Require:
What is the context of the artifact or document? Describe the artifact or document. What can be learned from the artifact or document?
Prompt:
At the end of each chapter there are a set of primary documents – sources created by people in the time period discussed in the chapter. These are in the “Working with Evidence” section and numbered, for example 1.1 through 1.5. Each item is followed by a set of questions. Item 1.1, for instance, has three prompts.
Instructions:
- In this assignment, you should choose ONE of the “Working with Evidence” documents in EITHER Chapter 1 (189th pages) or Chapter 2 (281st pages).
- Write a 250 word essay that answers a question of your choosing.
PART 2 Continuity and Change in
the Second-Wave Era
600 B.C.E–600 C.E.
Chapter 3 State and Empire in Eurasia / North Africa, 600 B.C.E.–
600 C.E.
Chapter 4 Culture and Religion in Eurasia / North Africa, 600
B.C.E.–600 C.E.
Chapter 5 Society and Inequality in Eurasia / North Africa, 600
B.C.E.–600 C.E.
Chapter 6 Commonalities and Variations: Africa, the Americas,
and Pacific Oceania, 600 B.C.E.–1200 C.E.
THE BIG PICTURE
The Globalization of Civilization
Studying world history has much in common with using the
zoom lens of a camera. Sometimes, we pull the lens back to get
a picture of the global panorama. At other times, we zoom in a
bit for a middle-range shot of a particular region or civilization,
or even farther for a close-up of some specific individual, event,
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or place. As we bid farewell to the First Civilizations, we look
broadly, and briefly, at the entire age of agricultural
civilizations, a period from about 3500 B.C.E., when the earliest
of the First Civilizations arose, to about 1750 C.E., when the first
Industrial Revolution launched a new and distinctively modern
phase of world history. During these more than 5,000 years, the
most prominent large-scale trend was the globalization of
civilization as this new form of human community increasingly
spread across the planet, encompassing more people and larger
territories.
The first wave of that process, addressed in Chapter 2, was
already global in scope, with expressions in Asia, Africa, and
the Americas. But those First Civilizations, impressive as they
were, also proved fragile. By the middle of the first millennium
B.C.E., all of them had collapsed, fragmented, or been absorbed
into new and larger empires. But there was no going back, for
“civilization” as a form of social organization proved resilient as
well. Thus, in the 1,200 years between 600 B.C.E. and 600 C.E.,
new or enlarged urban-centered and state-based societies
emerged to replace the First Civilizations in the Mediterranean
basin, the Middle East, India, China, Mesoamerica, and the
Andes. In short, the development of civilization was becoming a
global process.
Many of these second-wave civilizations likewise perished, as
the collapse of the Roman Empire, Han dynasty China, and the
Maya cities reminds us. They were followed by yet a third wave
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of civilizations, from roughly 600 to 1500 C.E., including those of
China, Western Europe, West Africa, Russia, and the Islamic
World (see Part 3). Furthermore, smaller expressions of
civilization began to take shape elsewhere — in Ethiopia and
West Africa, in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and
Cambodia. Thus the globalization of civilization continued
apace. So too did the interaction of civilizations with one
another and with the gathering and hunting peoples,
agricultural village societies, and pastoral communities who
were their neighbors.
But how did these second and third waves of civilization
differ from the first ones? From a panoramic perspective, the
answer is “not much.” States and empires rose, expanded, and
collapsed. But little fundamental change occurred amid these
fluctuations. Monarchs continued to rule most of the new
civilizations; women remained subordinate to men in all of
them; a sharp divide between the elite and everyone else
persisted almost everywhere, as did the practice of slavery.
Furthermore, no technological or economic breakthrough
occurred to create new kinds of human societies as the
Agricultural Revolution had done earlier or as the Industrial
Revolution would do much later.
But if we zoom in a bit more closely, significant changes
emerge, even if they did not result in a thorough transformation
of human life. Global population, for example, grew more
rapidly, though with important fluctuations, as the Snapshot
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illustrates. This rate of growth, though rapid in comparison
with Paleolithic times, was quite slow if measured against the
explosive expansion of the past century. Another change lies in
the growing size of the states or empires that structured
civilizations. The Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese empires
of second-wave civilizations, as well as the Arab, Mongol, and
Inca empires of the third wave, all dwarfed the city-states of
Mesopotamia and the Egypt of the pharaohs.
SNAPSHOT World Population during the Age of Agricultural
Civilization
Data from Stephen K. Sanderson, Social Transformation (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995), 103.
Second- and third-wave civilizations also generated
important innovations in many spheres. Those in the cultural
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realm have been perhaps the most widespread and enduring.
The philosophical/religious systems of Confucianism and
Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; Greek
rationalism in the Mediterranean; and Judaism, Zoroastrianism,
Christianity, and Islam in the Middle East — these traditions
have provided the moral and spiritual framework within which
most of the world’s peoples have sought to order their lives.
Furthermore, technological innovations considerably
enhanced human potential for manipulating the environment.
“Chinese inventions and discoveries,” wrote one prominent
historian, “passed in a continuous flood from East to West for
twenty centuries before the scientific revolution.”1 They
included silk-handling machinery, the wheelbarrow, a better
harness for draft animals, the crossbow, iron casting,
gunpowder and firearms, the magnetic compass, paper,
printing, porcelain, and more. India pioneered the
crystallization of sugar and techniques for the manufacture of
cotton textiles. Roman technological achievements were
particularly apparent in construction and civil engineering —
the building of roads, bridges, aqueducts, and fortifications —
and in the art of glassblowing.
Nor were social hierarchies immune to change and
challenge. India’s caste system grew far more elaborate over
time. Roman slaves and Chinese peasants on occasion rose in
rebellion. Some Buddhist and Christian women found a
measure of autonomy and opportunities for leadership and
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learning in the monastic communities of their respective
traditions. Gender systems, too, fluctuated in the intensity with
which women were subordinated to men.
A further process of change following the end of the First
Civilizations lay in the emergence of far more elaborate,
widespread, and dense networks of communication and
exchange that connected many of the world’s peoples to one
another. Technologies diffused widely across large areas, as did
religions and diseases, often borne by long-distance trade
routes, such as the Silk Roads, that traversed Eurasia. In all of
these ways, the world became quite different from what it had
been in the age of the First Civilizations, even though economic
and social patterns had not fundamentally changed.
The first three chapters of Part 2 focus in a thematic fashion
on the Eurasian/North African civilizations of the second-wave
era (600 B.C.E. – 600 C.E.), which hosted the vast majority of the
world’s population, some 80 percent or more. Chapter 3
introduces them by examining and comparing their political
frameworks and especially the empires that took shape in most
of them. Far more enduring than their empires were the
cultural or religious traditions that second-wave civilizations
generated. These are examined, also comparatively, in Chapter
4. The social life of these civilizations, expressed in class, caste,
slavery, and gender relationships, also varied considerably, as
Chapter 5 spells out. In Chapter 6, the historical spotlight turns
to inner Africa, the Americas, and Pacific Oceania, asking
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whether their histories paralleled Eurasian patterns or explored
alternative possibilities.
In recalling this second-wave phase of the human journey,
we will have occasion to compare the experiences of its various
peoples, to note their remarkable achievements, to lament the
tragedies that befell them and the suffering to which they gave
rise, and to ponder their continuing power to fascinate us still.
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CHAPTER 3 State and Empire in Eurasia /
North Africa
600 B.C.E.–600 C.E.
305
Terra-Cotta Warrior Part of the immense funerary complex of terra-cotta
warriors constructed for the Chinese ruler Qin Shihuangdi, this crossbow
marksman represents the military power that reunified a divided China under
the Qin dynasty in 221 B.C.E.
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Empires and Civilizations in Collision: The Persians and the
Greeks
The Persian Empire
The Greeks
Collision: The Greco-Persian Wars
Collision: Alexander and the Hellenistic Era
Comparing Empires: Roman and Chinese
Rome: From City-State to Empire
China: From Warring States to Empire
Consolidating the Roman and Chinese Empires
The Collapse of Empires
Intermittent Empire: The Case of India
Reflections: Enduring Legacies of Second-Wave Empires
Are We Rome? It was the title of a thoughtful book, published in
2007, asking what had become a familiar question in the early
twenty-first century: “Is the United States the new Roman
Empire?”1 With the collapse of the Soviet Union by 1991 and the
subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, some
commentators began to make the comparison. The United
States’ enormous multicultural society, its technological
achievements, its economically draining and overstretched
armed forces, its sense of itself as unique and endowed with a
global mission, its concern about foreigners penetrating its
borders, its apparent determination to maintain military
superiority — all of this invited comparison with the Roman
Empire.
Supporters of a dominant role for the United States argued
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that Americans must face up to their responsibilities as “the
undisputed master of the world” as the Romans did in their time.
Critics warned that the Roman Empire became overextended
abroad and corrupt and dictatorial at home and then collapsed,
suggesting that a similar fate may await the American empire.
Either way, the point of reference was an empire that had passed
into history some 1,500 years earlier, a continuing reminder of
the significance of the distant past for our contemporary world.
In fact, for at least several centuries, that empire has been a
source of metaphors and “lessons” about personal morality,
corruption, political life, military expansion, and much more.
Even in a world largely critical of empires, they still excite the
imagination of historians and readers of history alike. The
earliest empires show up in the era of the First Civilizations when
Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires encompassed the
city-states of Mesopotamia and established an enduring imperial
tradition in the Middle East. Egypt became an imperial state
when it temporarily ruled Nubia and the lands of the eastern
Mediterranean. Following in their wake were many more
empires, whose rise and fall have been central features of world
history for the past 4,000 years.
But what exactly is an empire? At one level, empires are simply
states, political systems that exercise coercive power. The term,
however, is normally reserved for larger and more aggressive
states, those that conquer, rule, and extract resources from
other states and peoples. Thus empires have generally
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encompassed a considerable variety of peoples and cultures
within a single political system, and they have often been
associated with political or cultural oppression. Frequently,
empires have given political expression to a civilization or
culture, as in the Chinese and Persian empires. But civilizations
have also flourished without a single all-encompassing state or
empire, as in the competing city-states of Mesopotamia, Greece,
and Mesoamerica or the many rival states of post-Roman
Europe. In such cases, civilizations were expressed in elements
of a common culture rather than in a unified political system.
