A Short Walk through Our Long History: Recent Episodes
Clayton Mills
I think that if you want to understand the world we live in today, it helps to understand the important events of history. In this series, we are going to look at major events, people, documents, places, books, and ideas that have shaped history, and thus shaped our modern world.
Ok, last episode, I talked about how the Declaration of Independence came to be drafted, and I decided that it was really such an important document that I needed to take an extra episode to explain some of the important ideas within the document, and how they shaped our modern world.
I should start by warning you that this episode is a good bit longer than most in this podcast. The Declaration itself is just 1300 words, but there are so many good and important ideas in it, that it’s going to take a while to unpack it. I suggest, also, that if you can, while you listen, have a copy of the Declaration of Independence open to read as we go.
So far in this podcast, it’s been pretty rare that I devoted an entire episode to one person - that’s happened 8 times so, but this will be a first for me. I’m devoting 2 episodes to one document. But like I said, I think you can make a case that the Declaration of Independence is the most important document that humans have ever written. It’s certainly in the running.
But why is it so important? What is it about this document that makes it worthy of considering as one of the most important collections of ideas in all of history?
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Well, it’s 1776. Things are about to happen. We just had the Boston tea party, Patrick Henry’s speech, and the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British have shelled and burned several colonial towns, including Falmouth, Massachusetts and Norfolk, Virginia. These are their own colonies, and they have burned the towns.
The colonies are in open revolt against the British government.
At the end of the last episode, we left colonial Boston chafing under British military rule. Now Boston was a big port, a very important commercial center of New England, but it wasn’t all of New England, and it wasn’t even a very big city. In fact, Boston, at the time, was entirely on one small peninsula of land, in the middle of Boston Harbor. It was connected to the mainland by one small isthmus of land to the south. Nowadays, a lot of the harbor space around Boston has been backfilled, and so the old part of Boston isn’t quite as isolated as it was back in the colonial days.
But back in 1774, it was pretty easy for the British to cut off Boston harbor and cut off the city of Boston from the rest of Massachusetts. And after the Tea Party, the redcoats fully imposed martial law. There was a strict curfew, and restrictions on gatherings and crowds. But there was still an underground network of patriots, meeting secretly, and making plans. And they had spies amongst the British loyalists.
Things in Boston are about to get really dicey. In this episode, we’re going to look at several events that happened in Boston starting in about 1770 that all are part of the buildup of tension that leads to the beginning of the American Revolution.
Last episode we talked about the French and Indian war, and how that was part of the larger 7 Years’ War that Great Britain fought with the French and Spanish. Though Great Britain was the clear winner of that war, the British government did end up in a great deal of debt, and so, they did what governments always do - they raised taxes. If you’re a government, that’s just what you do. And of course, no one likes it.
In this episode, we’re going to look at a world changing war, that was started by an small Indian and colonial raid on a French patrol. That Indian raid included a few members of the Virginia Militia, including a 22 year old Lieutenant colonel named George Washington. This little raid was later described as “the volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America that set the world on fire.”
Well, last episode we surveyed the 13 original colonies, as they were at the start of the 1700’s. And as I mentioned, a lot happens in the 1700’s. And as I mentioned 2 episodes ago, one of the things that was happening at this time in Europe was the Enlightenment, which was in full swing by the 1700’s.
Anyway, the Enlightenment had a unique expression in America. The Enlightenment had a big effect in Europe, but its expression in the colonies was different. Like I said last episode, the group of people who had migrated to the American colonies was a fairly well-educated group to begin with - the first generation was usually someone who had been educated in England, and had been strongly influenced by both Reformation and Enlightenment thinking. The ideas of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, especially the idea of liberty of conscience, were part of reasons why people emigrated to the Americas in the first place
Well, buckle your podcast seatbelts, because we are getting to a point where a lot of stuff happens in a really short time. Welcome to the 1700’s! If you ask the question, which century ‘shaped our modern world’ the most, I think I might pick the 1700’s. A lot of influential stuff happened in the 1700’s.
So as we start this crucial century, I thought I should set the stage by talking about the state of the 13 English Colonies in the New World. But before I get to them, I should mention what else is going on in the New World, besides the English colonies. The English colonies were all on the Atlantic coast, from what is now Maine down to the Florida Georgia line.
Ok, I need to step back for an episode, and step away from the narrative of the English colonies in North America, which I really want to talk about, and instead spend a bit of time talking about one of the most important intellectual parts of the early modern era, because this whole intellectual trend really influences everything that happens in the next few episodes. It’s really the ideas of the Enlightenment that drive the whole Modern era, actually. The Enlightenment is every bit as important as the Renaissance or Reformation, historically, and it’s more important in terms of shaping the ideas, values, and society of the Modern Era.
So that brings up the obvious question of, ‘What is the Enlightenment, anyway?’ And why is it called that? What lights came on? Another term that is used to describe this era is ‘The Age of Reason,’ which seems a little cocky to me, like the people before this era had not been reasonable, or not using their brains or something. The Greeks and the Romans had themselves made a big deal of Reason, and using Reason to explore truth and how things worked. But something did change in the 1700’s. Well, several things. And we’ll look at some of them this episode.
One of the things you might have noticed in the past few episodes, besides the fact that we were jumping around in time a bit, was that we actually got a bit into the 1500’s. For example, the High Renaissance ended in 1520, with the death of Raphael.
An anyone with any sense of history at all knows that by getting into the 1500’s, we have missed one of the most historic dates of all time, 1492. Famous and infamous, but no doubt, one of the most important dates in history.
But before we get to Columbus sailing the ocean blue, there were some other, previous explorations by people from other countries. First of all, we have to acknowledge that the Viking explorers, like Lief Ericson, had actually sailed to the New World around 500 years earlier, right around 1000 AD, but that information had just never reached the overall consciousness of Europe, and after the Vikings, no one explored that way.
OK, so in my original plan for the flow of the podcast, I wasn’t going to talk about the Hundred Years War, but the more I looked at what was going on in European History, the more I felt like it was worth talking about. Why? Well, the hundred years war happened at a crucial time, it was kind of the last thing that happened before the Renaissance spread to England and France and really set the stage for those two countries to have their own Renaissances, and it set the stage for the Reformation to spread to England (though not France), it kind of marked the end of feudalism (kind of) in England and France, and it basically established the boundaries and monarchies of modern England and France. Plus it had Joan of Arc, the Battle of Agincourt, and the first use of modern artillery in a battle! Spoiler - the side with the artillery won.
Well, I was going to try to squeeze Gutenberg into the last episode, since he actually lived before the High Renaissance, and his invention kind of fit into the ethos of talking about the high points of the Renaissance. But there was just too much to cover in one episode, plus Gutenberg really does deserve his own episode.
The TV channel A&E did a countdown, back in 1999, just before the new millennium began, and it counted down the most important people of the last 1000 years - so the period from AD 1000 to AD 1999. They surveyed a bunch of history experts and professors to come up with the list. It’s kind of an interesting list, and is still out there on the internet. Coming in at the number 2 most important person of that millennium is Martin Luther, who we will get to in a couple of episodes. But coming in at number one was Johannes Gutenberg.
Ok, here we are. The High Renaissance. Lots of great stuff happened during the Renaissance, but there was one particular period, about 35 years, where some of the greatest art in all of human history was made. And I’m just going to say up front, that for this episode, you really do have to go to the podcast website and look at the art yourself. I mean, I can describe Michelangelo’s David statue, or you can look at a picture of. It’s far too visual an episode for just a podcast. The website is ‘shortwalkthroughhistory.com,’ and all the images I’m going to talk about are in the post for this episode.
Also, I mentioned at the end of the last episode that I was going to talk about Gutenberg in this episode, but this episode was already getting kind of long, even without him, so I’m going to have to move him to a separate episode, after this one.
It’s hard to overstate how important the Renaissance was. It’s kind of one of the highest high points of all of human history. I mean, there are Renaissance faires all over the US, including one in Texas that starts next week. Fortuitous timing, that. But there’s not really faires for other stuff - there’s no ‘Reformation faire,’ nor an ‘Enlightenment Faire.’ There’s definitely not any ‘Dark Ages Faires.’ It’s because the Renaissance was a good time. It was a time when Europe began to rediscover some of the good things that had been lost since the Roman Empire.
