7
The Afro-Eurasian Network (800 BCE-200 CE)
 
 
 
The first rise of cities and civilizations on the planet occurred, as we have seen, in four large river valleys of Afro-Eurasia. These cities formed a network, a small core of urban life, in which people were trading and communicating with each other. During the period 800 BCE to 200 CE these societies elaborated the bureaucratic and religious systems that persevered as distinct world cultures into the global age.
Before our story moves on to what people in the core cities were creating, it is well to remember that outside and around the urban areas most people continued to live in various kinds of pre-urban life—in farming, herding, or hunting-and-gathering cultures. The Sahara Desert cut off the herding peoples of sub-Saharan Africa from the mainstream trade. People in the Americas continued their hunter-gatherer culture. North of the Afro-Eurasian core of rising urban civilizations lived the Celts of Europe and the horse-riding nomads of inner Asia. These nomads periodically swooped down into farming and urban areas; since they played a decisive role in the development of the subcontinent of India after early urban life there collapsed about 1500 BCE, they will appear briefly in this chapter but will be featured in the next two.
The Celts deserve special mention because their culture has often been downplayed in narratives of world history, since they were conquered by the Romans. At their height in about 300 BCE, however, Celtic people were living across Europe, from Ireland to the Black Sea, from Belgium to Spain and Italy, after originating in about 1000 BCE in the area of eastern France and western Germany where the Rhine and the Danube rivers begin.
Romans called the Celts “Gauls,” from a Greek word, hal, meaning salt, for salt and iron were the basis of their economy. By 900 BCE iron tools and weapons were in frequent use in the eastern Mediterranean and Europe, where the Celts traded them up and down the rivers to which they gave names: Rhine, Main, Neckar, Ruhr, and Isar.1
The Celts lived a sophisticated communal subsistence farming culture, with elected officials, women’s equality, excellent roads made of oak beams, stone buildings, exquisite metal jewelry and tools, and a lunar calendar more nearly accurate than the Julian (Roman) calendar. They worshipped many gods and goddesses led by their priests, the Druids. They used Greek letters for commerce but refused, in order to retain their capacity for memorization, to put their history, genealogy, and religion into print. Superb warriors, they preferred hand-to-hand combat and sometimes fought naked. They were able to pillage Rome for seven months in about 390 BCE, a little more than a hundred years after senators established the Roman republic. But the Roman Empire fought back, as will be seen, eventually conquering all of Celtic territory except Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany (the north coast of France), where the Celts have been able to maintain their 3,000-year-old culture into modern times.2

India

Turning to the urbanized areas of Afro-Eurasia, we start with India bounded on the north by the Himalayas, which were created when India was a separate floating continent that crashed into the Asian mainland. Only one passable route through these majestic mountains existed—the Khyber Pass. In about 1500 BCE, horse-riding nomads from the north, speaking an Indo-European language, migrated into northern India through this pass. Did they attack and conquer or quietly assimilate? The answer is not known.
They did arrive, however—these people known as the Aryas, lighter-skinned than the indigenous Dravidians. Somehow the two groups merged into a system of varnas (literally colors) or castes, in which the lighter-skinned Aryas occupied the higher castes and the Dravidians the lower ones. Priests and scholars held the highest rank (Brahmins), then the warriors and rulers (Kshatriyas), then all the other Aryas, and finally the non-Aryas. The caste system became distinctive of Indian culture, perpetuating itself by marriage strictly restricted to fellow caste members. Today the caste system has been officially abolished, but there are still 25,000 sub-caste groups organized into 3,000 castes, classified into the four ancient varnas.
The caste system became associated with a belief in reincarnation. The priests taught that every living creature has an atman, or self, that at death separates from the body and returns in another body, depending on its karma, or deeds done during its life. If the self and its body accepts the caste position allotted to it and carries out its duties faithfully, then the self is rewarded by returning in the next life to a higher caste. If not, the self is punished with a lower caste. This belief system helped people accept the socioeconomic immobility of the caste system.
The people of India enjoyed little political unity, since local rulers were unable to solicit enough support from across their castes to conquer neighbors and since nomadic groups kept arriving from the north to raid and to assimilate. Because horses did not fare well in India’s climate, Indians could not resist the horse-riding warriors from the north.
