4.

THE FIRST
CIVILIZATIONS

We shall now visit China’s Shaanxi province.

In the spring of 1974, the people there were suffering the effects of a prolonged drought. One day in late March, six brothers met under some trees on the outskirts of the city to discuss strategies. The eldest of them, Yang Peiyan, pointed to a place which he thought seemed a good place to dig a well.

The next morning, the six brothers arrived with their spades and began digging a hole, four metres square. Everything went as expected until, around the middle of the day, they reached a very hard layer, approximately one metre in. “Maybe it’s the top of an old clay oven”, said one of them. That was what they hoped, because then they would soon break through its ceiling, and the digging would become much easier again.

It took two brutal days of hard work to break through the hard layer, which turned out to be approximately 30 cm deep – more than you might expect for the top of a clay oven. But after they had broken through, the digging became a lot easier as expected, and soon the hole was so deep they needed a ladder to climb down.

About a week later, the brothers encountered some small terracotta fragments. This didn’t surprising them much, since they believed there had been a furnace on the ground before. However, on March 29, one of them hit a piece of pottery that was somewhat larger than before. He threw it away quickly without a second thought but, a few minutes later, one of the others said: “I’ve found a jar, a big one!” When they began to scrape this one free they saw, to their chagrin, that it was actually the torso of a pottery figure. They threw the disappointing discovery into the basket and pulled it up out of the hole.

A moment later, another of the brothers found a porcelain head. And after, that the artifacts just kept coming; porcelain arms, porcelain legs, procaine heads, arrowheads made of copper.They pulled it all up and threw it on the ground with the soil, while still digging for the water.

Meanwhile, some children had come to watch, and they began to throw stones at the objects and some of them took a few home to play with. Others also created a scarecrow of a porcelain torso, and a few picked up the arrowheads and brought them to a local recycling centre, where they sold them as metal scrap.

This is where this story might very well have ended, had an irrigation specialist from the nearest town not passed by three days later and asked to see the progress of the hitherto fruitless excavation (still no water). Here he noted the scattered remnants of terracotta in the excavated soil. Upon his return home, the specialist reported the discovery to Mr. Zhao Kangmin from the local cultural centre.

On 28 April; a month after the Yang brothers had started their excavation, Zhao came by with his bike, and when he saw pieces of terracotta body parts spread all over the ground, he knew this was something special. Still, he pondered for a while whether to tell anyone because it had proved dangerous, sometimes fatal (especially during Mao’s former cultural revolution) to bring to light memories of the past which might be considered anti-revolutionary. He took the chance, went to the recycling centre to buy back the arrowheads, collected the discarded terracotta fragments, glued them together and exhibited it all in his cultural centre.

Nothing further happened over the following two months, until a journalist named Lin Anwen visited the cultural centre. When he saw the new objects exhibited, he became very interested and realised it was an important find. “This is not just anything,” he thought. “Perhaps it stems back from China’s early civilization.”

He was right. It turned out that the figures were created by a civilization that had existed more than 2,000 years earlier. At that time, around the year 200 BC, the Chinese had a civilization that in many ways was far more advanced than the one that existed when the brothers dug their wells in 1974. It was probably this harsh fact that the Maoists wanted kept secret – that they lived in a civilization in steady decline, which had been declining for centuries, if not millenia.

How was it possible that China had a civilization in 1974, which in many ways was less advanced than that of 2,000 years earlier? Or more generally: how is is that some civilizations advance while others decline or collapse? In the previous chapters, we looked at the basic conditions for creativity and growth, but why do these conditions fluctuate in a given civilization?

Let’s start from the beginning. Up until approximately 5,000 years ago, the planet was home to lots of cultures within which people traded with one another, but all societies were tribal with none formally organized as real civilizations. Interestingly, when civilizations finally arrived, they developed, curiously enough, in four different areas of the globe that had one trait in common: they all featured flowing water that people were able to to “tame” or manage.³⁵ Four out of four doesn’t sound like a coincidence, and perhaps one reason is that as we all know from our childhood, it can be fascinating to try to control water. But “taming” it on a large scale can also be very useful.

The first of the four sites was in what is now Iraq; in the delta between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, where there lived a people called the Sumerians. These people had problems with regular flooding of their (otherwise very fertile and productive) delta, and they therefore (and maybe also because it was fun) began, from about 4,800 BC, to do something about it: they built dams, underground water chambers and drainage. They were creative, in other words, and, from about 3,300 BC, they began to develop the world’s first city-state, although “town” may be a better description of what it was.