Polo!
Yes, in this episode, I’m starting with Marco Polo. There’s not a lot of people who I have looked at over the course of this podcast where I say, ‘Man, I would have liked to have had his life,’ but Marco Polo is someone whose life sounds pretty awesome. Not free of hardship, but whose life is? Anyway, his life was pretty epic. Also, he seems like a pretty good guy, despite being hard to find in a pool.
We’ve already talked about a lot of galloping hordes in this podcast, including the Goths, the Huns, and the Vikings. But there is one tribe that outstrips them all, and even outstrips the Roman Empire in terms of sheer territory conquered. In fact, this tribe conquered and ruled the largest territory in the entire history of the world. Yes, I’m talking about Genghis Khan and the Mongols.
Ok, I know, there’s nothing more eye-rollingly boring than medieval literature, right? Wrong! It’s super interesting, in the stories that are told, and in the development of English as a language, and in the development of the novel as a literary genre. Did you read Harry Potter? Those were good novels, right? Both the concept of a novel, and also some of the cool things in Harry Potter, like wizards, hippogriffs, magic wands, magic potions - a lot of these ideas come from medieval literature.
Before I get into talking about medieval literature, I need to take a side trip into very modern literature: the internet. More specifically, the brand-new Short Walk through our Long History WEBSITE! Yep, go to Shortwalkthroughhistory.com, and you will find our new website.
You probably have heard of Prince William and his wife Kate. You might have heard of their official titles, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Or William’s dad, Prince Charles. He’s the Prince of Wales. Have you ever wondered where these titles come from? I mean, William and Kate don’t own the city of Cambridge or anything, do they? Is Prince Charles in charge of Wales in some way? I mean, the British territory of Wales, not the sea-dwelling mammal. He’s definitely not in charge of those.
Where do these titles, and other titles like Duke, Viscount, Baron, Marquis, Earl, Lord, and Count, actually come from?
They come from Feudalism, that’s where they come from. But where does feudalism come from, you may well ask. It’s a good question, and definitely important in the Medieval period, because feudalism basically describes the entire economic, political, religious, and social fabric of most of Europe during the Middle Ages, and into the modern world.
Last episode, we talked about the Charles the Hammer and his son Charlemagne, and the Carolingian renaissance in France and western Europe. After Charley and Charley were gone, though, Europe settled back into a period of relative darkness, without much central control. There wasn’t really one dominant power in any part of Europe, and partly because of this, the Dark Ages was a time when a lot of different groups were moving to new places in Europe, conquering and being conquered. Some of these tribes, the sea-borne ones, were known as Vikings.
Last episode, we talked about the rise of Islam, and how it swept over the Middle East, Central Asia, and across North Africa. And I mentioned that the Islamic Caliphate, which was controlled by the Umayyad dynasty at that time, conquered Spain, and pushed their way up into France.
In 732, however, in France, the Caliphate ran into a Frankish king with one of the greatest nicknames of all time: Charles the Hammer.
Ok, so Europe was reeling from the volcanic winter of 536, and then the subsequent Plague of Justinian in 541, and it was beginning to descend into the Dark Ages. But nearby, in the Arabian Peninsula, things were just about to get really busy.
In AD 570, in the small desert town of Mecca, a boy was born into the Arab tribe of Quraysh, the tribe that controlled Mecca. This boy was named Muhammad ibn Abdullah, which means, Muhammad, the son of Abdullah. But his father, Abdullah, died very shortly after Muhammad was born, and his mother, Amina, died when he was 6. So he was raised by his uncle, his father’s brother, Abu Talib.
Before we get fully into the Middle Ages, and all the cool barbarian stuff that happens there, like Vikings, let’s take stock of the rest of how the rest of the world was doing in AD 476. Because while we were focused on Rome, there was actually stuff going on in the rest of the world
I’m going to begin this episode with a famous quote from Edward Gibbon, from his massive work, the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness...... The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
It is kind of remarkable that despite all its corruption and all the turmoil, the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did. There are lots of factors in its demise, but Gibbon is right when he points out that it is more surprising that it lasted so long, than it is that it fell. Like I said in an earlier episode, Rome was strong as long as it had a good emperor, but Rome didn’t always produce the kind of people who made good emperors.
In the late 200’s while the Roman Empire was struggling with a long series of bad emperors and empire-wide troubles with barbarians, Christianity was spreading all throughout the empire. However, not everyone was happy about this.
From the time that Caesar Augustus took control and turned Rome into an Empire, until about 200 years later, Rome enjoyed a time of unparalleled peace and prosperity. This became know as the Pax Romana - the Roman Peace.
Remember how, a few episodes ago, we left Julius Caesar on the floor of the Senate, in a pool of blood? Well, that’s NOT how we left Jesus at the end of the last episode. It’s a very distinctive claim by his followers - that he did die, but that he rose from the dead.
There’s really no debate that Jesus was one of the most important people in all of history, but there are two ways to look at that. On the one hand, his life, death, and resurrection definitely started one of the world’s largest and most influential religions. Even those who do not claim to be Jesus’ followers are aware of that.
But the other way to look at his life makes him even more significant. Because what he claimed, and what his earliest followers claimed, was that his life, death and especially his resurrection meant that he was the Son of God, and that he had somehow opened the doors of heaven for all of us, not just the Jews, but also all of the nations, so that we could be free from both sin and death. If what they claimed is true, then yes, that’s incredibly significant, much more so than just starting a big religious institution.
In two places in the the New Testament, the Apostle Paul uses the phrase, ‘in the fullness of time,’ to indicate that in some way, the time was ripe for the Messiah to arrive. Paul doesn’t explain what he meant, but I think we can come up with some ideas. We’ll come back to that thought, the idea that the time when Jesus lived was not accidental.
So last episode we left Julius Caesar lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Some in the Senate were very happy about this, but generally speaking, most of Rome liked Caesar, and were not happy about it.
The Senators who assassinated him had a clear picture of what they didn’t want: a tyrant ruling over them. But they did not have a clear picture of what they did want, and they didn’t have anyone ready to step into the vacuum of power that existed after the center of their government - Caesar - was removed. And now much of the city of Rome was mad at the Senate. After a welcome period of peace during the reign of Caesar, everyone knew that now there was going to be more trouble.
We’re about to look at one of the most interesting, most famous people in all of history - Julius Caesar. If you had to choose the 5 most famous people of all time, Caesar might make the list. He’s that famous. Why is he interesting? Look at his resume: conquered gaul, became part of the triumvirate that ruled Rome, wrote books and poems, won lots of amazing battles, invaded Britain, conquered Egypt, had an affair and a child with Cleopatra, took over the Roman republic, adopted his nephew who later became the first emperor, was named dictator for life, then was killed on the Senate floor by his own friends. Then later he had a play written about him by a guy named Shakespeare. He was an amazing general, and he also basically destroyed the Roman Republic, and set the stage for the Roman Empire, but he was a very good dictator, as dictators go. What have you done today? I went to Kroger and bought dog food, so there’s that.
In order to cover Caesar well, I think I’m going to spend this episode not on Caesar, but on the events that lead up to Caesar. Also, the stuff leading up to Caesar is really interesting in itself, and it’s relevant to us today, for a couple of reasons.
Throughout Roman history, from the early days of the republic to the last days of the empire, Rome was threatened by barbarian tribes. They came marching down from northern Europe every couple of hundred years, and occasionally captured and burned Rome. But Rome’s biggest threat was not the barbarians, at least, not until the very end. At the height of the strength of the Roman Republic, Rome faced their most dangerous threat, and also suffered their very worst, and most embarrassing, military defeats. That threat was the city of Carthage, and especially their great general, Hannibal.
When Rome got rid of her last king, an aftereffect was that Rome had a long-lasting hatred of tyrants, and so the government they set up was designed to prevent any one man from taking power.
Not to say that their original government was completely fair and just - at first the government of the Republic was completely run by the patricians. The plebeians were left out. When they got rid of Tarquin the Proud, the Senate just took over running Rome. To be in the Senate, you had to be a patrician. So the Senate was biased towards the patricians, and the plebeians felt left out. That will become a problem in a bit.