Indian religion proved tolerant and gradually added local gods until it became a conglomeration of multiple gods and goddesses—330 million, according to one tradition. Yet within this multiplicity was unity; all the gods and goddesses were considered manifestations of a single divine force pervading the universe. The name by which this religion is known today emerged in about the eleventh century CE, when Islamic invaders called it Hinduism, meaning “what Indians do.” 3
Eventually various beliefs and practices developed that challenged both the authority of the Brahmin priests and the idea of endless reincarnation. Yoga was one of these practices—the idea that individuals could gain liberating insight through mental and physical discipline. But the most influential challenge came from an individual named Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 BCE), who became known as the Buddha, or “Enlightened One.” 4
Gautama was born the son of a king of a small kingdom in what is now Nepal, into the Kshatriya caste. After a regal upbringing and a luxurious life for twenty-nine years, he renounced his privilege and became a wandering ascetic. After six years he realized that asceticism was no more likely to produce insight than was luxury, and he chose a middle path. Seated under a banyan fig tree south of the present city of Patna in northeast India, he had a sudden and profound insight that became the basis of his teachings. He stressed living modestly, to minimize desire and suffering, and searching through self-discipline and meditation. He did not believe in gods or a single god nor in the persistence of a self or soul after death. His goal was to achieve nirvana, literally “snuffing out the flame,” a release from the cycles of reincarnation. He lived out his sense of leadership by traveling throughout India to teach his insights.
The Buddha’s teachings attracted many followers, who took vows of celibacy, nonviolence, and poverty. As his teachings spread, a schism developed between those who retained the original teachings (Theravada Buddhism) and those who added new teachings, such as worshipping the Buddha as a god and revering bodhisattvas, or people who almost attain nirvana but choose reincarnation in order to stay on Earth and help others.
The Indian subcontinent achieved political unity after the death of the Macedonian-Greek ruler Alexander the Great, who reached the Punjab (northern Pakistan) in 326 BCE. After Alexander’s death, the Indian ruler Chandragupta Maurya, could extend his control. From 269 to 232 BCE the great king Ashoka further extended the kingdom by conquest. Full of remorse, Ashoka converted to Buddhism and practiced nonviolence, morality, tolerance, and moderation. He outlawed animal sacrifice, stopped the slaughter of animals in his kitchens, and gave up royal hunting trips. The Buddhist wheel of the law, adopted by Ashoka, still waves on India’s flag today; under Ashoka Buddhism became a world religion.
About fifty years after Ashoka’s death the government of northern India collapsed under attacks from the north, not to be reunited for another 500 years. Yet this period of feuding kingdoms from the third century BCE to the third century CE is considered a classical period of the flowering of Indian art and literature.

China

In China, there was no collapse of early urban life, and a distinctive culture based on appealing to ancestors continued. After the Shang dynasty, China endured a period of at least twenty-five warring feudal states vying for power from about 1030 to 221 BCE. Dikes and canals were built to bring the whole floodplain of the Yellow River under cultivation. Many new inventions became integrated into the culture, among them animal-drawn ploughs, the trace harness, crossbows, and a money economy. Bronze appeared in China in about 1500 BCE, while iron production started at about 500 BCE. The Chinese wanted jade from central Asia, while Mediterranean people wanted lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and Iran; hence, weak trading routes were in place between the Mediterranean and China during this time.
The trace harness, in use in China from the fourth century BCE, used a breast strap low across the horse’s collarbone rather than across its throat, the latter of which reduced the horse’s efficiency by partially choking it. Europeans probably did not invent the trace harness; central Asian people brought it to Hungary in the mid-sixth century CE; until then, horses in China could pull heavier loads than those in Europe.
To protect themselves from nomad attacks, the Chinese developed massive arms production, especially of crossbows, which could pierce two suits of metal armor. The trigger mechanism on the crossbow involved three moving pieces on two shafts, each cast in bronze and ground to precision. Greeks used crossbows in the fourth century BCE; whether they were smuggled out of China or copied, no one knows. Crossbows disappeared in Europe from 400 to 900 CE, then reappeared and were used by Cortez as one of his main weapons in subjugating the people of Mesoamerica.5
Despite the political instability in China, it enjoyed a period of intellectual development. Hundreds of schools of philosophers traveled about giving advice and setting up academies. The feudal system was replaced with a bureaucratic one, complete with police and passports. Coins stamped with their value appeared in the middle of the first millennium BCE.
