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Alexandrian Empire Anasazi Angkor Aztec Britain (Sub-Roman) British Empire Casas Grandes China Dilmun Dutch Colonial Empire East African Coast Easter Island

Eastern Woodlands Egypt (Pharaonic) Ethiopia Etruscans Great Zimbabwe Greece (Classical) Harappan Hawaii Hittites Hohokam Holy Roman Empire Ik

Inca Kachin Lovango Mauryan Empire Maya Mesopotamia Middle Nile Minoan Mogollon Mogul Empire Mycenae Olmec

Ottoman Empire Pacific - General Persian Empire Petra Phoenicians Pre-Inca Roman Empire Sahel Spanish & Portuguese Empires Tasaday Toltec West African Forest Yir Yoront

Alexandrian Empire

Portrait of Alexander the Great

Alexander died in Babylon on the 13th of June 323 BC, at the age of only 33. He had achieved an empire virtually as large and covering the same ground as the Persian empire. Yet for all his greatness, Alexander's empire was among the shortest in history - not surviving, in a coherent form, his death. Instead, the empire was divided into the kingdoms of the Diadochi, each of which followed a different course. Ptolemaic Egypt was one, for example, succumbing to Roman conquest in 30 BC. Hellenistic Greece, another part, succumbed to Roman conquest in the second century BC. Back

Anasazi

Part of an abandoned Anasazi pueblo that was constructed in a natural cave in Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park

The Anasazi people underwent a flowering similar to the Mogollon, Chaco Canyon being their supreme achievement. This is today a 15-kilometre long, silt-filled and barren valley, where there were eight towns connected by roads 9 metres wide. Now they are ghost towns, filling up with sand in a dessicated and extremely unpromising landscape. The villages were pueblos, which means that the houses all merged into one another. The largest, Peublo Benito had up to 800 rooms and was clearly a planned community built over the period AD 919 to 1085. It is estimated that the total population was 15,000 with 1,200 at Pueblo Bonito. The Chacoans were apparently in contact with the Mexican civilisations to the south, with a small amount of trade going on between them. During the first half of the twelfth century, all these villages were abandoned. Towards the end, the towns were scavenged for building materials. After Chaco was abandoned, the Anasazi seem to have flourished anew at the site of Mesa Verde, somewhat to the north. This settlement dates back to about AD 700 and after a period of decline in the decades after AD 900, underwent renewed growth. About half the villages in this region were constructed in huge open caves on cliffs, suggesting a defensive motivation. The high point of the Mesa Verde culture occurred between 1230 and 1260. By the end of the thirteenth century, the whole of the Anasazi area on the Colorado plateau was being abandoned. The population abandoned their pueblos and seem to have moved to the south and southeast, where they established new but perhaps more simply organised pueblos that have continued into historical times. Back

Angkor

Part of Angkor Wat

In the jungles of Cambodia, there is a potent symbol of the transience of glory in the temple complex of Angkor. The name comes from the Sanskrit Nagara, which means holy city. When it was discovered in 1850 by Henri Mouhot, it was a set of stone ruins, covered in jungle creepers and patrolled by wild animals, whose provenance was unknown to the local people and the subject of their folklore (Higham, 19). Yet in 1296, when it was sufficiently renowned to receive a visit from an ambassador of Kublai Khan, it was a flourishing and industrious centre of civilisation, with a population of about one million (Lissner, 167). Angkor was conceived as a centre for ritual and cult activities (Higham, 321). In particular, it was a Hindu monument dedicated to Vishnu, and later a Buddhist temple (Digby, pers. comm.). It is not actually certain that there was an appreciable urban populace in Angkor itself but some evidence from surface finds suggests there was (Higham, 329). Outside the capital, there were 90+ provinces, each with its own governor, defended centre and villages (Higham, 341). Its greatest building, Angkor Wat is on a par with the European cathedrals (Lissner, 168). It covers 48,000 square yards and its highest tower reaches 230 feet. It is surrounded by a moat 360 feet wide and 12.5 miles around. The Khmer who built and inhabited Angkor apparently possessed extensive libraries although nothing has survived (Lissner 168). 80 km away at Koh Ker, there is Prasat Thom, temple mausoleum of Jayavarman IV, which is second only to Angkor Wat in size. It is possible that there were also secular buildings and palaces, there. Yet, at the time of Mouhout's visit the contemporary Cambodians were illiterate peasants living in stilt-based huts (Lissner, 168). Angkor was founded by Jayavarman II and its enormous stone reservoirs indicate a well developed capacity to organise labour. The reservoirs were constructed to irrigate land. Angkor Wat itself was built as the temple-mausoleum of Suryavarman II (who reigned AD 1113 to 1150), using stone brought from quarries over 30 km away. At the time of the Chinese ambassador's visit, Angkor seemed extremely prosperous and stable. Zhou Daguan, the ambassador, described 1-2000 servants living in the capital, plus aristocrats, bureaucrats and numerous slaves (Higham, 341). However, this visit occurred at a time nearing the contraction of the mandala (Higham, 341) and events showed that the impression of stability was an illusion. By about 1450 it was in terminal decline, and by the 1470's it had been abandoned altogether. Angkor in fact was just one of several centres of civilisation in the region which have subsequently been discovered and which appear to have been abandoned about the same time. This has been compared to the fate of the Maya culture of central America, where the major centres were all deserted within a short time of each other around the 9th century and the population reverted to living in the countryside. These other great centres were discovered in the decades after Mouhout's discovery of Angkor (Higham, 20). The cause of this abandonment is not known. Furthermore, Angkor was a particularly well developed and long-lasting example of a phenomenon which was endemic to southeast Asia. This was the mandala, which constituted, in effect, a petty feudal chiefdom. Angkor was distinguished by its durability and by the relatively ordered transmission of succession: prior to Jayavarman II, the successive overlords were usually usurpers. Sources: I Lissner The Living Past (London 1957); C Higham The archaeology of mainland southeast Asia (Cambridge 1989). Back

Aztec

An artist's impression of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

The first American civilisation to come to the attention of the Europeans was that of the Aztecs in the valley of Mexico. Its ancient capital, Tenochtitlan, is today the site of Mexico City. It was founded on an island in the middle of a lake and, like Venice, it was threaded by numerous waterways. The Spanish under Cortes first entered this city on 8 November 1519. Less than two years later, by August 1521, it had been utterly destroyed and the conquest of the Aztec empire was complete. Tenochtitlan was undoubtedly a great city. It encompassed 2500 acres, which may be compared with the 3500 acres of Rome under Marcus Aurelius. It had a population of 90,000 at the time of Cortes's entry. The population of contemporary London was only 40,000: that of Paris was 65,000. The city was joined to the mainland by a giant causeway over a mile long and along this an aqueduct six feet wide brought fresh water. The city's sanitation systems were far in advance of anything available in Europe until the end of the eighteenth century . The Aztecs were also fearsome warriors who held sway over a large part of what is today southern Mexico, excluding the Yucatan peninsula, an area the size of modern Germany. It is remarkable that this empire succumbed so easily to Cortes's force of a thousand Spanish soldiers. Certainly the Aztecs lacked metal, the wheel, and draft animals and were technologically disadvantaged compared to Cortes with his horses and firearms. However, these firearms were still relatively clumsy and required lengthy reloading. They could hardly have guaranteed success in a real war, where Cortes might have been outnumbered by as many as twenty to one. Thus, it seems that a significant element in the Aztec downfall was the disgruntlement of the various peoples whom they had conquered and upon whom they preyed for their human sacrifices. They seized the opportunity of the Aztec's discomposure at Cortes's arrival to throw off the former's hegemony. Thus, Cortes did not so much conquer this empire as precipitate its disintegration along pre-existing fault lines. At any rate, after 1521, the Aztec empire passed into 1imbo and its great wealth, largely in the form of gold, was shipped off to Europe. In 1840, few were prepared to believe that the Aztecs had been capable of raising the buildings ascribed to them. Back

British Empire

British flag being run down during the Kenyan independence ceremony - a scene that was repeated many times in Britain's other colonies

The British East India Company was founded in 1600 and spearheaded British colonial expansion in the Far East, in a manner similar to the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The British established centres of operation above all in India, gradually extending their authority, depriving the Portuguese of the opprotunity to exploit their bridgehead in Goa (Digby, pers. comm.), establishing an equilibrium with the Dutch and eventually setting up a full-blown colonial regime in India, as well as other large areas such as Malaya. The Indian Ocean and South China Sea was just one scene of British commercial and political interests, however. As the Spanish and Portuguese were dividing up the south American continent, the British were finding out what was to be gained in the north, with John Cabot voyaging there in 1497 and 1498, not long after Columbus's discoveries and to all intents and purposes independent of him. Indeed, it seems that Cabot would have been the discoverer of America had he not been pre-empted by Columbus. In this part of the world, the British found themselves up against the French, in which struggles they were eventually victorious. Although they lost the territories of the United States after the Declaration of Independence, they held on to Canada and at that time were acquiring the new continent of Australia. They were also began to take on interests in Africa where there was much land to be divided up. At the same time, British influence in Europe increased. The British navy was built up to far stronger than that of any other European power, while Britain was undergoing the industrial revolution ahead of the continent. Combined with her extensive overseas trade, this turned Britain into the richest nation in the world. At the Battle of Waterloo, British supremacy was made apparent in comparison with France which had hitherto been perhaps the dominant European power. Thus, in 1800, Britain's and France's manufacturing outputs were equal, but by 1860 Britain's was two and half times that of France. In 1815, Britain was the richest nation in the world in per capita and over the next fifty years she became even richer. The year 1860 was Britain's zenith in relative terms . At the same time, for a hundred years after 1815, there were no significant wars between the European great powers. The British felt that they had somehow discovered the formula for great and lasting prosperity and peace . By 1900, Britain had established the largest empire the world has ever seen. Furthermore, it was considered that by being 'the first frog to jump out of the pond', Britain had achieved a position of unassailable dominance. Yet, in the event Britain's empire was to prove relatively shortlived, as shortlived indeed as most empires. In 1905, one journalist asked whether the empire that was celebrating the first anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar would survive to celebrate the second. The answer of course is that it would not, by a long chaIk. Beginning before the Second World War, and continuing apace thereafter the British Empire steadily disintegrated. Today, Britain is still among the richest and most powerful members of the United Nations. However she once controlled a quarter of the surface of the earth. Now she is largely confined to the British Isles. Once, her navy was as powerful as the next three or four navies put together. Now it has itself slipped to the third or fourth rank. Once, she had the highest per capita income in the world. Now she has slipped to somewhere below tenth place. In every relevant indicator Britain's relative decline is sizeable and obvious. Back