OK, I’ve been building up to Rome for basically this whole podcast so far, and now it’s time to finally start talking about it. In this episode, I want to answer the question, ‘Why is Rome so important?’
So we’re back in the mid-500’s BC, and we are back in India, slowly working our way around to talking about the Buddha.
Before I talk about his life though, I think I need to give just a bit of background on the religion and culture of India at the time. So we’re going to talk a little about Hinduism, before we talk about Buddhism. Boy, talk about a couple of topics that are hard to explain. Hinduism and Buddhism? Yeah, clearly not going to really do them justice in a single podcast episode. But Buddhism was a kind of reaction to Hinduism, so it makes sense to explain what the Buddha was reacting to.
The really golden part of the Golden Age of Greece took place in a pretty small area, actually. It took place mostly on the Attic peninsula, and mostly in the city of Athens. But most scholars include the years after Athens was destroyed as part of the Golden Age, the years when Greece was conquered and ruled by the Macedonians, and then Greek culture was spread all over the eastern Mediterranean. The generally accepted end of the Golden Age is the death of Alexander, in 323 BC. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here, we haven’t even really introduced our friend Alexander.
As the battles between Athens and Sparta were going on, oddly enough, some very important philosophical questions were being asked; questions that philosophers and theologians are still talking about to this day. The enigmatic man asking these questions was named Socrates, and though he himself wrote nothing of his own words, it’s quite possible that the only single person who wasn’t a writer himself who was more influential in western history than Socrates was Jesus.
Episode 10 - The Peloponnesian Wars
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.
This is Episode 10 - The Peloponnesian Wars.
The Golden Age of Greece, which we focused on last episode, lasted from around 528 BC to 323 BC, and it was a time of great prosperity in Greece. And that very prosperity brought about some inter-city rivalries, as the city-states of Greece competed for their share, or more than their share, of the riches.
When I say rivalry, what I actually mean is some fairly long brutal, bloody, battles. This wasn’t just a political or economic rivalry, it was armies in the field, destroying each other’s cities and territory.
The two main cities in this war, were of course Athens and Sparta. But the other cities of Greece were basically forced to choose sides. Fighting took place all over Greece, hence the name of the war: The Peloponnesian Wars. The Peloponnese is the name of the lower part of the Greek peninsula - the part that Sparta was on. Athens is on a different peninsula, the Attic peninsula, located across a narrow isthmus, just to the north-east of the Peloponnese. The city of Corinth sits right at the isthmus. Just look it up on a map, for goodness sake. Anyway, Athens and Sparta are only about 150 miles apart by land, so it’s not that surprising that they were rivals.
It’s interesting that during what is considered the Golden Age of Greece, there was this really intense set of battles between the two leading cities. It’s still the Golden Age, and there’s still great art, philosophy, historical writing and literature being created, but there’s also a lot of fighting. Part of that is because even though there was fighting, for most of the war, Athens was not really threatened. The armies were off fighting somewhere else. I say most of the war, because in the end, it does go pretty poorly for Athens, and yes, that was a major interruption in the plays and philosophy and art while the Spartans were assaulting the walls of Athens. Oh, and there was a plague, too. But hey, it’s still the Golden Age, so it’s all good.
Ok, we need to ask the question, why are the Peloponnesian wars important enough to spend a whole episode on them? Well, for one, there’s the fact that Athens was basically destroyed. That’s kind of big. For another, the Peloponnesian wars basically mark the beginning of the end of the era of Greek city-states, because after the wars are over, a weakened Greece is conquered by Macedonia, and rolled up into the kingdom of Philip of Macedon.
Another reason it’s worth talking about is that Thucydides wrote an excellent history of the wars, and his historical work is even better than Herodotus’ work on the Persian wars. Thucydides was a participant in the wars, and so his work is even more timely and accurate.
Speaking of the Persian wars, Greece’s victory over Persia is what sowed the seeds of the Peloponnesian wars. During the war, the independent Greek cities had joined together in what was called the Hellenic League, which was kind of a loose treaty in which all the cities that joined agreed to send soldiers, in exchange for which, that city would be protected by the Hellenic army. You didn’t have to join, but if not, it was just your little city against Xerxes and a million Persians. Hmm, what should we do?
After the Persian wars, Persia never again threatened the Greek mainland, but Persia still was in control of all of Ionia, also called Asia Minor, or modern-day Turkey. The Persians had captured Byzantium, a Greek city, and some of the Hellenic League, including Athens, wanted to take it back. The Spartans, however, proposed that they just leave Asia Minor in the hands of the Persians, and that they all go home. Athens strongly objected to this, because many of the cities on the coast of Asia Minor were Athenian colonies. Also, Athens itself had been abandoned to the Persians by the Greek land forces, and the Persians had destroyed much of Athens.
The Athenians managed to convince most of the Hellenic league to join them in liberating Byzantium and the other Greek colonies. Sparta was now kind of over a barrel. If they just packed up and left, that would leave Athens as clearly in charge of the Hellenic League, which Sparta definitely did not want to happen. Also, the lead general of the Hellenic land forces was a Spartan, so if they left, they would also leave the army in Athenian hands. So Sparta stayed, and helped the Hellenic league liberate Byzantium. But that was the last time Athens and Sparta would work together.
So while the army was off fighting in Byzantium, back in Athens, the city was being rebuilt. And on of the things that Athens decided to do was to not just rebuild the city wall, but to extend the city walls all the way down to their port city of Piraeus. These walls were called the Long Walls, and they were about 8 miles long, and the Spartans were not at all happy about it.
The Spartans were also not happy with what was going on in the Hellenic army. Their commander, Pausanias, had been accused of carrying on secret negotiations with Xerxes. Now this was probably just a political play, but it was a serious enough accusation that Pausanias was removed as the lead general, and replaced by Xanthippus, an Athenian. The Spartans sent a replacement general, but Xanthippus refused to give up command, so the Spartan army went home. That was the end of the Hellenic League.
Now we’re about to get into a whole series of other leagues, with shifting alliances and cities moving from one league to the other. It’s a bit like the old NFL - AFL days, with a bit of the WFL and USFL thrown in as well. Sorry, millennials, if you don’t understand that reference.
Anyway, Athens responded to the Spartans leaving the league by simply creating a new league, which became known as the Delian League. It was named this because the Greek Island of Delos served as the treasury for the entire league. From the beginning, the league was dominated by its largest and wealthiest member, Athens.
Back in Sparta, not to be outdone, the Spartans formed a league of their own - The Peloponneisan league, made up of basically all the cities on the Peloponnesian peninsula, and also Corinth, which was on the isthmus that connects the peninsula to the rest of Greece. And of course this league was dominated by the Spartans.
The Delian league set about re-capturing islands that had been captured by the Persians, and of course all those ‘liberated’ islands became part of the Delian league too. Not everyone in the Delian league always wanted to do what Athens wanted to do, so at times, Athens was quite forceful and threatening to its own allies.
In 460 BC, the Aegean island of Naxos, not to be confused with the tex-mix island of Nachos, decided it had had enough, and declared itself out of the league, and no longer subject to the league rules and payments. According to Thucydides, they were forced to re-join the league after a siege. Athens also used force on several other Greek cities to keep them in the league. Thucydides said, ‘The Athenians were not the old popular rulers that they had been at first.’
The beginning of the active fighting between Athens and Sparta was in 457 BC. Sparta sent an army into the area of Boetia, which was part of the Delian league. Their pretext was that they were just passing through, on their way to the town of Doris, which was farther to the north, but the Athenians didn’t want them to visit Doris, so they sent out their own army. The Spartans won the battle (no surprise there, ‘Don’t fight the Spartans in a ground battle’ should be one of the two classic blunders). The two armies skirmished in the area for several years, and though the Spartans often won, they usually just left aftewards, and Athen reclaimed the territory.
In 446 BC, so about 11 years later, Athens proposed a peace with Sparta. The treaty was supposed to be for 30 years, so it was called the 30 years peace. Even though it only lasted 14 years.
In 433, a city named Corcyra, which was a Corinthian colony, decided to leave the league, and asked Athens for help. They weren’t technically part of the Peloponnesian league, but still, when Athens sent ships to help them, it was a treat to the peace. Athenian ships ended up fighting with Corinthian ships, and the war was on.