Similar processes, i.e. first taming of water and then the development of towns, came later by the Nile in Egypt (from approximately 3,200 BC), by the Indus River in India (also from approximately 3,200 BC) and by the Yellow River and Yangtze River in China (from approximately 2,000 BC). It happened later in the Americas, but this was probably for a simple reason. After people left Africa, some walked through Asia, up to Siberia, across to Alaska and then (according to recent genetic studies) all the way down the American West coast to Tierra del Guego in Southern Chile, before spreading inland towards Eastern North-and-South America. As long as these people carried on moving (this obviously took thousands of years), they remained pure extractors. They would not have farmed because they could always keep moving into new land, and they would have had very limited social spaces because the new places were free of people on all sides except where they came from. So self-taming, social interaction, permanent settlements and farming simply came much later to North America than to Euroasia, and it came even later to South America.

Alongside the taming of water and the construction of the first towns in Eurasia came agriculture. Exactly when this started, we do not know, but it’s not hard to imagine how it could have happened: a group of hunters captured a large number of goats in one go and realized that if they killed them all, some of them would rot before they could be eaten. So they decided to keep some of them alive in captivity for later use. Then a goat has a kid, and it dawns on the hunters that they have invented an automatic meat machine!

Here’s another scenario: while the men are out hunting, the women and children collect fruit, nuts and grass, and one of them realizes that if they sow or plant these just outside their residence, they will be spared a long walk.

These are obvious ideas, so it is no wonder that agriculture developed independently in the Middle East, Mexico, the Andes, China, the Brazilian rain forest, New Guinea and Africa within a few thousand years of one another and, in most of these places, it spread quickly after its start. In the beginning, these early farmers used no crop rotation, so the ground would quickly become depleted. In addition to this, there would eventually appear a high concentration of specific pests around any place in which people cultivated a particular kind of crop. For these two reasons, they became nomadic farmers, moving from place to place, which, of course, stimulated the adaption of their methods among other people.

Farming made it easier to stay closer together, so people could concentrate larger military forces. Also, the higher concentrations of people stimulated trade, which again made specialization feasible, so craftmansship improved. The fact that you did not have to carry all your possessions around anymore made it feasible to have more of them. So people started to work harder to become richer; perhaps because the richest men won the most attractive women, which created genetic selection for strivers.

Complexity grew and, for example, Sumerians developed architecture and city-planning to organize their living spaces and writing systems and simple counting systems to organize their trade and distribution systems. Their largest city, Uruk, was at its peak around 2,900 BC, a six square kilometre extension and, by then, probably contained around 50,000-80,000 inhabitants who lived protected behind a defence wall. Never before had the world seen anything remotely like that, and Uruq was now the centre of the world.

However, Uruk would soon be overtaken by the Chinese, particularly thanks to a man named Qin Shih Huang, who lived from year 260 to 210 BC.³⁶ Qin’s father was the ruler of one of seven rival states in an area that made up a large part of modern China, and when his father died in 246 BC, the young boy replaced him as local ruler. He then managed, through a series of victorious military expeditions, to gather all the seven states under its own leadership. This became the foundation of the Chinese empire, which he named after himself (“China“ is derived from Qin). All this happened more than 2,200 years ago.

While before his tenure, China had suffered countless wars, it had actually also been pretty creative with a thriving culture based on the principle of “the hundred schools”. This phenomenon, which dates back to 770 BC (2,800 years ago), involved an ongoing process of combining different philosophies in a “melting pot”, that led to lots of creativity and innovation. However, Qin ordered the burning of all written texts in year 213 BC and furthermore the live burial of 460 Confucian scholars three years later. Meanwhile he introduced a single philosophy called legalism, which is quite easy to explain: it meant that people should strictly abide by the law.

These laws stated, among other things, that people should participate in public projects and it was through this that Qin managed to build the Great Wall, which is still the world’s largest man-made structure. He also built a number of roads that connected his, now gigantic, empire. In 214 BC - four years before his death – he started to design the 36 km long Lingqu channel that would connect two rivers, which meant that you could sail no fewer than 2,000 km through China without ever having to cross land. It still works today.

There was also a very personal, private project. After his death Qin wanted to be buried in an underground tomb with an entire army plus various other delights. According to historian Sima Qian, who lived 145 BC - 90 AD, so was born just 65 years after Qin ‘s death, 700,000 workers were employed in the construction of this mausoleum. Furthermore, he reported that this amazing tomb contained mercury-filled models of 100 of China’s rivers and models of palaces and towers. The ceiling was supposedly decorated with celestial bodies, protected by (Indiana Jones-style) crossbows that would automatically shoot intruders.

