist 67/5 (1965): 1142.

“torn in anguish by their nails”: Quoted in Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia: De Capo Press, 2007), 41.

Some German youth: Tacitus, Germania, 31.

“loss of a little blood”: Ibid., 14.

Huns: Priscus fr. 10; Scythians: Herodotus 4.64; Lusitanians: Diodorus 5.34.6ff.

word for “man” sufficed: Denis Sinor, “The Inner Asian Warriors,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 101/2 (1981): 135.

Banquet: Herodotus 4.66. Skinning of enemies: Ibid., 4.64ff, and Ammianus Marcellinus 31.2.14. Chinese accounts: “When they fight in battle,” wrote one Chinese historian, “those who have cut [enemy] heads or captured prisoners are presented with a cup of wine, and all the booty that they have taken is also given to them; the people they capture are made into slaves” (Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies, 278, citing Shi chi 110, 2892). The author of this passage, Ssuma Ch’ien (Sima Qian), had never encountered the earlier writings of Herodotus, written thousands of miles away.

“to make soldiers”: A widely cited remark. See, for example, Nicola Di Cosmo, introduction to Military Culture in Imperial China, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 18.

Prologue to the Great Age of Walls: Alexander’s Gates

“land of unwalled villages”: Ezekiel 38:11–12.

gates that Alexander had built: Josephus, Jewish War 7.7.4.

Walls Connect Eurasia

He described his team: Mark Aurel Stein, On Ancient Central Asian Tracks (repr., Delhi: Book Faith India, 1998), 30.

Stein once recalled: Ibid., xvii, 30.

“skeletons prop each other up”: Cited in Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 96.

still being sung: Ibid.

Balkh: Arezou Azad, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan: Revisiting the Fada il-i Balkh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 92–95.

Iron Gates: The wall reached at least 5.5 meters (eighteen feet) in height and had platforms for archers, inner corridors for troop movements, and loopholes for shooting. S. A. Rakhmanov, “The Wall between Bactria and Sogd: The Study on the Iron Gates, Uzbekistan,” in New Archaeological Discoveries in Asiatic Russia and Central Asia (Saint Petersburg: Russian Academy of Sciences, 1994), 75–78.

reports of nations: Full tale of Zhang’s reports in Sima, Records of the Grand Historian, 2:231–46.

Hadrian’s Walls

Stanegate Frontier: For an overview, see N. Hodgson, “The Stanegate: A Frontier Rehabilitated,” Britannia 31 (2000): 11–22.

“separate the Romans and barbarians”: Historia Augusta, Hadrian 11.2.

“the open plain”: Tacitus, Agricola 3.7.

old-growth oaks: David Breeze, The Frontiers of Imperial Rome (Barnsley, UK: Penn and Sword Military, 2011), 4, 12, 78.

Trajan’s Walls: The series of three barriers carry the name Trajan’s Rampart, the Valu lui Traian, or sometimes Trajan’s Wall, although no connection to Trajan has yet been demonstrated. Several other fortifications in southeastern Europe are unfortunately known by the same name. The interpretation of the walls as Roman is argued in W. S. Hanson and Iona Oltean, “The ‘Valu lui Traian’: A Roman Frontier Rehabilitated,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 25 (2012): 297–318. For the less convincing case that the walls were constructed by medieval Bulgarians, see Paolo Squatriti, “Moving Earth and Making Difference: Dikes and Frontiers in Early Medieval Bulgaria,” in Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Florin Curta (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005); and Uwe Fiedler, “Bulgars in the Lower Danube Region: A Survey of the Archaeological Evidence and of the State of Current Research,” in The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazans and Cumans, ed. Florin Curta (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2008), 162–66. As for the Roman date, it seems entirely implausible that Hadrian, while erecting vast defenses in relatively placid areas, would have left untouched and unimproved a region where the barbarian threat was constant, menacing, and so threatening to Constantinople that subsequent emperors spent the next several hundred years redoubling their efforts to fortify it.

lines of fortresses and watchtowers: S. T. Parker et al., The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Final Report on the Limes Arabicus Project, 1980–1989, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2006); Philip Mayerson, “The Saracens and the Limes,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 262 (1986): 35–47; Procopius, Buildings 5.8.5.

Paradise Lost

an end to war: P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, vol. 2: Orations XVII–LII, trans. Charles Behr (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1981), 26, 67ff.

schools filled the cities: Ibid., 26.104.

