World History in a Year (Week 23) - 600s BC
If the 700s BC were a time of political and religious change in Western Asia, with the rise of imperial power in Assyria contrasted by new ethical movements challenging the rule of force, the 600s BC illustrate a period of economic transformation across Eurasia. The most pivotal of these transformations was the simultaneous invention of coinage on both sides of Asia, in central Anatolia and in China.
The existence of money long predated the invention of coinage: cowrie shells, for example, had been long used in China, and Bronze Age long-distance trade in the Mediterranean had used large bars of metal for transactions. But coinage provided money with a defined value that was under government control, in small, portable units. (It’s also incredibly convenient to archaeologists once people start putting names and dates of rulers on it.)
Central Anatolia was an appropriate and predictable place for the invention of coinage: it had large quantities of gold and silver, and its kingdoms, though not close to being peers of Assyria militarily or politically, were legendarily rich. The Greek legend of Midas was drawn from a Phrygian king, Mita, in the 700s; Lydian rulers included Gyges (600s BC), attributed a mythical ring granting invisibility, and Croesus (500s BC), subject of the phrase “as rich as Croesus”. While the legends about these rulers were legends, they were real kings, and were remembered with images of wealth and treasure. The earliest coins in central and western Anatolia, from the late 600s BC, were made of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver. This was of course incredibly valuable; you wouldn’t be going to the market and doing your grocery shopping with an electrum coin. The coins were round, with images of animals on them; some from Ephesus also had writing.
Coin of Alyattes of Lydia, showing lion's head, c. 620/10–564/53 BC
Electrum coin of Phanes from Ephesus; at left, stag with text inscription; 625–600 BC
At roughly the same time, and completely independently, China also invented coinage. These coins were bronze, with a standardized spade shape. They were mass-manufactured in the world’s oldest known coin mint, which was located in the state of Zhou, the seat of the (much-reduced in power) Zhou monarch. (Picture from Wikipedia)
It’s interesting that the origin of coinage is not associated with great powers, but, in Anatolia, with states on the edge of a much greater empire, and in China, with a residual kingdom that had lost most of its power in the previous century. It suggests rulers seeking to assert their power in new ways in a context where their actual power faced significant limits.
Coinage came alongside other economic changes in China. Just as the Late Bronze Age Collapse led to the increased use of iron in Western Asia, the fall of the Zhou Dynasty did the same in China.
China's iron manufacturing process differed from Western Asia. Iron requires far higher temperatures to melt than bronze does, and technology in western Asia and Europe could not achieve those heats; they instead relied on melting away all the impurities out of the iron, and then shaping the solid iron via blacksmithing. China, however, had long experience with very high-temperature furnaces for pottery and bronze production, and so developed cast iron, a process of melting iron to mass-produce goods. Cast iron required substantial purification after the initial melting in order to get a good-quality product, and those steps were only developed gradually over the centuries; but its invention enabled large-scale use of iron for agricultural tools, substantially increasing China’s food production. (Bronze had been too valuable to be widely used for everyday tools.) Additional increases to agricultural production during this period came from more widespread use of oxen and water buffalo for plowing; better irrigation; broader cultivation of soybeans; and new varieties of rice and millet.
So political disintegration was accompanied by technological and economic innovation - and also by political innovation. Whereas the Zhou had entrusted certain regions and government functions to particular noble families, the states of Qi (on the Shandong Peninsula in the east) and Chu (in the south, between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers) became more centralized, with the central government directly controlling appointments of officials and regional governors. Some government appointments also became more merit-based.
Another change in China was increased private trade, as there were now many small states interacting with each other; under the Zhou, trade had been managed by the state as a ritual of gift and tribute. Road and canal networks were expanded, because efficient transportation was an asset in warfare; but this also facilitated commerce.
Expansion of trade likewise occurred in other areas of the world. Two examples where inter-regional trade in luxuries enhanced the power of new elites were Saba in Yemen, source of frankincense, and Hallstatt in Austria, source of salt.
