Sublime

When such dramatic situations occur today, it seems that everyone has a piece of advice to give. Things were no different back then, during the Late Bronze Age. One letter found at Ugarit, possibly sent by the Hittite viceroy of Carchemish, gives the Ugaritic king advice on how to deal with such enemy ships. He begins, “You have written to me: ‘Shi

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But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that the first men were ruled despotically. It does not

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The situation of the Yamnaya chiefs might have been similar to that described by Barth in his account of the Yusufai Pathan invasion of the Swat valley in Pakistan in the sixteenth century. The invader, “faced with the sea of politically undifferentiated villagers proceeds to organize a central island of authority, and from this island he attempts

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According to the most recent evidence, Homo sapiens may have begun to migrate from Africa as early as 180,000 years ago, or perhaps even earlier, reaching sites along the Red Sea and perhaps the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Israel.3 Yet it appears that these first migrant groups outside of Africa did not survive. A second migration, known as t

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In about the year 1477 BC, in the city of Peru-nefer in the Nile delta of Lower Egypt, quite close to the Mediterranean Sea, Pharaoh Thutmose III ordered the construction of a grand palace with elaborate frescoes. Minoan artists from distant Crete, located far to the west across the Great Green (as the Mediterranean Sea was known to the Egyptians),

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Ultimately, the diaspora of the Celts as far as Anatolia was intimately related to the break-up of the Macedonian empire. And the turmoil following the death of Alexander the Great also drew the Celts to Egypt – arriving in North Africa as mercenaries, just as they had done in Asia Minor. After Alexander’s death, with no clear successor identified,

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by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization around 3500 BC, temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy—one that is in some ways still with us, actually, because it’s to the Sumerians that we owe such things as the dozen, 60-minute hour, or the 24-hour day.32 The basic monetary uni

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In ancient Athens, for example, the work of Draco in the seventh century BCE, though now a byword for harshness (‘draconian’), was notable as the first attempt there to put what had been oral rules into writing; a thousand years before that in Babylon, Hammurabi’s code did something similar. The Twelve Tables are much on that pattern. They are a lo

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