The major Eurasian empires of the second-wave era — those
of Persia, Greece under Alexander the Great, Rome, China
during the Qin (chihn) and Han dynasties, and India during the
Mauryan (MORE-yuhn) and Gupta dynasties — shared a set of
common problems. Would they seek to impose the culture of
the imperial heartland on their varied subjects? Would they rule
conquered people directly or through established local
authorities? How could they extract the wealth of empire in the
form of taxes, tribute, and labor while maintaining order in
conquered territories? And they also shared a common destiny,
as they vanished into history.
SEEKING THE MAIN POINT
How might you assess — both positively and negatively — the role of
empires in the history of the second-wave era?
Why have these and other empires been of such lasting
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fascination to both ancient and modern people? Perhaps part of
the reason is that they were so big, creating a looming presence
in their respective regions. Their armies and their tax collectors
were hard to avoid. Perhaps they fascinate also because they
were so bloody. The violence of conquest easily grabs our
attention, and certainly all of these empires were founded and
sustained at a great cost in human life. Many people have found
the collapse of these once-powerful states likewise intriguing.
But empires have also commanded attention simply because
they were influential. Probably the majority of humankind
before the twentieth century lived out their lives in empires,
where they were often governed by rulers culturally different
from themselves. These imperial states brought together people
of quite different traditions and religions and so stimulated the
exchange of ideas, cultures, and values. Despite their violence,
exploitation, and oppression, empires also imposed substantial
periods of peace and security, which fostered economic and
artistic development, commercial exchange, and cultural
mixing. In many places, empire also played an important role
in defining masculinity, as conquest generated a warrior culture
that gave particular prominence to the men who created and
ruled those imperial states.
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311
Empires and Civilizations
in Collision: The Persians
and the Greeks
The centuries between 600 B.C.E. and 600 C.E. witnessed the
flowering of second-wave civilizations in the Mediterranean
world, the Middle East, India, and China. For the most part,
these distant civilizations did not directly encounter one
another, as each established its own political system, cultural
values, and ways of organizing society. A great exception to that
rule lay in the Mediterranean world and in the Middle East,
where the emerging Persian Empire and Greek civilization,
physically adjacent to each other, experienced a centuries-long
interaction and clash. It was one of the most consequential
cultural encounters of the ancient world.
The Persian Empire
By the mid-sixth century B.C.E., the largest and most impressive
of the world’s empires was that of the Persians, an IndoEuropean people whose homeland lay on the Iranian plateau
just north of the Persian Gulf. Living on the margins of the
earlier Mesopotamian civilization, the Persians under the
Achaemenid (ah-KEE-muh-nid) dynasty (550–330 B.C.E.)
constructed an imperial system that drew on previous
examples, such as the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, but far
surpassed them all in both size and splendor. Under the
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leadership of the famous monarchs Cyrus (r. 559–530 B.C.E.) and
Darius (r. 522–486 B.C.E.), Persian conquests quickly reached
from Egypt to India, encompassing in a single state some 35 to
50 million people, an immensely diverse realm containing
dozens of peoples, states, languages, and cultural traditions (see
Map 3.1).
Map 3.1 The Persian Empire
At its height, the Persian Empire was the largest in the world. It dominated the
lands of the First Civilizations in the Middle East and was commercially
connected to neighboring regions.
Guided Reading Question
COMPARISON
How did Persian and Greek civilizations differ in their political
313
organization and values?
The Persian Empire centered on an elaborate cult of
kingship in which the monarch, secluded in royal
magnificence, could be approached only through an elaborate
ritual. When the king died, sacred fires all across the land were
extinguished, Persians were expected to shave their hair in
mourning, and the manes of horses were cut short. Ruling by
the will of the great Persian god Ahura Mazda (uh-HOORE-uh
MAHZ-duh), kings were absolute monarchs, more than willing
to crush rebellious regions or officials. Interrupted on one
occasion while engaged with his wife, Darius ordered the
offender, a high-ranking nobleman, killed, along with his entire
clan. In the eyes of many, Persian monarchs fully deserved
their effusive title — “Great king, King of kings, King of
countries containing all kinds of men, King in this great earth
far and wide.” Darius himself best expressed the authority of
the Persian ruler when he observed, “What was said to them by
me, night and day, it was done.”2
But more than conquest and royal decree sustained the
empire. An effective administrative system placed Persian
governors, called satraps (SAY-traps), in each of the empire’s
twenty-three provinces, while lower-level officials were drawn
from local authorities. A system of imperial spies, known as the
“eyes and ears of the King,” represented a further imperial
presence in the far reaches of the empire. A general policy of
respect for the empire’s many non-Persian cultural traditions
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also cemented the state’s authority. Cyrus won the gratitude of
the Jews when in 539 B.C.E. he allowed those exiled in Babylon
to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple in
Jerusalem (see “Judaism” in Chapter 4). In Egypt and Babylon,
Persian kings took care to uphold local religious cults in an
effort to gain the support of their followers and officials. The
Greek historian Herodotus commented that “there is no nation
which so readily adopts foreign customs. They have taken the
dress of the Medes and in war they wear the Egyptian
breastplate. As soon as they hear of any luxury, they instantly
make it their own.”3 (See more on Herodotus’s perceptions of
Persia in Working with Evidence, Source 3.1.) For the next 1,000
years or more, Persian imperial bureaucracy and court life,
replete with administrators, tax collectors, record keepers, and
translators, provided a model for all subsequent regimes in the
region, including, later, those of the Islamic world.
The infrastructure of empire included a system of
standardized coinage, predictable taxes levied on each
province, and a newly dug canal linking the Nile with the Red
Sea, which greatly expanded commerce and enriched Egypt. A
“royal road,” some 1,700 miles in length, facilitated
communication and commerce across this vast empire.
Caravans of merchants could traverse this highway in three
months, but agents of the imperial courier service, using a fresh
supply of horses every twenty-five to thirty miles, could carry a
message from one end of the road to another in a week or two.
Herodotus was impressed. “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat,
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nor darkness of night,” he wrote, “prevents them from
accomplishing the task proposed to them with utmost speed.”
And an elaborate underground irrigation system sustained a
rich agricultural economy in the semi-arid conditions of the
Iranian plateau and spread from there throughout the Middle
East and beyond.
Elaborate imperial centers, particularly Susa and Persepolis
(per-SEP-uh-lis), reflected the immense wealth and power of the
Persian Empire. Palaces, audience halls, quarters for the
harem, monuments, and carvings made these cities into
powerful symbols of imperial authority. Materials and workers
alike were drawn from all corners of the empire and beyond.
Inscribed in the foundation of Persepolis was Darius’s
commentary on what he had set in motion: “And Ahura Mazda
was of such a mind, together with all the other gods, that this
fortress [should] be built. And [so] I built it. And I built it secure
and beautiful and adequate, just as I was intending to.”4
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Persepolis The largest palace in Persepolis, the Persian Empire’s ancient
capital, was the Audience Hall. The emperor officially greeted visiting dignitaries
at this palace, which was constructed around 500 B.C.E. This relief, which shows
a lion attacking a bull and Persian guards at attention, adorns a staircase
leading to the Audience Hall.
The Greeks
It would be hard to imagine a sharper contrast than that
between the huge and centralized Persian Empire, governed by
an absolute and almost unapproachable monarch, and the
small competing city-states of classical Greece, which allowed
varying degrees of popular participation in political life. Like
the Persians, the Greeks were an Indo-European people whose
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early history drew on the legacy of the First Civilizations,
especially Egypt. The classical Greece of historical fame
emerged around 750 B.C.E. as a new civilization and flourished
for about 400 years before it was incorporated into a succession
of foreign empires. During that relatively short period, the
civilization of Athens and Sparta, of Plato and Socrates, of Zeus
and Apollo took shape and collided with its giant neighbor to
the east.
Calling themselves Hellenes, the Greeks created a distinctive
civilization, particularly in comparison with that of the
Persians. The total population of Greece and the Aegean basin
was just 2 million to 3 million, a fraction of that of the Persian
Empire. Furthermore, Greek civilization took shape on a small
peninsula, deeply divided by steep mountains and valleys. Its
geography certainly contributed to its political organization,
which found expression, not in a Persian-style empire, but in
hundreds of city-states or small settlements (see Map 3.2). Most
were quite modest in size, with between 500 and 5,000 male
citizens or free men. But Greek civilization, like its counterparts
elsewhere, also left a decisive environmental mark on the lands
it encompassed. Smelting metals such as silver, lead, copper,
bronze, and iron required enormous supplies of wood, leading
to deforestation and soil erosion. Plato declared that the area
around Athens had become “a mere relic of the original
country. . . . All the rich soil has melted away, leaving a country
of skin and bone.”5
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Map 3.2 Classical Greece and Its Colonies
The classical civilization of Greece was centered on a small peninsula of
southeastern Europe, but Greek settlers planted elements of that civilization
along the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black seas.
Guided Reading Question
CHANGE
How did semidemocratic governments emerge in some of the Greek
city-states?
Each of these city-states was fiercely independent and in
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frequent conflict with its neighbors, yet they had much in
common, speaking the same language and worshipping the
same gods. Every four years they temporarily suspended their
continual conflicts to participate together in the Olympic
Games, which began in 776 B.C.E. But this emerging sense of
Greek cultural identity did little to overcome the endemic
political rivalries of the larger city-states, including Athens,
Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth, among many others.
Like the Persians, the Greeks were an expansive people, but
their expansion took the form of settlement in distant places
rather than conquest and empire. Pushed by a growing
population, Greek traders in search of iron and impoverished
Greek farmers in search of land undertook a remarkable
emigration. Between 750 and 500 B.C.E., the Greeks established
settlements all around the Mediterranean basin and the rim of
the Black Sea. Settlers brought Greek culture, language, and
building styles to these new lands, even as they fought, traded,
and intermarried with their non-Greek neighbors.