Steppe nomads kept attacking China in the north and northwest; from them the Chinese learned chariot warfare and the use of saddles and stirrups. By about 350 BCE the Chinese had learned cavalry warfare, although horses were expensive to keep in a land without grass. (One horse ate as much grain as twelve people.) 6
In 221 BCE the family of Chin managed to unify the whole Chinese empire. The first emperor, Chin Shih Huang Ti, proved indefatigable, poring over a ton of reports on wood and bamboo tablets per month. He took over estates and had them managed by the government. He standardized weights, measures, and the gauges of carts and chariots, and extended the Great Wall. Fifteen years later, however, power passed to the Han dynasty, which ruled China from 206 BCE until 220 CE.
The Chinese empire rested in part on the surplus of grain produced by its system of canals, which also provided the transportation for taxes to be collected. The tax was a percentage of the annual harvest, collected in kind and delivered to court. Men also owed one month a year of labor and two years of military duty. The walls of Changan (now Xian), the capital from 202 BCE until 8 CE, enclosed about 246,000 people in 2 CE, when the first national census was taken. About 60 million people lived in the empire, an estimated 10 to 30 percent of them in cities, compared to about 10 percent living in cities in Europe.
The other foundation of the Han dynasty lay in the moral teachings of Confucius (Latinized form of Kong Fuzi, or “Master Kong”), who lived in about 551 to 479 BCE. Confucius taught the proper way to live—namely, that social hierarchy is a natural phenomenon and that gentlemen should cultivate good relationships with the spirits by behaving properly in private and in public. Under the Han rulers, the study of Confucian texts became the mark of an educated man and the qualification for holding administrative office, won through competitive examinations.
During the period 480 to 221 BCE, many among the masses of Chinese people began to follow the teachings of Laozi (or Lao Tsu), about fifty years older than Confucius, although the facts are not firm. Laozi advised renouncing worldly ambition, focusing on self-enlightenment and finding one’s own path (the Tao) to right conduct, which his followers preferred to social, bureaucratic, and governmental requirements. Laozi’s teachings became known as Taoism or Daoism.
Trade along the routes from China to central Asia and to the lands of the Mediterranean jumped to a much higher level in about 101 BCE when the emperor Han Wu Ti (Wudi) sent an envoy to fetch a special kind of large horse raised in the Fergana Valley, now Uzbekistan. This envoy, Zhang Qian, made eighteen trips altogether, although the first took thirteen years round-trip because he was captured on the way. His route became known as the Silk Road, after China’s main export. Made from caterpillars spinning cocoons in mulberry trees, silk was a secret the Chinese kept until the sixth century CE. Silk became a kind of currency and the most important form of property in central Asia. Greeks and Romans treasured it; Buddhists needed large quantities for banners. Seeds and crops were also exchanged along the Silk Road; wine grapes and alfalfa went to China, which sent apricots and peaches to the Mediterranean (Fig. 7.1).7
During the Han era a skeptical and rationalist way of thinking developed in China, just as it had in Greece a century or two earlier. An active intellectual life went on, including the invention and spread of paper. Imperial officials kept registers of land and households in order to keep track of money and services due. Chinese textile technology was not approached by Iran or Europe until centuries later. Coal was used as fuel for iron making.8
The loads transported on the Silk Road hid invisible travelers—the viruses of animal diseases. Some of these diseases we still know as childhood illnesses—smallpox, mumps, whooping cough, and measles. These diseases did not spread from animals to people until people were living in densities of approximately 300,000 or more, insuring a constant source of new hosts for the virus after the death of its first.9
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7.1 The Silk Road and Han China
The Silk Road spread these diseases to vulnerable city populations at both its ends. From about 165 to 180 CE serious epidemics occurred in both the Roman and the Chinese empires, claiming the lives of up to 25 percent of the population, one factor leading to the downfall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE.