This written account was the only reasonably reliable source we had about this Qin’s mausoleum - until fairly recently.

And now we must return to the story of the six Yang brothers in Shaanxi Province and their failed attempt to plumb a well. We had reached the point in the story when a reporter from the news agency Xinhua had entered the local cultural centre and sensed that the copper spearheads and terracotta on display were very old and significant.

On 24 June 1974, Lin Anwen reported his observation to central government. The officials sent archaeologists out to the site of the well to take a look, where they found an astonishing quantity of porcelain items and arrow heads. They dug further, and eventually they could form a picture of it all. This find, they now understood, had to be Qin’s tomb, and it probably contained some 40,000 copper objects and some 6,000 terracotta soldiers, statuettes of 130 chariots, 520 terracotta draft horses and 150 terracotta cavalry horses had been buried there - most of them life-size.

It is now assumed that the entire underground complex is more than 20,000 square metres in size (200,000 square feet), and there are still large parts of it that haven’t been excavated. Most interesting among the areas not yet opened up is an apparent burial mound, which is found above parts of the mausoleum, and which probably contains the remains of the deceased emperor himself .

China under Qin was not just a civilization - it was an empire. As we previously discovered, an empire can be defined as a society in which people from one civilisation rule others. The point at which a specific society can be described as an empire is a matter of definition, but most descriptions of the history of empires put the total number at approximately 200. The following table shows the most important of them.

It is remarkable - and very rich food for thought - that all previous empires have disappeared. Take, for example, the Egyptian Empire which, for a long period of time, constituted the world’s most advanced civilization with an extremely advanced division of labour and technical capability. In its third dynasty (2,737-2,717 BC), Egyptian ruler Djoser managed to develop an efficient bureaucracy and introduce construction with cut stone blocks. When he died, he was buried in a pyramid 62 metres high, which still stands to this day. His successor promoted international trade and began the construction of the largest pyramids, which are also still preserved.

THE LARGEST EMPIRES IN WORLD HISTORY IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.³⁷ THE MOST REMARKABLE FIGURES FOR DURATION, SIZE AND POPULATION ARE HIGHLIGHTED IN GREY BACKGROUND. ALL OF THESE EMPIRES, AND ALMOST 200 OTHERS, HAVE FALLEN.

While Egypt arguably remained the most advanced civilization on the planet for more than two millennia, and while it simultaneously ruled the world’s oldest empire in 500 years, it is China that takes the prize for being the world’s longest-lasting empire of 2,133 years. China was also one of the two empires that held the largest share of the world’s contemporary population - approximately 37% (the other being Rome).

The Chinese Empire was, in many ways, fabulous. During China’s Song Dynasty, which started approximately 1,200 years after Emperor Qin’s death and lasted until 1,279, Hangzhou served as the national capital, which made it the world’s most advanced city - an honorary title that previously could have been given to Uruk, Athens, Alexandria and Baghdad.

In Hangzhou, one could then find hundreds of restaurants, hotels and theatres. There were tea houses with landscaped gardens, large-collared lamps, fine porcelain, calligraphy and paintings by famous artists. The night-life was rich and varied, and there were skilled puppeteers, sword-swallowers, theatres with professional actors, acrobats, musicians, snake-charmers, storytellers and more. In addition, those with particular interests could join clubs for food, art, antiques, music, horseback riding and poetry. And all this happened around 800 years ago.³⁸ In parallel with this cultural extravaganza, the Chinese developed a range of new technologies. For example, they introduced the world’s first paper banknotes as well as the first printing machines, gunpowder, matches, toothbrushes and compasses.³⁹ They also studied biology, botany, zoology, geology, mineralogy, astronomy, medicine, archaeology, mathematics, cartography, optics, and developed social programmes such as nursing homes, public hospitals and cemeteries. They had efficient postal services and constructed public buildings which they maintained with great care. In addition, they took care to further develop China’s already extensive road network, and they had thousands of ships that criss-crossed rivers and coastlines, including some which served as floating restaurants.

Because China was successful and well-protected, its population increased rapidly. The best estimates tell us that, in the 1400s, there lived 100 million to 130 million people in China compared with just 50 million to 55 million across Europe.⁴⁰ Because of China’s population size and creativity, the Chinese were capable of taking on tasks, which were entirely outside of European capability. Let’s take an example: We all know the story of Christopher Columbus, who sailed to America in 1492. He had a total crew of 87 men plus three ships which were 18, 17 and 15 metres in length, respectively.

