Author: Daan Nijssen

In the late 24th century BC Sargon of Akkad conquered all Sumerian city states and established his Semitic kinsmen as governors over them, thus creating the first multiethnic state. Sargon then set out on a series of conquest that would bring him to the edges of the known world and win him the reputation of an unrivaled world conquering hero. Although his empire was shortlived, Sargon established the Akkadian language and culture as a dominant presence in the Near East for millennia to come and Near Eastern kings up until the time of Alexander the Great tried to emulate his conquests. Although Sargon started a new imperial tradition, he did not exist in a vacuum. Therefore, let us look at the historical context and see which factors gave rise to the phenomenon known as the Akkadian Empire.

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The nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes have always fascinated me. Although these nomads have maintained a relatively primitive lifestyle up until the nineteenth century, they have also given rise to many of history’s largest land empires. Despite the fact that the Eurasian steppes were seen by many as the edge of the civilized world, many prominent peoples in history – most noticeable the Indo-Iranians and the Turks – have migrated from there. What exactly makes these ‘primitive’ peoples from these ‘desolate wastelands’ so successful? This question has consumed anthropologists for decades. The successes of these nomads seem to defy the notion that only economically complex societies can form states and empires. Luckily, there has been a movement among anthropologists dedicated to studying these nomadic societies, in order to find out in which ways these economically simple societies may evolve to a high level of political complexity. Their findings have been published in a bundle titled Nomadic Pathway in Social Evolution (2003).

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A few days ago I discussed Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. In that article I proposed the hypothesis that Caesar modeled himself after Alexander the Great in his ambitions to be a world conquering hero. Alexander was not the first world conquering hero, however, since he himself explicitly tried to model himself after the Persian kings. The Persian kings, in turn, modeled themselves after their Babylonian and Assyrian predecessors. Ever since the reign of Sargon of Akkad (2334-2279 BC), Mesopotamian kings tried to present themselves as world conquering heroes who, with the help of the gods, established their righteous rule over the earth. Like Julius Caesar, these Assyrian and Babylonian kings issued yearly reports of their campaigns, in which they recorded their victories and other impressive deeds. Since Assyrian kings did not have to deal with pesky senators who thought absolute monarchy was a bad idea, they could be very explicit and in-your-face with their ambitions of world conquest. They also didn’t use the neutral sounding third person, but made sure that they used the first person wherever possible. One of the most interesting and best preserved Assyrian royal inscriptions is Sennacherib’s Taylor Prism.

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Most written accounts of historical events are based on information from oral tradition. Whether we are dealing with early reports or historiographical works written centuries after the events, the information was spread by word of mouth before it reached the author. For this reason alone historians should familiarize themselves with the ways in which oral tradition preserves and transmits memories of historical events. In order to judge the reliability of a source, one should always try to reconstruct the way by which the information reached the author, for even the most objective narrator is only as reliable as his most reliable sources. Despite the importance of oral tradition in history, a truly systematic study of oral tradition started relatively late. One of the founding fathers of this systematic study is the Belgian anthropologist Jan Vansina, whose Oral Tradition as History (1985) is still authoritive to this day.

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Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars – the Commentarii de Bello Gallico – are one of the most accessible Latin texts. Because of it’s clear prose, straightforward message and lack of complex poetic constructions, it is often used as a practice text for students of Latin. This, in turn, has made the Roman conquest of Gaul one of the most widely known episodes in Roman history. Moreover, it has given schoolchildren of all times the chance to read the work of one of history’s greatest generals: Julius Caesar. Whether you love him or hate him, Caesar certainly was a talented writer in addition to being a great general. He managed to captivate the people of Rome with his commentaries on the Gallic Wars, which contributed greatly to his political success. It is therefore of great importance to understand the political context of his work.

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The transition to agriculture is perhaps the most pervasive change in human history. The agricultural revolution allowed mankind to settle down, to grow in number and to develop various crafts that were not directly related to the collection of food. This in turn led to the rise of cities and states that could effectively rule millions of people. Because the sedentary agricultural people had many advantages over the nomadic hunter-gatherers, their way of life came to dominate the world. From 9000 BC onward, farming spread slowly and steadily across the world. However, the agricultural revolution was not always a smooth one-way process, as this research by Gulio Lucarini illustrates. In fact, the benefits of agriculture were not always as obvious as they appear to us now and in some regions the agricultural revolution even met with resistance.

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According to the Gospel of Matthew, wise men from the east visited Jesus shortly after his birth. Having followed a star that signified the savior’s birth, they had come to worship the new king and to bring gifts in the form of myrrh, frankincense and gold. This episode in the Nativity story has baffled many people ever since. Because Matthew doesn’t give a lot of background information on these wise men and the reasons of their visit, the narrative has been subject to many different interpretations. However, with today’s knowledge of Ancient Near Eastern cultures, we might just be able to understand this episode a little better.

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About two centuries ago linguists became increasingly aware of the similarities between the European and South Asian languages. They concluded that these languages must have had a common ancestor. The question who the speakers of this proto-language were, from which Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and many others were descended, has concerned scholars ever since.  Unfortunately, the search for these proto-Indo-Europeans has had some destructive side effects in modern history, including the racial doctrines of the nazi’s. Nevertheless, despite all the pseudo-scientific and racialist ideas that this subject has inspired, there has been a lot of quality research on the proto-Indo-Europeans as well in recent decades. One of the most distinguished post-WWII scholars of Indo-European studies is James Patrick Mallory, who has spent most of his career trying to find the proto-Indo-European homeland and to reconstruct the migration patterns of their descendants. The conclusions of his investigations have been published in his monograph In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989).

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In ancient times the steppes of Central Asia were home to numerous tribal federations. Since the proto-Indo-Europeans had first domesticated the horse around 4000 BC and started using it for warfare, a new way of life had originated on the plains of southern Russia. Originally, this way of life was restricted to Indo-European speaking peoples, but somewhere during the first millennium BC the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic tribes north of China started adopting this lifestyle as well. They soon became masters of equestrian warfare and formed a mighty tribal federation known as the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu were probably the most succesful and longest lived tribal federation in history, changing shape, homeland, and names over the course of centuries. Beside Xiongnu, these tribes were known as Chionites, Hephtalites, Huna, and Huns. Who were these people?

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Ancient China has an incredibly rich historiographical tradition that is nearly as vast and complex as that of the Greeks. At the basis of this tradition lay Sima Qian’s ‘Records of the Grand Historian’, a monumental work on China’s history that spans the period between the reign of the mythical Yellow Emperor and that of the Han emperor Wu, Sima Qian’s contemporary. Sima Qian has been called the Chinese Herodotus, which at first glance seems to be a textbook example of the Eurocentric tendency to compare great eastern people to their western counterparts, but there are indeed some significant similarities between the two. Nevertheless, Sima Qian’s magnum opus – the Records of the Grand Historian, has a lot of unique Chinese characteristics as well.

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