The Spartan army marched into Athenian territory. Many people of the Attic peninsula retreated to Athens, hoping for safety behind the long walls. But there, they ended up finding something worse. In 430 BC, a terrible plague struck Athens. Crowded with refugees, the city was ripe for an epidemic. The plague, plus continued defeats from the Spartans and their allies, severely weakened Athens. The plague even killed the Athenian leader Pericles. Thucydides, the historian, was in Athens at the time, but he survived, and it is his record of the plague that is our best account of what happened. In his own words, it sounds pretty horrible:
…violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes; the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. …. Sneezing and horseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough. The body was reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers. If they passed this stage, the disease descended further into the bowels, inducing a violent ulceration there accompanied by severe diarrhea. This brought on a weakness that was generally fatal.’
No mention of ‘loss of sense of smell,’ though.
But still, yuck. It doesn’t sound like Athens was the place to be in 430.
Meanwhile, the Spartans had been building their own navy, and they put it under the command of an admiral named Lysander. Lysander defeated the Athenian navy several times, and in August of 405, the Spartan navy destroyed 171 Athenian ships in a single battle. Lysander set sail for Athens, and when he got there, the Athenians surrendered. Lysander had the Long Walls destroyed, and he set up a puppet government of 30 Athenian aristocrats, who have gone down in history as simply ‘the 30.’ They were supported by a garrison of Spartan troops. They presided over a bloody purge of anyone who had’t gotten their vaccination, oh, sorry, over anyone who had even the slightest leanings towards democracy. They reportedly had thousands of leading Athenians killed.
Eventually, the Athenians were helped by a force from the Greek city of Thrace, and the Spartans and the 30 all left Athens. But they left Athens in ruins. The Athenians re-instituted their democracy, but they were never again the political or military force they had been in the previous years. Sparta also was damaged by the wars. They had also lost many men, and many of their harvests had been ruined by the soldiers being away from home at harvest time. So supplies were low, and so were the treasuries of the cities.
As a result, many of the Spartan and other Peloponnesian league soldiers left to find work outside of Greece. In fact, right at this time a new king named Cyrus - not Cyrus the Great, he was earlier - was rising in Persia, and he sent out a call for soldiers from the Peloponnese, and many answered his call, because he could pay them.
The combined effect of the weakness of Athens and the exodus of Spartan soldiers left all of the southern part of Greece very vulnerable. That vulnerability will be exploited by Philip of Macedon, but before we get to that story, we need to talk about one of the biggest impacts of the Golden Age of Greece. One of the people who survived the plague, and all the fighting, was a rambling old teacher named Socrates. Next episode, we will look at him, his student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle, who together are easily the most important teacher-student teacher -student trio in all of history.
Episode 9 - Athenian Democracy, and the Golden Age of Greece
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.
This is Episode 9 - Athenian Democracy, and the Golden Age of Greece.
We have talked about the famous battles of the Greek - Persian wars, and how after the huge naval battle at Salamis, the Persians never threatened Greece again. The Battle of Salamis happened on September 27th, 480 BC. There were still a few important land battles in 479 BC, but the Greeks won those as well, and destroyed what was left of the Persian army in Greece. This sets the stage for an era of peace and prosperity in Greece that would be incredibly influential.
As points of reference, just to tie this all in with other things that were happening around this time in other parts of the world, I thought I would mention some other important world events. So 80 years or so before Salamis, off in India, around 563 BC, Buddha was born. Buddhism begins to form as a religion in the years following the Buddha’s death. Buddhism will eventually become one of the world’s largest religions, but it had a small start, as did Christianity. We’ll come back to that in upcoming episodes.
Also about this time, the Jews who had returned from exile in Babylon were re-building their temple, under the guidance of Nehemiah and Ezra.
And also around this time, in 509 BC the Roman Republic was founded. We’ll also come back to the Romans. Lots of important stuff going on in the 5th century BC. By the way, I don’t really like calling these time periods, ‘the 5th century,’ because it just doesn’t match up in a way that I like. Because the 5th century is the 400’s. It’s the time period from 499 BC to 400 BC. And then we have that problem again in the AD’s. It’s because the first century is the zeros and tens, like 49 BC. So I prefer saying, in the 400’s BC, rather than saying the 5th century. It makes more sense to me, even though the historians all like to use ‘5th century.’ For the rest of these episodes, I’m going to stick with the actual numbers, and not use the 4th or 5th century nomenclature.
So in the 400’s BC, a lot of important stuff was going on. But what was also happening was the Golden Age of Greece, which lasts from the reign of Pisistratus, a tyrant who ruled over Athens around 528 BC, until the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC. So right about 200 years. The Golden Age of Greece is also known as the Classical Period, or Classical Greece.
So what made it golden? What made it a classic? Well, there were two ascendent cities during this time, Athens and Sparta. They both were incredibly prosperous, and both laid claim to be the leading city in Greece. They fought several times during this period, and we’ll talk about those battles in the next episode. But what really made this time period unique was all of the stuff going on in Athens during this time. So the Golden Age of Greece is really a mostly Athenian thing, even though Sparta was doing very well during this time also. But all the ‘golden’ stuff came from Athens.
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So in this time period, just to summarize, from Athens, we have Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, and the birth of democracy. All of these have left lasting impacts in politics, philosophy, and literature. And of course that’s not even the full list. There was also beautiful pottery and amazing architecture, including the Parthenon in Athens, which has been described by some as the most perfect building ever built.
So what created this great period of productivity? It was something about the nature of Athens in those days. For one thing, Athens was peaceful and prosperous. It takes both of those things for a city or culture to be able to create a class of people who are artists, philosophers, and historians. In the middle of a siege from an enemy, no one is worried about writing ancient history or the next great play. So Athens has a period of tranquility and prosperity, and some great artists, writers and thinkers have time to be creative.
We’ll come back to this at the end of the episode, but there are a lot of ways that this time period influences our modern world. Obviously, the advent of Athenian democracy, and the idea that citizens can come together to create their own government, and protect their own rights, is something that influenced the founding of the United States and other democracies around the world.
Well, that brings up an issue we need to clarify, since we’re talking about democracy. Because the United States isn’t technically a democracy. It’s a republic - Well, Plato might argue that we’re currently an oligarchy, putting on a show of being a republic, but more on Plato and his descriptions of government later, in another episode. A true democracy is where all the citizens vote, or at least can vote, on every law. A republic is where the citizens select a representative to go vote for them. The citizens vote on who will represent them, and then the representatives actually vote on the laws. So the United States and the United Kingdom are both types of republics, not democracies. They have representatives that do the lawmaking and the voting.
Anyway, Athens was a true democracy, where all the citizens could vote on the laws.
So how did Athens come to be a democracy, and enter into its golden age? As most golden age stories do, the story starts with a tyrant, and people getting fed up with the tyrant’s tyrannical ways.
By the way, the word tyrant, back in the days of ancient Greece, didn’t mean a harsh, autocratic ruler. It just meant someone who has taken over the role of leading the government in an illegitimate way. The term tyrant didn’t originally refer to how someone ruled; it referred to how they took power.
In 546 BC, an Athenian named Pisistratus took control of Athens. His rule lasted for 18 years, and was actually a good period for Athens, and so the Athenians didn’t put up too much of a fuss about him. But then, his sons took over, and they were tyrants in our modern sense of the word. The Athenians tolerated Pisistratus, because despite the way he took power, he did a good job as the leader of the city. His sons did not, and the Athenians decided they didn’t want to be ruled by someone they had not chosen.
There were a couple of other rulers, but then in 510 BC, the Athenians chose Cliesthenes to be their ‘archon,’ or leader.
One of the hallmarks of the Athenian system of government was that they wanted to be ruled by someone they themselves had chosen. This idea, the concept of government by the consent of those governed, is one of the core ideas of liberty. And within that idea, and also within the Declaration of Independence, is also the idea that if the people who are governed do NOT consent to their government, it is their right to change the government. That’s what the Athenians did.
Cliesthenes reformed a lot of Athenian practices, and rebuilt the democracy. There was an Assembly, that any citizen could attend, which met every 10 days to debate and vote on proposals made by the Council. The Council was made up of 500 citizens, and they would propose laws that would then be voted on by the Assembly. There were also strategoi and archons who were elected to serve specific roles.