Impressive indeed, and we shall later revisit that story. But by comparison, between 1405 and 1433, a Chinese citizen named Zheng He led seven international expeditions to the African East coast, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia with some 300 ships and a crew of approximately 30,000 men. According to contemporary records, some of these boats were 150 metres long (approximately 450 feet) and had nine masts. Zheng He returned from his trip – which took place more than half a century before Columbus’ - with a cargo of luxury goods including gold, silver, copper and silk, as well as a collection of exotic animals, all of which were gifts for the emperor.

ZHENG HE EXPEDITIONS 1405-1433.

The reality is that even many hundred of years before the birth of Christ, China had a large middle and upper class society, which cultivated and valued products of exceptional beauty and quality, such as fine pottery (which we still today refer to as “china”), gold, opulent jewellery, refined penmanship, calligraphy, paintings, beads, silver, ivory and of course the famous Ming vases. There were major art collectors, who were advised by art experts. Their ship-building technology was way ahead of Europe’s at the time of Columbus, and their boats had watertight compartments.

It was also the Chinese who, between 1403 and 1408, set out to create an encyclopaedia of all known knowledge. To that end, the emperor asked more than 2,000 researchers and authors to read 8,000 sources and extract the information. When this encyclopaedia was finished, it included almost 23,000 hand-written scrolls. In terms of words, it remained the world’s biggest encyclopaedia in the 600 years to the 2007, when it was finally surpassed by online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which no one printed out.⁴¹

The Chinese had tremendous knowledge, but one thing they apparently did not know. They did not know that there was an almost equally phenomenal empire with an equally large population on the other side of the world: the Roman Empire, which emerged a few hundred years later than the Chinese Empire. Nor did the Romans apparently know about the Chinese Empire - a peculiarity when you consider that these empires, at one time, together comprised almost three-quarters of the world’s population.

Rome was as culturally-fascinating as China and it also introduced a model of society which would later serve as inspiration for many states, including large parts of today’s Western world. The precursor for that model came from Greece.

The “Greece” of antiquity was not actually a country, but a scattered cluster of independent mini-states with a shared culture and language. Nor did the people in this culture call their civilization “Greek” at the time, but “Hellenic”; the name “Greece” was coined by the Romans later. Between 700 BC and 350 BC, this area combined all of our criteria for spontaneous creativity: 1) small units 2) change agents, 3) networks, 4) shared memory systems, and 5) competition.

Let’s start with the small units. Greek civilization comprised up to 1,000 independent mini-states or “polis”, as these were known, most of which were in the area that is now modern Greece, but with some in Greek settleements elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Athens, at its peak, contained approximately 400,000 citizens and slaves; Syrakuse, which was a Greek settlement in Sicily, had 200,000 citizens/slaves and Sparta some 150,000, but many other polis had perhaps 5-10,000 inhabitants, and some were much smaller than that; tiny self-ruling villages.

So Greek civilization was extremely decentralized, and it was also exposed to many change agents, as each of these polis were influenced by the others and also by wide-ranging overseas trade and relationships with Greek settlements elsewhere.

That brings us to networking: The Greeks enjoyed excellent networking due to their sailing culture that was stimulated by Greece’s countless islands, curved coastlines, natural harbours and reasonably-calm seas. Networking also happened because groups of mini-states formed loose military alliances around one of the bigger ones. One example was the Delian Leque, which consisted of 150-173 polis under the leadership of Athens, and others included the Spartan League and the Boeotian League.⁴² These unions were loose, temporary and shifting, but they did facilitate communication between their members for as long as they lasted.

Fourth, in spite of its decentralization, the Greeks benefitted from speaking a common language and having shared alphabet, numbering system, religion and so on.

And finally, the Greeks had a highly competitive culture, which included commercial competition, staging of frequent drama competitions, fiercely competitive sports games (they invented the Olympic Games), and wars.

THE GREEK CIVILIZATION 336 BC. AS THE MAP SHOWS, IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT THE ROMANS WERE INSPIRED BY THE GREEKS, WHO LIVED IN SOUTHERN ITALY.⁴³

The Greeks had spread out and settled on the coastal areas of North Africa, around the Black Sea, and in Spain, France, Corsica, Sardinia plus southern Italy, where they established similar small city-states as part of a loose, de-centralized civilization.

Although primitive democracy may well have existed from time-to-time in small Neolithic societies, people today describe some of the Greek city states as the first civilized democracies in world history and, of these, Athens, which introduced its extensive democracy in 453 BC, became the most advanced. Athens was home to great scientists, historians and philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Euripides, Herodotus and many others who we still admire today.

Athens had become extremely wealthy through shipping and trade, and the city gradually began to attract creative and ambitious people from neighbouring areas. Classical Athens was thus, for a time, extremely dynamic, and it was characterized by freedom, democracy, creativity, individualism and enjoyment of life, although much of this was less true for women, let alone slaves.