The Han empire contended as well with intrigues in the ruling class, corruption and inefficiencies, uprisings of desperate peasants, the spread of banditry, and the ambitions of rural warlords. The underlying instability that the Chinese could never overcome, however, was the continuing raids and attacks of nomadic peoples from the steppes. After the Han regime fell, China experienced a period of political fragmentation that lasted until the late sixth century CE.
The Silk Road trade consolidated the network among Afro-Eurasian cities and agrarian civilizations. It linked China, India, Greece, and Rome in a heavy traffic of ideas and products that initiated a new era in world history, as we will see in the next chapter. This connection between China and the Mediterranean proved no less significant for the first millennium than the link to the Americas by Columbus did for the modern world. Before moving into this new era of the Silk Road link, however, we must catch up with life and culture around the Mediterranean Sea.

Greece

More is known about the Greeks than is known about early Mesopotamia, China, or India, because the evidence is more abundant, through excavation and preserved texts. The Greeks did not experience a rapid rise into dense urban regions with extreme social stratification. The rocky hills of the lower Greek peninsula, with their crops of barley, olives, and grapes together with sheep and goats, could not support large urban populations. Northern Greece had enough rainfall for raising horses and cattle. But the fallout from the volcanic eruption on Thera (Santorini) in about 1650 BCE influenced the climate for years to come. Not until about 800 BCE did the Greeks create an urban form called the polis, new in the world and one that incorporated more of the equality that the Greeks knew from tribal life than did cities in Mesopotamia, India, or China.
The polis, usually located on a hilltop, included the surrounding countryside. It was an association of citizens, led by a magistrate elected for a limited time, usually a year. Citizenship was open only to males, for it required fighting for the polis in person; women, children, slaves, and foreigners were excluded. Wise magistrates such as Solon in 594 BCE forgave debts and rearranged property and voting rights to prevent the gap between rich and poor from becoming too large.
In about 700 BCE alphabetic writing reached Greece from Phoenicia, enabling Greeks to write down the epics attributed to Homer. Greek colonists established hundreds of new cities around the coasts of Greece, Italy, Turkey, and the Black Sea, as the Greek population increased five- to sevenfold in the eighth century BCE. The colonists became the model of individualism, much admired by Greeks, who called themselves Hellenes and other people barbaroi, literally non-Greek speaking. People in the city of Lydia, in present western Turkey, invented coins with their value stamped on them as a way for the state to guarantee the weight and purity of gold, silver, and copper. The Greeks hastened to adopt coinage and, as a result, trade flourished.
In the Iliad, the Greek poet Homer honored individual valor in fighting. Yet by the mid-seventh century BCE the Greeks were using phalanx fighting on land, in which citizens fought side by side in lines, each using his shield to protect the man next to him. In this way the pursuit of fame and glory was transferred from the individual to the polis as a whole. In 480 BCE, in a surprise victory at sea, a coalition of about twenty Greek cities defeated the army of the Persian empire. A year later the Greeks defeated them again on land, inaugurating a golden period of 150 years of Greek cultural creativity led by its largest city, Athens.
During these years Athens held about 300,000 people, of whom 30,000 to 40,000 men were citizens. They developed a distinctive upper-class style consisting of political discussions in the agora, athletic games which men played in the nude, and drinking parties with philosophical debate, all based on developing individual power and using the mind to reason without any constraints set by priests or kings. The citizens practiced direct democracy, with legislative power vested in the whole body of citizens and executive power in a Council of 500, limited to two-year terms. Ten generals had to be elected annually but could serve indefinitely. Pericles served as a general from 461 to 429 BCE, the height of Greek democracy.10
Loyalty to the polis came first for the Greeks, and magistrates, rather than priests, arranged the religious rituals. A panoply of gods were worshipped by the upper class; led by Zeus, the sky god, and Ares, the war god, these deities behaved like humans, except that they enjoyed immortality. The agricultural majority of people practiced fertility cults based on female deities such as Astarte.
Teachers called Sophists provided training in logic and public speaking for upper-class men. In the absence of an authoritative priesthood, Greek thinkers applied their power of verbal reasoning to all areas of life. Drama, poetry, history, philosophy, and science flowered, reaching a climax in the questions raised by Plato (d. 347 BCE) and the answers given by Aristotle (d. 322 BCE).