The most distinctive feature of Greek civilization, and the
greatest contrast with Persia, lay in the extent of popular
participation in political life that occurred within at least some
of the city-states. It was the idea of “citizenship,” of free people
managing the affairs of state and of equality for all citizens
before the law, that was so unique. A foreign king, observing
the operation of the public assembly in Athens, was amazed
that male citizens as a whole actually voted on matters of policy:
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“I find it astonishing,” he noted, “that here wise men speak on
public affairs, while fools decide them.”6 Compared to the rigid
hierarchies, inequalities, and absolute monarchies of Persia
and other ancient civilizations, the Athenian experiment was
remarkable. This is how one modern scholar defined it:
Among the Greeks the question of who should reign arose
in a new way. Previously the most that had been asked was
whether one man or another should govern and whether
one alone or several together. But now the question was
whether all the citizens, including the poor, might govern
and whether it would be possible for them to govern as
citizens, without specializing in politics. In other words,
should the governed themselves actively participate in
politics on a regular basis?7
The extent of participation and the role of “citizens” varied
considerably, both over time and from city to city. Early in
Greek history, only wealthy and well-born men had the rights of
full citizenship, such as speaking and voting in the assembly,
holding public office, and fighting in the army. Gradually, men
of the lower classes, mostly small-scale farmers, also obtained
these rights as they gained the means to purchase the armor
and weapons that would allow them to serve as hoplites, or
infantrymen, in the armies of the city-states. In many places,
strong but benevolent rulers known as tyrants emerged for a
time, usually with the support of the poorer classes, to
challenge the prerogatives of the wealthy. Sparta developed a
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distinctive political and social system, famous for its extreme
military discipline and its large population of helots, conquered
people who lived in slave-like conditions. Most political
authority was vested in its Council of Elders, composed of
twenty-eight men over the age of sixty, who came from the
wealthier and more influential segment of society and served
for life.
It was in Athens that the Greek experiment in political
participation achieved its most distinctive expression. Early
steps in this direction were the product of intense class conflict,
leading almost to civil war. A reforming leader named Solon
emerged in 594 B.C.E. to push Athenian politics in a more
democratic direction, breaking the hold of a small group of
aristocratic families. Debt slavery was abolished, access to
public office was opened to a wider group of men, and all
citizens were allowed to take part in the Assembly. Later
reformers such as Cleisthenes (KLEYE-sthuh-nees) and Pericles
extended the rights of citizens even further. By 450 B.C.E., all
holders of public office were chosen by lot and were paid, so
that even the poorest could serve. The Assembly, where all
citizens could participate, became the center of political life.
Athenian democracy was direct rather than representative,
and it was distinctly limited. Women, slaves, and foreigners,
who together constituted far more than half of the population,
were wholly excluded from political participation. Nonetheless,
political life in Athens was a world away from that of the
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Persian Empire and even from that of many other Greek cities.
Collision: The Greco-Persian
Wars
In recent centuries, many writers and scholars have claimed
classical Greece as the foundation of Western or European
civilization. But the ancient Greeks themselves looked primarily
to the East — to Egypt and the Persian Empire. In Egypt, Greek
scholars found impressive mathematical and astronomical
traditions on which they built. And Persia represented both an
immense threat and later, under Alexander the Great, an
opportunity for Greek empire building.
Guided Reading Question
CONNECTION
What were the consequences for both sides of the encounter between
the Persians and the Greeks?
If ever there was an unequal conflict between civilizations,
surely it was the collision of the Greeks and the Persians during
a half century of intermittent military conflict known to us as
the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 B.C.E.). The confrontation
between the small and divided Greek cities and Persia, the
world’s largest empire, grew out of their respective patterns of
expansion. A number of Greek settlements on the Anatolian
seacoast, known to the Greeks as Ionia, came under Persian
control as that empire extended its domination to the west. In
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499 B.C.E., some of these Ionian Greek cities revolted against
Persian domination and found support from Athens on the
Greek mainland. Outraged by this assault from the remote and
upstart Greeks, the Persians, twice in ten years (490 and 480
B.C.E.), launched major military expeditions to punish the
Greeks in general and Athens in particular. Against all odds and
all expectations, the Greeks held them off, defeating the
Persians on both land and sea.
Though no doubt embarrassing, their defeat on the far
western fringes of the empire had little effect on the Persians.
However, it had a profound impact on Greece and especially on
Athens, whose forces had led the way to victory. Beating the
Persians in battle was a source of enormous pride for Greeks. In
their view, this victory was the product of Greek freedoms,
which had motivated men to fight with extraordinary courage
for what they valued so highly. It contributed to a European
construction of the world as sharply divided between East and
West in which Persia represented Asia and despotism, and
Greece signified Europe and freedom. The Greek victory also
radicalized Athenian democracy, for it had been men of the
poorer classes who had rowed their ships to victory and who
were now in a position to insist on full citizenship. The fifty
years or so after the Greco-Persian Wars were not only the high
point of Athenian democracy but also the Golden Age of Greek
culture. During this period, the Parthenon, that marvelous
temple to the Greek goddess Athena, was built; Greek theater
was born from the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
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Euripides; and Socrates was beginning his career as a
philosopher and an irritant in Athens.
But Athens’s Golden Age was also an era of incipient empire.
In the Greco-Persian Wars, Athens had led a coalition of more
than thirty Greek city-states on the basis of its naval power, but
Athenian leadership in the struggle against Persian aggression
had spawned an imperialism of its own. After the war, Athens’s
efforts to solidify its dominant position among the allies led to
intense resentment and finally to a bitter civil war (431–404
B.C.E.), with Sparta taking the lead in defending the traditional
independence of Greek city-states. In this bloody conflict,
known as the Peloponnesian War, Athens was defeated, and
the Greeks exhausted themselves and magnified their distrust
of one another. Thus the way was open to their eventual
takeover by the growing forces of Macedonia, a frontier
kingdom on the northern fringes of the Greek world. The glory
days of the Greek experiment were over, but the spread of
Greek culture was just beginning.
Collision: Alexander and the
Hellenistic Era
By 338 B.C.E. Philip II, king of Macedonia, had politically unified
Greece under his rule — something the Greeks themselves had
been unable to achieve — but this unification came at the cost of
the prized independence of its various city-states. It also set in
motion a second round in the collision of Greece and Persia as
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Philip’s son, known later as Alexander the Great, prepared to
lead a massive Greek expedition against the Persian Empire.
Such a project appealed to those who sought vengeance for the
earlier Persian assault on Greece, but it also served to unify the
fractious Greeks in a war against their common enemy.
The
story of
Guided Reading Question
CONNECTION
this
ten-
What changes did Alexander’s conquests bring in their wake?
year
expedition (334–323 B.C.E.), accomplished while Alexander was
still in his twenties, has become the stuff of legend (see Map
3.3). Surely it was among the greatest military feats of the
ancient world in that it created a Greek empire from Egypt and
Anatolia in the west to Afghanistan and India in the east. In the
process, the great Persian Empire was thoroughly defeated; its
capital, Persepolis, was looted and burned; and Alexander was
hailed as the “king of Asia.” In Egypt, Alexander, then just
twenty-four years old, was celebrated as a liberator from
Persian domination, was anointed as pharaoh, and was
declared by Egyptian priests to be the “son of the gods.” Arrian,
a later Greek historian, described Alexander in this way:
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MAPPING HISTORY
Map 3.3 Alexander’s Empire and Successor States
Alexander’s conquests, though enormous, did not long remain within a single
empire, for his generals divided those lands into three successor states shortly
after Alexander’s death. This was the Hellenistic world within which Greek
culture spread.
READING THE MAP: During which stage of Alexander’s empire-building
enterprise did he establish the most new cities?
MAKING CONNECTIONS: Compare this map with Map 3.2, which shows an
earlier period of Greek political and cultural expansion. How would you describe
the differences between the two processes of expansion? Are they similar in any
way?
His passion was for glory only, and in that he was
insatiable. . . . Noble indeed was his power of inspiring his
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men, of filling them with confidence, and in the moment of
danger, of sweeping away their fear by the spectacle of his
own fearlessness.8
Alexander died in 323 B.C.E., without returning to Greece, and
his empire was soon divided into three kingdoms, ruled by
leading Macedonian generals.
From the viewpoint of world history, the chief significance of
Alexander’s amazing conquests lay in the widespread
dissemination of Greek culture during what historians call the
Hellenistic era (323–30 B.C.E.). Elements of that culture,
generated in a small and remote Mediterranean peninsula, now
penetrated the lands of the First Civilizations — Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and India — resulting in one of the great cultural
encounters of the ancient world.
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Alexander the Great This mosaic of Alexander on horseback comes from the
Roman city of Pompeii. It depicts the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.E.), in which Greek
forces, although considerably outnumbered, defeated the Persian army, led
personally by Emperor Darius III.
The major avenue for the spread of Greek culture lay in the
many cities that Alexander and later Hellenistic rulers
established throughout the empire. Complete with Greek
monuments, sculptures, theaters, markets, councils, and
assemblies, these cities attracted many thousands of Greek
settlers serving as state officials, soldiers, or traders.
Alexandria in Egypt — the largest of these cities, with half a
million people — was an enormous cosmopolitan center where
Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Babylonians, Syrians, Persians, and
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many others rubbed elbows. A harbor with space for 1,200 ships
facilitated long-distance commerce. Greek learning flourished
thanks to a library of some 700,000 volumes and the Museum,
which sponsored scholars and writers of all kinds.
From cities such as these, Greek culture spread. From the
Mediterranean to India, Greek became the language of power
and elite culture. The Indian monarch Ashoka published some
of his decrees in Greek, while an independent Greek state was
established in Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan. The
attraction of many young Jews to Greek culture prompted the
Pharisees to develop their own school system, as this highly
conservative Jewish sect feared for the very survival of Judaism.
Cities such as Alexandria were very different from the
original city-states of Greece, both in their cultural diversity and
in the absence of the independence so valued by Athens and
Sparta. Now they were part of large conquest states ruled by
Greeks: the Ptolemaic (TOL-uh-MAY-ik) empire in Egypt and
the Seleucid empire in Persia. These were imperial states,
which, in their determination to preserve order, raise taxes, and
maintain the authority of the monarch, resembled the much
older empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Assyria, and Persia.
Macedonians and Greeks, representing perhaps 10 percent of
the population in these Hellenistic kingdoms, were clearly the
elite and sought to keep themselves separate from non-Greeks.