Then in 495 BC, a very gifted leaded named Pericles becomes one of the strategoi. He was a strategoi for 50 years, and this is the height of the golden age. Pericles also strengthened the democracy, and presided over the rebuilding of the Acropolis (which had been badly damaged by the Persians), including the building of the Parthenon, as well as several other temples.
During the time of Pericles, two of the greatest philosophers in all of human history were born. Both Socrates and Plato were born during the time when Pericles was one of the strategoi. Socrates was probably born around 470 BC, so his time as a productive philosopher and teacher happened in part during the time of Pericles. Plato was one of Socrates’ students, and his time as a teacher and writer took place after Pericles, but still during the Golden Age. I’m planning on having a separate episode on Socrates, Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle, because they really are important enough, in terms of how they affected the modern world, to warrant their own episode. I should mention here that they basically started the first permanent school of higher education, which was called the Academy.
During this same time period, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were writing comedies and tragedies that are still studied today. Their writing, along with Homer’s, (and also Plato’s) is considered the best writing in the Greek language. These guys were the Greek equivalents of Shakespeare. And Shakespeare himself was influenced by some of the Greek plays.
In addition to the playwrights, we also have the first real historians of antiquity during this period. Herodotus and Thucydides both tried to accurately record historical events, not long after they had actually happened. Before them, much of the historical record was written by kings who had conquered someone, and had a ‘history’ written to glorify their own deeds. So accuracy was less important than glorifying the king who had commissioned the historical writing.
Herodotus is known as the father of history. Although others recorded historical events before he did, he did a much more thorough job of getting and recording the facts of events. It is his records of Thermopylae and Salamis that are our best source for the names, dates, and flow of events of those battles. Though both Herodotus and Thucydides wrote clearly pro-greek histories, their thoroughness and descriptiveness set the standard for all future historians.
The physician Hippocrates, of the famous Hippocratic oath, also wrote during this period, and his books on health and medicine are among the oldest records of human health and disease, and set the stage for much of the medical writing down through the ages.
On top of all this writing, there was also a great surge in architecture and sculpture. When you think of Classical Architecture, that means ancient Athenian architecture. I mentioned the Parthenon, which was the temple to Athena on the Acropolis, which was the hill at the top of Athens. There were other temples up there, too, and they were also amazingly beautiful.
So we kind of had it all back in ancient Athens in these years, and other cultures throughout history have always looked back at these times and the writings and art of this period and been inspired by them. Many of the great things about ancient Rome were lifted straight from ancient Greece, for example. After the democracy of ancient Athens, Greece was conquered by Philip of Macedon, whose son, Alexander the Great, took Greek culture and the Greek language and spread it all around the Mediterranean and into Asia. The Greek language became a sort of trade language of the Mediterranean, the language that everyone used for business. It was relatively easy to write, and because the Greek alphabet is very phonetic, it was also relatively easy to learn the language. Greek verb tenses are crazy hard to master, but basic Greek, the kind you would use for trade, was relatively easy. But because of the writings of the Greek masters, Greek also became the language of scholarship, for many generations.
This is one of the reasons that the New Testament was written in Greek, even though Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic, which was the common language of Judea during his life. The New Testament was written to an audience beyond just the region of Judea, so because of the audience, and because Greek was the language of trade and of scholarship, the original writers of the New Testament wrote their gospels and epistles in Greek.
So the Golden Age of Greece had it all, and became a major influence on the rest of the ancient world.
What other things from classical Athens affect our modern world? Google an image of the US supreme court building. It’s a Greek temple, basically. Greek architecture has influenced monuments and official buildings all through history.
What else affected our modern world? Well, for starters, there’s the idea of citizens taking responsibility for their own government. The idea that the people of the city are responsible for the defense, government, and well-being of the city, and that the responsibility for setting up a form of government actually lies with the people, not the king - that’s an Athenian ideal. It’s not the king or some external ruler who is responsible for the city, it’s the people of the city. And they, the people, can choose the form of government that they want. It is more recently called ‘government by the consent of the governed.’
At the core of this is the idea that it’s NOT the government who owns the city or the country, it’s not the king that owns it all, it’s the people who own it. The beginning of the US constitution invokes this idea with the phrase, ‘We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union,…’. It’s ‘the people’ who are putting together the government, and designing a form of government that will protect them from tyrants. That’s what the Athenians were trying to do, that’s what the founding fathers of the US were trying to do, that’s what the lords of old Britain were trying to do with the Magna Carta, at some level. Protect their rights from a tyrant.
Behind this is the idea of personal responsibility, the idea that I am responsible for my life, my well-being, and my future - it’s not the government that is responsible for that, it’s not the king, it’s not society, it’s me. I’m responsible. The greeks would have called this ‘honor.’ It incorporates the idea of doing what’s right, doing one’s job, doing what one is supposed to do, and being responsible for one’s own life. This was definitely in the minds of the founding fathers of the US, although it seems like we’ve lost this a bit in recent years.
The Athenians took responsibility for protecting themselves from internal threats - that is, tyrants - and external threats - like Persians, for example. It’s an important principle, and it’s kind of odd how seldom in world history a group of people is governed by a government that they chose for themselves. In the modern world, we kind of take for granted, but until recently, it was a rarity. Usually, people were governed by a king, either from their own region, or one from somewhere else who had conquered them. That has been the historical norm, not people governing themselves. Tyranny, not self-rule, has been the norm.
One other way that Athens is still influencing the modern world is the scientific world-view that dominates the western world. We’ll talk more about this in the episode about Plato and Aristotle, but they had a huge impact on the development of science as we know it today. Especially Aristotle. His enormous body of work influenced both science, philosophy, logic, and religion, but again, we’ll come back to him and Plato again later.
But before we get to them, we need to take a look at what basically put an end to the really golden part of the golden age of Greece, and that is the Peloponnesian wars. Next episode, we’ll look at the battles between Athens and Sparta. Then we’ll come back to Athens to focus on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then on to Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander, the Great.
Episode 8.1 - Ancient Greek Military Strategy
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.
Welcome to Episode 8.1 - A side trip to look at ancient Greek military strategy and weapons. Specifically hoplites and triremes. I’ve mentioned that ancient Greece wasn’t that large of a place, and they weren’t as populous as some of the other larger empires that they fought against, but they were still somehow able to defeat many of their enemies. Eventually, under Alexander the Great, they will conquer the largest area of land, and create the largest empire, that the world had ever seen, to that point, but we’re not there yet.
Today, I want to take a look at the technology, training, culture, and tactics that allowed Greece to be so successful militarily.
Different countries throughout history have had different advantages over their neighbors, and it’s often these advantages that determine which country ends up being the strongest. For example, Ancient Egypt had the advantage of a steady supply of water and good fertile soil, because of the Nile river. This meant that they usually had plenty of food and water, which meant they could develop a pretty large population. Food and population stability also creates wealth, so the Egyptians could afford a large army.
It often gets overlooked in history just how expensive it is to have an army. Navies are even more costly. And now there’s air forces, and space forces, and man, it’s really expensive! The US budget for just defense spending last year (2021) was over $750 Billion. With $750 billion in cash, you could buy ALL the real estate in Greece. The US spent that in one year on just the military. Unfortunately, none of that was used to destroy our federal government, which really seems to be the biggest threat that the US faces right now. I mean, our own government is a bigger threat to our liberties and way of life than any other foreign government. It’s not like Mexico is massing a huge army on our southern border, planning to invade.
A huge group of drug dealers and human traffickers, maybe. Maybe they are invading, but it seems like our government is paying them to come. Let’s pay the invaders! That seems like a good strategy to keep them from trying to come in illegally. Yeh, we need some way to defend ourselves from our own government.
Amies were expensive back in the ancient world as well, and to keep an army in the field, you had to feed them, move them with carts and horses, provide some of the equipment for them, and then pay them. This all costs a lot of money. This was also why there was so much looting and pillaging when an army captured a city. It was a way that the soldiers got paid. Soldiers could make a lot of money in a good looting. This helped with their usually meager pay. In fact, many soldiers took the job not because they got a bit of steady pay from the government, but because they might have the chance to loot Athens, or Sardis, or some wealthy city, whose army they had just defeated. It could make you pretty rich, at least by the standards of the day.