Athenian women seemed to have lived under complete patriarchy, but their experiences differed from city to city, and even the patriarchal model may be more men’s idealization than a description of historical conditions. Sparta’s aristocratic women acquired some wealth and autonomy when their mercenary husbands were off soldiering, but some men in Athens, including Aristotle, thought the Spartan women were licentious, greedy, and the cause of Sparta’s decline.11
During these golden years about one-third of the people of Attica (southern Greece) were slaves. Most of the slaves were foreigners; some were natives fallen into debt. Slaves did any work and submitted to any sexual acts ordained by their owners, but there seems to have been little extreme cruelty or abuse. The slave Epictetus became a philosopher still read today. Greek writers justified slavery by claiming that the barbaroi were not as rational as the Greeks and hence were better off under their care.
Why was Athens so successful for a period of time? Whatever else, the city was unusually rich, gaining great wealth from silver mines in its territory. It also functioned as a mini-empire, collecting tribute from other city states in the league it established to defeat the Persian navy. By its expansionist policies Athens provoked the Peloponnesian War with the other Greek states (431-404 BCE). Athens and its allies lost this war to Sparta and its allies, and the Greek states never figured out how to live in peace. Athens regained its freedom, destroyed Spartan expansion, and continued its Golden Age another half century.12
In 338 BCE, sixteen years before the death of Aristotle, Philip of Macedonia (the area just north of the Greek peninsula) conquered Athens and the other Greek cities. Two years later Philip was assassinated, perhaps at the instigation of his estranged wife. His son, Alexander, who had been tutored by Aristotle, took over at age twenty. Within fifteen years Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire, creating the largest one known to that time. His conquests included Egypt and the northern coast of Africa. Greek ideas and style were incorporated throughout Alexander’s empire as Greeks helped to administer it. Whatever Egypt had contributed earlier to Greek and Roman culture, the flow now reversed as Egypt became Hellenized, then Romanized.
During their heyday, Greek cities reduced the forest cover of Greek lands from about 50 percent in 600 BCE to about 10 percent in 200 BCE. They used timber for heating, cooking, firing pottery, smelting iron and bronze, and building ships. They used four-fifths of their land area as pasture for sheep and goats, resulting in severe overgrazing.13 When conquered by the Romans from 215 to 146 BCE, the Greeks succumbed to the imperial, bureaucratic governance more common elsewhere in the urbanized world.

Rome

The Italian peninsula served as the focus of the other civilization on the northern side of the Mediterranean. Here geography proved friendlier than in Greece; Italy was more fertile and could support a larger population. During the seventh and sixth centuries BCE Etruscans from Etruria, centered on the western side of Italy between the Arno River (Pisa and Florence) and the Tiber River (Rome), dominated the peninsula until checked by the Romans.
In about 600 BCE seven hill towns in central Italy on the western coast merged to become Rome. In 507 BCE members of the senatorial class overthrew a ruling tyrant and established the Republic of Rome, which lasted until 31 BCE. Under the republic all male citizens could vote, but the vote of a wealthy citizen counted more than the vote of a poor one. Increasingly, hereditary senators governed as Rome institutionalized inequality. The oldest male member of the family, called the paterfamilias, held authority over all other family members.
During the time of the republic, Rome gained control of the Italian peninsula and acquired its first overseas colonies—Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. Rome’s most brilliant general, Julius Caesar, conquered the Celtic people of Gaul, now France, in 59 to 51 BCE. Every year a different senator served as governor in the provinces, but over time this system proved inadequate as Rome extended its control to the Rhine; to Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade along the Danube to the Black Sea in Europe; parts of Turkey; the Near East; and northern Africa. In 47 CE the Romans conquered southern England but never Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Here the Celts held the line.
People from the conquered areas were sold into Roman slavery in huge numbers, including 500,000 captured by Julius Caesar in his nine years of fighting in Gaul. There is no reliable evidence for estimating the overall proportion of slavery in Roman society, but Roman emperors had about 20,000 slaves and wealthy families had as many as 4,000.
