The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [75]
Uruk did not last, because the climate dried out and the population collapsed, aided no doubt by soil erosion, salination, imperial overspending and uppity barbarians. But Uruk was followed by an endless series of empires on the same ground: Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, neo-Assyrian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman (briefly, under Trajan), Parthian, Abbasid, Mongol, Timurid, Ottoman, British, Saddamite, Bushite ... Each empire was the product of trading wealth and was itself the eventual cause of that wealth’s destruction. Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.
Cotton and fish
The urban revolution on the banks of the Euphrates was repeated on the banks of the Nile, Indus and Yellow rivers. Ancient Egypt could grow nearly two tonnes of wheat per hectare on land irrigated and replenished with nutrients by the annual flood of the Nile, providing an ample surplus of food, if peasants could be persuaded to produce one, to exchange for other goods, not excluding pyramids. Even more than in Mesopotamia, Egypt followed the path of irrigation, centralisation, monument building and eventual stagnation. Dependent on the flow of the Nile for their crops, the peasants became subject to whoever owned the boats and sluice gates, and he took most of the surplus. Unlike hunter-gatherers or herders, farmers faced with taxes have to stay put and pay, especially if surrounded by desert and dependent on irrigation ditches. So once Menes had unified the upper and lower valley and made himself the first pharaoh, the productive Egyptian economy found itself nationalised, monopolised, bureaucratised and eventually stifled by – in the words of two modern historians – the ‘leaden authoritarianism’ of its rulers.
On the banks of the Indus, an urban civilisation arose without spawning an emperor, at least not one whose name is known. Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro are known for the precisely standardised size of their bricks and their neat sanitary arrangements. The port of Lothal was distinguished by what appears to be a dock and tidal lock, and a factory for making beads. There is less sign of palaces or temples, let alone pyramids, but the anthropologist Gordon Childe’s preliminary conclusion that the whole thing appears to have been rather egalitarian and peaceful turned out to be largely wishful thinking. Somebody was imposing a neat grid of streets and building a hefty ‘citadel’ of pillars, towers and walls. Smells like a monarch to me. As Sir Mortimer Wheeler wrote in his autobiography: ‘I sat down and wrote to Gordon Childe in London that the bourgeois complacency of the Indus civilisation had dissolved into dust and that, instead, a thoroughly militaristic imperialism had raised its ugly head amongst the ruins.’
The Indus people were good at transport: bullock carts may have been used here for the first time and plank-built sailing boats. Transport allowed extensive trade. Some of the very earliest settlements in the region, such as Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, were importing lapis lazuli from north of the Hindu Kush mountains as early as 6,000 years ago. By the time of Harappa, copper came from Rajasthan, cotton from Gujarat, and lumber from the mountains. Even more remarkably, the archaeologist Shereen Ratnagar concluded that boats sent exports west to Mesopotamia, stopping at ports along the coast of what is now Iran – implying a seamanship that is surprising at such an early date. There can be little doubt that the great wealth of the Indus cities was generated by trade.
The Harappan people ate a lot of fish and grew a lot of cotton, things they had in common with citizens of another valley on the far side of the world. Caral in the desert of the Supe Valley in Peru was a large town with monuments, warehouses, temples and plazas. Discovered in the 1990s by Ruth Shady, it lies in a desert crossed by a river valley and was only the biggest of many towns in the area, some of which date from more than 5,000 years ago – the so-called Norte Chico