World History in a Year (Week 25): 500s BC
The 500s BC saw Axial Age developments in religion and philosophy in Western Asia, Greece, and India, and continuing political and economic changes in China. Another major change was the start of iron production in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
I’m going to start with Western Asia, because many of the things that happened there had knock-on effects for other regions. Babylon (having defeated Assyria in the late 600s BC) was the dominant power in the region until the mid-500s BC – it never conquered Egypt, but aside from that it controlled roughly the same territory as Assyria had, from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. In 587 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II conquered the kingdom of Judah and deported its people. This is a key event in the history of religion, because up until this point the religions of ancient states were generally strongly tied to a particular location and ruling structure. For the Jewish people to maintain their religion without a king, without their territory, and without temples, was unprecedented and showed a new form of religion: one focused on a religious text and moral precepts, adhering to a single god who was not geographically limited, and sustained by religious practice as a community. This change did not cease to be important when the Persian emperor Cyrus allowed the return of the Jews to Judea and the rebuilding of the temple.
Persia (also called the Achaemenid Empire to distinguish it from later Persian empires) replaced Babylon as the dominant Western Asian power in the second half of the 500s BC – but to a much greater extent. Its first emperor, Cyrus, took the throne in 559 BC, ruling a small part of southwest Iran; over the next 20 years he conquered a large part of central Asia, the Babylonian Empire as far as the Mediterranean, and most of Anatolia. (The main power in western Anatolia had been Lydia, ruled by Croesus; apocryphally, he went to war with Cyrus on the basis of an oracle telling him that if he did he would “destroy a great empire”, and realized too late that the empire in question was his own).
Cyrus’ successor, Cambyses, continued Persia’s expansion by conquering Egypt. Following a power struggle, a usurper, Darius I, took power. He extended Persia’s borders to include northeast Greece in the west, the Indus Valley in the southeast, and most of present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the northeast. The Persian Empire at the end of 500s BC (seen outlined in red in the map below) was by far the largest empire the world of the time had ever seen. (If it existed in the present day, it would be the 7th-largest country.) The conquest of the Phoenicians by Persia left the Phoenician maritime colonies in the central and western Mediterranean in the hands of Carthage: not a peer of Persia, but a substantial power in the Mediterranean. Carthaginian territories are outlined in orange on the map.
Persia’s extensive system of roads with regular places for resting and changing horses, though constructed for military and administrative purposes, facilitated inter-regional overland trade on an expanded scale. The increased use of horseback riding generally (for travel as well as combat) was itself important to this, and relatively new to Western Asia, where it was in the process of replacing chariots. The Persian messengers were the subject of the famous line (by Herodotus, in the next century), “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
The Persian Empire’s religion was Zoroastrianism (or Mazdaism if you want to hair-split). There is no agreement on when the religion and its eponymous founder Zoroaster date from. Estimates range from the 1500s BC to 500s BC, which is deeply unhelpful – like estimating that a given event in Britain happened “sometime between the Norman Conquest and WWII”. But the Persian Empire is when it started to have a major impact. Zoroastrianism believed there were two deities, representing good and evil (or order and disorder), the good one being named Ahura Mazda. The choices of humans could aid one side or the other in this cosmic conflict. Like Judaism, this was a religion whose god had global, not regionally limited, scope, and that made ethical claims – it was about good and evil, right and wrong. Zoroastrianism was not exclusive, however, and the Persians practised religious toleration.
The identification of good with order had obvious convenience for an empire. While Persia still very much used force and conquest and exacted tribute, its art, architecture and propaganda tended towards an emphasis on cosmopolitanism and unity between many peoples, in contrast to Assyria's emphasis on brute force and terror. The foundation of the ancient world's imperial age lay in learning that force and fear alone weren’t enough to maintain control of a vast area; identity and ideology were needed.
Other major developments were occurring on Persia’s eastern and western borders, in India and Greece. In India’s Ganges Valley numerous small states called janapadas were established – the first states in India for over a millennium, since the collapse of Harappa. Through warfare, these were reduced over the course of the century to 16 larger states called mahajanapadas (‘great states’, roughly), with about 4-5 being the most powerful. Some of these states were monarchies, like the kingdom of Magadha. Others, like Vriji, were sanghas, or confederations of many different tribes ruled by aristocratic assemblies; some sources call them republics, while others dispute the term. Indian state formation, and conquest of smaller states by larger ones, was thus occurring prior to contact with Persia, rather than being a result of this contact. However, contact with Persia did have important impacts on India – in particular, Indian writing (dating from the late 500s or early 400s BC) is derived from the Persian script.
India began a religious transformation at the same time as its political transformation. The Upanishads are Hindu religious-philosophical texts. (From this point on I'm going to use 'Hindu' rather than 'Vedic' for simplicity, though some of the major elements of later Hinduism have yet to develop. A second clarification is that while I say ‘texts’, their initial form at this point would have been oral.) The dates of their composition are very debated, and occurred over multiple centuries – some of my sources give a range of 1000-500 BC or 750-500 BC, but the ones with a more specialized focus on Indian religion tend towards the 500s BC and after. The setting depicted in the Upanishads fits with the world of states and cities that developed in the 500s BC better than it does with earlier periods. But there were many Upanishads, written over a long period. I will only discuss a couple of them; and although I discuss them in this post and Buddhism and Jainism in next week’s on the 400s BC, I’m not clear on how much agreement there is on which came first.