“universal and clear to all”: Ibid., 26.81, slightly altered to fit the sentence.

towns entirely abandoned: Similar abandonments occurred in Angers, Aix-en-Provence, and countless other cities. Ambert saw complete abandonment; Javols and Angers saw particularly brutal destruction. Joseph Gagnaire, “Ambert,” Villes et agglomérations urbaines antiques du sud-ouest de la Gaule: Histoire et archéologie, Deuxième Colloque Aquitania: Bordeaux, 13–15 septembre 1991 (Bordeaux: Éditions de la Fédération Aquitania, 1992), 19; Françoise Prévot, “Javols-Mende,” Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule des origines au milieu du VIIIe siècle, vol. 5, ed. Nancy Gauthier and Jean-Charles Picard (Paris: De Boccard, 1986), 82; Michel Provost, La carte archéologique de la Gaule 49: Maine et Loire (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1988), 87–88; A. Desbat, “Note sur l’abandon de la ville haute de Lyon,” Récentes recherches en archéologie gallo-romaine et paléochrétiennes sur Lyon et sa région, ed. S. Walker (Oxford: BAR, 1989); M. E. Bellet et al., “Orange: Cours Pourtoules,” Gallia Informations (1987–88/2): 321–25; D. Busson, “Paris: Place André Honnorat et rue Michelet,” Gallia Informations (1993/1–2): 29–30. Tours: Michel Provost, La carte archéologique de la Gaule 37: Indre-et-Loire (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1988), 78, 85, 90, 92. Aix: J.-P. Nibodeau, “Aix-en-Provence: Boulevard de la République,” Gallia Informations (1987–88/2): 225.

wall at the narrow isthmus: Zonaras 12.23. This was but one in a long series of attempts to wall off the Peloponnesus, the best known of which is the so-called Hexamilion. See Timothy Gregory, The Hexamilion and the Fortress (Isthmia) (Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1993). For a suggestion of a slightly later date, pertaining to the threat of Attila, see Robert Hohlfelder, “Trans-Isthmian Walls in the Age of Justinian,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 18 (1977): 173–79.

birds in a cage: The Anonymous Continuator of Cassius Dio fr. 9.2, cited in The History of Zonaras: From Alexander Severus to the Death of Theodosius the Great, trans. Thomas Banchich and Eugene Lane (New York: Routledge, 2009).

sacked five hundred cities: Zonaras 12.21, and Banchich and Lane, History of Zonaras, 101n5, for related sources and the claim of five hundred cities sacked.

regions were abandoned altogether: The Agri Decumates were once guarded by twenty thousand troops, Raetia by ten thousand, and Dacia by fifty thousand. See Lawrence Okamura, “Roman Withdrawals from Three Transfluvial Frontiers,” in Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. R. Mathisen and H. Sivan (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996), 11. All three provinces were abandoned in the reign of Gallienus.

Gaul survived the turbulence: Luce Pietri, “Angers,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, 5:1; C. Sintès, “L’évolution topographique de l’Arles du Haut-Empire à la lumière des fouilles récentes,” Journal of Roman Archeology 5 (1992): 141; G. M. Woloch, “A Descriptive Catalogue of Roman Cities,” in Pierre Grimal, Roman Cities, ed. and trans. G. M. Woloch (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 129; Charles Bonnet and C. Santschi, “Genève,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, vol. 3 (Paris: De Boccard, 1986), 41; F. Prévot, “Limoges,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, vol. 6 (Paris: De Boccard, 1989), 72; L. Pietri, “Rennes,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, 5:62; F. Prévot, “Rodez,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, 6:44; N. Gauthier, “Trèves,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, vol. 1 (Paris: De Boccard, 1986), 20; L. Pietri, “Troyes,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, 5:71.

For nearly three hundred years: A few cities had been granted the protection of walls during the early Empire. For a list of walled cities in early imperial Gaul, see C. Goudineau, “Les villes de la paix romaine,” in Histoire de la France urbaine, ed. George Duby, vol. 1: La ville antique (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 244.

Buildings in the paths: For example, J.-M. Fémolant, “Senlis: Ancien palais épiscopal, Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie,” Gallia Informations (1989/1): 240; Bonnet and Santschi, “Genève,” 41; H. Sivan, Ausonius of Bordeaux: Genesis of a Gallic Aristocracy (New York: Routledge, 1993), 41.

torn down simply to provide stone: In general, see Grimal, Roman Cities, 79; Ramsay MacMullen, Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 129; Louis Maurin, “Remparts et cités: Les provinces du Sud-Ouest de la Gaule au Bas-Empire (dernier quart du IIIe siècle—debut du Ve siècle),” in Villes et agglomérations, 368; T. F. C. Blagg, “The Reuse of Monumental Masonry in Late Roman Defensive Walls,” in Roman Urban Defences, ed. J. Maloney and B. Hobley, Council for British Archaeology Research Report 51 (London: CBA, 1983).

broke apart tombs, temples: In Paris, the city walls contained materials drawn from the old amphitheater, theater, and baths. The walls of Rennes included blocks from a Hadrianic temple to Mars. At Sens, the walls incorporated columns and panels from the public baths, and the walls of Senlis contained sections from a temple of Jupiter. Portions of a victory monument, a temple of Mars, and a monumental arch all found their way into the walls of Mainz. The walls of Bordeaux incorporated stones from a number of public buildings. Metz incorporated stones from its old baths. Temple fragments were in the foundations of the walls at Tours. Even the tiny town of Alzey used stones from a column to Jupiter and a temple of Apollo. The walls of Avignon seem to have included large blocks of inscriptions, sculpted fragments, and the debris of a triumphal arch. For Paris, Sens, Senlis, Mainz, Bordeaux, and Alzey, see Blagg, “Reuse of Monumental Masonry,” 131–34. For Rennes: Pietri, “Rennes,” 61. Bordeaux: Hagith Sivan, “Town and Country in Late Antique Gaul: The Example of Bordeaux,” in Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity, ed. J. Drinkwater and H. Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 133; and Sivan, Ausonius of Bordeaux, 39. Metz: N. Gauthier, “Metz,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, 1:40. Tours: Provost, Carte archéologique de la Gaule 37, 81. Avignon: J. Biarne, “Avignon,” in Gauthier and Picard, Topographie chrétienne, 3:17.