Casas Grandes

Houses at Casas Grandes

At the same time that the Chacoan and Mimbres systems were collapsing, another centralised society was emerging at Casas Grandes in what is today northern Chihuahua, the state of Mexico. Casas Grandes became a small city, with some 2,200 people, that seems to have been the economic and administrative centre for a region of some 48,125 square miles. Yet Casas Grandes was itself only shortlived and had been abandoned by the fifteenth century. Towards the end, people built ramps to reach the still usable upper rooms as the walls of buildings crumbled. Back

China

Part of the Great Wall

Another great civilisation originally based upon rivers was that of China, with its twin axes of the Yangtse and Yellow rivers. Its story resembles that of Egypt and Mesopotamia, with periods of high civilisation and extended empire interrupted by periods of regression and disunity. Apart from the legendary Hsia dynasty , the first organised society in the region was the Shang dynasty which arose, apparently quite suddenly, around 1600 BC. The earliest forms of Chinese characters date to this time. Chinese writing is not as ancient as that of Egypt or Mesopotamia, but it still survives while they were forgotten. Around 1000 BC, the Shang were conquered by the Chou, an originally less civilised people who came from the west. The Chou established a wide empire with a developed form of feudalism almost as sophisticated as that of medieval Europe, and their reign appears to be regarded as something of a golden age in Chinese history. The Chou were themselves harried by barbarians, this time from the north, and increasing instability led to the disruption of the empire in 771 BC. During the so-called Spring and Autumn period which followed, the Chou domain became very small and the power of the kings continued to wane. From about 600 BC, during the Warring States period, China was composed of 24 feudal states which were endlessly fighting each other. Over time, they gradually coalesced until in 221 BC, final unification was achieved under the Ch'in dynasts. The Ch'in were responsible for building the Great Wall (although some sections were inherited from earlier states), whose purpose may have been as much to keep the population inside, like the Berlin Wall, as it was to keep the Barbarians outside, but which in any case illustrates the coherence and authority of the Ch'in state. The Ch'in achievement is considered to be the First Unification. The Ch'in dynasty was very quickly replaced by the Han dynasty, although the state remained unified. In AD 221, however, the First Partition took place and for the next fifty years the functions of the state went into abeyance, people turned to other-worldly religions and there was a deep concern with the social problems of the day. The Second Unification took place in AD 265 under a new dynasty the Chin. However by AD 300 there were renewed problems in the north and, in the Second Partition, the Chin empire contracted to its southern part while a succession of dynasties fought it out in the north. The Third Unification took place in AD 581 and by 610 full control had been regained. The new empire achieved its maximum expansion under the T'ang dynasty about AD 750, another golden age in Chinese history. After this, a slow decline and contraction set in, with the Chinese losing their territories in Turkestan, Mongolia and Korea through the remainder of the eighth and the ninth centuries. After AD 875, rebellions became widespread and in AD 906, the empire fell apart in the Third Partition. The next fifty years was another dark age, a time of confusion during which some ten dynasties followed each other in rapid succession, but whose detailed history is obscure. In AD 960, the Fourth Unification was achieved by the new Sung dynasty. During the first few centuries after the Fourth Unification, the Chinese made tremendous advances in science and technology and were well ahead of Europe. They improved their ordnance, developed acupuncture and variolation (a precursor to vaccination), invented the magnetic compass and made important discoveries in astronomy and mathematics. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Chinese knowledge of botany surpassed that which Europe would achieve in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Sung dynasty was extinguished by Genghis Khan in 1279, but was immediately replaced by a Mongol dynasty. They ruled for a hundred years only to run into political and economic difficulties, and be replaced by the Ming dynasty after a series of conquests, over the period 1356 - 1382. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however the position of the government was greatly deteriorating with increased brigandage and even an invasion of the capital city in 1644, when the Ming emperor committed suicide and the Ch'ing dynasty took over. Nevertheless, the Chinese state retained its integrity although now increasingly overtaken by Europe, until the overthrow of the last emperor in 1912 and the introduction of the republic. Back

Classical Greece

Ruins on the Acropolis at Athens

The other major force in the Italian peninsula before the rise of Rome was the Greeks. Their provinces, called Magna Graecia consisted primarily of the instep of Italy's boot, the eastern parts of Sicily, and the western coast as far as Naples. During the fifth and fourth centuries, while the Etruscan civilisation was in decline, the Greek civilisation was in full flower. This was the time of the great city states, such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes. During the Greek apogee, the basic foundations of Western civilisation itself were laid down. Although it would be foolish to imagine that the advances of this age had no prehistory, for example in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations, the Hellenistic culture nevertheless represents a kind of point of departure for European politics, philosophy, mathematics, science, literature and historiography. Even as they conquered and subdued them, the Romans acknowledged the enormous intellectual debt which they owed to the Greeks. Indeed, during the first half of the second century BC, some Romans protested at the extent of borrowings from Greece . Nevertheless, while the Romans excelled in the practical arts of warfare, industry and government, they made precious few original and important additions to the Greek intellectual tradition. AII the same, through the fourth century, the Greek city states went into decline. This was not a continuous downhill movement. It took place unevenly and there were bursts of recovery. Yet the overall cumulative effect was unmistakably regressive. A particularly devastating blow was dealt by the conquest of Greece by Philip of Macedon, which began in 359 BC. In 336 BC, after Philip's assassination, his son Alexander the Great took over However Alexander died in 323 BC, leaving behind an independent Hellenistic empire. By the beginning of the second century, however, the Hellenistic empire was in a severely weakened state and the Romans moved in to conquer it. Since then, Greece has remained a poor and relatively backward region of Europe. Back

Dilmun

Ruins of Dilmun

The city of Dilmun on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf was established around 2000 BC. It dominated the route to the Indies, the key path by which trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus valley civilisation took place. As such, it became very wealthy. Yet around the time of Christ the city was abandoned and for the next two thousand years, until the discovery of oil restored wealth to the region, it was given over to nomadic camel-herders. Dilmun has only become known again in the last hundred years. at first through references in Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions, and then in the middle of this century through identification and excavation of the actual site. Before then, Dilmun was totally unheard of and yet two thousand years previously it had been a household word with artefacts and inscriptions found all the way from Greece to Burma. Back

Dutch colonial empire

Dutch colonial architecture in Indonesia

In 1602, the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie was formed, under government auspices. At that time, the Dutch were the leading maritime nation in Europe. Fighting against the Portuguese, the British and local authorities, they established their rule throughout Indonesia, ruthlessly suppressing competition and, when necessary destroying rivals' plantations which they deemed to be illegal. The two-way trade that they thus dominated brought sizeable profits, although the VOC's enforcement operations absorbed considerable funds and the actual long-term value of the trade may have been negligible or even negative for the Dutch state. At any rate, by 1799, the VOC was bankrupt and it disintegrated. The VOC's territories in Indonesia were subsequently taken over by the Dutch government, which set up a straightforward colonial regime. The Dutch East Indies remained a significant overseas property of the Netherlands for another 150years, but eventually achieved independence as Indonesia in the decades following the end of the Second World War. Back

East African coast

Ruins of the Great Mosque at Kilwa

On the east African coast, urban development took place along a strip of coastline, only 10 kilometres deep but some 2400 kilometres long. Here there developed a distinctive culture which was partly urban, mercantile, literate and Islamic. The city of Kilwa in this region was described by an Arab visitor in AD 1331 as one of the most beautiful towns in the world, and Portuguese sailors arriving there in 1514 were equally impressed, remarking upon the stone and mortar buildings and the luxuriance of the surrounding countryside. Some of the east African cities, such as Mogadishu, Mombasa as well as Kilwa, have remained important to the present day Many others however that were thriving during the first half of the second millennium AD were subsequently abandoned, in some cases even before the arrival of the Portuguese. The city of Gedi, for example, founded in the thirteenth century, was abandoned in the early sixteenth century though briefly reoccupied at the end of the sixteenth century. This pattern of cities being founded, occupied and then abandoned appears to have been going on some time. Archaeological sites dating from the eighth and ninth centuries are widely distributed along the coast. Back

Easter Island

Two of Easter Island's characteristic statues or 'moai'

