It is a challenge to avoid teleology, writing history as if its outcome was known all along. Historians are bad prophets but good at prophesying the future when they already know what happened. But historians are often not so much chroniclers of the past or seers of the future as simply mirrors of their own present. The only way to understand the past is to shake off the present: our job is to seek what facts we can to chronicle the lives of earlier generations – high and low and as broad as the world – using everything we know.
A world historian, wrote al-Masudi in ninth-century Baghdad, is like ‘a man who, having found pearls of all kinds and colours, gathers them together into a necklace and makes them into an ornament that its possessor guards with great care’. That is the kind of world history I want to write.
The familial footsteps on Happisburgh beach were rapidly destroyed by the tides – but it would be several hundreds of thousands of years before the beginning of what we call history.
ACT ONE
WORLD POPULATION:
70,000 BC: 150,000
10,000 BC: 4 million
5000 BC: 5 million
2000 BC: 27 million
1000 BC: 50 million
Houses of Sargon and Ahmose: Ziggurats and Pyramids
POETESS, PRINCESS, VICTIM, AVENGER: ENHEDUANNA
Four thousand years ago, Enheduanna was at the height of her splendour when a raider invading the empire attacked her city, seized her and evidently raped her. Not only did she survive but she was restored to power – and recovered by writing about her ordeal. Enheduanna was the first woman whose words we can hear, the first named author, male or female, the first victim of sexual abuse who wrote about her experiences, and a female member of the first dynasty whom we can know as individuals. She was as privileged as you can get in the 2200s BC – a princess of the Akkadian empire (based in Iraq), high priestess of the moon goddess and favourite daughter of the first conqueror that we know of: Sargon. But like every empire, it all depended on power and violence – and when the empire tottered it was she, a woman, who endured that downfall in the form of sexual violence.
She was probably in her thirties, politically experienced as the long-serving high priestess of the moon goddess Nanna or Sin, and potentate of the city of Ur, but still young enough to bear children. Brought up at the court of her father, Sargon, king of the Four Quarters of the World, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, daughter of his favourite queen Tashlultum, she believed passionately in her patron goddess but she also enjoyed the luxury of royalty: she appears on a disk wearing a fluted robe and cap and tightly plaited hair, performing a ritual at her temple. She presided over a huge staff – as testified by the seals of ‘Adda, estate manager of Enheduanna’ and ‘Sagadu the scribe’ – but fashion and hairstyle were also important: one seal reads ‘Ilum Palilis hairdresser of Enheduanna child of Sargon’. In her temple complex, Enheduanna had her hair plaited by Ilum Palilis – the first named fashionista in history – as she dictated orders to Sagadu about her estates, the temple herds and her poetry. Her hymns praised the goddess – ‘when she speaks heaven shakes’ – and of course her father, ‘my King’. But then some time after his death, when his sons and grandsons struggled to hold the empire together, a raider, or a rebel known as Lugal (king), launched a coup and somehow seized the princess-priestess-poetess herself. Possessing her won him the prestige of Sargon the Great; if he could father a child by her, he might found a dynasty, ennobled by the blood of Sargon. Enheduanna knew what she faced: ‘Oh moon god Sin, is this Lugal my destiny?’ she wrote. ‘Tell heaven to set me free of it!’ It sounds as if she was raped by this upstart: ‘That man has defiled the rites decreed by holy heaven … Forcing his way in as if he was an equal, he dared approach me in his lust.’ She remembered it viscerally as any woman would: ‘a slobbery hand was laid across my honeyed mouth’. And he removed her from her beloved temple: ‘When Lugal stood paramount, he expelled me from the temple, flying out of the window like a swallow.’
But she was lucky: the empire struck back. Her brother or nephew routed Lugal and reconquered the Akkadian empire, thus liberating Enheduanna and restoring her as high priestess. How did she grieve for her pain and celebrate her survival? She did what writers do: she wrote. And she wrote proudly: ‘I am Enheduanna, let me speak to you! My prayer, my tears flowing like some sweet intoxicant. I went towards the shade. It shrouded me in swirling dust.’
The exact date and precise details of this episode are obscure but we know she existed and we know her words: in her survival as a woman, not to speak of her record as author and ruler, she represents the experience of women throughout history, as ruler, writer, victim, whose survival she herself celebrates unforgettably as a goddess ‘in a queenly robe … riding on leashed lions’, slashing ‘her enemies to pieces’ – quite an image and a voice both astonishingly modern and very much of the twenty-third century BC.
Enheduanna lived a long time ago, yet the human family was already very old in her time. It probably started in Africa. We do not know how exactly humans evolved and we probably never shall. All we know is that all humans were originally Africans, that the nurturing of children required teams that we call families and that the story of humanity from the beginning to the twenty-first century AD is an invincibly exciting and complicated drama. Historians have long debated when history began.* It is easy to point to footprints, chiselled tools, dusty walls and bone fragments, but for the purposes of this book history started when war, food and writing coalesced to allow a potentate, usually a male one like Sargon but sometimes a female like Enheduanna, to harness power and promote his or her children in order to keep it.
Seven to ten million years ago, while our planet, itself four to five billion years old, was in the grip of ice ages that receded and returned, hominins of a currently unknown genus separated from chimpanzees. By about two million years ago, in east Africa, a creature who walked upright on two feet had evolved. This was Homo erectus, who lasted most of the next two million years – the longest period of human existence – and who lived by foraging and hunting. Soon afterwards, some of these creatures migrated out of Africa into Europe and Asia, where different climates caused them to develop into different branches to which scientists have given Latin names such as antecessor, neanderthalensis and heidelbergensis after the places where their bones were discovered. DNA suggests most were dark-skinned with dark eyes. They already used stone axes. By 500,000 years ago, from South Africa to China, they were hunting large animals and perhaps using fire to cook, and there is evidence of both caring and violence from the start: some disabled individuals lived to a good age, suggesting social care, while on the other hand several skulls found in a northern Spanish cave had head injuries inflicted 430,000 years ago – the first confirmed murders. Some 300,000 years ago, they started to make offsite fires, changing landscapes for the first time, and using wooden spears and traps to hunt large animals.
Hominin brains nearly tripled in size, requiring an ever-richer diet. Larger-headed babies were harder for females to deliver: the tightness of the female pelvis – a compromise between the form necessary to walk upright and that needed to deliver a baby – made childbirth dangerous for both the mother and the baby, a vulnerability that helped shape the family in history. We guess this meant that they needed a group of related people to help raise their babies – and, if correct, these small blood-related communities became the defining unit of human history, the family that we still need today even though we are masters of the planet, dominators of every other species and the creators of remarkable new technologies. Anthropologists love to project that families were a certain size, that men did one task, women another, but all this is guesswork.