The Chhandogya Upanishad, written as a discussion between a father and his arrogant young Brahim-trained son, cast doubt on the sufficiency of Vedic ritual, and presented a more expansive view of knowledge and learning that went beyond memorization. This was part of the broader Axial Age critique of ritual. It also shows that the branches of study had broadened by this time, mentioning mathematics, grammar, astronomy, dialectics, chronology, and military science.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad was of even greater significance. It was written as a philosophical debate between many characters (a style that would, in a parallel development, also be used in later Axial writings in Greece and China). It presented the idea that people were reincarnated, and that the quality of one’s reincarnation depended on their actions in life. And it concluded that the greatest happiness comes from the renunciation of all desire and all property and family ties, becoming a wandering beggar. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism would all have renunciates of this sort (wandering beggar-philosophers), though the lifestyle wasn’t as central to Hinduism as to the others and Hindu philosophers differed in their views on it.
India, Greece, and China now all contained numerous small states competing and fighting with each other. This seems to have been an important contributor to the Axial age. Rapid change and disruption, and frequent violence, led people to think about how society could be better. Competition between small states meant that no single view prevailed. Rulers could seek new ideas to gain an advantage; scholars and philosophers could advocate their views to different rulers; people could look at states around them and think about different ways of life and governance, and which ones they preferred. All of this combined with much more widespread literacy than in previous periods, which facilitated discussion and debate on ideas. At the same time, the rise of currency and expansion of commerce meant that people could gain social prominence and wealth by trade rather than inheritance or military prowess, creating new social classes and raising new questions about what constituted worthwhile pursuits, a meaningful life, or meritorious activities, and how social status ought to be earned.
Greece, like India, had states with various different forms of governments. Some were ruled by tyrants (specifically meaning individuals who seized power and ruled autocratically, against earlier community traditions). Others were oligarchies. Sparta was an outlier where the vast majority of the population was enslaved. In the early 500s BC Solon of Athens reformed the Athenian political system to reduce political and economic inequality, though Athens was not yet a democracy. Across the Adriatic, Rome became a republic in 509 BC.
Another Axial commonality between India and Greece was the emergence of the idea of individual spiritual fulfillment as an aim of life. Whereas in India this produced renunciates, in Greece an early manifestation was the rise of "mystery cults” founded by charismatic leaders, that promised both spiritual fulfillment and magical powers through secret rituals. The most famous of these was the one led by Pythagoras.
Western Asia was an important influence on Greece, both economically and philosophically. Economically, coinage, invented in Anatolia in the previous century, reached Greece now. Athens minted its first coins in the late 500s BC. The earliest Greek philosophers were from Asia, specifically Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Miletus (before the Persian conquest) and Heraclitus of Ephesus (after the Persian conquest). They presented views on topics ranging from geometry, astronomy, and theology, to what substance was the base material for everything else (Thales said water, Anaximenes said air, Heraclitus said fire.)
China, like India and Greece, was made up of many small warring and competing states. Unlike India and Greece all the Chinese states appear to have functionally been monarchies – the political system of the Zhou Dynasty had been fragmented but not destroyed, whereas India and Greece had reestablished state systems after centuries without them.
The main changes in China in the 500s BC were political and economic. Politically, more Chinese states increased centralization of power by the king directly appointing regional governors and officials rather than entrusting the positions to aristocratic families. Economically, the system of landholding likewise shifted from one of rulers granting land to nobles to one of buying and selling land and paying taxes to the ruler. Both these things empowered a new ‘gentry’ class (shi), below the aristocracy but with the money to purchase land and the education to gain appointment to governmental and military positions. In terms of philosophy, Confucius was born in 551 BC; but since his main philosophical activity was during and after his 50s, we’ll discuss him next week.
The Oaxaca region of Mesoamerica was also home to multiple small warring states during this period, but they were much smaller: San José Mogote, at its height, had a population of around 1,300, and had several rivals in the region. In Olmec areas, the city of Tres Zapotes either displaced or coexisted with La Venta. Chalcatzingo was the main city in the basin of Mexico to the north. And some sources have the earliest Mayan monumental temple being built in this century, at Nakbé in Guatemala.
Finally, a major change occurred in multiple different regions of sub-Saharan Africa in the 500s BC: the use of iron. Iron smelting in the state of Meroe in Sudan dates from this time, as does iron smelting by the Nok culture in Nigeria and, by the end of the century, possibly iron smelting in Tanzania as well. The Nok culture in Nigeria also created distinctive terra-cotta sculptures of people, particularly of heads and faces (see photos below, from Wikipedia).
Around the same period, not far away, different clusters of villages along the Niger River specialized in different craft products and traded with each other. One village cluster might be ironworkers, another ceramic artists, another leatherworkers. Analysis of Nok ceramics show the clay all had similar chemical characteristics and thus likely came from one single location, which would be consistent with this development.
There has been heated debate about whether iron production in sub-Saharan Africa was invented independently, or if the knowledge came from outside. For Meroë, the latter could be the case: the earlier Sudanian state of Napata had ruled Egypt in the 700s BC, and Egypt had iron. For Nigeria, the evidence tends towards independent invention, as archaeological remains show people trying out multiple different smelting methods and furnace types. Some historians have claimed Nigeria learned of iron smelting from Carthage, but no clear connection has been demonstrated.
Iron production may additionally have begun in Southeast Asia by the end of the 500s BC, making it now widespread across much of the eastern hemisphere.