In 31 BCE the republic ended as Octavian, the grand nephew of Julius Caesar, became Augustus, an all-powerful emperor-dictator who gave Rome an administrative bureaucracy capable of managing its empire with considerable honesty and consistency. The period 27 BCE to 180 CE is known as the Pax Romana, a period without major warfare in western Europe. The height of Roman domination occurred in the second century CE.
The city of Rome in the first three centuries of the Common Era contained about a million people. For food its people depended on grain shipped from Sicily and northern Africa. Roman culture blended many Mediterranean influences; Roman gods absorbed Greek ones, as Jupiter included Zeus and Mars included Ares. Roman roads connected over 5,000 miles from Scotland to Palestine; on them one could average about 92 miles a day by horse.
Salt proved a necessary ingredient in Roman success; more than sixty salt works were developed throughout the empire. The army needed salt for the soldiers and horses. Soldiers were sometimes paid in salt (the origin of the word salary and the expression “worth his salt”). Fish were the centerpiece of Roman cuisine and salted fish one of their chief commodities for trading.14
One of the satellite states of the Roman system was Judea, the Jewish state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The height of the Jewish state had come in the tenth century BCE, under kings David and Solomon. By 933 BCE the state had split into Israel and Judah; Israel fell to Assyria in 722, and in 586 Judah fell to the Babylonians, who destroyed Jerusalem and its temple and deported at least 10,000 Jews to Babylon. In the fifth century BCE Jerusalem was rebuilt but Judah remained a satellite state in some imperial system or other—Persian, Hellenistic, and, after 68 BCE, Roman.
In a fateful event in 6 CE, the homeland of the Jews (roughly equivalent to modern Israel) came under direct Roman rule. The Roman governors could tolerate the Jewish belief in one god only if images of Roman imperial power were displayed. This, together with high taxation, provoked Jewish resistance. Many Jews began to hope for the imminent arrival of the Messiah, the “Anointed One,” who would drive the Romans out.
In this context Jesus, a young carpenter from Galilee in northern Israel, began to teach. He opposed the Jewish religious leaders, both Sadducees and Pharisees, whom he found excessively concerned with money and power. Urging a return to personal faith and spirituality, he was considered a political agitator and potential revolutionary by the other Jewish leaders, who had made their compromises with Roman authority. Jesus was handed over to the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, who permitted Jesus to be condemned and crucified, a punishment usually reserved for common criminals.
Jesus’s followers, believing that he rose from the dead after his crucifix-ion, spread his message of God’s love. Paul, a Jew from the Greek city of Tarsus in Anatolia (Turkey), accepted the teachings of Jesus. From 45 to 58 CE Paul recruited followers in Greece, Syria-Palestine, and Anatolia, traveling on Roman roads, using the term Christian (from christos, Greek for “anointed one”), setting up Christian communities around the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
Back in Jerusalem things were not going well. Judea was ruled by a succession of Roman functionaries. Pontius Pilate was replaced in 36 CE. Tension between rich and poor, between city and country, increased. When work on the Temple Mount, begun under Herod the Great, was finally finished in the early 60s CE, 18,000 landless men were out of work. To keep social peace, the local government created the first known “make-work” project; men were paid to repave the city streets, even if they worked only an hour a day. A generation after the death of Jesus, in 66 CE, the Jews in Judea finally revolted against the Roman rulers; their revolt was crushed with the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, and with it the Christian community in Jerusalem. This cleared the path for Christians to diverge from their Jewish roots, to become more Hellenized, and to become a sizeable minority in the Roman Empire despite, or perhaps because of, governmental persecution. It left the Jews without a government of their own until the establishment of modern-day Israel in 1948.15
Christianity created identity and community for the poor and oppressed of the Roman world, especially as the empire experienced its process of disintegration. This began in about 165 to 180 CE, when the epidemics mentioned earlier wiped out about a quarter of the population of the Roman Empire. Christians may have coped more successfully with these epidemics than did other groups of Roman society. Christians recognized caring for the sick as a religious duty; non-Christians often fled and did not provide basic food and water to the ill, some of whom would have survived with basic care. Proportionately more Christians survived, and those who did felt warm gratitude to their community. Christian teachings made life meaningful even amid sudden death; heavenly existence was promised for missing friends and relatives.16
In the third century CE the Roman Empire suffered severe monetary inflation. Food prices rose. Gold and silver sources were depleted. The government put less gold and silver into newly minted coins, people lost confidence in coinage, and the economy reverted to barter and taxation in kind.17 Brigandage, always a sign of social distress, increased. The population shifted from cities back to countryside as people sought protection on the estates of powerful landowners. For a brief period Constantine (r. 306-337 CE) reunited the empire from Rome and converted to Christianity, but in 324 he transferred the capital to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople. In 410 Rome was sacked by invading Huns from the steppes of central Asia. The empire continued from Constantinople, while Italy and the rest of Europe fell into localized power structures.