Our earliest records of the state of Saba date from the 700s BC. It had a large walled capital, Marib; a written script derived from the Phoenician one; and a large dam to control and channel the waters from monsoon rains and use them for agricultural irrigation. Frankincense, used in religious rituals, was immensely valuable and brought Saba wealth, being trade to the rest of western Asia via camel caravans through the desert. Saba was likely the country referred to as Sheba in the Biblical story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. If Solomon was a real figure, he would have ruled much earlier, in the 900s BC – but much of the Old Testament was being written in the 600s BC, so it seems probable that the writers projected Saba’s existence back in history.
The wealth of Hallstatt in Austria came from the salt trade with states to the south. Salting was one of the main methods for preserving meat, and Hallstatt had substantial deposits of rock salt that could be mined and sold to other peoples across Europe. Hallstatt's people became wealthy off the salt trade: they had bronze and even gold goods buried with them, as well as amber from the Baltic and finely-made pottery and glass.
By the end of the century trade links went all across Europe: in addition to trade with Hallstatt, Greeks had a trading colony at Marseilles, receiving furs and food in return for artisanal goods and wine, and the Phoenicians continued to obtain silver from their colonies in Spain. Concentration of power increased even in more northerly regions, with chiefdoms setting up small realms in Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia.
Mining, and substantial cave exploration, was also taking place in the Appalachian Mountains of North America, where Indigenous people at Salts Cave mined for gypsum and medicinal sulphates. South of there, regional trade in luxury goods had a wide reach in Mesoamerica. The influence of the Olmecs, based on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, stretched northwest to near present-day Mexico City to and east to El Salvador and Honduras. Honduras was the principal source of the Olmecs’ jade, a substance as much valued by them as gold was in Eurasia.
An even more important development in 600s BC Mesoamerica was the invention of writing and of the Mesoamerican calendar. (There is considerable debate on the topic; this is one of the commonly-proposed scenarios, but not the only one.) The writing and the calendar are seen from the same source: a temple stone inscribed with “1-Earthquake” at the Zapotec site of San José Mogote. This is the name of a day in the Mesoamerican 260-day ritual calendar, which was combined with a 365-day solar calendar. People were also named for these days, and in this case the writing is likely the name of a person. Around the end of the 600s BC, San José Mogote faced an attack from a rival city-state in which its temple was burned down. When the temple was rebuilt shortly after, the threshold stone was inscribed with an image of a disembowelled man, along with the glyphs “1-Earthquake” – possibly the name a captured enemy killed in retaliation for the earlier attack.
And speaking of warfare, we’ll wrap up this week with Assyria. The course of political and military history in Western Asia during the 600s BC is something of a circle: it begins with the Assyrian sack of Babylon in 689 BC and ends with the Babylonians sacking the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BC and replacing Assyria as the dominant empire in the region. In between these two events Assyria reached its greatest height of power, conquering Egypt from the Napatans in 671 BC. This may, however, have been an overextension and the beginning of the end for Assyrian power: there were multiple assassination attempts on the Assyrian king Esarhaddon in the same year, and he retaliated with a purge of the nobility. Assyria was never able to hold on to Egypt long despite several follow-up invasions and sackings, and ultimately had to give up. Not long after they finally gave up on Egypt, Babylonia rebelled; the Assyrians subjected it to a devastating siege, and followed it up by sacking Susa, the capital of Babylon’s ally Elam.
The Babylonians, who had never accepted Assyrian rule quietly over more than a century of repeated conquests, rallied and over the period 627-612 BC launched a massive war with Assyria that ultimately destroyed it. In this they had as allies the Medes, a non-state people of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran who had repeatedly clashed with the Assyrians, and united in a tribal confederation for the purposes of the war. The Mede and Babylonian sack of Nineveh was as brutal and as complete as the Assyrian sack of Babylon. It spelled a final end to what has been called the world’s first empire – but the age of ancient empires was only beginning.
Next week will be a summary of what we’ve already covered and a look forward to what’s coming.