fragments of ancient architecture: M. Gauthier and P. Debord, Bordeaux, Saint-Christoly: Sauvetage archéologique et histoire urbaine (Bordeaux: Direction des Antiquités Historiques d’Aquitaine, 1983), 19–24.

the extraction of gravel: Roblin, “Paris: 14, rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie,” Gallia Informations (1993/1–2): 23. In Arles, townspeople pulled marble veneers off the walls of abandoned buildings and used the marble to cover holes in the ground. See Sintès, “L’évolution topographique de l’Arles,” 144.

In Fréjus: I. Béraud and C. Gébara, “Fréjus: Porte d’Orée,” Gallia Informations (1987–88/ 2): 271–72.

surrounded as it now was by lean-tos: Sintès, “L’évolution topographique de l’Arles,” 141–44; William Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51, 175–76; C. Sintès, “Arles: Institut de Recherche en la Provence Antique-Musée,” Gallia Informations (1990–91/1–2): 146.

reduced pitifully in size: Walls surrounded by sturdy temples and town houses, even abandoned ones, offered little defense; attackers could simply find shelter in the extramural buildings. Consequently, workers throughout the western provinces tore down any peripheral building that might provide a besieging army with cover, creating a no-man’s-land around the walls. J. Hubert, “Évolution de la topographie et de l’aspect des villes de Gaule du Ve au Xe siècle,” in La città nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio 6 (Spoleto, Italy: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1959), 535.

workers who destroyed it: The excavations are described in J.-M. Sauget and J.-C. Claval, “Clermont-Ferrand: Ancienne confiturerie Humbert,” Gallia Informations (1989/1): 39.

evacuated five grand houses: Excavations and dates of abandonment in Bérard, “Aix-en-Provence: Les Chartreux,” Gallia Informations (1990–91/1–2): 131–35.

Iron Age predecessors: For example, Bazas and Geneva: L. Maurin, “Bazas,” in Villes et agglomérations, 42; Bonnet and Santschi, “Genève,” 41.

days before Caesar: The final numbers attest to the near collapse of urban life. Walled Autun covered only one-twentieth its former area, yet its walls surpassed those of Auxerre, Troyes, Tours, Rennes, Anges, Loudon, Bayonne, and Périgueux. Few cities encompassed more than 30 acres. Bayeux, Dax, Limoges, Soissons, Mâcon, Agen, Albi, Beauvais, Evreux, Le Mans, Rennes, Auxerre, Grenoble, Embrun, Meaux, and Geneva each occupied between 17 and 30—pitifully small, but nowhere near the nadir. Senlis, Anger, Vannes, Vermand, Périgueux, Auch, St. Bertrand, St. Lizier, and Noyon were between 7 and 15 acres. Clermont-Ferrand, which had once sprawled over 494 acres, occupied only 7 by the later third century. Adrien Blanchet, Les enceintes romaines de la Gaule: Étude sur l’origine d’un grand nombre de villes françaises (Paris: E. Leroux, 1907), 14–19 (for Autun), 58–60 (Auxerre), 71 (Troyes), 39–44 (Tours), 50–53 (Rennes), 53–56 (Angers). For Bayonne, Dax, Loudon, Périgueux, see Maurin, “Remparts et cités,” 367. For acreages (converted from hectares), see Ferdinand Lot, La Gaule: Les fondements ethniques, sociaux et politiques de la nation française (Paris: Fayard, 1947), 397; O. Barraud et al., “Origin et développement topographique des agglomérations: Agen, Angoulême, Bourdeaux, Périgueux, Poitiers, Saintes,” in Villes et agglomérations, 208; S. T. Loseby, “Bishops and Cathedrals: Order and Diversity in the Fifth-Century Urban Landscape of Southern Gaul,” in Drinkwater and Elton, Fifth-Century Gaul, 150.

as if they were tombs: Ammianus 16.2.12.

occupy prehistoric hill forts: Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians, AD 200–600 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 40.

a new twenty-seven-mile wall: This is near the site of modern Obzor, starting at the Eleshnitsa River valley and ending at the Black Sea. Andrew Poulter, “An Indefensible Frontier: The claustra Alpium Iuliarum,” Jahreshefte des Österreischischen Archäologischen Institutes in Wien 81 (2012): 120.

forty Rhineland towns: Zosimus 3.1.

Defenseless behind Walls

just admitted its own ruin: Ammianus 31.4.6.