On the 5 April 1722, Easter Day, the Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen discovered the triangular speck of land in the southeast Pacific which he named Easter Island. Unlike all the other islands which were inhabited at first contact by Europeans, Easter still bears the name given to it by a European explorer There was no pre-European for the island because the islanders were not in contact with any others. The nearest habitable land was some 1450 miles away and the nearest land actually inhabited at the time of Roggeveen's discovery was 1800 miles away This was the inhabitant's universe and they had no need to give it a special name to distinguish it from other places. Yet despite its isolation, Easter still had people on it and they had been there at least thirteen centuries before Roggeveen arrived. Evidently there was virtually no habitable part of the earth's surface that escaped colonisation by human beings, and equally there was nowhere that escaped the fluctuations in complexity that we have been documenting. Easter Island is best known for its distinctive statues or moai. Roggeveen saw a number of these during his visit. When Cook arrived some fifty years later, the third visitor to the island, he found many statues overturned and the destruction appeared to be relatively recent. When the French explorer La Pérouse visited twelve years after Cook, in 1786, there were only two moai, from a total of some six hundred, left standing and even these had been toppled by the time that missionaries established the first permanent European presence in the nineteenth century. It has become clear that the Easter Island culture was in crisis at the time of European discovery and having lost the ability or inclination to erect the huge moai was engaged in destroying the same. The history of Easter Island prior to European contact has been divided into three periods. During the early period from AD 400 to 1100, the islanders constructed not moai but paved courtyards, called ahu, with a central platform and two long wings of stone. During the middle period, from 1100 to 1680, the quality of ahu construction declined and attention shifted to carving the moai instead. These were placed upon the ahu, with their backs to the sea. During the late period, from 1680 onwards, stone carving ended while the moai were toppled and the ahu reduced to rubble in what the native traditions report to have been a period of chronic warfare with at some stage a great battle in which one of two warring factions killed most of the others. The first missionary on the island, Brother Eyraud, also found that the islanders preserved wooden boards on which there were extended passages written in a script which they called rongo-rongo. However, it became apparent that the natives could no longer read this writing and the script has still not been reliably deciphered. Unfortunately, Eyraud, considering the rongo-rongo boards to be works of the devil ordered them to be burned and only a few examples survive, which makes it less likely that a decipherment will ever be possible. The rongo-rongo script is particularly remarkable because it is the only example of writing of any kind in the Pacific, prior to the European entry. The nearest equivalent are knotted strings used on the Marquesas islands as an aide-memoire for reciters of myth. Similarly, the Easter Island statuary, although not unique in the Pacific is certainly more impressive than anything found elsewhere. European visitors were astonished by the stone images, some of them as much as thirty feet high, wondering how they could have been erected by people who apparently lacked any thick timber or strong ropes to provide levers and pulleys. Thus, from the time of first settlement the Easter islanders evolved a relatively sophisticated culture although it is generally accepted that there was no central political authority and the moai were the projects of individual descent groups rather than a chief with island wide hegemony. Even so, by the time of Roggeveen's discovery, Easter Island had already begun a downward spiral of cultural regression. Furthermore, as elsewhere, this was not a simple up and down movement. One locality on the island, Orongo, was apparently an important ceremonial centre used in an annual ritual. However, it was abandoned in 1416 to be reoccupied again in 1420, then abandoned once more in 168D, perhaps having been abandoned and reoccupied on one other occasion during the intervening period. Back

Eastern Woodlands

Monk's Mound at Cahokia

In the southeastern part of the United States, the Hopewell culture emerged about 100 BC. The Hopewellians built large earthworks and engaged in trade over a large region. There is evidence for significant social differentiation. Around AD 400, however, the Hopewellian interaction sphere collapsed. Nevertheless, complex social organisation once again appeared in this general region with the emergence of the Mississippian tradition that lasted from AD 700 to 1500. Again, the increased tempo of social life is indicated in far-flung trade networks, building of large structures and the existence of social hierarchy. The town of Cahokia became the capital of a full-blown state. It covered 2000 acres with houses and had a population of some 30,000. The peak of its development spanned the two centuries 1050 to 1250, and its rulers caused to be built enormous earth mounds. Cahokia shows evidence of planning and it was evidently built by by a hierarchical society with centralised control of resources. There were several other large towns flourishing at the same time and urban living in the Mississippi valley seems to have peaked around 1250. After that the Mississippian culture went into decline, more than a century before Europeans were to set foot in the region, in the late sixteenth century. At Cahokia, building work ceased in the fourteenth century and it had been abandoned completely by AD 1500. The other centres were deserted at around the same time. When Europeans arrived they found only simple, autonomous tribal groups practising agriculture which they supplemented with hunting and gathering. There were no towns or powerful chiefs masterminding the construction of monumental earthworks. Like the Hopewellian decline of about a thousand years earlier the disintegration of the Mississippian culture has not been satisfactorily explained. It is apparent meanwhile that the Mississippian culture had some continuity with the Hopewellian. Hopewellian traditions persisted on the Gulf coast and were subsequently transmitted to the emerging Mississippians. In other words, the region went into a dark age which subsequently lifted, rather than one people and culture being completely wiped out to be replaced by entirely different ones. Furthermore, like the southwest, the story of the southeast is one of fluctuations and shifting fortunes of different regions. On the Delmarva peninsula, for example, the archaeological record shows periods of culture change interspersed with periods of equilibrium. Here, status differentiation and exchange networks emerged and evolved continuously from 800 BC, to AD 900. By 1000, however the more flamboyant and developed cultural traits had disappeared and given way to the simpler lifestyles of the so-called Woodland II period. Back

Ethiopia

Obelisk at Axum

Ethiopia, nowadays associated with poverty and famine, has a history of state organisation going back to the first century AD. The state of Axum had its own form of writing, a coinage and urban centres with multi-storeyed buildings, and it played a significant role in international politics of the ancient world. It was one of the first states to accept Christianity as it did so in the fourth century. The Axumite state had a prehistory during which urban life was developed. The temple of Yeha which dates from this pre-Axumite period was so well-built that its walls still stand 9 metres high after some 2500 years. In the tenth century, however, Axum was destroyed by a tribal chieftainess called Gudit. At about the same time, the region was coming under the influence of Islam. Ethiopia largely cut itself off from the world and it never recovered the confidence of the Axumite period, although some form of state organisation persisted down to modern times. Back

Etruscans

Etruscan sarcophagus

In the Italian peninsula, the Etruscan people had established an extensive and powerful empire at a time when Rome was still an obscure town on the Tiber. Indeed, according to legend, Rome in its earliest history was subject to Etruscan rule in the form of the Tarquins. Tarquinius Superbus was expelled in the sixth century BC and replaced by a republic of Roman citizens and it was after that that Rome began its rise to glory. At least one Roman writer thought that the Etruscans had ruled over the whole peninsula, although modern scholars believe that they were limited to its northern and western parts. The Etruscans were also something of a maritime power, especially along Italy's western coast. The political and economic supremacy of the Etruscans particularly took shape during the eighth and seventh centuries BC, although as the Villanovan culture they had been a significant entity since the late Bronze age of the twelfth and eleventh centuries. The Etruscans appear to have built up considerable wealth based on trade, the chief source being their command of the mineral wealth of Italy's northwest, the Tyrrhenian region which was their heartland. Around 600 BC there was an economic and political crisis in the Tyrrhenian region. This marked the end of the Etruscan expansion and the beginning of their decline. They appear to have been checked by the Phoenicians on one hand and by the Greeks on the other. The fall of the Tarquinian monarchy in Rome was thus part of a general trend of declining Etruscan prestige. From the late sixth century there begins a marked decline in archaeological remains, which reaches a low point during the last decades of the fifth century and the first decades of the fourth century. This is similar to the poverty of the British archaeological record between AD 400 and AD 600 and suggests an equivalent fall-off in productive activity. This decline seems to have been regional in nature, affecting the Phoenicians and Greeks, as well as the Etruscans. During the second half of the fourth century there was a marked resurgence in production but the political fortunes of the Etruscans continued to move backward. While being harried by Gauls from the north, they suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the Romans. From the second half of the third century onwards, the Etruscans presented no further problems to the Romans. Thereafter, their distinctiveness was increasingly eroded and with the award of Roman citizenship to the Etruscans in 89 BC, their culture was absorbed and extinguished as a separate tradition. The Etruscans held something of a fascination for the Romans. The emperor Claudius wrote a history of them while Hadrian took titles such as praetor Etruriae, which were archaic and honorary with no practical implications, somewhat like the modern Prince of Wales or Duke of Westminster Even to the Romans, the Etruscans were obscure and mysterious, and their language is only now being rediscovered through painstaking decipherment of inscriptions on their tombs. Back

Great Zimbabwe

Conical tower at Great Zimbabwe

The first well known site of early urbanisation in Africa must be the ruins known as Great Zimbabwe. This site stands as a symbol for indigenous realisation of state level social organisation and as such it is a source of African pride illustrated by the way in which its name has been adopted for the modern nation of this region. It is also typical of African urbanisation in that much about the society that built Great Zimbabwe is mysterious while it has been seen as something of an aberration. Europeans have found it difficult to believe that it could be of genuinely African origin and this has spawned all sorts of theories involving the lost tribe of Israel and the like. The view that there were no indigenous movements towards urbanisation and state formation is as misguided in its application to Great Zimbabwe as it is to Africa in general. Thus, the site of Great Zimbabwe was entirely a local African development and was occupied from the end of the first millennium AD. The stone buildings which are left today were constructed over the period 1250 to 1450 with the time of greatest prosperity in the middle of these dates. Its wealth was drawn in part from a central position in the gold trade of the region. It had a population of 18,000 justifying its designation as a city and there is evidence for a state with an administration and social hierarchy. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the gold trade seems to have declined and Great Zimbabwe came to a rather abrupt end. It had already been abandoned and was in ruins by the time that the Portuguese came to hear of it in the early sixteenth century. Back