In Egypt, for example, different legal systems for Greeks and
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native Egyptians maintained this separation. An Egyptian
agricultural worker complained that because he was an
Egyptian, his supervisors despised him and refused to pay him.9
Periodic rebellions expressed resentment at Greek arrogance,
condescension, and exploitation. But the separation between
the Greeks and native populations was by no means complete,
and a fair amount of cultural interaction and blending
occurred. Alexander himself had taken several Persian
princesses as his wives and actively encouraged intermarriage
between his troops and Asian women. In both Egypt and
Mesopotamia, Greek rulers patronized the building of temples
to local gods and actively supported their priests. A growing
number of native peoples were able to become Greek citizens
by obtaining a Greek education, speaking the language,
dressing appropriately, and assuming Greek names. In India,
Greeks were assimilated into the hierarchy of the caste system
as members of the Kshatriya (warrior) caste, while in Bactria a
substantial number of Greeks converted to Buddhism, including
one of the Bactrian kings, Menander. A school of Buddhist art
that emerged in the early centuries of the Common Era depicted
the Buddha in human form for the first time, but in Greek-like
garb with a face resembling the god Apollo. Clearly, not all was
conflict between the Greeks and the peoples of the East.
In the long run, much of this Greek cultural influence faded
as the Hellenistic kingdoms that had promoted it weakened and
vanished by the first century B.C.E. While it lasted, however, it
represented a remarkable cultural encounter, born of the
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collision of two empires and two second-wave civilizations. In
the western part of that Hellenistic world, Greek rule was
replaced by that of the Romans, whose empire, like
Alexander’s, also served as a vehicle for the continued spread of
Greek culture and ideas.
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Comparing Empires:
Roman and Chinese
While the adjacent civilizations of the Greeks and the Persians
collided, two other empires were taking shape — the Roman
Empire on the far western side of Eurasia and China’s imperial
state on the far eastern end. They flourished at roughly the
same time (200 B.C.E.–200 C.E.); they occupied a similar area
(about 1.5 million square miles); and they encompassed
populations of a similar size (50 to 60 million). They were the
giant empires of their time, shaping the lives of close to half of
the world’s population. Unlike the Greeks and the Persians, the
Romans and the Chinese were only dimly aware of each other
and had almost no direct contact. Historians, however, have
seen them as fascinating variations on an imperial theme and
have long explored their similarities and differences.
Rome: From City-State to Empire
Like the Persian Empire, that of the Romans took shape initially
on the margins of the civilized world and was an unlikely ragsto-riches story. Beginning as a small and impoverished citystate on the western side of central Italy in the eighth century
B.C.E., Rome later became the center of an enormous imperial
state that encompassed the Mediterranean basin and included
parts of continental Europe, Britain, North Africa, and the
Middle East.
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Originally ruled by a king, around 509 B.C.E. Roman
aristocrats threw off the monarchy and established a republic in
which the men of a wealthy class, known as patricians,
dominated. Executive authority was exercised by two consuls,
who were advised by a patrician assembly, the Senate.
Deepening conflict with the poorer classes, called plebeians
(plih-BEE-uhns), led to important changes in Roman political
life. A written code of law offered plebeians some protection
from abuse; a system of public assemblies provided an
opportunity for lower classes to shape public policy; and a new
office of tribune, who represented plebeians, allowed them to
block unfavorable legislation. Romans took great pride in this
political system, believing that they enjoyed greater freedom
than did many of their more autocratic neighbors. The values of
the republic — rule of law, the rights of citizens, the absence of
pretension, upright moral behavior, keeping one’s word — were
later idealized as “the way of the ancestors.”
With this political system and these values, the Romans
launched their empire-building enterprise, a prolonged process
that took more than 500 years (see Map 3.4). That empire began
in the 490s B.C.E. with the Romans gaining control first over
their Latin neighbors in central Italy and then, during the next
several hundred years, over most of the Italian peninsula.
Between 264 and 146 B.C.E., victory in the Punic Wars with
Carthage, a powerful empire with its capital in North Africa,
extended Roman control over the western Mediterranean,
including Spain, and made Rome a naval power. Subsequent
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expansion in the eastern Mediterranean brought the ancient
civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia under Roman
domination. Rome also expanded into territories in Southern
and Western Europe, including present-day France and Britain.
By early in the second century C.E., the Roman Empire had
reached its maximum extent.
MAPPING HISTORY
Map 3.4 The Roman Empire
At its height in the second century C.E., the Roman Empire incorporated the
entire Mediterranean basin, including the lands of the Carthaginian Empire, the
less developed region of Western Europe, the heartland of Greek civilization,
and the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
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READING THE MAP: Where were the imperial borders demarcated by
geographical features like rivers, oceans, or deserts? Where were they not?
MAKING CONNECTIONS: Comparing Map 3.4 with Maps 3.3 and 3.1, which
regions of the former Persian and Greek empires did the Roman Empire
incorporate?
Guided Reading Question
CHANGE
How did Rome grow from a single city to the center of a huge empire?
No overall design or blueprint drove the building of empire,
nor were there any precedents to guide the Romans. What they
created was something wholly new — an empire that
encompassed the entire Mediterranean basin and beyond. It
was a piecemeal process, which the Romans invariably saw as
defensive. Each addition of territory created new
vulnerabilities, which could be relieved only by more
conquests. For some, the growth of empire represented
opportunity. Poor soldiers hoped for land, loot, or salaries that
might lift their families out of poverty. The well-to-do or wellconnected gained great estates, earned promotions, and
sometimes achieved public acclaim and high political office.
The wealth of long-established societies in the eastern
Mediterranean (Greece and Egypt, for example) beckoned, as
did the resources and food supplies of the less developed
regions, such as Western Europe. There was no shortage of
motivation for the creation of the Roman Empire.
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Although Rome’s central location in the Mediterranean basin
provided a convenient launching pad for empire, it was the
army, “well-trained, well-fed, and well-rewarded,” that built the
empire.10 Drawing on the growing population of Italy, that
army was often brutal in war. Carthage, for example, was
utterly destroyed; the city was razed to the ground, and its
inhabitants were either killed or sold into slavery. Nonetheless,
Roman authorities could be generous to former enemies. Some
were granted Roman citizenship; others were treated as allies
and allowed to maintain their local rulers. As the empire grew,
so too did political forces in Rome that favored its continued
expansion and were willing to commit the necessary manpower
and resources.
Centuries of empire building and the warfare that made it
possible had an impact on Roman society and values. That vast
process, for example, shaped Roman understandings of gender
and the appropriate roles of men and women. Rome was
becoming a warrior society in which the masculinity of upperclass male citizens was defined in part by a man’s role as a
soldier and a property owner. In private life, this translated into
absolute control over his wife, children, and slaves, including
the theoretical right to kill them without interference from the
state. This ability of a free man and a Roman citizen to act
decisively in both public and private life lay at the heart of ideal
male identity. A Roman woman could participate proudly in
this warrior culture by bearing brave sons and inculcating these
values in her offspring.
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Queen Boudica This statue in London commemorates the resistance of the
Celtic people of eastern Britain against Roman rule during a revolt in 60–61 C.E.,
led by Queen Boudica. A later Roman historian lamented that “all this ruin was
brought upon the Romans by a woman, a fact which in itself caused them the
greatest shame.”
Strangely enough, by the early centuries of the Common Era
the wealth of empire, the authority of the imperial state, and
the breakdown of older Roman social patterns combined to
offer women in the elite classes a less restricted life than they
had known in the early centuries of the republic. Upper-class
Roman women had never been as secluded in the home as were
their Greek counterparts, and now the legal authority of their
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husbands was curtailed by the intrusion of the state into what
had been private life. The head of household, or pater familias,
lost his earlier power of life and death over his family.
Furthermore, such women could now marry without
transferring legal control to their husbands and were
increasingly able to manage their own finances and take part in
the growing commercial economy of the empire. According to
one scholar, Roman women of the wealthier classes gained
“almost complete liberty in matters of property and
marriage.”11 At the other end of the social spectrum, Roman
conquests brought many thousands of women as well as men
into the empire as slaves, who were often brutally treated and
subject to the whims of their masters (see “The Making of
Roman Slavery” in Chapter 5).
The relentless expansion of empire raised yet another
profound question for Rome: could republican government and
values survive the acquisition of a huge empire? The wealth of
empire enriched a few, enabling them to acquire large estates
and many slaves, while pushing growing numbers of free
farmers into the cities and poverty. Imperial riches also
empowered a small group of military leaders — Marius, Sulla,
Pompey, Julius Caesar — who recruited their troops directly
from the ranks of the poor and whose fierce rivalries brought
civil war to Rome during the first century B.C.E. Traditionalists
lamented the apparent decline of republican values —
simplicity, service, free farmers as the backbone of the army,
the authority of the Senate — amid the self-seeking ambition of
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the newly rich and powerful. When the dust settled from the
civil war, Rome was clearly changing, for authority was now
vested primarily in an emperor, the first of whom was Octavian,
later granted the title of Augustus (r. 27 B.C.E.–14 C.E.), which
implied a divine status for the ruler. The republic was history;
Rome had become an empire and its ruler an emperor.
But it was an empire with an uneasy conscience, for many
felt that in acquiring an empire, Rome had betrayed and
abandoned its republican origins. Augustus was careful to
maintain the forms of the republic — the Senate, consuls, public
assemblies — and referred to himself as “first man” rather than
“king” or “emperor,” even as he accumulated enormous
personal power. And in a bow to republican values, he spoke of
the empire’s conquests as reflecting the “power of the Roman
people” rather than of the Roman state. Despite this rhetoric, he
was emperor in practice, if not in name, for he was able to
exercise sole authority, backed up by his command of a
professional army. Later emperors were less reluctant to flaunt
their imperial prerogatives.
During the first two centuries C.E., this empire in disguise
provided security, grandeur, and relative prosperity for the
Mediterranean world. This was the pax Romana, the Roman
peace, the era of imperial Rome’s greatest extent and greatest
authority.
China: From Warring States to
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Empire
About the same time, on the other side of Eurasia, another huge
imperial state was in the making — China. Here, however, the
task was understood differently. It was not a matter of creating
something new, as in the case of the Roman Empire, but of
restoring something old. As one of the First Civilizations, a
Chinese state had emerged as early as 2200 B.C.E. and under the
Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties had grown progressively larger.
By 500 B.C.E., however, this Chinese state was in shambles. Any
earlier unity vanished in an “age of warring states,” featuring
the endless rivalries of seven competing kingdoms.