Synesius: Synesius, On Imperial Rule, opposition to luxury: 11.2–5; 12; 13. Opposition to walls: 11.6. Draft civilians rather than hire mercenaries: 14.6–8.

rubble of cities: Procopius, Wars 3.2.24.

“died with one city”: Brian Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28.

all four of her children: Olympiodorus fr. 29.2.

bodies washed ashore: Eugippius, Life of Saint Severinus 20.1–2.

countless snakes: Procopius, Wars 8.20.42–46.

complaining when it didn’t come: Synesius, ep. 125.2; 132.2.

The barbarians seized: Ibid., 61.2; 73.4; 107.1; 125.1–2; 130.4–6.

the manufacture of weapons: Ibid., 107.1; 133.6.

purchased from traders: Ibid., 133.7.

patchwork arsenal: Ibid., 108.1–2.

evening patrols: Ibid., 125; 132.

They were curious: Ibid., 108.3.

no help from Rome: Priscus, fr. 40, depicts the Roman governor Boniface as a resolute barbarian-fighter who not only fended off their hordes but occasionally engaged them in single combat. He was, however, often at odds with the central government.

stench of putrefaction: The chief chronicler of these depravities is Victor of Vita, History of the Vandal Persecution, trans. John Moorhead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992). See especially at 1.3–4, 1.6, 1.8, 1.10, and 1.12. See also Possidius, Life of Augustine, 28, and Quodvultdeus, In Barbarian Times, cited in P. J. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 289.

Bishops debated: Possidius, Life of Augustine, 30.

Talk of Gog and Magog: James Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 37.

Carthaginians went to the circus: Daniel Van Slyke, “The Devil and His Pomps in Fifth-Century Carthage: Renouncing Spectacula with Spectacular Imagery,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 59 (2005): 58. Richard Lim, “The Tribunus Voluptatum in the Later Roman Empire,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 41 (1996): 168.

heroics were rare: The final generation of Romans rallied somewhat. It was their emperors who let them down. In the western provinces, one city after another held off the invaders, assuming an imperial army would eventually race to their rescue, but that relief generally never came. The Franks, who gave their name to France, took over Gaul in a series of sieges, the longest of which, the siege of Paris, reputedly lasted ten years. Around that same time, the Goths were seizing Roman cities farther south, and they sometimes held out also. At the city of Clermont-Ferrand, besieged townspeople were reduced to eating the grass that grew in the cracks of the city walls. The city’s leading citizen assembled a small force that succeeded in temporarily driving off the Goths, but the city was soon enough lost, surrendered without a fight by the imperial government.

abandoned in favor of more secure hill forts: David Frye, “Aristocratic Responses to Late Roman Urban Change,” Classical World 96/2 (2003): 185–96.

long walls of the Dark Ages: The most powerful Dark Age state was that of the Franks, and it responded to the invasion of Magyar horsemen by restoring the original Devil’s Dykes, the old Roman walls of Hungary, also known as the limes Sarmatiae or Csörz árok. Eszter Istvánovits and Valéria Kulcsár, “The History and Perspectives of the Research of the Csörsz Ditch (‘Limes Sarmatiae’),” in Limes XVIII. Proceedings of the XVIIIth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies Held in Amman, Jordan (September 2000), vol. 2, ed. P. Freeman et al. (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2002), 626; Charles Bowlus, Franks, Moravians, and Magyars: The Struggle for the Middle Danube, 788-907 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 13.

average of once every decade: In 422, 442, 447, 481, 486, 493, 499, and 502. Brian Croke, “The Date of the Anastasian Long Wall,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 20 (1982): 68–69.

Anastasian Long Wall: I have split the difference between the estimate of 56 km given by J. Crow and A. Ricci, “Investigating the Hinterland of Constantinople: Interim Report on the Anastasian Long Wall,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997): 239, and the 65 km estimate of Croke, “Date of the Anastasian Long Wall,” 60. The wall was built of uniform blocks, standing five meters (sixteen feet) high. Up-to-date field reports of excavations are available at the Anastasian Wall Project website, www.shca.ed.ac.uk/projects/longwalls/anastasianwall.htm.

six times in one ten-year period: In 577, 583, and 587, and the Slavs in 581, 584, and 585. See Croke, “Date of the Anastasian Long Wall,” 69–70.

stone-and-clay houses: Florin Curta, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

“Scythian desert”: Procopius, Secret History 18.20–21.

He rebuilt cities: Justinian’s southeastern-European fortifications are the theme of Procopius, Buildings 4. Procopius emphasizes, especially at 4.1.4 and 4.1.6–7, that the new walls were necessitated by the unprovoked attacks of barbarians. Their archaeology is discussed in Curta, Southeastern Europe, 40–48.

sorrow and dejection: Procopius, Secret History 26.5ff.

“demolishing their own property”: Agathias 5.13.5–6, quoted in Crow and Ricci, “Investigating the Hinterland,” 239–40.

shifted toward other strategies: On the development of Byzantine strategy, see Edward Luttwack, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), passim; John Haldon, Warfare, State, and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204 (London: Routledge, 1999), 36.