But back to my point, which was that if you wanted to have a good army, it helped to have a sizable population, decent food supply, and enough money to pay for an army. But once you had an army, you kind of had to take them out and fight someone every so often, or the army would get restless and start fighting the local government. So you had to have an army, but you also had to take them out from time to time and let them destroy your neighbors.
Another advantage that countries had, besides a good army, were their natural resources. For example, in Mesopotamia, there’s not a ready supply of tin or copper, which is what you need to make bronze weapons. Every bronze-age empire in Mesopotamia had to go up into the hills to the northeast of the Tigris river, and try to capture the land where there were copper and tin mines. So there was a resource constraint they had to overcome.
So let’s look at the Greek natural advantages. Greece had a relatively stable growing season, and reliable water supplies. They didn’t have a whole lot of farmland, because it was hilly and rocky, but they could grow olives, grapes, and other things besides farm crops. Then, they have almost infinite coastline, so they have all these great harbors for ships. With their ships, they would sail across the Aegean and then eventually the whole Mediterranean to trade what they had for things like wheat and other grains. They were expert sailors and fishermen, so they were very at home on the water, unlike some other cultures. The Egyptians, for example, almost never sailed out in the open waters of the Mediterranean, but instead kept to the calm waters of the Nile.
The Greek coastline also meant that they could do a lot of fishing. So, if you like fresh fish cooked in olive oil, ancient Greece would have been a good place for you.
They also had decent land for raising sheep and goats. The rocky, mountainous land was difficult to travel in, which meant that smaller city-states tended to the be the norm in Greece, rather than one big empire, even though they were all bound together by the same culture, language, gods, and often by treaties to support other city-states. The mountainous terrain made it difficult to move armies around, so the Greeks were somewhat protected from neighboring tribes. The Greeks had a lot of ships, so they could use the coastline and the sea to transport armies, which helped them be more mobile than some of their land-bound neighbors. Also, Greece had its own supplies of copper, tin, and zinc, which meant they could make their own bronze weapons.
So despite being relatively small in terms of population, Greece had some advantages over Persia, Egypt, Assyria, and some of the other ancient empires.
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But now we get to the part that I think is interesting enough to make an extra episode about it. Greek weapons and strategy, which was really one of their best advantages. The bit about geography was just background, but it helps explain why the Greeks fought in the way that they did.
Your average Greek soldier was not a professional soldier, but was only a soldier part-time, during the ‘campaigning’ season, or when there was an outside threat. The rest of the time, they were middle-class land owners, shop keepers, fishermen, or something like that. I say middle-class, because to be a soldier you had to provide your own armor, helmet, shield, sword, and spear. That took a bit of cash, so your subsistence farmer might not have been able to do that.
So all this stuff was made of bronze. Bronze is made by taking copper, melting it, and mixing in tin, zinc, arsenic, or some other things. Good bronze is much stronger than just copper, and it holds a better edge on a sword. You hit a copper sword with a bronze sword, and the copper sword is going to just bend, or at least have a big dent in it. So having good bronze weapons is an advantage over those who don’t have them. This is of course why this era is called the Bronze Age. It is followed by the Iron Age, because once people figured out that they could make even stronger weapons with Iron (really, it was a type of steel), then those countries had an advantage over the peons who were still using bronze. Classical Greece exists at the end of the Bronze Age, and just before the beginning of the Iron Age. The Greeks had good bronze, and had become very adept at making bronze things, including the weapons and armor for their soldiers.
A Greek foot soldier was called a hoplite, and there were also soldiers who were archers, and calvary as well. Let’s take a look at what foot soldier’s equipment, because it’s the Greek foot soldiers who really made the big difference in these famous battles. I wish I could show you a picture, but hey, this is podcast. Just google hoplite, and you can see a lot of pictures. They were pretty cool looking.
So a soldier would have a helmet made of bronze, usually with a big crest on the top, made with horsehair. I honestly don’t know why they added the horsehair crest, but it was a really common feature of helmets in the ancient world. I guess they just thought it looked cool? It does look cool, but it doesn’t seem to be helpful in any other way.
The soldier also had a breastplate of bronze, that also covered their back. These were heavy, at least 50 pounds. Then they also had a large, round shield. Their shields were a bit bigger than Captain America’s shield, and instead of vibranium, they were made of just plain old bronze. The shield was big enough to cover them from their shoulder to down below their hips. But they were also heavy.
Soldiers also often had greaves, which are like tall bronze socks, that covered their shins. They wore leather gauntlets on their forearms as well.
Some Greek soldiers had a form of armor called linothorax, which was a kind of tunic made of linen. Doesn’t sound very sturdy, does it? Here you go, here’s a nice loose t-shirt for armor. That should work. But apparently, they had a way of gluing together layers of linen, to make a sort of flexible, breathable cloth armor, that was much lighter and cooler than bronze. Some people have recently tried to recreate this type of armor, and found that with several layers glued together, linen could indeed stop an arrow, or stop a sword from penetrating, which I find kind of amazing. It’s the ancient Greek equivalent of Kevlar.
For weapons, the hoplites usually carried a short sword, and a long spear. The spear usually wasn’t a throwing spear, they held on to it and basically stabbed people from a bit of a distance. More on that in a minute.
The Greek soldiers fought in a unit known as a phalanx. The basic idea of a phalanx had been developed by the Sumerians, but the Greeks improved it. They used a phalanx that was essentially a big square. In a phalanx, the soldiers all fought as a unit, not as a mob of individuals just chopping at whomever they find next, like you see in the big battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings or other movies. The soldiers lined up shoulder to shoulder, with their shield on their left arm. The Shields protected themselves, and the soldier to their left. With their right arm, they held their spear. So the front line of the phalanx was a long line of shields, with spears sticking out of it. The next line of soldiers, just behind the front line, also held up their shields, and would use them to push on the front line. The Greeks used an 8 line phalanx, so they had 8 lines of soldiers. The lines behind the front line would also point their spears out the front of the formation, so if an enemy got past the first set of spear points, they would meet more spear points. So there was a lot of spear stabbing going on.
If the spears got dropped or broken, or the enemy was too close, they would use their swords. The front line could also fall back through the second line, to change who was up front, and relieve the soldiers who where at the front, as they tired.
It was a powerful formation, and if an enemy, like the Persians, used simple line sof soldiers, or let the soldiers run loose like a mob, the phalanx would basically crush the enemy line. Think of it as a solid brick of soldiers, pushing its way through a loose crowd.
In the Battle of Marathon, the Greeks and the Persians both lined up in long lines across from each other, then started marching towards each other. The Greeks had intentionally thinned out the center of their line, and set full phalanxes on their left and right flanks.
The Persians, who were much more lightly armored, had a different strategy for battle. The Persians would unload an enormous volley of arrows, you know, ‘darken the sky with our arrows,’ that stuff, then follow with a cavalry charge that would often break the enemy lines. Then the foot soldiers would come in and defeat the enemy, often just by sheer numbers.
The Greek general at Marathon, Miltiades, had actually fought under the command of King Darius of Persia for a while, so he knew the Persian strategy. He also knew that the cavalry was not with the Persian army, so he marched his troops out quickly, before the Persians expected them. The Persian cavalry was away, on their way to Athens itself, hoping to perhaps take the unguarded city.
The Persian and Greek lines closed in on each other. According to Herodotus, the Greeks covered the last 400 meters or so at a run, still in formation, which was an unusual tactic for them. The Persian archers were firing away, but their arrows didn’t do much damage against the Greek armor. The Greeks phalanx formation had a system of holding up their shields, which created a sort of shield umbrella, so the arrows weren’t effective.
The lines crashed into each other, and the hand-to-hand fighting began. The Persians pushed forward in the center, where their best troops were, and the Greek center gave way, but then the thick Greek phalanxes on the flanks began to push the Persian lines in onto themselves. The Persian lines collapsed, and their soldiers began to run for the boats. The Greeks caught and killed many of them. The stories say that the Greeks only lost about 190 men, while killing 6400 Persians. This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but even so, it’s clear that it was a very lopsided battle, and a huge victory for the Greeks. The Persians that survived got on their boats and sailed back to Ionia, or what is now Turkey. The Greek armor and their phalanx strategy had beaten the lighter, more mobile Persians.