Guided Reading Question
COMPARISON
Why was the Chinese empire able to take shape so quickly, while that
of the Romans took centuries?
To many Chinese, this was a wholly unnatural and
unacceptable condition, and rulers in various states vied to
reunify China. One of them, known to history as Qin
Shihuangdi (chihn shee-HUANG-dee) (i.e., Shihuangdi from the
state of Qin), succeeded brilliantly. The state of Qin had already
developed an effective bureaucracy, subordinated its
aristocracy, equipped its army with iron weapons, and enjoyed
rapidly rising agricultural output and a growing population. It
also had adopted a political philosophy called Legalism, which
advocated clear rules and harsh punishments as a means of
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enforcing the authority of the state. With these resources,
Shihuangdi (r. 221–210 B.C.E.) launched a military campaign to
reunify China and in just ten years soundly defeated the other
warring states. Believing that he had created a universal and
eternal empire, he grandly named himself Shihuangdi, which
means the “first emperor.” Unlike Augustus, he showed little
ambivalence about empire. Subsequent conquests extended
China’s boundaries far to the south into the northern part of
Vietnam, to the northeast into Korea, and to the northwest,
where the Chinese pushed back the nomadic pastoral people of
the steppes. (See Zooming In: Trung Trac, for an example of
resistance to Chinese expansion.) Although the boundaries
fluctuated over time, Shihuangdi laid the foundations for a
unified Chinese state, which has endured, with periodic
interruptions, to the present (see Map 3.5).
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Map 3.5 Classical China
The brief Qin dynasty brought unity to the heartland of Chinese civilization, and
the much longer Han dynasty extended its territorial reach south toward
Vietnam, east to Korea, and west into Central Asia. To the north lay the military
confederacy of the nomadic Xiongnu.
Building on earlier precedents, the Chinese process of
empire formation was far more compressed than the centurieslong Roman effort, but it was no less dependent on military
force and no less brutal. Scholars who opposed Shihuangdi’s
policies were executed and their books burned. Aristocrats who
resisted his centralizing policies were moved physically to the
capital. Hundreds of thousands of laborers were recruited to
construct the Great Wall of China, designed to keep out
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northern “barbarians,” and to erect a monumental mausoleum
as the emperor’s final resting place. More positively,
Shihuangdi imposed a uniform system of weights, measures,
and currency and standardized the length of axles for carts and
the written form of the Chinese language.
As in Rome, the creation of the Chinese empire had domestic
repercussions, but they were brief and superficial compared to
Rome’s transition from republic to empire. The speed and
brutality of Shihuangdi’s policies ensured that his own Qin
dynasty did not last long, and it collapsed unmourned in 206
B.C.E. The Han dynasty that followed (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.)
retained the centralized features of Shihuangdi’s creation,
although it moderated the harshness of his policies, adopting a
milder and moralistic Confucianism in place of Legalism as the
governing philosophy of the state. It was Han dynasty rulers
who consolidated China’s imperial state and established the
political patterns that lasted into the twentieth century.
ZOOMING IN
Trung Trac: Resisting the Chinese Empire
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Trung Trac and Trung Nhi.
Empires have long faced resistance from people they conquer, and
never more fiercely than in Vietnam, which was incorporated into an
expanding Chinese empire for over a thousand years (111 B.C.E.–939
C.E.). Among the earliest examples of Vietnamese resistance to this
occupation was that led around 40 C.E. by Trung Trac and her younger
sister Trung Nhi, daughters in an aristocratic, military family. Trung
Trac married a prominent local lord, Thi Sach, who was a vocal
opponent of offensive Chinese policies — high taxes, even on the right
to fish in local rivers; required payoffs to Chinese officials; and the
imposition of Chinese culture on the Vietnamese. In response to this
opposition, the Chinese governor of the region ordered Thi Sach’s
execution.
This personal tragedy provoked Trung Trac to take up arms against
the Chinese occupiers, and she quickly gained a substantial following
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among peasants and aristocrats alike. Famously addressing some
30,000 soldiers, while dressed in full military regalia rather than the
expected mourning clothes, she declared to the assembled crowd:
Foremost I will avenge my country.
Second I will restore the Hung lineage.
Third I will avenge the death of my husband.
Lastly I vow that these goals will be accomplished.
Within months, her forces had captured sixty-five towns, and, for
two years, they held the Chinese at bay, while Trung Trac and Trung
Nhi ruled a briefly independent state as co-queens. Chinese sources
referred to Trung Trac as a “ferocious warrior.” During their rule, the
sisters eliminated the hated tribute taxes imposed by the Chinese and
sought to restore the authority of Vietnamese aristocrats. A large
military force, said to number roughly 80,000, counted among its
leaders thirty-six female “generals,” including the Trung sisters’
mother.
Soon, however, Chinese forces overwhelmed the rebellion, and
Trung Trac’s support faded. Later Vietnamese records explained the
failure of the revolt as a consequence of its female leadership. In
traditional Vietnamese accounts, the Trung sisters committed suicide,
jumping into a nearby river, as did a number of their followers.
Although the revolt failed, it lived on in stories and legends to
inspire later Vietnamese resistance to invaders — Chinese, French,
Japanese, and American alike. Men were reminded that women had led
this rebellion. “What a pity,” wrote a thirteenth-century Vietnamese
historian, “that for a thousand years after this, the men of our land
bowed their heads, folded their arms, and served the northerners
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[Chinese].”12 To this day, temples, streets, and neighborhoods bear the
name of the Trung sisters, and a yearly celebration in their honor
coincides with International Women’s Day. Usually depicted riding on
war elephants and wielding swords, these two women also represent
the more fluid gender roles then available to some Vietnamese women
in comparison to the stricter patriarchy prevalent in China.
QUESTION
How might you imagine the reactions to the Trung sisters’ revolt from
Chinese officials; Vietnamese aristocrats; Vietnamese peasants, both male
and female; and later generations of Vietnamese men and women?
Consolidating the Roman and
Chinese Empires
Once established, these two huge imperial systems shared a
number of common features. Both, for example, defined
themselves in universal terms. The Roman writer Polybius
spoke of bringing “almost the entire world” under the control of
Rome, while the Chinese state was said to encompass “all under
heaven.” Both of them invested heavily in public works — roads,
bridges, aqueducts, canals, protective walls — all designed to
integrate their respective domains militarily and commercially.
Furthermore, Roman and Chinese authorities both invoked
supernatural sanctions to support their rule. By the first century
C.E., Romans began to regard their deceased emperors as gods
and established a religious cult to bolster the authority of living
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rulers. It was the refusal of early Christians to take part in this
cult that provoked their periodic persecution by Roman
authorities.
Guided Reading Question
EXPLANATION
Why were the Roman and Chinese empires able to enjoy long periods
of relative stability and prosperity?
In China, a much older tradition had long linked events on
Earth with the invisible realm called “Heaven.” Neither a place
nor a supreme being, Heaven was an impersonal moral force
that regulated the universe. Emperors were called the Son of
Heaven and were said to govern by the Mandate of Heaven so
long as they ruled morally and with benevolence. Peasant
rebellions, “barbarian” invasions, or disastrous floods were
viewed as signs that the emperor had ruled badly and had thus
lost the Mandate of Heaven. Among the chief duties of the
emperor was the performance of various rituals thought to
maintain the appropriate relationship between Heaven and
Earth.
Both of these second-wave civilizations also absorbed a
foreign religious tradition — Christianity in the Roman world
and Buddhism in China — although the process unfolded
somewhat differently. In the case of Rome, Christianity was
born as a small sect in a remote corner of the empire. Aided by
the pax Romana and Roman roads, the new faith spread slowly
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for several centuries, particularly among the poor and lower
classes. Women were prominent in the leadership of the early
Church, as were a number of more well-to-do individuals from
urban families. After suffering intermittent persecution,
Christianity in the fourth century C.E. obtained state support
from emperors who hoped to shore up a tottering empire with a
common religion, and thereafter the religion spread quite
rapidly. (See “Society and the Church” in Chapter 10.)
In the case of China, by contrast, Buddhism came from India,
far beyond the Chinese world. It was introduced to China by
Central Asian traders and received little support from Han
dynasty rulers. In fact, the religion spread only modestly among
Chinese until after the Han dynasty collapsed (220 C.E.), when it
appealed to people who felt bewildered by the loss of a
predictable and stable society. Not until the Sui (sway) dynasty
emperor Wendi (r. 581–604 C.E.) reunified China did the new
religion gain state support, and then only temporarily.
Buddhism thus became one of several alternative cultural
traditions in a complex Chinese mix, while Christianity, though
divided internally, ultimately became the dominant religious
tradition throughout Europe. (See “China and Buddhism” in
Chapter 8.)
The Roman and Chinese empires also had a different
relationship to the societies they governed. Rome’s beginnings
as a small city-state meant that Romans, and even Italians, were
always a distinct minority within the empire. The Chinese
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empire, by contrast, grew out of a much larger cultural
heartland, already ethnically Chinese. Furthermore, as the
Chinese state expanded, especially to the south, it actively
assimilated the non-Chinese, or “barbarian,” people. In short,
they became Chinese, culturally, linguistically, and through
intermarriage in physical appearance as well. Many Chinese in
modern times are in fact descended from people who at one
point or another were not Chinese at all.
The Roman Empire offered a different kind of assimilation to
its subject peoples. Gradually and somewhat reluctantly, the
empire granted Roman citizenship to various individuals,
families, or whole communities for their service to the empire
or in recognition of their adoption of Roman culture. In 212 C.E.,
Roman citizenship was bestowed on almost all free men of the
empire. Citizenship offered clear advantages — the right to hold
public office, to serve in the Roman military units known as
legions, to wear a toga, and more — but it conveyed a legal
status, rather than cultural assimilation, and certainly did not
erase other identities, such as being Greek, Egyptian, or a
citizen of a particular city.
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Roman Actors This mosaic from Pompeii, likely created during the first century
C.E., depicts the staging of a theatrical production.
Various elements of Roman culture — its public buildings, its
religious rituals, its Latin language, its style of city life — were
attractive, especially in Western Europe, where urban
civilization was something new. In the eastern half of the
empire, however, things Greek retained tremendous prestige.