Athens was also famous for its philosophers’ widespread (and correct) belief, that most complex phenomena in nature could be explained by relatively simple underlying principles. For example, one of Athens’ philosophers thought that all matter was in fact composed of different sorts of water (wrong). Another thought it was made up of a combination of earth, fire, air and water (hmmmhh). A third thought it was made of something he called atoms. Bingo!

Art was another Greek fascination that especially thrived in Athens. Over time this evolved into ever-more sophisticated pottery, architecture, paintings, figurines and sculptures. The sculpures were initially inspired by the enormous Egyptian sculptures, but the Greeks learned, over time, to create sculptures of humans that were far more life-like and expressive. They called this kind of work “technología”, which was a combination of “techn” for art, skill and craft and “logos”, which meant “word” or “expression of an idea”. Today, we call it technology, although we sometimes forget that this can indeed be an art.

The Greeks, and in particular the Athenians, also introduced a number of political concepts that the world had not seen before, and the word “politics” even comes from the Greek “politicos”. Their word “isegoria” meant freedom to speak in public, “parrhesai” meant the right to say whatever you wished, “demokratia” meant rule by the people, and “eleuteria” meant liberty; it is no coincidence that Athens named three of its warships Demokratia, Eleuteria and Parrhesai, respectively.

They fought for these concepts, and they fought hard. Of course, one might have expected that a disadvantage of decentralization was reduced ability to wage large-scale war, but this wasn’t so. This became evident when the Greeks were confronted by attacks from mighty Persian armies between 499 and 449 BC. During the most intense series of these attacks, which took place between 480 and 490 BC, the Persians commanded the largest army and navy in the world, which was under the unified command of the Persian king Xerxes. This force attacked much smaller ones assembled by interim alliances between Hellenic city states such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Chalcis and Aegina.

However, even though the Greeks could mobilize far fewer soldiers and ships than the Persians, and even though they often disagreed violently on strategy in what the contemporary historian Herodotus called their “war of words” (their commanders often screamed at each other in public strategy debates), when it came to actual battle, the Greeks beat the Persians again and again. For instance, at the great sea battle at Salamis in 480 BC, a Greek navy destroyed a much larger Persian one sinking approximately 200 Persian ships and killing at least 40,000 Persians; the Greeks only lost 40 ships and a few thousand men at most. At the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, 300 determined Spartans, supported by 5,000 - 20,000 other Greek volunteers, managed to block a pass, holding off 70,000 – 300,000 Persian soldiers for a week and, at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, some 10,000 Greeks soundly beat a Persian army two-and-a-half times its size. All in all, the Persian king Xerxes, who controlled 70 million people and an area 20 times bigger than Greece, lost 250,000 men in his various failed attempts to conquer two million Greeks.

Despite Greek ideals of freedom, democracy, in 404 BC, Athens was conquered by Sparta, which in many ways was its opposite. Sparta was an authoritarian society based on discipline and ascetic lifestyle. Here, all male citizens worked for the state as full-time soldiers, and Sparta’s citizens were, by law, excluded from carrying out trade and craftsmanship and could apparently not own gold or silver or in any way demonstrate signs of prosperity, which is why anyone having a similar lifestyle today is called “Spartan”. Most of its inhabitants were slaves who did all the manual work with the women. This nation had no philosophers, historians, writers and architects.

The hyper-creative Greek era of many small city-states lasted for approximately 350 years from around 700 BC to 359 BC, when Phillip II of Macedonia in northern Greece began to conquer the surrounding city states one after the other. At some point in the mid 340s BC, he sent the Spartans a note which, according to one source, said: “If I win this war, you will be slaves forever” and to another “If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.” According to both accounts, the Spartans’ replied with one of the coolest military bulletins of all times. It contained just one word: “If”.

Phillip decided to avoid Sparta, but eventually conquered the rest of the Greek states and united them in a federation. His son Alexander the Great used this as a basis for mobilizing an army that conquered Persia and continued into Pakistan, Syria, Egypt and other countries, where he, for a while, controlled some 5.2 million square kilometres (two million square miles) of land. After his early death, the empire was broken up, and some Greek states such as Rhodes, Dilos, Crete and Chios re-emerged as strong financial centres, but the creative era of hundreds of independent city-states never returned.