“not allowed to use my freedom”: J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 2:73.

Cycles of Walls and Despots

“trust in virtue, not in walls”: Helmut Langerbein, “Great Blunders?: The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, and the Proposed United States/Mexico Border Fence,” History Teacher 43/1 (2009): 14.

“anxiety about border defense”: Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45.

“smile to kill people”: Ming Dong Gu, Translating China for Western Readers: Reflective, Critical, and Practical Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 160.

historians logged numerous complaints: Arthur Wright, “Sui Yang-Ti: Personality and Stereotype,” in The Confucian Persuasion, ed. A. Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 66.

“a hundred million people”: Lovell, Great Wall, 133.

aphrodisiac-driven sexual desires: Wright, “Sui Yang-Ti,” 66–71.

“Emperor Yang exhausted the country”: Lovell, Great Wall, 143.

“process of military training”: David Morgan, The Mongols (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 84.

raping his women: René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 249.

adopting a sedentary life: Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, trans. Julia Crookenden, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 241.

no value to the Mongol soldier: Mongol religion, such as it was, consisted of a sort of halfhearted shamanism. See Morgan, Mongols, 40–41.

“earthen-walled cities”: The Secret History of the Mongols: The Origin of Chingis Khan, adapt. and trans. Paul Kahn (Boston: Cheng and Tsui, 1988), 114, 116.

“the walls of their cities”: Ibid., 161.

cowed tribute-payers: Morgan, Mongols, 74.

The population of China: Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Vol 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), introduction.

Heaven is weary: Grousset, Empire of the Steppes, 249.

maintain a strong defense: Edward Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995), 83.

rebuilt the city walls: Yinong Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time: The Development of Urban Form in Suzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 123.

sea link between Europe and Asia: On Chinese maritime history, see Edward Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Ocean in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (New York: Pearson, 2006); Gang Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, c. 2100 BC–1900 AD (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997); John Wills Jr., ed., China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

nearly two hundred wars: Alastair Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 184.

“groaning in bed”: David Spindler, “A Twice-Scorned Mongol Woman, the Raid of 1576, and the Building of the Brick Great Wall,” Ming Studies 60 (2009): 66–94.

as late as 1805: On this wall, see Yonglin Jiang, “The ‘Southern Great Wall of China’ in Fenghuang County: Discovery and Restoration,” Ming Studies 68 (2013): 57–82; and Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1/2 (1999): 139–68, at 148–49.

“Endlessly they built walls”: Lovell, Great Wall, 260.

Walls and the Apocalypse

Babylon in 1811: Claudius Rich, Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818).

riding, archery, and truth telling: Herodotus 1.136.

“swallow the Greek poison”: Roman Ghirshman, Persian Art: The Parthian and Sassanian Dynasties, 219 B.C.–A.D. 651, trans. Stuart Gilbert and James Emmons (New York: Golden Press, 1962), 261.

protecting the entire Empire with walls: R. N. Frye, “The Sasanian System of Walls for Defense,” in Studies in Memory of Gaston Wiet, ed. Myriam Rosen-Ayalon (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1977), 7; Hamid Mahamedi, “Wall as a System of Frontier Defense during the Sasanid Period,” in The Spirit of Wisdom [Mēnōg ī Xrad]: Essays in Memory of Ahmad Tafazzoli, ed. Touraj Daryaee and Mahmoud Omidsalar (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2004). There is one allegedly Achaemenid-era wall, located in northern Afghanistan and named, like several others, kam pirak. Unfortunately, little is known of this wall, which ran 60 km (37 miles) from Dilbarjin toward Balkh, and given that linear barriers seem to have been utterly foreign to the Achaemenids, I am skeptical that the date will withstand scrutiny. See Warwick Ball, Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan, 2 vols. (Paris: ADPF, 1982), 145; Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London: Routledge, 2000), 315.

“Lord of the Shoulders”: Mahamedi, “Wall as a System of Frontier Defense,” 157.

Moat of Shapur: Frye, “Sasanian System of Walls,” 8–9, relying on the Persian historian Yāqūt.

“panic and bloodshed”: Jerome, ep. 77.8.

defending both empires: For example, Priscus fr. 41.1, 47.

“bleeding their country”: Moses Dasxuranci, The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movses Dasxuranci, trans. C. J. F. Dowsett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 83. He nevertheless described the walls as “wonderful works.”