The dissolution of the Roman Empire happened over many generations, not as suddenly as did those of Mesopotamia and Minoa. The complexity of factors contributing to such decay defies analysis. Historians have pointed to moral decay, climate change, lack of military preparedness, prevalence of slavery, and abuse and degradation of natural resources. Reduction in agricultural production resulting from erosion and overgrazing certainly contributed. Urban people in Italy depended on far-flung colonies for their food and way of life, and eventually the central authorities could no longer maintain control of the colonies.
Greek and Roman upper-class patterns of citizenship and freedom lasted only a few centuries, but the ideas lived on orally and in texts preserved in libraries. When conditions were ripe again in Italy, these ideas would resurface to put their imprint on the whole European experience.

Population, Environment, and Religion

Since the world’s first two censuses were taken during the Han and the Roman empires as part of their bureaucratic programs, no one knows how many people lived before those times or outside those empires. Historians estimate that as farming got started there were perhaps 6 million people living in the whole world. This population increased to 100 million by 1000 BCE and to about 250 million in 1 CE. Agriculture released the prior constraints on human numbers; with surplus food people could raise many children to adulthood. Innovations in technology led to population increases, which outstripped capacity and led to declines, in cycles. In 100 CE there were about 75 cities of 30,000 to 450,000, with a total large-city population of perhaps 5 million.18
The people added by agricultural success came at a cost, both natural and human. The natural cost consisted of the human degradation of the environment that sustained them—principally deforestation, soil erosion from deforestation, and salinization of the soil from irrigation. Deforestation, caused by the pasturing of sheep and goats and by the need for fuel for heating and cooking and for charcoal for pottery and metallurgy, is the background for the development of all human society.
These environmental impacts were strongly in evidence in Afro-Eurasia by 200 CE. The plains of Sumer had become completely barren. The complex society that emerged in the Indus Valley lasted only about 500 years due to deforestation and salinization. The loss of trees in China caused flooding by the Yellow River, which came to be known by the color of soil carried in it. The cedars of Lebanon, prized for their height and straightness, were a mainstay of Phoenician commerce; only a few small groves remain today. The Mediterranean shores lost their natural vegetation of oaks, beech, pines, and cedars; only olive trees would grow on badly eroded hillsides, their roots strong enough to penetrate the limestone rock. The Roman provinces of North Africa were reduced to vast deserts. These areas never recovered from the degradation of their environments from 800 BCE to 200 CE. Only Egyptians reached a sustainable balance, for 7,000 years, with a river that naturally renewed the soil downstream each year (with soil eroded from up-river locations) until, in the twentieth century, irrigation and dams stopped the flooding and destroyed the natural cycle.19
There were costs to humans, too, from the increasing human density. Life in cities and their outlying tribute areas proved difficult and precarious; many adjustments had to be made, and much misery had to be borne. By 200 CE the vast majority of humans still lived in villages, but a growing proportion of them had to pay tribute or taxes to urban-based rulers. Those living within cities were divided into an extreme social stratification, between those owning land and the landless majority who provided their labor for subsistence pay. Only a minority elite enjoyed the fruits of civilization. Warfare became a constant feature of life in order to extend control and to protect stored food surplus. Finally, after travel on the Silk Road linked dense populations across all of Afro-Eurasia, urban people had to face the devastation of epidemics caused by animal viruses and bacteria that could only spread to dense human populations.