While the Greek civilization still comprised hundreds of tiny city-states, Rome had itself been such a miniature nation. Founded during the Etruscan era, it was only one among many others on the Italian peninsula. Like these others, Rome had, at this time, been led by a Big Man - an absolute monarch, who was elected for life by a local Senate. However, probably in the year 509 or 510 BC, there was a rebellion, where this leader was deposed by a number of the city’s aristocrats. The city’s patriarchs now established a new form of government, which eventually came to delegate responsibility between patriarchs and ordinary citizens, called plebeians.

In the year 494 BC, Rome was involved in a war, but the plebeian army simply refused to fight unless Rome’s laws and regulations were written down and applied equally to all free men. This, they hoped, would ensure they always knew where they stood and no longer needed to pander to the powerful. They demanded, in other words, what we today call a constitutional state. At first, the aristocrats refused this, but after years of discord, they agreed to send a commission of three patricians to Greek towns to study how democracy worked there. We don’t know if these towns were in Greece or they were Greek settlements in Southern Italy. The latter sounds very likely as, for instance, Naples (Napoli in Italian) just of couple of days travelling from Rome, was of Greek origin. Its original name was Neopolis, which was Greek for Newtown.

To the Romans, it was Athens, which was the inspiration; not Sparta. Many Romans spoke Greek as well as Latin, and it was common among the upper classes either to send their children to Athens or perhaps to Greek settlements in Southern Italy to study or to employ Greek slaves to teach their children Greek. In either case, many of them would know about Greek ideas of politika, isegoria, parrhesai, demokratia and eleuteria. They would know about the freedom some of the Greeks practised.

The Roman interpretation of the Athenian model became wildly successful, because100 years later - in the year 275 BC - Rome had, through a series of military victories and political alliances, taken control of most of the Italian peninsula, and over the subsequent 300 years, the Roman conquests continued. The geographical culmination of the empire came in the year 117 AD, when the empire also encompassed the entire North African coast as well as parts of Great Britain, Iran, Iraq and some other areas.

While the geographical expansion stopped at this point, the Roman culture and civilization continued to flourish. During its golden age under Antonius Pius (138 -161 AD) , the imperial capital had more than 25 public libraries where people could borrow books, and reading was now so popular that Romans had private book collections, even though books were handwritten and therefore very expensive. By this time, many houses in Rome were richly decorated with art and had floors with fine mosaics and walls adorned with frescoes; many even had running water.

Like the Chinese, the Romans evolved as sybarites and advanced connoisseurs of the good things in life. For instance, as they produced large quantities of wine, they also started to write reviews about the best vintages, such as that from the year 121 BC, which was said to be particularly delicate.⁴⁴ Roman society was now much better organized than surrounding countries and its postal service could, for example, transport letters and parcels at an average speed of 65 km a day.

Just as we can admire Roman administration, we can enthuse about some of the art and architecture. A visit to the excavated Roman city of Pompeii, for example, is very impressive. This village was buried in ash and pumice in 79 AD, so what we see today is exactly how it was on that devastating day. Here we see countless restaurants and pizza bars and a public sauna built with double walls, so the steam could be trapped between them to create a well-distributed heating effect. The ceilings in the sauna are decorated with paintings and sculptures and boasted trenches to prevent drops of condensation from falling onto the bathers. Life was good!

But beneath the surface, problems began to accumulate. The first was that, since 49 BC, after 500 years of Greek-style democracy the empire had developed an autocratic management style. Getting ahead in Rome now rested either on military merits or flawless rhetoric; being able to express yourself clearly and elegantly. Form was more important than practical experience.

The second and bigger problem was that many of Rome’s conquests were constantly on the verge of starvation and provided no returns to the empire - it was perhaps only Egypt that provided the Romans with a stable profit. In addition, more and more practical work was now, as in Sparta , done by slaves. This was not a model to stimulate innovation, because new ideas for managing production will rarely appear if you spend your life in a villa removed from the place of production.

In addition, the army increasingly comprised non-Romans; for example, under, the emperors Trajan and Hadrian (who reigned in 98 -117 and 117-138 respectively) less than 1% of the Roman army was actually made up of Romans.⁴⁵

As the empire reached its maximum geographical extent under these emperors, and as its culture sparkled in that period, the financial tensions began to grow, until they reached breaking point. When Emperor Trajan realized he could not recover sufficient taxes, he introduced forced labour and his successor Hadrian expanded the secret police, hired more internal spies and built a greater layer of bureaucracy in order to collect taxes and keep the ever-more dissatisfied citizens in check.