entire Merv oasis: Andrej Bader, Vassif Gaibov, and Gennadij Koselenko, “Walls in Margiana,” in In the Land of the Gryphons: Papers on Central Asian Archaeology in Antiquity, ed. Antonio Invernizzi (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1995), 39–50, supplanting Frye, “Sasanian System of Walls,” 14, who earlier dated the 250 km oasis walls to Antiochus I. Balkh: Azad, Sacred Landscape, 92–95. The Balkh walls encircled not only the walled city but also outlying farms and villages within its 72-km (45-mile) perimeter. Bukhara: The rampart dated from the fifth century and encompassed the entire oasis, including some fifteen districts and numerous villages. Its length is also estimated at 250 km. See Ciro Lo Muzio, “An Archaeological Outline of the Bukhara Oasis,” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 4 (2009): 46. Although Lo Muzio dates the wall somewhat later, more recent fieldwork indicates that the Bukhara oasis wall dates to the fifth century. See Sören Stark et al., “Preliminary Results of the Field Season 2013,” www.isaw.nyu.edu/research/bukhara-project/2013-field-season. Additional description at W. Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 98, 113–16. Bayhaq: Ira Lapidus, “Muslim Cities and Islamic Societies,” in Middle Eastern Cities: A Symposium on Ancient, Islamic, and Contemporary Middle Eastern Urbanism, ed. Ira Lapidus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 68. Tashkent: The “stone city” was sheltered by three layers of walls, the outermost of which enclosed the entire oasis. See Guy Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 480–81. Nur: Aleksandr Naymark, “The Size of Samanid Bukhara: A Note on Settlement Patterns in Early Islamic Mawarannahr” in Bukhara: The Myth and the Architecture, ed. Attilio Petruccioli (Cambridge: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1999), 46. Samarkand: Naymark, “Size of Samanid Bukhara,” 46. Naymark believes that the oasis wall of Samarkand functioned throughout the early Middle Ages, whereas it is the opinion of Stark et al., “Preliminary Results,” that the Samarkand oasis wall, identified as Divar-i-Qiyamat, should be dated to the time of Abu Muslim in the mid-eighth century.

twenty new walls: Murtazali Gadjiev, “On the Construction Date of the Derbend Fortification Complex,” Iran and the Caucasus 12 (2008): 2, 12.

Archaeologists believe that the walls: Muhammed-Yusuf Kiani, Parthian Sites in Hyrcania: The Gurgan Plain (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1982), 11–38, who attributes construction to Mithradates II (123–87 BC), has been sharply criticized by archaeologists, who have firmly established a date shortly before or after AD 500. See James Howard-Johnston, East Rome, Sasanian Persia and the End of Antiquity (Burlington, VT: Variorum, 2006), 194n79; and Jebrael Nokandeh et al., “Linear Barriers of Northern Iran: The Great Wall of Gorgan and the Wall of Tammishe,” Iran 44 (2006): 121–73.

water for brick making: Hamid Rekavandi et al., “Secrets of the Red Snake: The Great Wall of Iran Revealed,” Current Archaeology 27 (2008): 12–22.

five barriers: After a crushing defeat in the late fifth century AD, the Sasanids enhanced their fortifications in the region. Around 500, they added the Ghilghilchay Wall, south of Derbent in the Siyazan region of Azerbaijan, and the main defenses at Derbent and Ghilghilchay were then supplemented by three long earthen ramparts—one north of Derbent, another between Derbent and Ghilghilchay, and a third south of Ghilghilchay. See Howard-Johnston, East Rome, 192. Khosrow was probably responsible for constructing the spectacular stone wall that replaced the mud-brick original at Derbent. Archaeology confirms the statements of early medieval geographers who credit the 50 km (31 mile) mud-brick wall to Kavadh I (r. 488–531). Standing up to five meters (sixteen feet) high and resting on a base some eight meters (twenty-six feet) thick, the Ghilghilchay Wall formed a key part of the broader Caspian defense system. See Asker Aliev et al., “The Ghilghilchay Defensive Long Wall: New Investigations,” Ancient West and East 5/1–2 (2006): 143–77; Howard-Johnston, East Rome, 192, gives the length as only 30 km. The Ghilghilchay Wall, here given the name that derives from the river it follows, is also occasionally known as the Shirwan Wall or the Gilginsky Wall.

Russian republic of Dagestan: In Armenian sources, Derbent is known as Cor, and it figures in Byzantine sources as Tzour, Chorytzon, or Tzon. It is also written as “Darband,” and was constructed during the reign of Yazdigerd II (439–57). Aliev et al., “Ghilghilchay Defensive Long Wall,” 144–48; Gadjiev, “On the Construction Date,” 1–15. Derbent means “locked gate” in Persian, and towns by that name are liberally scattered across the mountains of the old empire.

“Alans and other barbarians”: John Barker, Justinian and the Later Roman Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 116; Gadjiev, “On the Construction Date,” 13.

“Great Caucasian Wall”: The improved Derbent fortifications began as two parallel walls that reached from the sea to the Caucasus, then continued for more than 40 km (25 miles) into the mountains. As always, scholars disagree as to the length. Gadjiev, “On the Construction Date,” 2; Howard-Johnston, East Rome, 192; see also the older account of V. Minorsky, A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th—11th Centuries (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1958), 13, 86–89. For a nineteenth-century traveler’s account, see William Ainsworth, ed., All Around the World: An Illustrated Record of Voyages, Travels, and Adventures in All Parts of the Globe, 2 vols. (London: W. Collins, 1866), 294–98.

cursed name: Alexander was “considered the third of the trinity of evil spirits which according to Zoroastrian belief was created by Ahriman to vex the Iranian race.” The Shahnameh of the Persian Poet Firdausi, trans. James Atkinson (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1832), 338.