Harappan

Ruins at Harappa, possibly of a palace

There were trading contacts with Mesopotamia but, evidently, such interaction was of significantly less scope. It is hard to believe that these societies could have co-existed for a millennium or more in complete ignorance of each other's existence, but it is possible that one side or the other expressly discouraged any kind of intercourse. Certainly, it is commonly observed that the Indus valley civilisation gives the impression of being secretive, totalitarian and introverted. Unlike Mesopotamia and Egypt, its script is still not properly deciphered, perhaps largely due to the fact that there are no extended texts but only seals and other brief inscriptions. Its isolation is reflected in the fact that, whereas the achievements of Mesopotamia and Egypt were known in outline before archaeologists began reconstructing their histories in detail from the eighteenth century on, the existence of the Indus valley civilisation was entirely unsuspected until in 1921 an Indian archaeologist began to unearth Harappa, the city which was one of its two great centres (the other being Mohenjo-Daro) and from which its alternative name of the Harappan civilisation is derived. Up till then it had been believed that there were no buildings in India earlier than 500 BC. Yet the Harappan civilisation, which appears to have flourished between 2500 and 1500 BC, is as accomplished as any, with drains, bathrooms, latrines and shops all in evidence. Furthermore, its cities were laid out in the form of a grid, like Manhattan, indicating the existence of a centralised authority capable of complex planning and imposing its will. Besides the two great centres, there were numerous smaller settlements and the total area of the Indus valley civilisation exceeded that of either Egypt or Mesopotamia. Through the thousand years of its existence, the archaeological record indicates that the Harappan culture changed little. Yet for some reason the cities were eventually abandoned and forgotten and buried in the mud. From about 1750, the building work was shoddier and less uniform. In some places, people took to living among the ruins in flimsy huts. The region reverted to a simpler, decentralised way of life and it would be another millennium at least before civilisation re-emerged in northern India. Back

Hawaii

In the northeastern Pacific, the island group of Hawaii is like Easter over a thousand miles from the next habitable land. The sense of isolation is perhaps less profound, however given that a number of islands make up the group. Even so its remoteness meant that it was also settled relatively late, some time between AD 300 and 500. The Hawaiians developed a more complex form of social organisation than the Easter islanders with rival chiefdoms which engaged in territorial wars and built up little empires that sometimes extended over more than one island. Paramount chiefs would rule over client chiefs from whom they received tribute. The paramount chiefs could undertake ambitious engineering works with the corvée labour at their disposal. However the little empires tended to overstretch themselves and were eventually beaten back by rivals. Thus, the political history of Hawaii is marked by a repeating cycle of conquest, expansion, collapse and retrenchment, at least within the last few centuries prior to European contact. Moreover, it is possible that the island group as a whole was in a phase of regression at the time that Cook discovered it. The population growth in some areas had reached a peak and was declining. Back

Hittites

Ruins of the Hittite capital, Hattusas

The Hittite nation had its base in Asia Minor. Until the 1880's, the Hittites were little more than a name in the Bible. However, from about this time, archaeologists began to uncover their history The exact origins of the Hittite state are obscure but it was apparently existence by the beginning of the second millennium BC and it began to establish an empire from 1792 with the conquests of Anitta. It showed considerable advancement in the fields of military tactics, political organisation, legislation and the administration of justice. The obvious and first route of expansion for an empire-building state in central Asia Minor was to the west and the Dardanelles. Much of Hittite history however concerns adventures to the south and east into Mesopotamia from which they were separated by the Taurus mountains. Furthermore, like the Egyptian and Mesopotamian experiences, these were characterised by a series of advances and retreats. In about 1600 BC, the Hittites pushed down as far as Babylon and overran the Amorite kingdom which had been Hammurabi's creation. This was only a temporary success, however, and Hittite influence in the region was continually changing as they were continually challenged by other peoples who sometimes defeated them and were themselves sometimes defeated. Meanwhile the Hittite state became weakened internally by a succession of intrigues and palace murders until a strong king called Telipinus restored order in 1525 BC. Nevertheless, immediately after his death, the Hittite state seems to have entered a dark age of about 50 years, during which the historical sources go silent. This is considered to mark the end of the Hittite Old Kingdom. It was followed by the Hittite Empire, although this was not created overnight. The Hittites who had earlier conquered Babylon were now themselves subject to raiding in their own homeland and they lost control of the western part of Asia Minor. Then in 1380 BC, the Hittite leader Suppiluliamas managed to make the whole of Syria, from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, a Hittite dependency, as well as reconquering the west. His fame spread far and the young widow of Tutankhamun even sent a message to him asking if she could take one of his sons in marriage (Suppiluliamas complied but his son was murdered on arrival in Egypt, apparently by the powerful courtier who subsequently married the Egyptian queen). The west rose up again after his death only to be crushed once more by Suppiluliamas's successor. There then followed a trial of strength with the Egyptian empire which resulted first in a standoff and finally, in 1284 BC, a peace treaty. The next couple of decades were apparently a time of particular prosperity. However, they were followed by entry into a terminal decline. The situation in the west rapidly deteriorated and quickly the Hittite state was disrupted at its core. The Hittite people, or a considerable portion of them, fled into Syria, perhaps due to pressure of invaders moving in from across the Caucasus mountains. In the southeastern provinces, the Hittite culture had a strange afterglow lasting five centuries. It is this relocated Hittite nation which appears in the Bible. Finally, in the last decades of the eighth century BC, these remaining Hittite kingdoms became Assyrian provinces. By the time that Greek travellers penetrated the region, the very name of the Hittites had already been forgotten. Back

Hohokam

Hohokam ruins

The earliest complex cultures in the region were brought by the Hohokam people who were immigrants from Mexico first arriving about 300 BC. They apparently maintained fairly close links with the more advanced civilisations of Mesoamerica, and during the period AD 550 to 900 built platform mounds and ball courts similar to those of the southern cities. The Hohokam developed increasingly large and complex irrigation systems, and there is evidence for clear political authority and social stratification by about AD 1000. Yet the Hohokam's descendants, the Pima Indians of historical times had no centralisation and low level of social organisation. Apparently, Hohokam society underwent a drastic decline in complexity. Back

Holy Roman Empire

Charlemagne

After the abdication of Romulus Augustulus and the demise of the western Roman empire, there followed a dark age not only in Britain but in the whole of Europe. It was characterised by a drastic loss of security and the dissolving of the political landscape into a medley of petty chiefdoms. Eventually however a new empire began to take shape in France under the Merovingian kings of the Franks. These were replaced by a new dynasty of which a scion was Charlemagne. He extended the empire in Germany and into northern Italy and on Christmas day AD 800 was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope. This style indicates the prestige and hold over people's minds that the long-defunct Roman empire still possessed. The western European empire carved out by Charlemagne was, like that of Alexander short-lived as a coherent entity It was partitioned at the Treaty of Verdun, thirty years after Charlemagne's death, and the resulting kingdoms were themselves further partitioned two or three times before the ninth century was out. The concept of a Holy Roman Empire, based in central Europe, nevertheless persisted and eventually came under the dominion of the Habsburg family. They extended their holdings through marriage and inheritance, and from 1519 to 1555, the emperor Charles V ruled over territory that included Burgundy, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary Bohemia, Spain and southern Italy. When Charles abdicated, he divided the empire into its Spanish and Austrian halves, to be ruled separately by his sons. Nevertheless, the Habsburg empire remained a highly cohesive power bloc and for the next hundred years was far and away the dominant force in contemporary Europe. It seemed unstoppable and the likelihood was that it would establish a pan-European empire. In the event however, this did not happen and one author has commented on the strangeness of the Habsburg decline in spite of their apparent advantages. A serious decline in Spanish power became evident towards the end of the period, with the loss of the Netherlands at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the final admission of defeat against France at the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. The Austro-Hungarian Habsburgs were able to re-emerge as a European great power - though without the same dominance - in the later part of the seventeenth century, as Spain entered a period of even steeper decline. In fact, in the 150 years up to the battle of Waterloo, several other leading nations - the Netherlands, Sweden and the Ottoman empire - fell to the second rank, along with Spain, while Poland was eclipsed altogether. The Habsburg empire became relatively weaker over the next couple of centuries, as Prussia, France and Britain by turns took the number one spot. The Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist from 1807, although the Habsburg dynasty continued in existence, ruling over the Austro-Hungarian empire. This empire however was afflicted by chronic economic and political problems. It lagged behind in industrialisation and only survived militarily largely because the geopolitical ambitions of other more powerful states - France, Prussia, Russia - meant that it occupied a critical position in the balance of power and it was not in the interests of any to let it fall to the other. It seems that the writing was on the wall, however and the Austro-Hungarian empire proved to be the most significant casualty of the first world war, ceasing to exist thereafter in any recognisable form. Back

Ik

Starving Ik man

Firstly, it appears that it is not only complex states that can undergo regression and dissolution. In the mid 1960's, the anthropologist Colin Turnbull documented the case of the Ik (pronounced eek), whose society seemed to have disintegrated to the extent that not even the institution of the family continued to function. His account of the eighteen months or so that he spent among them must have a strong case to rank as the most depressing chronicle in the entire history of ethnography. He describes the Ik as being the most unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable and generally mean people as one could expect to meet. They live in the mountainous northeast corner of Uganda, bordering on Kenya to the east and Sudan to the north. The problem is that the Ik are starving. Traditionally, they were hunter-gatherers roaming long distances following the seasonal availability of food. However, when the national borders of this region were established, they found part of their territory closed to them. Then their richest hunting ground was turned into Kidepo National Park and poaching within it was strongly discouraged. The Ugandan government encouraged them to become farmers, but the uncertain rainfall of the region and the Ik's general lack of aptitude ensured that their fields provided a worthwhile return on their effort at best one year in three. The Ik had responded to this desperate famine with an emphasis on self-preservation. Those who could find food ate it promptly before there was any question of having to share it with others. The strong made no effort to help the weak. On the contrary they would steal the food from them, if they could. Those who could not care for themselves were seen as a burden and a hazard to the survival of others. Even husbands and wives foraged alone and ate their solitary meals out in the countryside. Mothers disowned their children after the age of three. The latter formed into bands, as protection against the adults, and learned food collecting techniques from each other and from the baboons, as much as from their parents. Although the Ik had villages built stick walls and fences, there was no sense of community Each house had its own separate corridor to the outside, and all were booby-trapped against visitors, while there were no signs of cooking or other domestic activity. When Turnbull tried to intervene in a small way by provisioning some of the older and weaker Ik, he was condemned for wasting food on people who would die anyway. When one young boy died, his father attempted to conceal the death and bury the boy within the compound. Otherwise he was afraid that he would have to hold a proper funeral and that meant a feast which he could not afford. Among the Ik, there simply was not room for such luxuries as family, sentiment and love. One young girl, Adupa, seemed not to have learnt the basic principles of survival and would bring food to her parents. They however only laughed at her when she asked them for food in return. In the end, when her incessant demands became intolerable, they shut her in a compound to starve to death. After a few days, they threw her body out into the bush like so much garbage. When Turnbull tried to help one man who had been fatally injured in a fight by giving him a cup of hot sweet tea, the man's sister stole the mug from his hands and ran away laughing with her trophy On another depressing occasion, Turnbull observed as the young son of a man who had just died tried to tear the lip plug from him as others fought over the body for the man's meagre possessions. He suggests that Ik society had degenerated to the point that its individual members had lost their basic human sense of mutuality. They no longer had a society However, evidence from the Ik language and from their own accounts of the past indicated that it had not always been like this. They had once had a real community, with the typical hunter-gatherer institutions of sharing and reciprocity. Yet they had gone backwards, far backwards to the kind of war of all against all that Hobbes (surely wrongly) imagined to be the primordial situation of the human race before it developed social living. Back