Many elite Romans in fact regarded Greek culture — its
literature, philosophy, and art — as superior to their own and
proudly sent their sons to Athens for a Greek education. To
some extent, the two blended into a mixed Greco-Roman
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tradition, which the empire disseminated throughout the realm.
Other non-Roman cultural traditions — such as the cult of the
Persian god Mithra or the compassionate Egyptian goddess Isis,
and, most extensively, the Jewish-derived religion of
Christianity — also spread throughout the empire. Nothing
similar occurred in Han dynasty China, except for Buddhism,
which established a modest presence, largely among
foreigners. Chinese culture experienced little competition from
older, venerated, or foreign traditions. It was widely recognized
across much of East Asia — in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, for
example — as the model to which others should conform.
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A Chinese Musician This Chinese stone relief from the fifth century C.E. depicts a
“celestial musician,” a minor Buddhist deity, playing a pipa, a string instrument
of Central Asian origin.
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Language served these two empires in important but
contrasting ways. Latin, an alphabetic language depicting
sounds, gave rise to various distinct languages — Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian — whereas Chinese did
not. Chinese characters, which represented words or ideas
more than sounds, were not easily transferable to other
languages. Written Chinese, however, could be understood by
all literate people, no matter which spoken dialect of the
language they used. Thus Chinese, more than Latin, served as
an instrument of elite assimilation. For all of these reasons, the
various peoples of the Roman Empire were able to maintain
their separate cultural identities far more than was the case in
China.
Politically, both empires established effective centralized
control over vast regions and huge populations, but the
Chinese, far more than the Romans, developed an elaborate
bureaucracy to hold the empire together. The Han emperor
Wudi (r. 141–87 B.C.E.) established an imperial academy for
training officials for an emerging bureaucracy with a
curriculum based on the writings of Confucius. This was the
beginning of a civil service system, complete with examinations
and selection by merit, which did much to integrate the Chinese
empire and lasted into the early twentieth century. Roman
administration was a somewhat ramshackle affair, relying more
on regional aristocratic elites and the army to provide cohesion.
Unlike the Chinese, however, the Romans developed an
elaborate body of law, applicable equally to all people of the
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realm, that dealt with matters of justice, property, commerce,
and family life. Chinese and Roman political development thus
generated different answers to the question of what made for
good government. For those who inherited the Roman
tradition, it was good laws, whereas for those in the Chinese
tradition, it was good men.
Finally, both Roman and Chinese civilizations had marked
effects on the environment in various ways. The Roman poet
Horace complained of the noise and smoke of the city and
objected to the urban sprawl that extended into the adjacent
fertile lands. Rome’s mining operations, the smelting of metals,
its large-scale agriculture, and its growing population — all of
this led to extensive deforestation and consequent soil erosion.
The shortage of wood in the heartland of the empire led to the
relocation of some ceramic workshops to Gaul, where timber
was more plentiful. Lead pollution, derived from the smelting
of lead ores in open furnaces and from lead water pipes and
cooking pots, shows up in the bones of Roman burials and as far
away as Greenland, where studies of the ice cap indicate that
lead in the atmosphere increased during Roman times. Here is
perhaps the earliest example of international atmospheric
pollution.
Large-scale Chinese ironworking during the Han dynasty
likewise contributed to substantial urban air pollution, while a
rapidly growing and dense population practicing intensive
agriculture stripped the north China plain of its ancient forest
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cover, causing sufficient soil erosion to turn the Hwang-ho
River its characteristic yellow-brown color. What had been
known simply as “the River” now became the Yellow River,
which frequently flooded with devastating results and over
many centuries dramatically changed course. In addition, as
China expanded north and west into the steppe lands of the
pastoral peoples, military/agricultural colonies of Chinese
farmers turned pasturelands into farmlands, plowing up longestablished sod. When the Chinese state subsequently grew
weaker or actually collapsed, such farms were abandoned, wind
erosion took hold, and deserts emerged.
The Collapse of Empires
Empires rise, and then, with some apparent regularity, they
fall, and in doing so, they provide historians with one of their
most intriguing questions: what causes the collapse of these
once-mighty structures? In China, the Han dynasty empire
came to an end in 220 C.E.; the traditional date for the final
disintegration of the Roman Empire is 476 C.E., although a
process of decline had been under way for several centuries. In
the Roman case, however, only the western half of the empire
collapsed, while the eastern part, subsequently known as the
Byzantine Empire, maintained the tradition of imperial Rome
for another thousand years.
Despite these differences, a number of common factors have
been associated with the end of these imperial states. At one
level, they both simply got too big, too overextended, and too
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expensive to be sustained by the available resources, and no
fundamental technological breakthrough was available to
enlarge these resources. Furthermore, the growth of large
landowning families with huge estates and political clout
enabled them to avoid paying taxes, turned free peasants into
impoverished tenant farmers, and diminished the authority of
the central government. In China, such conditions led to a
major peasant revolt, known as the Yellow Turban Rebellion, in
184 C.E. (see “Peasants” in Chapter 5).
Rivalry among elite factions created instability in both
empires and eroded imperial authority. In China, persistent
tension between castrated court officials (eunuchs) loyal to the
emperor and Confucian-educated scholar-bureaucrats
weakened the state. In the Roman Empire between 235 and 284
C.E., some twenty-six individuals claimed the title of Roman
emperor, only one of whom died of natural causes. In addition,
epidemic disease ravaged both societies, though more
extensively in the Roman world. The population of the Roman
Empire declined by 25 percent in the two centuries following
250 C.E., a demographic disaster that meant diminished
production, less revenue for the state, and fewer men available
to defend the empire’s long frontiers.
Historians have often linked the collapse of empires with
environmental factors as well, more often with reference to
Rome than to Han dynasty China. Considerable fluctuations in
the climate after about 250 C.E. led to drought in the third
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century, cold and wet conditions in the fourth, and increased
rainfall and cooler temperatures in the fifth, all of which
generated substantial soil erosion and declining agricultural
productivity. The North African breadbasket of the empire
suffered from serious salinization and increasingly desert-like
conditions. The extent to which such factors contributed to the
collapse of the Roman Empire remains a point of dispute
among scholars.
Guided Reading Question
CHANGE
What internal and external factors contributed to the collapse of the
Roman and Chinese empires?
To these mounting internal problems was added a growing
threat from nomadic or semi-agricultural peoples occupying
the frontier regions of both empires. The Chinese had long
developed various ways of dealing with the Xiongnu and other
nomadic people to the north — building the Great Wall to keep
them out, offering them trading opportunities at border
markets, buying them off with lavish gifts, contracting marriage
alliances with nomadic leaders, and conducting periodic
military campaigns against them. But as the Han dynasty
weakened in the second and third centuries C.E., such peoples
more easily breached the frontier defenses and set up a
succession of “barbarian states” in north China. Culturally,
however, many of these foreign rulers gradually became
Chinese, encouraging intermarriage, adopting Chinese dress,
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and setting up their courts in Chinese fashion.
A weakening Roman Empire likewise faced serious problems
from Germanic-speaking peoples living on its northern frontier.
Growing numbers of these people began to enter the empire in
the fourth century C.E. — some as mercenaries in Roman armies
and others as refugees fleeing the invasions of the ferocious
Huns, who were penetrating Europe from Central Asia. Once
inside the declining empire, various Germanic groups
established their own kingdoms, at first controlling Roman
emperors and then displacing them altogether by 476 C.E.
Unlike the nomadic groups in China, who largely assimilated
Chinese culture, Germanic kingdoms in Western Europe
developed their own ethnic identities — Visigoths, Franks,
Anglo-Saxons, and others — even as they drew on Roman law
and adopted Roman Christianity. Far more than in China, the
fall of the western Roman Empire produced a new culture,
blending Latin and Germanic elements, which provided the
foundation for the hybrid civilization that would arise in
Western Europe.
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Anglo-Saxon Treasure This purse hinge recovered from the royal grave site at
Sutton Hoo — one of the greatest hordes of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found in
England — is an exquisite piece of seventh-century barbarian art that combines
intricate gold work inlaid with gemlike garnets and glass. The paired images in
the center depict birds of prey hunting smaller birds — perhaps ducks. The outer
pair comprise men standing between beasts. Above are three plaques decorated
with elaborate geometric patterns, which are a hallmark of Germanic art from
this period.
The collapse of empire meant more than the disappearance
of centralized government and endemic conflict. In post-Han
China and post-Roman Europe, it also meant the decline of
urban life, a contracting population, less area under cultivation,
diminishing international trade, and vast insecurity for
ordinary people. It must have seemed that civilization itself was
unraveling.
The most significant difference between the collapse of
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empire in China and that in the western Roman Empire lay in
what happened next. In China, after about 350 years of
disunion, disorder, frequent warfare, and political chaos, a
Chinese imperial state, similar to that of the Han dynasty, was
reassembled under the Sui (581–618 C.E.), Tang (618–907), and
Song (960–1279) dynasties. Once again, a single emperor ruled;
a bureaucracy selected by examinations governed; and the
ideas of Confucius informed the political system. Such a
Chinese empire persisted into the early twentieth century.
The story line of European history following the end of the
western Roman Empire was very different indeed. No largescale, centralized, imperial authority encompassing all of
Western Europe has ever been successfully reestablished there
for any length of time. The memory of Roman imperial unity
certainly persisted, and many subsequently tried unsuccessfully
to re-create it. But most of Western Europe dissolved into highly
decentralized political systems involving nobles, knights and
vassals, kings with little authority, various city-states in Italy,
and small territories ruled by princes, bishops, or the pope.
From this point on, Europe would be a civilization without an
encompassing imperial state.
PRACTICING HISTORICAL THINKING
In comparing the Roman and Chinese empires, which do you find
more striking — their similarities or their differences?
Why were Europeans unable to reconstruct something of the
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unity of their classical empire, while the Chinese clearly did?
Surely the greater cultural homogeneity of Chinese civilization
made that task easier than it was amid the vast ethnic and
linguistic diversity of Europe. The absence in the Roman legacy
of a strong bureaucratic tradition also contributed to European
difficulties, whereas in China the bureaucracy provided some
stability even as dynasties came and went. The Chinese also had
in Confucianism a largely secular ideology that placed great
value on political matters in the here and now. The Roman
Catholic Church in Europe, however, was frequently at odds
with state authorities, and its “otherworldliness” did little to
support the creation of large-scale empires. Finally, Chinese
agriculture was much more productive than that of Europe, and
for a long time its metallurgy was more advanced. These
conditions gave Chinese state builders more resources to work
with than were available to their European counterparts.