Gog and Magog: Alexander appears as Iskander, and Gog and Magog as Yajuj and Majuj. On the reception of the Alexander myth in the Shahnameh, see Haila Manteghi, “Alexander the Great in the Shanameh of Ferdowsi,” in The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East, ed. R. Stoneman, K. Erickson, and I. Netton (Groningen, Netherlands: Barkhuis, 2012).

Divar-i-kanpirak, or Kempirak: Stark et al., “Preliminary Results.” Many scholars have identified Kanpirak with Bukhara’s oasis wall. However, recent excavations make identification with the long wall more probable. Locals know the wall as Kempir-Duval. See Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion, 113.

northeast of Tashkent: Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion, 172–73. This later wall began at the mountains and followed the Chirchiq River to the Syr-Darya, demarcating cultivated land from steppe. Like other long walls in Central Asia, it was built in the eighth century and, curiously, is known to locals by the same name, Kempir-Duval, as the long wall at Bukhara. Local tradition holds that the wall once extended much farther than its surviving traces.

against the Turks: The account is from Abu Bakr Muhammed ibn Jafar Narshakhi, The History of Bukhara, trans. Richard Frye (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1954), 33–34.

“they departed”: On the fate of Bukhara, see ‘Ala-ad-Din ‘Ata-Malik Juvaini, The History of the World-Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:75–85.

1.3 million: Ibid., 1:119–32.

numbers of the slaughtered: Morgan, Mongols, 74–78.

“fearful, hungry, and cold”: Hend Gilli-Elewy, “Al-Hawadit al-gami ‘a: A Contemporary Account of the Mongol Conquest of Baghdad, 656/1258,” Arabica 58 (2011): 368.

“hunger and fear”: Ibid.

canals still functioned: Jacob Gruber, “Irrigation and Land Use in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Agricultural History 22/2 (1948): 73.

hydraulic infrastructure: S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 465.

the number of wandering tribes: D. T. Potts, Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 258.

ate up the entire harvest: Norman Lewis, Nomads and Settlers in Syria and Jordan, 1800–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 8–9.

abandoned villages came to outnumber inhabited ones: Ibid., 11–23. By the mid-nineteenth century a growing number of tribes occupied Iraq as well. This movement became a “temporary flood” after World War I.

“Turkoman towers”: Potts, Nomadism in Iran, 316–17.

The Horrible Bombard

“Give me Constantinople”: Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 74.

Beyond the Pale

“his sword beside him”: Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1816), 113–14.

“like second nature”: Gerald of Wales, Topography of Ireland, 3:10, in The Historical Works of Giraldius Cambrensis, ed. Thomas Wright, trans. Thomas Forester and Sir Richard Colt Hoare (London: George Bell, 1905).

stone towers for residences: Terry Barry, “The Last Frontier: Defence and Settlement in Late Medieval Ireland,” in Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland: Essays Presented to J. F. Lydon, ed. T. Barry, R. Frame, and K. Simms (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 217–28.

Ukrainian Line: John LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 48–49. This line followed the Bereslovaia River before crossing overland to the Bereka River, which was followed to the Donets at Izium.

progress in Siberia: The Siberian Line, eventually consisting of the Orenburg, Usinskaya, Presnogor’kovskya, and Irtysh Lines, is described in I. Stebelsky, “The Frontier in Central Asia,” in Studies in Historical Geography, vol. 1, ed. J. H. Bater and R. A. French (New York: Academic Press, 1983).

sixteen hundred miles in length: Course described in LeDonne, Grand Strategy, 286–87.

“savage in character”: Emeri Van Donzel and Andrea Schmidt, Gog and Magog in Early Eastern Christian and Islamic Sources: Sallam’s Quest for Alexander’s Wall (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2009), 44.

Fort Brokenheart

“Young Indians”: Thomas Forsyth, “An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Sauk and Fox Nation of Indians Tradition,” in The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, vol. 2, ed. Emma Blair (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1912), 194.

“(death-whoop)”: Henry Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States: Their History, Antiquities, Customs, Religion, Arts, Language, Traditions, Oral Legends, and Myths, ed. Francis Drake, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1884), 184.

Warrior customs prevailed: “Even a cursory review of the literature reveals that one of the most highly prized social distinctions available to Native American males was that specific to the warrior tradition. To be considered a fierce warrior ready and willing to battle in defense of the people was the ultimate honor.” Richard Chacon and Rubén Mendoza, “Ethical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous Warfare and Violence in North America,” in North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence, ed. Richard Chacon and Rubén Mendoza (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 227.

“tenderest years”: Charles Bishop and Victor Lytwyn, “ ‘Barbarism and Ardour of War from the Tenderest Years’: Cree-Inuit Warfare in the Hudson Bay Region,” in Chacon and Mendoza, North American Indigenous Warfare, 37.

mature into elite warriors: R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple, The California Indians: A Source Book, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 433–34.