Inca

Closely fitted stones of an Inca wall

The feat which Cortes pulled off in subduing the Aztec empire while heavily outnumbered was remarkableenough. However it was surpassed barely a decade later when Francisco Pizzaro reduced the whole kingdomof the Incas, one of the great empires of all time stretching over 350,000 square miles, with 130 foot soldiers, 40cavalry and 1 small falconet cannon. Thus, the Inca civilisation, like that of the Aztec, was a flourishing militarised society which collapsed at what appears objectively to have been the slightest of pressures (the theoretical point is that the pressure came from an unexpected source; it shows what a confidence trick apolitically complex society is that it can collapse like a pack of cards when exposed to a fundamental challenge to its preconceptions - it does not inspire confidence as to what might happen on earth if aliens should ever land; however, one should not be too simplistic and must consider the effects of smallpox/internal wrangles). Also, like the Aztecs, the Inca empire was a relatively recent phenomenon which had been achieved by conquest of pre-existing cultures. Thus, overall, it is far to say that cultural evolution had been going on for over three thousand years in Peru before the rise of the Inca. Like the Romans, the latter inherited techniques from many cultures although they subsequently tried to rewrite history and suppress the memory of their predecessors. Cuzco, the Inca capital, was founded by the first Inca around AD 1100. Its buildings are made of stones fitted together with a precision that has never been duplicated anywhere in the world. Metals were mined and worked on a considerable scale, the Incas making use of bronze. The Inca royal road extended a total distance of 3250miles, longer than the longest Roman road (from Hadrian's wall to Jerusalem) and longer than any road anywhere until the nineteenth century. Besides this there was the coastal road of 2520 miles and numerous lateral roads. The Inca established a sophisticated system of runners along the roads, creating the fastest communications system the world had yet seen. The city of Quito, not fully part of the Inca empire until 1492,was a magnificent example of urban planning which was far in advance of anything that the Europeans were doing at that date. The Incas excelled militarily and, as masters of organisation, they turned their conquests into empire. Between 1100 and 1500, they had absorbed more than 500 small tribes in the empire. AD 1500represented perhaps the peak of the Inca civilisation. In AD 1527, the Inca Huayua Capac died without naming a successor and there followed a five year civil war between the rival claimants Huascar and Atahualpa. In1532, Atahualpa seemed to triumph but immediately thereupon he was tricked by Pizzaro and taken captiveafter being invited to parley. Then he was tricked again when, having supplied Pizzaro with the ransom demanded for his release, he was promptly executed. The Inca empire was unable to survive this crisis and it passed into history. Back

Kachin

Kachin tribesman, World War Two

In highland Burma, the anthropologist Edmund Leach observed a people called the Kachin, whose history seemed to exhibit a cycle of increasing and decreasing complexity, while he was on active service in the region, during the Second World War. According to Leach, political units within the Kachin hills varied greatly in size, were intrinsically unstable and were in a continual state of flux. In particular cultural groups seemed to oscillate between two different forms of social organisation. The so-called gumsa form was a kind of autocratic, feudal organisation with a paramount chief who received tribute and corvée labour from his subjects, and with a well-developed hierarchy. The so-called gumlao form was a kind of anarchic republicanism, in which there might be a village headman although he would not necessarily be able to exercise authority over the villagers. Now, supposedly, the dynamic which caused one form of organisation to transform into the other was largely driven by Kachin beliefs regarding marriage. Specifically, when a marriage took place, the Kachin regarded the wife's family as superior to the husband's family Furthermore, particular families would always maintain the same relation to each other i.e. as wife-givers versus wife-takers. This meant that chiefs had to take wives from outside their local community but such marriages put them in an inferior position to the outsiders and were not a good basis for inter-chief alliances. Hence, individual chiefs were isolated and accumulating dissent and disaffection eventually led to their overthrow On the other hand, the state of democracy was also unstable. Certain families tended to become superior to others, this being encouraged by the marriage ideology, and eventually a new chief and new hierarchy would emerge. Overall, therefore, it may be said that the Kachin were able to achieve state-like organisation but this contained within it the seeds of its own downfall. Having said all this, Leach admits that there is no historical evidence to back up his account, and in fact it contradicts almost everything else that has been written about the Kachin. The point is that the facts of Kachin history are so fragmentary that they could support almost any interpretation. Furthermore, Leach lost his own notes, on which his theory is based, during his campaigning in the region. Thus the whole thing is unreliable at best and probably utter nonsense. It certainly sounds like it. Back

Loango

City of Loango

The vast region of central Africa is particularly neglected. Oral traditions indicate that there were some large and wealthy settlements in this region, with powerful rulers. The reports of early European travellers also describe cities such as that of Loango suggesting a high level of civilisation. However, these settlements no longer exist and little else is known about them. Archaeologists have not been particularly active in the region and even if they were it is likely that few traces would be found to remain. Many of tropical Africa's cities were probably built from wood and grass and these materials decay quickly in the centre of the continent's debilitating climate. What is certain, however is that Africa has been the scene of political developments like those elsewhere with increases in wealth and social complexity eventually being reversed. Back

Mauryan Empire

Column capital from reign of Asoka

After the strange Harappan demise in about 1800 BC, perhaps the next great power in the region was Alexander between 327 and 325 BC. However, he failed to consolidate his conquests. In 321 BC, the Mauryan dynasty was founded by Chandragupta who resisted the pressure of Nicator, Alexander's Seleucid heir Under his grandson, Asoka, a Mauryan empire was established that stretched from north of the Indus to Bengal and then southwards to all but the tip of the subcontinent. After Asoka's death, however the empire was divided and its power declined until it had ceased to exist altogether by 185 BC. Back

Maya

Mayan temple at Tikal

In travelling to the Aztec heartland after his landing at the coast, Cortes passed through the land where another great civilisation of Mesoamerica - that of the Maya - had flourished, without suspecting its existence. Even today, despite the discoveries which have been made in the intervening period, most of the fundamental facts about the Mayans are still unknown. The Mayan civilisation comprised a number of city states spread across the Yucatan peninsula and the highlands of southern Mexico. The Mayans also built an extensive network of roads connecting these. Like the city states of classical Greece, they possessed apparently a cultural rather than political unity. There was no known Maya capital. The beginnings of the Mayan civilisation may go back as far as 2000 BC. Certainly Dzibilchaltun one of the largest cities was the site of a settlement from 1500 BC. There was a long formative period from 1000 to 300 BC, during which art and architecture were refined and socio-political complexity increased. The period of full-blown Mayan civilisation was from 300 BC to about AD 1000. After that date, the cities seem to have been abandoned, in a kind of domino effect sweeping across from the western highlands to Yucatan in the east. Numerous theories have been proposed for this abandonment, which is mysterious because it was not induced by military conquest and appears to have been spontaneous. At any rate, the Mayans spurned the cities which their ancestors had taken centuries to build and left them to be covered by the jungle so thickly that early explorers could pass within a hundred yards and not know they were there. At the time of the European invasion from 1492 onwards, the descendants of these city builders were simple peasants living in scattered, socially undifferentiated communities. Their conquest yielded none of the rich treasure which Cortes was able to plunder from the Aztecs. Back