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Intermittent Empire: The
Case of India
Among the second-wave civilizations of Eurasia, empire loomed
large in Persian, Mediterranean, and Chinese history, but it
played a rather less prominent role in Indian history. The
demise of the Indus Valley civilization by 1500 B.C.E. was
followed over the next thousand years by the creation of a new
civilization based farther east, along the Ganges River on India’s
northern plain.
By 600 B.C.E. what would become the second-wave
civilization of South Asia had begun to take shape across
northern India. Politically, that civilization emerged as a
fragmented collection of towns and cities, some small republics
governed by public assemblies, and a number of regional states
ruled by kings. An astonishing range of ethnic, cultural, and
linguistic diversity also characterized this civilization, as an
endless variety of peoples migrated into India from Central Asia
across the mountain passes in the northwest. These features of
Indian civilization — political fragmentation and vast cultural
diversity — have informed much of South Asian history
throughout many centuries, offering a sharp contrast to the
pattern of development in China. What gave Indian civilization
a recognizable identity and character was neither an imperial
tradition nor ethno-linguistic commonality, but rather a
distinctive religious tradition, known later to outsiders as
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Hinduism, and a unique social organization, the caste system.
These features of Indian life are explored further in Chapters 4
and 5.
Guided Reading Question
COMPARISON
Why were centralized empires so much less prominent in India than in
China?
Nonetheless, empires and emperors were not entirely
unknown in India’s long history. Northwestern India had been
briefly ruled by the Persian Empire and then conquered by
Alexander the Great. These Persian and Greek influences
helped stimulate the first and largest of India’s short
experiments with a large-scale political system, the Mauryan
Empire (326–184 B.C.E.), which encompassed all but the
southern tip of the subcontinent (see Map 3.6).
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Map 3.6 Empire in South Asia
Large-scale empires in the Indian subcontinent were less frequent and less
enduring than those in China. Two of the largest efforts were those of the
Mauryan and Gupta dynasties.
The Mauryan Empire was an impressive political structure,
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equivalent to the Persian, Chinese, and Roman empires, though
not nearly as long-lasting. With a population of perhaps 50
million, the Mauryan Empire boasted a large military force, a
civilian bureaucracy with various ministries, and a large
contingent of spies to provide the rulers with local information.
A famous treatise called the Arthashastra (The Science of
Worldly Wealth) articulated a pragmatic, even amoral, political
philosophy for Mauryan rulers. It was, according to one
scholar, “a book that frequently discloses to a king what
calculating and sometimes brutal measures he must carry out to
preserve the state and the common good.”13 The state also
operated many industries — spinning, weaving, mining,
shipbuilding, and armaments. This complex apparatus was
financed by taxes on trade, on herds of animals, and especially
on land, from which the monarch claimed a quarter or more of
the crop.
Mauryan India is perhaps best known for one of its
emperors, Ashoka (r. 268–232 B.C.E.), who left a record of his
activities and his thinking in a series of edicts carved on rocks
and pillars throughout the kingdom. Ashoka’s conversion to
Buddhism and his moralistic approach to governance gave his
reign a different tone than that of China’s Shihuangdi or
Greece’s Alexander the Great, who, according to legend, wept
because he had no more worlds to conquer. Ashoka’s legacy to
modern India has been that of an enlightened ruler, who sought
to govern in accord with the religious values and moral
teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism.
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Despite his good intentions, these policies did not long
preserve the empire, which broke apart soon after Ashoka’s
death. About 600 years later, a second brief imperial
experiment, known as the Gupta Empire (320–550 C.E.), took
shape. Faxian, a Chinese Buddhist traveler in India at the time,
noted a generally peaceful, tolerant, and prosperous land,
commenting that the ruler “governs without decapitation or
corporal punishment.” Free hospitals, he reported, were
available to “the destitute, crippled and diseased,” but he also
noticed “untouchables” carrying bells to warn upper-caste
people of their polluting presence.14 Culturally, the Gupta era
witnessed a flourishing of art, literature, temple building,
science, mathematics, and medicine, much of it patronized by
rulers. Indian trade with China also thrived, and Indian
commerce reached as far as the Roman world. When a
Germanic leader named Alaric laid siege to Rome in 410 C.E., he
demanded 3,000 pounds of Indian pepper to spare the city.
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The Great Stupa The Great Stupa of Sanchi, the oldest stone building in India,
was commissioned by Ashoka in the third century B.C.E. to house precious relics
of the Buddha.
Thus India’s political history resembled that of Western
Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire far more than
that of China or Persia. Neither imperial nor regional states
commanded the kind of loyalty or exercised the degree of
influence that they did in other second-wave civilizations.
India’s unparalleled cultural diversity surely was one reason, as
were invasions from Central Asia, which repeatedly smashed
emerging states that might have provided the nucleus for an allIndia empire. Finally, India’s social structure, embodied in a
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caste system linked to occupational groups, made for intensely
local loyalties at the expense of wider identities.
Nonetheless, a frequently vibrant economy fostered a lively
internal commerce and made India the focal point of an
extensive network of trade in the Indian Ocean basin. In
particular, its cotton textile industry long supplied cloth
throughout the Afro-Eurasian world. Strong guilds of merchants
and artisans provided political leadership in major towns and
cities, and their wealth supported lavish temples, public
buildings, and religious festivals. Great creativity in religious
matters generated Hindu and Buddhist traditions that later
penetrated much of Asia. Indian mathematics and science,
especially astronomy, were also impressive; Indian scientists
plotted the movements of stars and planets and recognized
quite early that the earth was round. Clearly, the absence of
consistent imperial unity did not prevent the evolution of a
lasting civilization.
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REFLECTIONS
Enduring Legacies of Second-Wave
Empires
These second-wave empires have long ago passed into history,
but their descendants have kept them alive in memory, for they
have proved useful, even in the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Such ancient empires have provided legitimacy for
contemporary states, inspiration for new imperial ventures,
and abundant warnings and cautions for those seeking to
criticize more recent empires. For example, in bringing
communism to China in the twentieth century, the Chinese
leader Mao Zedong compared himself to Shihuangdi, the unifier
of China and the brutal founder of its Qin dynasty. Reflecting on
his campaign against intellectuals in general and Confucianism
in particular, Mao declared to a Communist Party conference:
“Emperor Qin Shihuang was not that outstanding. He only
buried alive 460 Confucian scholars. We buried 460 thousand
Confucian scholars. . . . To the charge of being like Emperor
Qin, of being a dictator, we plead guilty.”15
In contrast, modern-day Indians, who have sought to present
their country as a model of cultural tolerance and nonviolence,
have been quick to link themselves to Ashoka and his policies of
inclusiveness. When the country became independent from
British colonial rule in 1947, India soon placed an image of
Ashoka’s Pillar on the new nation’s currency.
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In the West, it has been the Roman Empire that has provided
a template for thinking about political life. Many in Great
Britain celebrated their own global empire as a modern version
of the Roman Empire. If the British had been civilized by
Roman rule, then surely Africans and Asians would benefit
from falling under the control of the “more civilized” British.
Likewise, to the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, his
country’s territorial expansion during the 1930s and World War
II represented the creation of a new Roman Empire. Most
recently, the United States’ dominant role in the world has
prompted the question, are the Americans the new Romans?
Historians frequently cringe as politicians and students use
(and perhaps misuse) historical analogies to make their case for
particular points of view in the present. But we have little else to
go on except history in making our way through the
complexities of contemporary life, and historians themselves
seldom agree on the “lessons” of the past. Lively debate about
the continuing relevance of these ancient empires shows that
although the past may be gone, it surely is not dead.
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Second Thoughts
What’s the Significance?
Persian Empire
Athenian democracy
Greco-Persian Wars
Peloponnesian War
Alexander the Great
Hellenistic era
Alexandria
Augustus
pax Romana
Qin Shihuangdi
Han dynasty
Mauryan Empire
Ashoka
Gupta Empire
Big Picture Questions
1. What common features can you identify in the empires
described in this chapter? In what ways did they differ from one
another? What accounts for those differences?
2. Are you more impressed with the “greatness” of empires or
with their destructive and oppressive features? Why?
3. Do you think that these second-wave empires hold “lessons”
for the present, or are contemporary circumstances sufficiently
unique as to render the distant past irrelevant?
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4. Looking Back: How do these empires of the second-wave
civilizations differ from the political systems of the First
Civilizations?
Next Steps: For Further Study
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History
(2010). A fascinating account by two major scholars of the
imperial theme across the world. Chapter 2 compares the
Roman and Chinese empires.
Stanley Burstein, The World from 1000 B.C.E. to 300 C.E. (2017). An
up-to-date account of Afro-Eurasian civilizations and their
relationships by a prominent historian of the ancient world.
Arthur Cotterell, The First Emperor of China (1988). A biography of
Shihuangdi.
Sarah Pomeroy et al., Ancient Greece (1999). A highly readable
survey of Greek history by a team of distinguished scholars.
Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives
on Ancient World Empires (2009). Places the historical
trajectory and various themes of Roman and Han dynasty
empires in a comparative context.
Romila Thapar, Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961). A
classic study of India’s early empire builder.
Illustrated History of the Roman Empire, http://www.romanempire.net. An interactive website with maps, pictures, and
much information about the Roman Empire.
BBC, “The Immortal Emperor. Qin Shi Huang,” presented by Tony
Spawforth, 1996, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6zcd68hhs. A documentary film about China’s “first emperor” and his
enormous funerary complex of terra-cotta warriors.
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WORKING WITH EVIDENCE
Perceptions of Outsiders in the Ancient
World
The peoples of ancient Eurasia did not live in splendid isolation
from one another. Nor did they inhabit the kind of deeply
interconnected and globalized world that the past century has
created. But through war, commerce, the migration of peoples,
the spread of religions, and sheer geographic proximity, some of
those peoples became sharply aware of one another and
developed mental images of life beyond the familiar confines of
their own culture. What distortions arose as they pondered those
outside their circle? How did the “other” provide opportunities
to question or critique their own society? How and in what
contexts were outsiders depicted in ancient art and in writing?
The sources that follow provide five examples of this process
from the ancient world.