In his book The World of Late Antiquity, historian Peter Brown describes how art and culture blossomed in the later stages of the Roman Empire, but also how people complained that there now seemed to be more tax collectors than tax payers. For example, the state introduced the equivalent of modern VAT but, in practice, this was enormously expensive to collect, as there now had to be a government official present at all business transactions.⁴⁶

The situation deteriorated. In the early fourth century, most industries were forced into the so-called collegia, which were mandatory professional associations. To ensure traders did not evade taxation, they were now effectively indentured and could no longer leave their jobs or homeland, and their children were forced to take up the same professions as their parents. Similarly, farmers were forced into large agricultural communities called latifundia and could not leave these again. These labourers were now called coloni, and they were actually, in some ways, even more tied to the spot than the slaves, who, after all, could be sold or purchased free of their owners, if they were lucky.⁴⁷ In the year 380, a new law prohibiting young people from marrying outside their own class or industry was introduced, and to prevent the youth from escaping the taxmen, they were branded on their arms with their status. The state was now clearly no longer there to protect win-win transactions between individuals - it was instead engaged in a gigantic win-lose transaction between itself and the majority of the empire’s inhabitants.

The rising taxes, the increasing control and surveillance of the population and the ever-harsher restrictions on movement were not the only symptoms of the developing economic crisis. Persecution of the peasants and craftsmen also led to shortages, but to avoid the inflation that usually follows this, a death penalty was introduced for raising prices. However, inflation snuck in through the back door, as the government gradually reduced the silver content of coins from approximately 95% to eventually less than 5%.⁴⁸ Soon these coins were considered so worthless that even the state itself would no longer accept them as tax payments. Instead people had to pay in kind through forced labour, or with pure precious metals.

Even that was not sufficient to fill the coffers, and the army began, in parallel, to collect taxes from the people in the areas it passed on its way. It must have been a hellish experience for farmers to have be visited by an army of men collecting taxes and booty.

The increased (regular) tax burden hit farmers especially, which accounted for some 90% of gross domestic product (GDP). Eventually, taxes became so high that more and more left their farms and moved to cities, so that they could get closer to where the tax money was spent, and further away from where taxes were collected. The fields began to lay fallow, which obviously necessitated even higher taxes, which again increased the costs of collecting taxes - a vicious circle that had the added effect of causing food production to fall dramatically.⁴⁹ Under Emperor Valens, who reigned 364-378, there were some provinces in which between half and a third of the land was abandoned by peasants, despite the official movement restrictions. The state now tried to discourage further tax avoidance by forcing local communities to pay land tax on rural areas, whether they were cultivated or not.

The entire economic system was thus slowly disintegrating, and when people increasingly lacked a viable currency, they began to focus more on self-sufficiency and barter trade. Peasant revolts were becoming increasingly common and, instead of fighting the regular invading barbarians, peasants would frequently join them; it was no longer unusual for enterprising farmers to run away from Rome and instead work, for example, among the Germanic tribes in the north.

One of the most famous historians of all time, and many historians’ first source for analysis of Rome’s decline and eventual downfall, is Edward Gibbon, who, between 1776 and 1789, produced a body of work in six parts called The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.⁵⁰ This extends over some 4,000 pages, and Gibbon took advantage, as far as possible, of the original contemporaneous sources.

Very simply put, his overall conclusion is that the Roman Empire fell not only because of over-taxation, but because its original culture, values, morals and virtues had been degraded. The Romans rarely did their own practical (including military) work, but left this to slaves; they themselves became sloppy, pampered, unworldly and unwilling to defend the empire economically or militarily.

Gibbon added another explanation for Rome’s demise. He believed that logical and rational thinking inspired by Athens had been one of the main sources of Rome’s initial success, but concluded that it began to degrade in the empire’s later stages, where people turned away from both rational though and cultural achievement. From the first century AD onwards, this philosophy manifested itself among Roman cynics. Cynicism was a native Greek philosophy, its literal meaning being to live like dogs or “dog people”. The cynics rejected material possessions, sex, power and vanity in favour of a simple life without any cultural or personal possessions. Often they even chose to live as beggars and dressed in rags deliberately.⁵¹

Gibbon also assigned a great part of the responsibility for Rome’s decline to the behaviour of the Praetorian Guard. This was originally created by Emperor Augustus as a sort of personal bodyguard. During the first 200 years of its existence, it was mostly a positive and stabilizing factor, and it would remove particularly crazy or incompetent emperors from time-to-time. This could be necessary, as there was no shortage of these. For instance, Emperor Caligula opened a brothel in his palace, raped many women and took pleasure in reporting details of these experiences to their husbands. He also committed incest and appointed his favourite horse as priest (and promised that it should become consul). Elagabalus attended government meetings dressed as a transvestite and tried to castrate himself, while Nero murdered his mother, beat his wife to death accidentally and confiscated senators’ property so he could build himself an enormous golden villa.

