The World

The capital Akkad flourished under House Sargon. Its location is unknown, but standing somewhere on the Tigris it became a new sort of city. ‘Its population dine on the best of food, draw the best of drinks, make merry in the courtyard and throng the festival grounds,’ recounts The Epic of Gilgamesh, probably referring to Akkad.^* ‘Acquaintances dine together. Monkeys, mighty elephants … dogs, lions, ibexes and sheep jostle each other in public places …’, while its stores were packed with ‘gold and silver, copper, tin and blocks of lapis’. Grandees dressed richly, both men and women wearing cosmetics and taking trouble with their hair. Fashions changed as quickly as they do today – Sargon had worn a shaggy coat; the Naram-Sin elite preferred a robe tied with a pin at the shoulder. Akkadians consulted diviners – using extispicy, the reading of animal entrails – to advise on their decisions. There was a culinary cult: tablets record the variety of food eaten, from sheep and pigs to deer, rabbits, fieldmice, jerboas and hedgehogs. Beer was the favourite drink, enjoyed by men and women, made from fermented barley, drunk through a straw, at taverns run by independent women. Elite girls attended school and could write both Sumerian and Akkadian. In glimpses of family life, women gave birth in a seated position; children are shown playing with rattles, wheeled sheep and mini-wagons. Love spells were common: girls wore love charms around their thighs.

Foreigners wandered its streets, admiring its wonders. ‘Tigi drums, flutes and zamzam instruments resounded,’ says The Epic: ‘its harbours where ships moored were full of joy,’ trading with the entire Indian Ocean: ‘at the wharf … ships moor from Meluhha [India/Pakistan], Magan [Yemen/Oman] and Dilmun [Bahrain]’. Amorites, Meluhhans, Elamites bore goods there ‘like laden donkeys’, traders paying for their goods in barley or silver: there were so many Meluhhans that they lived together in their own village.

Meluhha – land of ivory – was centred around two cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, on the Indus (Pakistan but extending into India and Afghanistan), so well planned that they were built in grids with standardized bricks and even boasted public rubbish bins, and public lavatories and sewers that London would not possess until the nineteenth century and that are not universal in south Asia today. Using their own (still undeciphered) script, their workshops made jewellery in ivory, gold, carnelian, as well as textiles and ceramics. Mohenjo-daro may have housed as many as 85,000 people, the biggest city in the world, but its largest building was a public bath – no palaces, no ziggurats.

These Indian cities were not ruled by single kings; more likely they were governed by councils – perhaps Pakistan/India invented democracy – but the bathhouse stood in a sequestered citadel which might suggest it was the precinct of a priestly elite. Versions of urban life were being sampled simultaneously on several continents. In China, there were towns on the Yellow River and in the north, at Shimao (Shaanxi). In Ukraine, Taljanky, containing 10,000 people, was larger and maybe even earlier than the first city at Uruk. In America, long since separated from Asia, people in Mexico and Guatemala were building towns with as many as 10,000 inhabitants and pyramidal mounds that reflected their sacred calendar, using a form of writing, storing surplus maize in storehouses, and sculpting giant heads, probably of their rulers, who seem to be sporting helmets worn for their ballgames.^* On the Mississippi, people were raising monumental earthworks that somehow linked stars and calendar: the inhabitants of the largest of these – now called Poverty Point – were not farmers but nomadic hunters who somehow came together to build massive structures.

In west Asia, the Sargon family illustrated a paradox of empire. The bigger it grew, the more borders had to be defended; the richer it was, the more tempting a target it became for less settled neighbours – and the greater was the incentive for destructive family feuds. Drought brought hunger; nomads swooped on the cities. In 2193 BC, the Sargons lost control: ‘Who was king?’ asks the Sumerian king list. ‘Who was not king?’ By 1800, west Asia was in turmoil – even Egypt ceased to be a player in the most humiliating and gruesome way. It started with a row about hippopotami.

THE SHATTERED HEAD OF SEQENENRE THE BRAVE