Mesopotamia

Sumerian archer

Mesopotamia - meaning 'between rivers' - is the region between and around the Tigris and Euphrates. These two rivers arise in Turkey and flow through modern-day Syria and Iraq to join in the estuary of the Shatt-al-Arab, whence they empty into the Persian Gulf Like the Nile, the rivers bring fertility to the surrounding floodplain. They provided the basis for perhaps the world's first experiment in civilised living, predating the land of the pharaohs. The region's fall from supremacy is evident in a similar way. Iraq today is ranked about 100th in human development and much of what we know about the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation is based on reconstruction through the efforts of European and American archaeologists. Sumer and Akkad, two of the great ancient cities of the region had a history going back to the earliest human settlements of the sixth millennium BC. Now they are just mounds set in a desiccated plain, like the statue of Ozymandias. In fact, Mesopotamia saw the rise and fall of not one great nation but several. The first group to achieve hegemony in this region were the Sumerians, dating from around 3200 BC. Their civilisation was a collection of independent city states such as Ur, Eridu and Uruk. In 2350 BC, however, they were united under one ruler and then conquered by the Akkadians. The Akkadian empire lasted barely a couple of centuries, though, before it began to decay Between 2200and 2100 BC, Mesopotamia was plunged into a dark age (of 50 years according to Tainter), when the empire was fragmented, at war with itself and plundered by outsiders. Building, writing and art all seem to have ceased, as during the Egyptian interregna. This made way for a renaissance of the Sumerian nation, the so-called third dynasty of Ur, which represented a new golden age of high civilisation in Mesopotamia. However within a hundred years, the Sumerians were again in decline and this time it was final. After 2000 BC, the Sumerians ceased to constitute a significant political and military force and their culture was absorbed into that of the incoming Semitic races who would henceforward be dominant in the region. For two hundred years, Mesopotamia was again politically fragmented until in 1792 a Babylonian empire was established under Hammurabi , who is known to us as author of the world's first legal code. By this time, the people of Mesopotamia had calculated sqrt2 correctly to one part in two million, they knew how to calculate cube roots, and they were aware of pythagoras's theorem, 1200 years before Pythagoras was born. The Babylonian ascendancy was short-lived however, and the empire began to disintegrate soon after Hammurabi's death, under the pressure of incursions by people such as the Kassites, Hittites and Elamites. After hundreds of years of subjugation, Mesopotamia again saw a local nation gain prominence with the rise of the city of Assur after 1200 BC. Assur had been an outpost of Sumer which became independent after the decline of the third dynasty of Ur The Assyrian empire steadily extended its influence during the next six hundred years, with some setbacks. It went through Old, Middle and New Kingdoms , reaching its greatest height under the reign of Assurbanipal. Yet, only 14 years after his death, the empire collapsed in 612 BC, for reasons that are not really understood. (Tainter says that the Assyrian empire collapsed in 614 BC due to insurgency by Medes). By the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD the total occupied area had shrunk to only 6% of its level 500 years earlier and population dropped to the lowest point in 5000 years (Tainter, 6). Subsequently a new Babylonian empire was established which eventually succumbed to Persian conquest and then in 300 BC conquest by Alexander After this time and to this day Mesopotamia has never really regained its status as one of the world's leading powers, although it did flourish again for a few hundred years up to about the twelfth century under the lslamic caliphs. Thus, the history of Mesopotamia is littered with the decline, resurgence and eventual demise of several nations, stretching over 3000 years. Even when Herodotus visited, the names of Sumer and Akkad were already forgotten. The fact that the glory of their names failed to be passed down illustrates the darkness of some of the periods through which Mesopotamia passed. Back

Middle Nile

Pyramid at Meroe

The kingdom based upon the city of Meroe arose possibly as early as the seventh century BC and extended over 1100 miles of the Nile. lt possessed a secular government and was involved in extensive trade, especially with Egypt, that led to evident prosperity The society was complex with at least three social classes and the Meroites had their own form of writing which is no longer understood. Around the fourth century AD, however the Meroitic kingdom disintegrated. From the sixth century AD, there arose Christian kingdoms in the middle Nile. ln their early period these were marked by a high standard of living with heated baths and painted decor in the houses. As time went on, however, there was a steady reduction in the size and pretentiousness of their settlements. By the fifteenth century, the Christian kingdoms had been replaced by lslamic sheikhdoms. The largest of these, the Fung kingdom lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Thus, Nubia was the earliest part of Africa to accommodate complex societies and these were generally quite persistent. The city of Qasr lbrim was occupied continuously from 1500 BC to the nineteenth century AD. During this period, the level of the state was reached several times, interspersed with intervals of no centralisation and low political organisation. Back

Minoan

Minoan statuette

The Minoan civilisation began to take shape from about 2600 BC. The earliest palaces were built soon after 2000 BC (Tainter 9). Cities and luxurious palaces were built, with storehouses for foodstuffs raised in taxation, giving evidence of a complex polity Extensive trade took place with the Mesopotamian and, especially Egyptian civilisations. However, during the late Minoan period from 1550 to 1050 BC, building work declined rapidly to nothing and the trade balance with Egypt swung in favour of Mycenae. Crete came increasingly under the influence of Mycenae and may actually have been conquered. Then between 1375 and 1350, the Minoan civilisation seems to have met with a sudden, widespread and rather mysterious disaster The great palace at Knossos was apparently destroyed by fire and the cities were abandoned. This left the stage fully open to the Mycenaeans. However the cities seem to have been reoccupied after a period, although this was more of a squatters' world, and the Minoan culture persisted in a weakened and decadent form with some trade still taking place. Some cities of refuge were built during the eleventh and tenth centuries BC, but Crete was now an impoverished and weakened region. The Minoan culture died out completely to be forgotten all but for a few legends. Eventually, Crete was taken over by the Dorians in the sixth and fifth centuries BC and it became a Greek island. Back

Mogollon

Mogollon vase

To the east, the Mogollon people seem to have been stimulated by the Hohokam culture to take up agriculture and urban living themselves. The Mimbres culture was one of the products of this, though it disintegrated by the middle of the twelfth century for no certain reason. 200 miles to the south of the Chaco valley the Mimbres people occupied pueblos in a river valley of southwestern New Mexico. They developed a distinctive type of pottery for which collectors will today pay as much as $60,000. It is possible that the Mimbres pueblos served as waystations for Chacoan merchants on their travels to and from Mexico. The Mimbres culture seems to have collapsed at about the same time as that of Chaco Canyon, with abandonment of all the settlements. Back

Mogul Empire

Taj Mahal

When the Ottoman empire was in its heyday Islamic civilisation was also flowering in northern India, in the form of the Mogul empire. This was founded by Babar, a descendant of Genghis Khan and ruler of Kabul, in 1526, and was expanded by his son Akbar to stretch from Baluchistan in the west to Bengal in the east. Thus, this Islamic civilisation was encroaching on India overland at the same time as the Dutch, British and French were coming by sea. Its rulers displayed military genius, and it was the scene of great wealth with a sophisticated banking and credit network. 1691 saw the greatest extension of the Mogul Empire and by the same token marked the beginning of its dissolution. It was wracked internally by bloody conflicts between Muslims and Hindus, while being subject to attack by Afghanis in the north and the Hindu Maratha empire in the south. Weakened and shrunken it eventually succumbed easily to the British East India Company. Back

Mycenae

Tomb at Mycenae

Between 1400 BC and 1200 BC, the civilisation based on Mycenae was prominent in the Grrek peninsula. (It began around 1650 BC according to Tainter.) This was the home of Agamemnon who besieged Troy. The Mycenaeans first developed cities and traded throughout the Mediterranean, especially with the contemporary Minoan civilisation of Crete. Around about 1200 BC, however, the Mycenaean civilisation seems to have come to a fairly abrupt end with destruction of palaces and fortresses in many parts of Greece. The following 400 years were a dark age. The art of writing disappeared. Centres of power crumbled and the land dissolved into numerous local groups engaging in petty warfare. The scantiness of the archaeological record for this period indicates that the Greeks of this period were materially poverty stricken compared to the Mycenaeans. By the time the Greek city states emerged and writing was resumed during the Greek archaic period of 800 to 500 BC, the Mycenaean civilisation had been forgotten. The Greeks of the classical period had no memory of a Mycenaean civilisation qualitatively different from their own and divided from it by a dark age. Back

Olmec

Massive head, characteristic of Olmec culture

Hence, the Aztecs were themselves conquerors. Their empire was barely more than two hundred years old when Cortes destroyed it. They had first appeared in the Anahuac valley about AD 1200 as a migrant tribe from the northwest. The general region had however been fully settled from about 1000 BC by various tribes who began to build temples and cities. Among them, in the coastal areas, were a people called the Olmecs, with a distinctive form of art and architecture, who appear to have flourished from 800 BC to AD 600. After that time, they stopped their building and declined into obscurity. (NB: it should be possible to come up with more on the Olmecs than this: e.g. see Tainter) Back

Ottoman Empire

Ottoman sultan

At the time that Britain was expanding its colonial empire, the other leading European nations were doing the same. ln 1914, European powers occupied or controlled 84% of the earth's surface. In 1884-5, the Berlin West Africa conference divided up that part of the world, indicating the extent to which the rest of the world's fate was decided in Europe. Nowadays, that might no longer be true but Europe is still far richer and more powerful than Africa, Asia and South America. Cultural traditions which originated in western Europe still dominate the world. However, Europe's pre-eminence did not always seem so inevitable. For a long period, the Christian civilisation of Western Europe was under threat from the Islamic civilisation. In about AD 800, three quarters of the Iberian peninsula was under Arab rule in the form of the Emirate of Cordoba. Their grip was gradually loosened during the course of the Reconquista, which took several centuries. Granada was not retaken by Christians until 1492. Despite this success in the west, the situation in the east was becoming increasingly threatening with the rise of the Ottoman Turks. By the first quarter of the sixteenth century, their empire extended into the Crimea, down the Levant and all across north Africa. They closed the overland spice trade for Europe and countered the developing Portuguese activities in the lndian Ocean. They then began to turn their attention to Europe, conquering Hungary at the battle of Mohacs in 1526 and in 1529 actually laying siege to Vienna. Though Vienna proved to be their high tide mark, they were a real and ever-present threat thereafter Even as late as 1683 they were again besieging Vienna. However from the late sixteenth century the empire seemed to lose much of its vitality. Through the nineteenth century, it lost its European possessions, beginning with the liberation of Greece which was complete by 1830 and proceeding with the erosion of its holdings in the Balkans, primarily to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and in north Africa. At the beginning of the First World War the Ottoman empire was still substantial but by now it was self-evidently backward and weak compared to Europe. As a loser in the conflict, it was unable to resist its Levantine empire being divided up between the victors. The empire ceased to exist and the modern state of Turkey was left as the residue. Back