The battle of Marathon turned back Darius, but Xerxes came back to Greece with a LOT more men. But again, the Greeks had the advantage of their terrain. When Xerxes’ army met the Greeks, the Greek soldiers were defending a narrow mountain pass near the town of Thermopolyae. The Greeks basically plugged the pass with a phalanx, and no matter how many troops Xerxes threw at them, they would not budge.
It wasn’t until the Persians snuck around to attack the Greeks from behind that they were able to make any progress. And as I said last episode, Leonidas sent most of the Greeks home, and stayed behind with the rest of the Spartans, and 700 other Greeks, to face the Persians. The Spartans believed that the only way to return home was to return victorious. Spartans weren’t much for retreating.
Let’s take a bit of time here to talk about the military culture of Sparta. It was a unique thing in the ancient world. I said a bit ago that most soldiers were farmers, shopkeepers, etc. Not the Spartans. They were the first place in the world that had a class of full-time, professional soldiers, and they took it very seriously. The Spartans saw themselves as descendants of Hercules, or Heracles, if you like the Greek pronunciation better. If you were a male citizen, you were a soldier. If you were born a boy who was a citizen of Sparta, you were basically trained to be a soldier your entire life. This was for the citizens of Sparta - Sparta had a lot of slaves who did most of the actual work. Spartan women, who were married to a male citizen, were the ones who ran the households, ran the businesses, and kept watch on what the slaves were doing.
The men and boys were often off at camp, training. So by they time they were old enough to be part of the army, the boys had had years of training, and knew what was expected of them. The end result of all of this was that the Spartans were excellent warriors. They were in great shape, they were trained to work as a unit, They understood battle tactics and strategy, and they all shared the belief that to die on the field of battle was the ultimate honor.
Supposedly, when a Spartan man left for a battle, his wife would hand him his shield, and say, ‘with it, or on it.’ Which meant, either return victoriously or return dead. Now of course this is probably not what happened, but it does accurately depict something about Spartan culture. Either win, or die. And the Spartans usually won. Or they died fighting, like at Thermopolyae.
So while the Spartans had the best army of the ancient world, the Athenians were more focused on their navy. Unlike Sparta, which was inland, Athens was right on the coast. Part of what made Athens a great city was its substantial trade with other cities all across the Mediterranean. So the Athenians knew how to sail, even in the choppy, unpredictable waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
The Greeks created the first battleship of the ancient world - the trireme. The trireme was a long wooden ship, with a long pointed spike out in the front, just at the waterline. This spike was designed to crash into the opposing ship, and poke a hole in it at the waterline, so it would take on water, which would make the ship sink. Or in another tactic, they would drive the prow of the boat through the enemy’s oars on one side, which basically rendered the other boat unusable. They also had their version of the Marines - most triremes had a group of hoplites on board who would jump onto the enemy boat, and engage in hand to hand combat. They would then take over or destroy the enemy boat.
The trireme had three rows of rowers, top, middle, and lower. There were as many as 30 on each row, on each side. For the math challenged, that’s 180 rowers on a boat. They could get up to about 8 miles per hour, which is a lot for a rowboat. Also, they were big and heavy, so a big boat going 8 miles an hour with its long metal covered prow, crashing into another boat, would cause a lot of damage. So naval battles were a huge mess - boats crashing into one another, hoplites boarding enemy vessels, fires, sinking, and lots and lots of drowning, because apparently most sailors did not know how to swim. Which seems odd to me, but that’s how it is described by the historians. So, lots of drowning.
The Athenians invested a lot in their navy. The Triremes could be used both for battle, and for ferrying armies of hoplites to other places along the coast. Also, the Greeks, being regular sailors, knew their coast.
If you take a short look at Greece on a map, you’ll see that it’s an almost endless series of small islands, coastal peninsulas and inlets, and irregular coastline. Add into that rocks, shoals, narrow places, and tricky winds, and it’s easy to see how an enemy navy could have a hard time.
Some of Darius’s soldiers were destroyed on boats that sank during a storm before Marathon. Some of Xerxes’ soldiers were drowned when their boat-bridge across the Hellespont collapsed. After that, Xerxes had some soldiers ‘flog’ the sea, and throw chains in it, to say it had been imprisoned by its master, Xerxes. As far as anyone can tell, the sea basically ignored Xerxes and went on being the sea, as it always had. The Persians rebuilt the bridge, got their army across, and kept going, of course, until they got to Thermopolyae and the Spartans, where they had a bit of a pause, as I said earlier.
But their real defeat was at the hands of the Greek navy at Salamis. I mentioned this in the last episode. The Greeks, who knew the area, lured the Persian navy into a narrow straight between the island of Salamis and the mainland. The Greeks were able to maneuver, and they split the Persian navy in two. They also killed Xerxes’ brother Ariabignes, who was one of the admirals of the fleet, which added to the Persian’s confusion.
It’s worth pointing out that the Persian navy was actually a very good navy, filled with skilled sailors, and excellent vessels. They weren’t just a bunch of land-lubbing yahoos. In fact, many of the Greek crews were actually brand-new, and so were some of their ships. The Persians had all the advantages, except for the advantage of knowing the terrain, so to speak. But the Greeks weren’t afraid to face the Persians on the sea, and they won a monumental battle.
So, like the battle of Marathon before it, the battle of Salamis was a great Greek victory, and the Persians again retreated. This time, they didn’t come back. But pretty soon, Alexander and some more Greek phalanxes would be again fighting with the Persians. We’ll get to that soon.
Next episode: We go back to our historical flow, and we will talk about Athenian democracy, and the beginning of the Golden age of Greece.
Episode 8 - The Persian Wars
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.
Welcome to Episode 8 - The Persian Wars. We’re talking today about the ancient wars between Greece and Persia. I’ve mentioned that Greece has had an important impact on the western world, but did you know that ancient Greece was almost wiped out? A couple of times? Greece was a small country, but they tangled with the biggest empire of their time: The Persians. The battles between these two countries will become legendary, and will give us a couple of the best quotes of all time. Also, Pheidippides! And his famous last words. Lots of good quotes in this episode.
We’ve mentioned the days of the Mycenaeans, and the Greek dark ages, and how the beginning of the end of the Greek dark ages was when Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, which was sometime around 800 BC.
Now we’re getting to the real beginning of recorded history, and from this point on, we can almost always date what one culture says is going on against the records of other cultures. In other words, we’re finally at the point where we have a unified timeline, and we can fit events to very specific dates on the timeline. Before this, we always had to say ‘sometime around 800 BC,’ but after this, we’re getting to the point where we can say ‘on September 27th, 480 BC, this happened.’ That’s the date, by the way, of the Battle of Salamis, which was the Ancient Greek version of the Battle of Midway. Well, with less dive-bombers.
So, around 550 BC (ok, I’m still using ‘around’ in a few places). Around 550 BC, the Persians, who were a tribe from what is now Iran, began to expand. They conquered the Medes, who had been the biggest kingdom in the region, and then continued to expand. Their king was Darius, and he built up the largest empire the world had seen to that point.
The Persian empire stretched from the Persian gulf in the south, to what is now Kazahkstan in the east, up to the middle of the Black Sea in the north, and in the west, they began to expand into Greek-held lands in what is now Turkey. This area of Turkey was called Ionia, and at first the Ionian cities did not resist the Persians. They didn’t have the strength. But in 499 BC, the Ionians tried to rebel. They were supported by two cities from mainland Greece, Eritria and Athens. Together, they destroyed a Persian city, Sardis, and then the Eritrians and Athenians went back home. Well of course the Persians quickly came back and re-conquered Ionia. And the Persians did not forget that the Athenians and Eritreans had helped in the revolt. So the Persians are thinking about the cities of Eritrea and Athens. And they aren’t happy. This set up 50 years of fighting, known to the Greeks as the Persian Wars.
