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The Bronze Age - and The Beginning of Empires
Empire. To speak the word is to fill the imagination with apparitions of grandeur and strength. Say it aloud, and hear the very sound of power. Empire.
The first empire of modern times was that of Alexander the Great, ascending like a meteor to a blaze of glory, then, in a few short years, disappearing soon after the death of its creator. Next came the mighty Roman Empire of Caesar and Augustus that spread civilization throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
A thousand years later Genghis Khan reigned for three generations undefeated across a vast empire that encompassed nearly one hundred and eighty degrees of longitude. Next came the far-reaching Spanish Empire that spanned the oceans around the world and colonized the new world.
The French Republic under Emperor Napoleon, like Alexander before him, blazed briefly across Europe, and was almost immediately superceded by the British Empire where the sun never set for over a hundred years. Even in modern times the Soviet Union was, at the height of its power, a mighty empire that spanned more than half the globe and influenced events in nearly every country in the world.
In all these great undertakings, the will of one man, or perhaps just a few, ruled the fates not only of their own country, but the lands of others, usually strangers and often subjugated. All these subjects frequently existed only to provide men and resources to the ruling country, in exchange, occasionally, for the benefits of empire.
But before these great empires came to exist, there were others, smaller in scale, earlier in time, that provided the basis for the beginning of civilization to evolve. These early empires brought stability out of chaos and barbarism, while providing men the opportunity to learn both the rules on how to govern men and the necessary skills to lift him out of a rural existence. These first empires provided the protection needed for farmers to create villages, then cities, and defended these cities against the incessant attacks by barbarian outsiders.
Now we are much further back in time and smaller in scope. The Egyptian Empire. The Assyrian Empire. The ancient Sumerians. Finally we reach history’s very first recorded empire, the Empire of Akkad, far back in the Age of Bronze. With the establishment of this Akkadian Empire, the basic rules for empire-building were developed: first conquer, then preserve, and finally, administer.
Five thousand years ago, there was no word for ‘empire’ because none existed, and few could even imagine such a concept. There was only the farm, the small village, and the migrating nomads, themselves descendants of the first hunter-gathers. Even the rules of empire, taken for granted now, were difficult to learn, and so even that first empire was slow to be born, a complex combination of many new and innovative constructs.
The mysterious secrets of bronze weapons had to be discovered, understood, and then used to revolutionize warfare. Bronze had other uses as well. It changed agriculture, husbandry, and craftsmanship. At roughly the same time, breakthroughs in farming enabled farms to grow in size, and become fruitful enough to support an extended family. That led to the first small village, weak and vulnerable, but still a potent place where men could work together and share skills and resources.
Gold entered the scene, and gave mankind a way to store and transport value. The horse supplied the muscle to support these new technologies. A small creature in the wild, it had been bred into a larger and more powerful animal capable of carrying a man and his weapons. Finally there was innovation and evolution of the bow. No longer the weak weapon of antiquity, scarcely able to bring down a bird or a rabbit, but stronger now, curved and reinforced, it possessed new-found strength and accuracy, and for the first time in history the weaker man could learn a skill that gave him equality with his physically stronger neighbors or attackers.
But the most important skill of empire remained the knowledge of how to unite men, not only in warfare but in communal living. The power of men was multiplied enormously when they learned to live together in relative peace. The village became the city, and the city created the technology of civilization.
But before civilization could begin its slow rise, the first empire had to be born. It was a long, painful birth, one that lasted many hundreds of years, before the Empire of Akkad could spread from a single small village in the Land Between The Rivers, and extend its reach to the Mediterranean Sea in the west and the Indian Ocean in the south.
Those very first steps toward that empire took place on the banks of the Tigris River, more than six hundred years earlier. There was no road to guide those steps, not even a dirt track between the tiny villages and isolated farms. The countryside was mostly empty, inhabited only by fierce hunters constantly on the move, as they migrated from place to place in search of food.
But time had started moving faster now, and mankind was restless, searching for a better way of life. Conditions were nearly ripe, and now the three requirements needed to begin the journey toward empire and civilization were present: need, determination, and intelligence. Only the right man was missing to begin the progression. At last a man appeared, but he had only two of the necessary three requirements. Fortunately, there was another, and she possessed the missing element. Together, and with luck, they would see the dawn of empire begin.
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