Pacific - general

A Lapita pottery head

The other islands in the Pacific that bear European names - Christmas, Henderson, Pitcairn, for example - were not inhabited when discovered and no native names were available. However, the fact that these islands were not inhabited when discovered does not mean that they had never been discovered. On the contrary many showed signs that people had been there some time in the past. Pitcairn for example was found to be vacant by its discoverer Carteret in 1767 and it provided a hideaway for some of the Bounty mutineers who founded a colony there in 1790. However there were obvious signs of previous settlers all over the island, including peculiar and startling rock carvings, so that the mutineers were at first afraid of being attacked by natives who were only in hiding and had not really abandoned the island at all. In all there were more than ten and possibly as many as twenty (the archaeology is uncertain) islands in Polynesia that had been settled for a time but were abandoned by the time of European contact. Furthermore, a number of these islands may have been settled and abandoned more than once. Thus, it is fair to say that some kind of cycle of expansion and retrenchment was true of the Pacific as a whole. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that at the time of European discovery the Polynesians did not make or use pottery. Yet, from the 1920's onward, archaeologists began to discover pottery sherds of a type now called Lapita ware that had once been in widespread use throughout the main Polynesian island groups. This pottery is part of a general cultural complex that seems to connect Polynesia with Melanesia into a region sharing a common culture. The Lapita culture is also associated with evidence for extensive long-distance trade. Its origins are believed to date back to about 3600 BC, while its period of greatest activity was from 1500 BC to 500 BC. In about AD 300, pottery finally ceased to be made altogether. The speed with which the Lapita culture spread through the western and central Pacific, and the extensive trade which characterised it, indicate that the bearers of the Lapita culture were engaged in intensive, long-distance voyaging in the millennium before Christ. By the time of European contact, however, such voyaging had largely died out. The Polynesians still made daring journeys between islands in their canoes, but these were mostly within island groups. The kind of ambitious exploratory voyages that would have been necessary to settle the Pacific in the first place were rare or non-existent, to the extent that subsequent scholars continue to debate exactly how this could have been achieved. In some respects, therefore, the Polynesians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were relatively more backward than their ancient ancestors and their culture as a whole was in regression. Back

Persian Empire

Ruins at Persepolis, capital of the Persian empire

Perhaps the greatest empire of antiquity was not the Roman empire at all but that of the Persians . This flourished between 600 BC and 300 BC. And the Persian empire was itself built upon the ruins of an earlier empire of the Medes, a people who came from southern Russia. Nothing of theirs now survives and they are little more than a name. At its peak, the empire stretched from the Indus to the Aral and Caspian seas, then to the Dardanelles and northeastern Greece: it took in all of Mesopotamia and extended down the Levant into Egypt and northwest Africa as far as Cyrene. Five hundred thousand Persians ruled over fifty million people - half of the population of the world at that time. Greece was the rock on which the Persian empire foundered. A series of attempted invasions were repulsed, though at considerable cost to the defenders. The greatest challenge came under Xerxes, who inherited the empire from Darius. The Greeks managed to resist him only to succumb later to Philip of Macedon. Xerxes allowed the empire to decay in a welter of excess and extravagance. Under his successors, one can trace its downfall with a fatal series of murders and assassinations. The empire was finally destroyed by Alexander the Great, but he in effect had only to cut down what was already rotten and internally sick. Back

Petra

House at Petra

In some ways, the story of Dilmun is echoed in that of the city of Petra, which lies in the mountains between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. Remarkable for the fact that its buildings were carved directly out of the rock, this was the capital of the Nabataeans who, from 200 BC, grew rich on trade between Mesopotamia and the Hellenistic cities. Yet their fortunes eventually went into decline and the city was abandoned long ago. Back

Pharaonic Egypt

Pharaonic statue from temple at Luxor

The Egyptian Old Kingdom, during which the pyramids were built, ended in the first intermediary period which lasted between 2190 BC and 2052 BC. The building of monumental architecture declined to virtually nothing. Feudal lords asserted their independence and warred with each other There were repeated famines, trade dwindled, and life expectancy was reduced. It was in every respect a retrograde step. The nation lost its coherence and integrity. Whatever the factors were that allowed this, one of the world's first states, to come into existence, they had apparently exhausted their magic. Even so, beginning with Mentuhotep II, a series of pharaohs arose who reasserted their authority and established the Middle Kingdom. Again there was internal peace and an expanding frontier. The state recovered its organising power and its ability to dispose of huge quantities of excess labour, as the large temple complexes at Karnak which were built at this time testify. Yet the Middle Kingdom itself ran into political problems and dissolved into the second intermediate period of 1778 to 1610 BC. During this time, Egypt was even invaded and ruled for a time by a mysterious people called the Hyksos. These people were eventually expelled and the New Kingdom was established by another sequence of energetic pharaohs. The New Kingdom itself ran into difficulty in 1069, with the end of the 20th dynasty. It was followed by the 3rd Intermediate Period, during which there was virtually continuous tension only rarely flaring into open conflict. The interaction of these forces led to extreme political fragmentation in the last century of the period (Trigger 232). The 3rd Intermediate Period finally ended in the Late Period, beginning in 664 BC. The Egyptian intermediate periods were dark ages. They are dark not only because they were times of trouble and conflict. They are dark in a more literal sense, because we have very little idea of what actually happened during them. During these centuries, the historical record goes almost completely silent. There are very few contemporary inscriptions or documents. It seems that people had better things to do, or more pressing concerns, or simply learning and the transmission of learning went into abeyance. The Hyksos for example are an enigma. This appears to be a name that the Egyptians gave them and is not necessarily the name they gave themselves. Although theories abound nobody really knows where they came from or where they eventually went. Besides this, the Hyksos invasion only succeeded because Egypt was already disrupted. Thus, the remarkable thing about these dark ages is that they occurred seemingly spontaneously. In 2190 and 1778 BC, Egypt was overwhelmed not by a conqueror but by itself. Back

Phoenicians

Head of a Phoenician woman

Vying with the Etruscans at one stage and, with the Greek city states, providing a check to their growth were a people called the Phoenicians. Their origin is obscure, but they appear to have been a Canaanite people and they first come to the attention of history in the cities which they established along the Levant, chief among which were Byblos, Sidon and Tyre. The Phoenicians were highly accomplished merchants and grew wealthy on a number of highly sought after products which they traded throughout the Mediterranean. These included a purple dye and paper, for which Byblos was famous this being the source of the Greek word for book (biblioV - biblios) and our Bible, bibliophile etc. The Phoenicians even reached as far as Cornwall in the millennium before Christ, whence they brought tin back to the Mediterranean area. Only Byblos has yielded any material dating before 1500 BC in archaeological excavations, so that the rise of the Phoenicians took place sometime after this. From their original homeland in the Levant, the Phoenicians founded a number of cities around the rim of the Mediterranean as bases for their trading operations. The most famous of these was the city of Carthage in modern-day Tunisia, which was founded 814-3 BC. The Levantine part of the empire was regularly engaged in struggles with the other people in that part of the world. In 574 BC, Tyre, the most defensible of the eastern Phoenician cities because of its location on an island a short distance off-shore, fell to Nebuchadnezzar and was incorporated into his Babylonian empire. In 539 BC it was taken by the Persians and, after strong resistance, it was taken by Alexander in 332 BC. As a result of this pounding, the focus of Phoenician civilisation shifted to the western Mediterranean. For a while, Carthage, along with other western Phoenician cities, such as Cadiz in Spain, was the dominant power in the west and fantastically opulent. In particular, it was a sea-power with a fearsome navy, given its reliance upon sea-borne trade. However the rise of Rome spelled trouble for Carthage and western Phoenicia generally. Directly facing Italy and Sicily across the Mediterranean, it posed a considerable obstacle to the aspirations of the nascent Roman state. In its first public treaty, the Roman republic recognised the Carthaginian trade monopoly in the western Mediterranean, in return for being allowed to pursue its own military agenda on the Italian peninsula without interference. However as Roman power grew, restrictions on its trade became increasingly intolerable and conflict with Carthage was inevitable. In the first and second Punic wars (Punic being the Latin for Phoenician), Rome was victorious and the Phoenician Spanish empire was destroyed. As a result of this second decisive defeat, Carthage descended into obscurity for some fifty years. When she flexed her muscles again in 150 BC and successfully waged war against the Africans in her hinterland, she was attacked by Rome on the grounds that this was a violation of the peace treaty. Cato urged the action with the words 'delenda est Carthago' or 'Carthage must be destroyed'. In this 3rd Punic war, Carthage was utterly razed to the ground. Thus was ended the career of a people who had played a very significant role in Mediterranean economic, political and cultural life (to them is attributed the origin of our alphabet). There were and are no more Phoenicians. Even their language is lost. Interestingly, as he stood on the wasteland where Carthage had been, at the end of the campaign, where he had killed a large fraction of the population and destroyed all their homes, the victorious Roman general Scipio is said to have had a fearful presentiment that Rome would one day suffer the same fate. Back

Pre-Inca

Chavin pot in shape of a feline

The history of the whole region of Peru is one of changing fortunes of various groups. The pre-Inca cultures of Chavin, Paracas and Mochicas flourished from about AD 400 to 1000. The Ica-Nazca culture is famous for its lines and figures carved on the Nazca plain. These are non-trivial monuments as is evidenced by the fact that they are still clearly extant today Yet their purpose is quite unknown and the society that produced them was defunct even in the Inca's day. The latter drove a 24-foot wide coastal road right through them. Around AD 900, an empire based upon the city of Tiahuanoco rose to prominence. Contemporaneous with it was the large city of Huari which appears to have been influenced by Tiahuanaco . From 1000 to 1300, this was the dominant political entity in the whole Peru-Bolivia region. Yet most of the details of this civilisation are quite mysterious and unknown - including the name of its people. The cities of Huari and Tiahuanaco appear to have declined in prosperity and been abandoned around AD 1000. Both of these cities, with their respective northern and southern empires, seem to have met their demise at the same time. Even in 1549, the natives knew that the ruins of Tiahuanaco predated the Inca civilisation, yet they could not remember who had built them. The Chimu empire also predated the Incas, lasting between AD 1000 and 1466. From the city of Chan-Chan it ruled over 600 miles of the coast. Everything appears to have been done on a large scale with mass production of cultural items. Back

Roman Empire

Coliseum at Rome

For Europeans, perhaps the most visible example of the failure of an advanced society is the downfall of the Roman empire . In AD 476, the fifteen year old Romulus Augustulus abdicated at the instigation of the barbarian Odoacer. This was the end of the western Roman empire. Eighty years previously, however in AD 395 (or was it AD 286), the empire had been divided into its western and eastern halves. The eastern Roman empire survived considerably longer until the fifteenth century when it was overthrown by the Ottoman empire. By the time of Romulus Augustulus's abdication, the Roman empire had been an enormous fact of life for some seven or eight hundred years. That it should be no more was a tremendous shock to contemporaries and one that has reverberated down the centuries. During its heyday, the Roman empire exceeded in size, power and sophistication any state that existed or had ever existed. Yet this was no protection and eventually it succumbed, its army, its administration, its coinage consigned to oblivion.