Source 3.1 A Greek Historian on Persia
Born to a wealthy Greek family in Asia Minor, Herodotus (ca. 485–
425 B.C.E.) came of age when the wars between the Greeks and
Persians were still recent memories. He devoted much of his life
to recording the history of that great conflict in a series of books
known as The Histories. In doing so, he pretty much invented for
the Western world the craft of history as a systematic and
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connected narrative based on research. As a man of means, he
was able to travel widely in the Persian Empire, Egypt, Syria,
Babylon, Sicily, and Italy, making notes of what he saw and
collecting stories, myths, and oral recollections along the way.
The selection that follows contains some of his personal
impressions of Persia.
What cultural differences does Herodotus notice between
Greek ways of living and those of Persia?
What posture does Herodotus take toward these
differences? He does refer to Persians as “barbarians,” but
at the time that term may have meant simply “non-Greek,”
without the implication of “savage” or “uncivilized” that it
later acquired. Does he express a critical view of the
Persians or a more positive understanding?
What parts of this account might be helpful to historians
seeking to describe life in ancient Persia? What might a
historian learn about the Greeks’ views of themselves from
this description?
HERODOTUS
The Histories
mid-5th century B.C.E.
The customs that I know the Persians follow are these. They
have no images of the gods and no temples or altars; they
consider the use of them a sign of foolishness. This comes, I
think, from their not believing the gods to have the same nature
as human beings, as the Greeks imagine. The Persians’ practice
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is to climb to the tops of the highest mountains to offer
sacrifices to Zeus, the Greek name for the chief god of the
universe. The Persians use this god’s name to refer to the whole
extent of the sky. They also sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the
earth, to fire, to water, and to the winds. . . .
Of all the days in the year, the one they celebrate the most is
their birthday. It is customary to serve much more food on that
day than usual. The richer Persians have an ox, a horse, a
camel, and an ass roasted whole for the meal; poorer people
cook smaller kinds of cattle. They eat relatively few main
courses but many extra courses, which they serve a few dishes
at a time. For this reason, the Persians say that the Greeks leave
a meal hungry because they have nothing worth mentioning
served to them as an extra after the meats and that if the Greeks
did have extra courses served, they would never stop eating.
The Persians love wine and drink large amounts of it. . . .
When they meet another person in the street, you can tell if
the people meeting are of equal status by the following
indication: If they are, instead of speaking, they kiss each other
on the lips. In the case where one is a little inferior to the other,
the kiss is given on the cheek. Where the difference of rank is
great, the inferior lies down on the ground in front of the
superior. . . . The farther away other peoples live, the less the
Persians respect them. The reason is that they regard
themselves as very greatly superior in all respects to the rest of
humanity, believing that other peoples’ excellence is directly
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proportional to how close they live to Persia. . . .
No one so readily adopts foreign customs as the Persians. For
this reason, they wear clothing like that of the Medes,
considering it superior to their own. In war, they wear Egyptian
armor to protect their chests. As soon as they hear of any luxury
from any country, they instantly make it their own. In
particular, they learned from the Greeks to have sex with
adolescent boys. Each man has several wives and an even
greater number of concubines.
In terms of manliness, manly courage on the battlefield is the
greatest proof, with fathering many sons the second greatest. . .
. They carefully educate their sons from the age of five to the
age of twenty in only three subjects: riding horses, shooting
arrows, and speaking the truth. Until boys are five, they are not
allowed to come into the sight of their fathers, but instead
spend their time with the women. They do this so that if the
child dies young, the father will not be saddened at losing him.
I praise this custom and the following one too. The king does
not put anyone to death for a single instance of wrong-doing,
and no Persian inflicts an extreme penalty on a slave for a single
instance of wrong-doing.
I can say all these things about the Persians with complete
certainty, relying on my own personal knowledge.
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Source: Herodotus, The Histories, 1:131–37, 140, in Herodotus and
Sima Qian: The First Great Historians of Greece and China, edited
by Thomas R. Martin (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), 46–49.
Source 3.2 A Greek Goldsmith Depicts the Scythians
Nomadic Scythian pastoralists who grazed their animals on the
vast grasslands north of the Black Sea traded extensively with
Greek colonies along the coast. Skilled craftsmen in these
settlements regularly created luxury items for nomadic elites like
this magnificent gold beaker dating from the fourth century B.C.E.
The beaker depicts scenes from the everyday life of pastoralists,
including the stringing of a bow, the bandaging of a wound, and,
in the scene depicted here, the pulling of a tooth — a common if
painful procedure in the ancient world. Found in a Scythian
grave on the Crimean Peninsula, the lifelike figures reflect Greek
artistic sensibilities, but the hairstyles and clothing are distinctly
Scythian.
An elite Scythian most likely commissioned this beaker.
How does this information shape how you think about this
Greek depiction of the Scythians?
Does the beaker offer any evidence that the Greek craftsman
who made it had directly encountered Scythians?
Both the beaker and Herodotus present Greek views of other
cultures. What does the beaker add to the insights offered
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by Herodotus?
Scythian Cup, Crimea
4th century B.C.E.
380
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Source 3.3 A Roman Historian on the Germans
Occupying much of Central Europe north of the Roman Empire,
ancient Germanic-speaking peoples were never a single “nation”
but rather a collection of tribes, clans, and chiefdoms. They were
regarded by the Romans as barbarians, though admired and
feared for their military skills. These Germanic peoples were
famously described by Tacitus (56–117 C.E.), a Roman official and
well-known historian. Tacitus himself had never visited the lands
of the people he describes; rather, he relied on earlier written
documents and interviews with merchants and soldiers who had
traveled and lived in the region. Unlike Herodotus, he wrote
about people who lived without the states and cities
characteristic of civilizations.
What can we learn from Tacitus’s account about the
economy, politics, society, and culture of the Germanic
peoples of the first century C.E.?
Which statements of Tacitus might you regard as reliable,
and which are more suspect? Why?
Modern scholars have argued that Tacitus used the
Germanic peoples to criticize aspects of his own Roman
culture. What evidence might support this point of view?
What differences might you notice between Herodotus’s
description of Persian civilization and Tacitus’s discussion of
an agricultural village society?
TACITUS
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Germania
1st century C.E.
The tribes of Germany are free from all taint of intermarriages
with foreign nations, and they appear as a distinct, unmixed
race, like none but themselves. . . . All have fierce blue eyes, red
hair, huge frames, fit only for a sudden exertion. They are less
able to bear laborious work. Heat and thirst they cannot in the
least endure; to cold and hunger their climate and their soil
inure them. . . .
They choose their kings by birth, their generals by merit.
These kings have not unlimited or arbitrary power, and the
generals do more by example than by authority. . . . And what
most stimulates their courage is that their squadrons or
battalions, instead of being formed by chance or by a fortuitous
gathering, are composed of families and clans. Close by them,
too, are those dearest to them, so that they hear the shrieks of
women, the cries of infants. . . .
Tradition says that armies already wavering and giving way
have been rallied by women who, with earnest entreaties and
bosoms laid bare, have vividly represented the horrors of
captivity, which the Germans fear with such extreme dread on
behalf of their women. . . . They even believe that the female
sex has a certain sanctity and prescience, and they do not
despise their counsels, or make light of their answers. . . .
Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on
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certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with
human victims. . . . Augury and divination by lot no people
practice more diligently. . . .
When they go into battle, it is a disgrace for the chief to be
surpassed in valor, a disgrace for his followers not to equal the
valor of the chief. . . . Feasts and entertainments, which though
inelegant, are plentifully furnished, are their only pay. The
means of this bounty come from war or rapine. Nor are they as
easily persuaded to plough the earth and to wait for the year’s
produce as to challenge an enemy and earn the honor of
wounds. Nay, they actually think it tame and stupid to acquire
by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.
Whenever they are not fighting, they pass much of their time
in hunting, and still more in idleness, giving themselves up to
sleep and to feasting, the bravest and the most warlike doing
nothing, and surrendering the management of the household of
the home, and of the land, to the women, the old men, and all
the weakest members of the family. . . . It is the custom of the
states to bestow by voluntary and individual contribution on the
chief a present of cattle or of grain, which, while accepted as a
compliment, supplies their wants. They are particularly
delighted by gifts from neighboring tribes . . . such as choice
steeds, heavy armor, trappings, and neckchains. We have now
taught them to accept money also.
It is well known that the nations of Germany have no cities,
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and that they do not even tolerate closely contiguous dwellings.
They live scattered and apart. . . . No use is made by them of
stone or tile; they employ timber for all purposes, rude masses
without ornament or attractiveness. . . .
Their marriage code, however, is strict, and indeed no part of
their manners is more praiseworthy. Almost alone among
barbarians they are content with one wife, except a very few
among them. . . .
Very rare for so numerous a population is adultery, the
punishment of which is prompt, and in the husband’s power.
Having cut off the hair of the adulteress and stripped her naked,
he expels her from the house in the presence of her kinfolk, and
then flogs her through the whole village. The loss of chastity
meets with no indulgence; neither beauty, youth, nor wealth
will procure the culprit a husband.
To limit the number of their children or to destroy any of
their subsequent offspring is accounted infamous, and good
habits are here more effectual than good laws elsewhere. . . .
It is the duty among them to adopt the feuds as well as the
friendships of a father or a kinsman. These feuds are not
implacable; even homicide is expiated by the payment of a
certain number of cattle and of sheep, and the satisfaction is
accepted by the entire family, greatly to the advantage of the
state, since feuds are dangerous in proportion to a people’s
freedom. . . .
385
[S]laves are not employed after our manner with distinct
domestic duties assigned to them, but each one has the
management of a house and home of his own. The master
requires from the slave a certain quantity of grain, of cattle, and
of clothing, as he would from a tenant, and this is the limit of
subjection.
Source: Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, The
Agricola and Germania of Tacitus (London: Macmillan, 1877), 87ff.
Source 3.4 A Roman Depiction of Sarmatians
Germans were not the only people to periodically threaten the
borders of the Roman Empire. Various groups of pastoralists
from north of the Black Sea regularly migrated west, raiding and
sometimes invading Roman territory, especially along the
Danube River. The Romans respected the military prowess of
these nomadic horsemen, whom they frequently fought and
sometimes absorbed into their armies. Dating from the second
century C.E., this bas-relief sculpture of p…