“apprentice warrior”: Antoine Simone Le Page Du Pratz, The History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina (1774; repr., New Orleans: Pelican Press, 1947), 308.

thrown in the air: Helen Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 79.

inserted in the wounds: To George Catlin, that tireless advocate of Indian causes and sensitive recorder of Indian customs, it was almost too painful to watch. He recalled the awful ripping sounds made by the knives and how the tortured youths had smiled at him, proud of their ability to withstand pain. George Catlin, O-Kee-Pa: A Religious Ceremony; and Other Customs of the Mandans (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1867); also George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, 3rd ed. (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1844), 158ff.

demonstrating valor: On war dances, both preparatory and celebratory, see Marian Smith, “The War Complex of the Plains Indians,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 78/3 (1938): 449–52. A Dakota warrior with a kill to his credit was awarded an eagle’s feather marked with a red spot. If he had slit his victim’s throat, he could wear an even more prestigious ornament, a red feather that had been notched. Chippewa warriors wore two feathers for bloodying their weapons, three for killing and scalping an enemy, and five for having taken a wounded prisoner. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, 1:184–85.

sacred protection: One of the earliest English observers of Native Americans, Arthur Barlowe, noted of the Indians of Virginia in 1584, “When they goe to warres, they carry about with them their idol, of whom they ask counsel, as the Romans were woont of the Oracle of Apollo.” Arthur Barlowe, “The First Voyage to Roanoke, 1584,” https://archive.org/details/firstvoyagetoroa00barl. The custom of warriors carrying bundles of charms into battle was later observed among Algonquians, Pawnee, Iowa, Osage, Omaha, Kansa, Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Sioux, and Crows, among others. Smith, “War Complex,” 446–47.

Scalps: James Axtell and William Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut; or, Who Invented Scalping?,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37/3 (1980): 451–72.

Tribal military societies: Robert Lowie, “Military Societies of the Crow Indians,” in Societies of the Plains Indians, ed. Clark Wissler (New York: Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, 1916), 143–218; as well as William Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

shown cowardice: John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty, Cheyenne Memories, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 63.

women did all the work: See, for example, the remarks of Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, 1:22: “The greatest obstacle to the success of agricultural life among them has hither to been a haughty spirit of pride and the unqualified laziness of the men and boys, who will not work. The men hunt a little in summer, go to war, kill an enemy, dance, lounge, sleep, and smoke. The women do everything—nurse, chop wood and carry it on their backs from a half to a whole mile, hoe the ground for planting, plant, hoe the corn, gather wild fruit, carry the lodge, and in winter cut and carry the poles to pitch it with, clear off the snow, etc: and the men often sit and look on.”

“unmistakably primitive people”: For the history of these women, as well as those men who made similar expeditions, see Ure, In Search of Nomads.

“I go dance on Broadway”: Merian C. Cooper, Grass (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), 53.

The Last Battles

gypped in a heroin deal: Upton Close, “Hot Water along the Great Wall,” Saturday Evening Post, April 8, 1933, 6–7, 31–36.

“Great Wall is glorious!”: Lovell, Great Wall, 312.

“come to us on bended knee”: “On Bended Knee,” Time 21/4 (January 23, 1933): 25.

“Lives are our ammunition!”: “War of Jehol,” Time 21/10 (March 6, 1933): 23.

“at some deer”: “Glorious 16,” Time 21/11 (March 13, 1933): 24.

“monument to fear”: Lovell, Great Wall, 279.

“Chinese love of enclosing walls”: Ibid., 15.

“incompatible with them”: Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 98.

“Wall is what makes China”: Jeffrey Meyer, cited in Dee Mack Williams, Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Development, and Identity on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 63–64.

“the national psyche”: Ibid., 64.

“new Wall of China”: Brent Sterling, Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors? What History Teaches Us about Strategic Barriers and International Security (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 212.

“Great Wall of France”: Ibid., 232.

“concrete labyrinth”: Harold Rosen, “Maginot Line,” Changing English 11/2 (2004): 243.

“A Hell of a Lot Better Than a War”

“it was blank”: Peter Wyden, Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 682.

“better than a war”: Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 220.

Epilogue: “Love Your Neighbor, but Don’t Pull Down Your Hedge”

“biggest exporter of cages in the world”: “Israel: Walled In,” Financial Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/ccf4b532-3935-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7?mhq5j=e3.

“crossed the border”: Chris Helman, “What Trump Can Learn from the Man Who Built Israel’s Border Walls,” Forbes, February 1, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/02/01/what-trump-can-learn-from-the-man-who-built-israels-border-walls/.

“nor particular efficient”: Langerbein, “Great Blunders?,” 10.

“control your borders”: Daniel Halper, “Hillary: I Voted for Border Fence to Keep Out Illegal Immigrants,” Weekly Standard, November 10, 2015, http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillary-i-voted-for-border-fence-to-keep-out-illegal-immigrants/article/1061753.

“Koch brothers’ proposal”: Peter Beinart, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration,” Atlantic, July–August 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-democrats-immigration-mistake/528678/.