The Praetorian Guard typically got rid of bad emperors by killing them (for example, they cut off Elagabalus’ head off and tossed the rest of the body into the Tiber river). However, over time, their sense of mission started to change, and they now evolved into a sort of armed parasite that predominantly served itself.

As if all these problems were not enough, Rome also suffered from misallocation of capital, as savings were primarily used for unproductive land purchase, which didn’t contribute to any productivity increases and led to increased concentration of ownership. And finally, it became increasingly intolerant of diversity and dissent. For instance, emperor Theodosius burned the great library in Alexandria, Egypt in 391, and two years later, in 393 he outlawed the pagan rituals at the Olympics, after which they were terminated and remained so for the next 1,503 years (the games were restarted in 1896).

Adding up all these factors, the empire increasingly looked like something that would collapse, and that was indeed what happened. In the year 406, the Romans received alarming reports that Germanic barbarians had crossed the Rhine and begun trespassing on Roman territory. Just four years later, the barbarians attacked and briefly plundered the capital itself, having marched down the Italian peninsula without encountering much resistance.

The barbarians left again, but 15 years later Rome abandoned England, and soon lost much of its Spanish and French lands followed by North Africa. Over the following 50 years, disintegration was complete, and the city of Rome’s population declined by three-quarters.

The Western Roman Empire went from total domination to total extinction within just 71 years. The Eastern Roman Empire survived as the dirigiste Byzantine Empire until this was wiped out in 1453 by the Ottoman Muslims. Byzantium, we should add, was the name of a Greek village in present day Turkey, which was later renamed Constantinople as it became the capital of the Eastern Roman emporiums. Today it is called Istanbul.

The stories of the first great civilizations provide general food for thought, because it was not only Rome that fell, but each and every empire that has ever existed. Nowadays, few people speak of the great Mesopotamian, Cretan, Sinitic or Canaanite civilizations and yet, these were very powerful in the past.

From this, it is difficult to conclude anything other than civilizations and empires almost inevitably create something that destroys themselves from within. If you read a very brief history of Rome’s rise and fall, one may be led to believe that empire fell because it was overrun by barbarians. Well yes, it fell when it was overrun, but such an interpretation is rather misleading. Before it was overrun it had, as we have seen, been decaying for a very long time. Rome was already about to collapse from within, when the barbarians broke through. The forces that finally brought the empire to its knees were heavily outnumbered by Roman citizens; the Vandals, who conquered North Africa, never numbered more than 80,000 and, even more remarkably, the Ostrogoths, who took over Italy and parts of, inter alia, Switzerland and Croatia, were in a minority of about 5% of the local population that they subdued.

In earlier days, there had always been barbarians harassing Rome at its borders, but it had brushed these off fairly easily and often, subsequently, assimilated them quite successfully. One reason was simply that life in Rome in those days was considered so attractive that many barbarians volunteered for the Roman army or settled on Roman soil. In fact, it was often these barbarians who, after assimilation, conquered new areas for the Romans. In the early stages of the empire, Rome prevailed because people viewed what it offered as very attractive, and because the empire thus was able to mobilize them for its cause.

However, within the later stages of the empire, the common attitude had changed. Now, it was not longer thought attractive to live in the Roman Empire, where the state restricted people’s movement and buried them in taxes. Nor was it any longer particularly prestigious or attractive to fight for a Roman army, which had increasing difficulties paying its soldiers. The reality was that if it had not been the Germanic barbarians who had taken Western Rome, it would have been only a matter of time before someone else had done so.

So Rome “committed suicide”, and the ironic tragedy is that while the Romans were initially inspired by Athens, over time their society came to resemble Athens’ diametric opposite: Sparta. As we will see in the book’s fifth section, it is certainly not the first or last time in history that something like that will happen, and we find many elements of the exact same pattern playing out in much of Europe and, to a lesser degree, the US today.

Rome’s first expansion was clearly a creative force, as it secured internal peace, opened borders and facilitated trade and emigration through the building of roads and ports, established a vast postal system and implemented practical common standards. If we compare it to modern Europe, the European Union (EU) has, in its early stages, also stimulated creativity by opening borders and facilitating movements of capital, people, goods and services. But what came later in Rome, also has clear parallels in the present: self-serving institutions, over-taxation leading to tax evasion and restricting production, limitations of movements through exit taxes and, finally, increasing irrationality and cultural indifference. We shall examine that more closely in sections five and six.

However, long before we get to that, we must, in the next chapter, delve into the extraordinary and surprising positive consequences the fall of Rome had for Western Europe.