Sahel

Timbuktu from a nineteenth century print

Africa of the Sahel, the savannah lands bordering the southern edge of the Sahara, is today one of the most desperate regions of the world. Yet the resources situation in this area was not always so bleak as it seems at present. This was the setting for very important social and political developments during the first and second millennia AD. The accounts of contemporary travellers describe large and flourishing cities in this region, including Timbuktu and its rival Jenne. The wealth of this urban civilisation seems to have been founded on trade, and the beginnings of a complex trade network in the region may go as far back as three thousand years. Certainly, iron was in use in this part of west Africa no later than 500 BC. Grave tumuli of the first millennium AD show social differentiation suggesting that some form of political authority was able to establish itself. However, the region's wealth went into decline during the second millennium and it appears that the modern famine-stricken population is actually less than was comfortably supported up to the sixteenth century. The region around Jenne, described by a local scholar in the middle ages as rich, blessed and favoured by the Almighty, and a site which had been occupied since the third century BC, is now chronically dependent upon international aid and relief work. Back

Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires

Spanish colonial church

From the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain's power was not confined to Europe but was global in its impact. Along with her Iberian rival, Portugal, Spain led the first stages of the European foray into the wider world. While the Portuguese headed around the Cape of Good Hope and to India, Spain concentrated on the new world of America. Yet despite their head start in this outpush, the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires did not bring them the same advantages that the Dutch, French and British derived from theirs. In 1494, through the Treaty of Tordesillas, the world was partitioned between the Spanish and Portuguese, with the approval of the Pope. At the time, this seemed only natural. Both countries were far ahead of the rest of Europe in their explorations. Yet, it very quickly proved an empty gesture, as the French and British began to penetrate north America and, along with the Dutch, the far east. The Portuguese suffered the most. The Dutch won the battle for maritime southeast Asia and the British the struggle for India, although the Portuguese did retain Brazil. Thus, between 1600 and 1663 the Estado da India suffered catastrophic reverses at the hands of the Dutch. It was Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal who stimulated the improvements in seafaring that made the European maritime expansion possible, yet it was not his country that benefited the most in the end. And in any case, by 1821 the Latin Americans had broken their political connections with the mother countries of Spain and Portugal, largely terminating the once grand and far-flung empires of these two Iberian states. Back

Sub-Roman Britain

The Venerable Bede, chronicler of dark age Britain--he wrote 100 years or so after the fact

In western Europe, the fall of the Roman empire was followed by a severe dark age. In Britain, the empire withdrew before AD 400 and those two centuries from AD 400 to AD 600 are obscure indeed. This was the time of the adventus Saxonum, the arrival of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Yet the manner in which this took place is entirely unknown. There is only one documentary source from that period, the writings of the monk Gildas dating towards the end of the period. And that is a very obscure source: most of it is a lament for the sorry state of affairs in Britain due to the Saxon invasions and the few references to actual events are difficult to interpret. Gildas's account is supplemented in only the barest manner by the history of Bede, written in the eighth century, and a few later authors who were apparently able to draw upon earlier sources which have not survived to the present. To illustrate the depth of our ignorance, this period is supposed to be the time of King Arthur a very significant figure in British history. And yet it is not known for sure whether Arthur ever really existed and at least one expert on the period is adamant that he did not. Apart from these meagre documentary sources, our only insights come from archaeology and the study of place names. Yet even there, with archaeology at least, data is scarce. Whereas there is an abundant archaeological record for Roman Britain and for Britain since AD 600, there is a dearth of finds dating to the two centuries after the Roman withdrawal. Traditionally, it was believed that this indicated a drastic reduction in the population, presumably due to bitter and bloody fighting with the incoming Saxons. However more recently it has been suggested that this is in fact due to the general breakdown of order. We know that the towns were abandoned and people reverted to living in the countryside. Furthermore, it was no longer safe to travel on the Roman roads due to brigandage encouraged by the loss of a central authority. Hence, whereas before people had used metal and ceramic goods manufactured by specialists and brought by road to markets in the towns, this trade could no longer take place. People resorted to home-made implements which tended to be far less durable, wooden cups and bowls, for example, rather than pottery ones. This is the reason for the poverty of the archaeological record. Meanwhile place names provide some indication of the distribution of particular tribes and groups, among other things, but even so as a source of historical information they are generally scant and ambiguous. One interesting feature however is that the names of the Roman towns were preserved in some cases in a barbarously truncated form combined generally with ceaster from the Roman castra. Others, such as Leicester and Chichester lost all trace of their Roman names, while at places such as Chester and Caistor on the Wolds, the word ceaster was used by itself indicating that the Romano-British name had been entirely forgotten. That people forgot the names of such significant places as towns shows how dark this dark age was. Back

Tasaday

Tasaday man and woman

Meanwhile, off shore on the Philippine island of Mindanao, there was discovered in 1971 a group of people who possibly underwent a very severe regression of social organisation. These are the Tasaday, who when discovered were living naked in caves and surviving by foraging in the forest. Theories about the Tasaday vary from the view that they were leftovers from the stone age who had preserved their ancient culture by being isolated in the jungle, in a manner similar to those Japanese soldiers who emerged from the jungle from time to time, supposedly unaware that the second world war was over, to the view that they were an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the local farmers for political reasons. The most widely accepted view now, however is that the Tasaday are derived from farmers who at some indeterminate time in the past abandoned farming and reverted to a much simpler way of life in the forest, presumably due to famine, earthquake or some other crisis. Back

Toltec

Toltec figure

In the valley of Anahuac itself, from about 200 BC, the Toltec people made a number of advances in agricultural techniques. They founded the city of Teotihuacan, which, with its huge pyramids, dwarfs everything else in Mexico and Mesoamerica. The archaeological record shows a steady decline in Toltec mastery, however, and in AD 900 they were driven out of Teotihuacan by another people, the Chichimecs. By the time that the Aztecs rose to prominence, Teotihuacan was in ruins and not even its name was known any longer. (Tainter does not recognise the Toltecs as the builders of Teotihuacan.) Back

West African forest

Benin bronze head

Southwards in the West African forest region of modern Nigeria, there is a similar story of urbanisation long before contact with European traders. For example, the modern city of Benin was occupied by at least the thirteenth century AD, whereas the Portuguese did not reach even the coast of this part of Africa until two centuries later. In the nineteenth century when it was taken over by colonial interests it was found to have sophisticated bronze art and administration. This area was the setting for the so-called Akan states, which seem to have grown rich on the gold trade, and which were mentioned by the earliest European visitors. The Akan settlement of Begho was a large market town, which reached a peak of prosperity at the beginning of the sixteenth century and then went into decline. The last Akan state, that of Asante, put up a strong resistance to colonisation by the British and fought several wars before being wholly overrun. Back

Yir Yoront

Australian aborigine sand art

The potential of an Australian society to disintegrate is illustrated by the experience of the Yir Yoront. This group lived on the west coast of tropical Cape York and was quite isolated until about 1900. In 1915, an Anglican mission was established in the territory of the tribe adjoining the Yir Yoront. The missionaries made it possible for the Yir Yoront to earn European trade goods at the station or in some cases even handed them out for free. Among these goods were steel axes, which were superior to the Australian's own polished stone axes and much coveted by them. The axe was an important item in Yir Yoront material culture, not only for technical reasons, but also because it determined the nature of certain social relationships. Only initiated males knew the skills necessary for making stone axes and therefore only they possessed such articles. Women, who needed the axes for their own activities, were therefore dependent upon men to borrow them. Junior men also relied upon senior men both to use the latters' axes and to acquire the necessary skills from them. Thus, the stone axe was a crucial symbol of Yir Yoront masculinity and it helped to emphasise the precedence of men over women and of the old over the young. However when the missionaries gave away steel axes, they made no distinctions on the basis of sex or age and it became possible for both women and junior men to have axes of their own. In a short time, the traditional dependency was eroded. Indeed, it could even be reversed as old men, more conservative and circumspect, tended to avoid the mission and so stood far less chance of receiving a steel axe. Having only a stone axe, they might find themselves in the position of having to borrow the superior steel item from their wives or children. The whole Yir Yoront social universe was undermined, this situation with the steel axes in truth being only one of many fundamental challenges to their traditional world view posed by the arrival of the European missionaries. The Yir Yoront world view was, in effect, cut loose and set adrift. Given that the missionaries were actively seeking to convert the aborigines to an alternative ideology, it was inevitable that in a short time, the Yir Yoront culture, which had persisted perhaps for many millennia, disintegrated utterly. Back

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