During the thousand years of the period 800 BCE to 200 CE, Afro-Eurasia witnessed a notable creative outpouring of religious thought. All of the major world faiths of today appeared in this period, if one counts Christianity and Islam as developments of the prophetic stream of Hebrew life. The great sages of Eurasia appeared during this era—Zoroaster20 and Mani (Manichaeism) in Persia, Confucius and Laozi in China, the Vedic seers and Buddha in India, the Greek philosophers, the Jewish prophets, Jesus and later Muhammad in the Mediterranean. Outside the urban areas—in the Americas, in northern Europe, and in sub-Saharan Africa—people seem to have continued their earlier religions.
The new religions that appeared in the urban core seemed different in kind from earlier ones. During hunting-and-gathering days people respected the invisible spirit world that paralled all living things; later they worshiped gods and goddesses who behaved like people on a grander scale but without mortality. These were both life-affirming postures, with joyous celebrations and fearful pleadings, but focused on valuing the given natural world in which people were embedded. Pre-urban and non-urban people did not experience much change during their lifetimes, and presumably they valued the abiding quality of life—the sense of primordial time and life as it always is.
The new religions in the period 800 BCE to 200 CE turned away from affirming this world, which no longer seemed wholly satisfactory, to envisaging a better, transcendent world. The new prophets and sages stressed how to gain salvation, release, or nirvana, how to achieve a better life after this one, or how to return to a better incarnation. In part, they were working out ethical systems that would motivate people to the behavior needed for living in the density of growing cities.
At the same time, the prophets and sages were finding antidotes for the personal distress that so many people experienced in city life—a psychic compensation for the misery and uncertainties of urban life or of adjacent village life, where people paid tribute to urban elites. Belonging to a religious community in a city gave people the opportunity to reestablish the kind of small, caring group that had characterized life in small bands of hunter-gatherer society and in village life before the beginning of urbanization.
Living in cities had many advantages, especially for the landowning elites. But always it involved betraying the local customs of pre-city life. It presented a choice to people; whether to imitate civilized city ways with hopes for a better life, thus rejecting village custom and primordial life, or to repudiate civilized ways and strengthen traditional customs. This same choice confronts many people today, as the forces toward urbanization intensify to include every area of Earth.

Unanswered Questions

1. Historians and philosophers generally agree on the appearance of world religions in a certain period of time, from 800 BCE to 200 BCE, named the Axial Age by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers in a world history first published in 1949, called The Origin and Goal of History. What are the reasons for the roughly simultaneous appearance of the world religions?
There is no agreement yet on the answers to this question. Possibly these religions, with their emphasis on the next world, reflected the difficulty of life in the density of cities. Individual thinkers, for the first time, seem to have been able to separate themselves from the community consciousness and imagine their own answers; perhaps this resulted in part from increased contacts among people with different ideas. The presence of alphabetic writing, a vehicle for organizing and spreading the results of individual reflection and thought, must have played a significant role; Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe specifically in a book. Increasing travel and trade in networks of routes meant that sharing and collective learning increased. Questions about the nature, the causes, and the consequences of the so-called Axial Age are ripe for research and clarification. Whatever the reasons for the rise of these religions, many people are still living with thought systems created some 2,000 years ago, rather than with newer ones that might relate to current knowledge and conditions.21
2. Did the Roman Empire “fall”?
The conventional view in Europe and the United States has held that the disintegration of Roman military and political power marked the end of a civilization, leaving Europe in the grip of a dark age of material and intellectual poverty. In the 1970s Western historians began to avoid the words “decline,” “fall,” and “crisis,” and instead used “transformation,” “change,” “transition.” In the 1980s a German scholar, A. Demandt, in Der Fall Roms, made an alphabetical list of 210 reasons given over the centuries to explain the “fall” of the Roman Empire, while an American, Alden Rollins, reviewed briefly the many books over the centuries about the fall of Rome; both showed how writers could attribute the “fall” to almost any cause. Change does not necessarily mean decay, and, in any case, “fall” implies some speed, while the complex process of transformation proceeds gradually. With this discussion in mind, I have referred to the “dissolution” rather than to the “fall” of the Roman Empire.22