Ok, now we are getting to one of the most famous battles of all time, the battle of Marathon. This battle is carefully recorded by the Greek historian, Herodotus, who wrote about it only 50 years after it happened. In 490 BC, Darius came back to Greece with a massive army and a massive navy. He landed first at Eritrea, and destroyed the city. Darius and the army then got back in their boats, and sailed to Marathon, a small town just northeast of Athens. The Athenians sent their best messenger, a runner, a guy named Pheidippides, to run to Sparta, and ask for help. It’s about 150 miles from Athen to Sparta. Lots of hills. Herodotus mentions our friend Pheidippides. Supposedly, Pheidippides ran that 150 miles just in 2 days. For scale, that’s about the distance from Houston to Austin. The MS 150 is a BICYCLE race from Houston to Austin, and it takes 2 days. Supposedly Phidippedes ran that whole thing, and then asked the Spartans for help.
Normally the Spartans would have been all over this request, since they were maybe the most war-loving city in all of history. But they were in the midst of an important city festival, and the elders said they couldn’t come fight until the festival was over. No, we can’t come defend Greece. We have this party, see? It’s kind of a big deal, so we’ll come when the party is over. OK? So Pheidippides ran back to Athens with the bad news. And then the Athenians sent him on to the front at Marathon with army.
The Greek army had about 10,000 soldiers. Kind Darius and the Persians had at least 30,000. Some estimates are higher. When they began the battle, the Greeks intentionally let the center of their line collapse, and then the phalanxes on the Greek wings turned in and crushed the Persians. We’ll talk more about the Phalanxes and what they are in a separate episode. The Persians, sensing that they were being beaten, fell apart and ran, and the Greeks chased them and cut them down, chasing them all the way to their ships. The Persians lost as many as half of their men, which was a stunning defeat. The ones who survived sailed back across the Aegean Sea to regroup.
Back on the field at Marathon, the Greeks sent our runnin’ friend Phidippedes to run back to Athens, and tell then what had happened. The distance from Marathon to Athens is just about 25 miles, which is where we get the distance for a modern marathons. Phidippedes runs up to Athens, and says to the elders, ‘Nicómen!’, which means, ‘We won!’. And then he died, right there, right in front of the elders. As last words go, though, those are pretty good. Right?
So we have a historic victory for the Greeks, and and a heroic effort from Phidippedes, and the Persians retreating across the Aegean Sea to Ionia and points farther east.
Not long after that, King Darius dies, but the memory of what happened in Greece does not. Darius’s son, Xerxes (one of the cooler names in all of history, btw), succeeds him. Xerxes wants to out-do his father, and wants to expand the Persian empire even farther. So he decides he’s going to bring an even bigger army to Greece, and show them what’s what.
So in 480 BC, 10 years after Marathon, he sets out, with an army of between 150 thousand and million men. Accounts vary on the size, Herodotus says a million, but it’s quite probable this was the biggest army ever, up to this point in history. Xerxes also has a huge navy, to try to fight the Greek navy, and keep them from sailing up the coast and flanking his army.
But instead of sailing most of his army to Greece, he marches them. There’s a stretch of water they have to cross, in what is now Istanbul, called the Hellespont. Xerxes has his engineers build a bridge there, using 600 ships, which is an enormous number of ships, by the way, and planks and even dirt on the planks, so his army can march on a road. It apparently took the army seven days to cross, the army was so large. Once they were across, they had to march over to the main part of the Greek peninsula. And they had to march through some mountains to get to the peninsula.
But there waiting for them in the mountain pass, near the town of Thermopylae, was a group of about 7000 Greeks, including 300 Spartans led by their king, Leonidas. You know where this is going, don’t you? The battle at Thermopylae is one of the most famous battles in all of history. Leonidas and the Greeks had the advantage of good position, but Xerxes had almost unlimited men. So sometime in late July or early August of 480 BC (see, we’re getting more specific. I told you we would), Xerxes begins to attack the Greeks.
Leonidas and the Greeks held the pass for 7 days, including 3 full days of fighting, against the vastly larger Persian army. Now we’re getting to the great quotes from this battle. When the Persians sent an envoy to tell the Greeks that they should surrender, the Greeks refused. The envoy said, ‘We will darken the sky with our arrows!’ Which they could easily do, with that many men. But A Greek soldier, named Dienekes, reportedly said, ‘Good. Then we will fight in the shade.’ That, is one of the best battle quotes of all time. But the best is still to come. The Persian envoy rather forcefully told King Leonidas to surrender all his weapons. And Leonidas said, ‘Come and get them.’ In all the history of battle quotes, that, is the most bad-ass. ‘Come and get them.’
So the Persians eventually attacked, and the Greeks held them off for 3 days, until a local resident told Xerxes about a small mountain pass and led some of the Persians back behind the Greek lines. Leonidas, realizing what was happening, let most of the Greeks go, to head back to Athens. The 300 Spartans, and maybe 700 other Greeks stayed to hold the pass. Almost all of the Greeks who stayed to hold off the main Persian army ended up fighting to the death.
The Battle of Thermopylae was technically a Greek defeat, but it wasn’t really a Persian victory. The Greek and Spartan warriors had bought the rest of Greece more than a week to prepare, and they had badly dented the morale of the Persians. But the Persians did eventually break through the mountain pass at Thermopylae, and marched on to Athens. But when they got there, they found the city deserted.
Now we get to the real victory, and the battle that just doesn’t get as much attention as Marathon or Thermopylae, even though it’s the one that really matters. Salamis.
Salamis is an island off the coast of Greece, and it was the site of one of the largest naval battles in all of history. Again, the Greeks were outnumbered, but again, the Greeks were better sailors than the Persians, and had the advantage of location. According to Herodotus, there were about 370 Greek ships, against about 1200 Persian ships. That’s more than 3 to 1. But the Greeks lured the Persians into a narrow straight between two islands, where the huge number of Persian ships actually worked against them, as they were too crowded and couldn’t maneuver. The Greeks thoroughly routed the Persian navy, and killed their admiral, who was one of Xerxes’ brothers. Xerxes himself supposedly watched the battle from a mountainside near the shore, and realized that the Persian fleet had been destroyed.
Xerxes took most of his army and marched back to Asia. He left behind a sizable force, though, under one of his generals, Mardonius. Eventually, in 479 BC, the Greeks defeated Mardonius and the Persians at the battle of Plataea, ending the wars between the Greeks and the Persians. The Persians never came back and attacked the Greeks.
Eventually though the Greeks will grow strong enough to attack the Persians, but that won’t happen until Alexander the Great comes on the scene. The Greeks were still a bit bitter about all these attacks, and wanted a bit of revenge.
But the defeat of the Persians in 479 BC begins what is known as the Golden Age of Greece, which is one of the most intellectually productive times in western history. We’ll look at this in upcoming episodes.
So how do these battles between the Greeks and the Persians influence our modern world? Well, as I’ve said, Greece is one of the most influential cultures in the history of the western world, and it wouldn’t have been that if it had been beaten by the Persians. Maybe we would then be talking about how influential Persia was on western history, but hey, Thermopolyae. Salamis. Greece won.
The most influential thinkers in Greece show up soon after these battles. Because the Greeks had bought themselves some time and some peace, they had a time of prosperity, where they were not spending their time fighting external enemies. And in that time they developed some of the greatest thinkers the world has seen. We’ll look at those guys in upcoming episodes.
Another way that these battles influenced the modern world is that the western world, and especially western military units, have essentially inherited some of the values of the ancient Greeks who strove to defend their homelands. Courage in the face of overwhelming odds, self-sacrifice, teamwork, leaders who are part of the battle, the importance of choosing your battleground, and the right to defend yourself against tyrants - all of these are important values in the western world. In the end, this is what the Greek defense against Persia was all about - the Greeks were defending their right to rule themselves, rather than to be ruled by Persia. And they were willing to take up arms and fight to the death, rather than let someone else rule them against their will.
There are echoes of this spirit in the American Revolution, in the American Civil War, in the Reformation, in the English Civil war, The Scots fighting against the invading British, the Zulus fighting against the invading British, OK, anyone fighting against the invading British, and in many of the great battles of western history. The idea that some foreign power can come in and take over your land, then tell you to pay tribute to them - that is tyranny. And though some people have said, ‘ok, we’ll submit, that’s better than fighting, don’t hurt us,’ other peoples have said instead, ‘no, I’m not going to lie down and let that happen.’ That’s the spirit of Patrick Henry’s famous quote, ‘Give me Liberty, or give me death.’
One last thought on how that matters in our modern world. It might just be that our current world is moving in the direction of tyranny again. The history of the world is an ongoing struggle between tyrants who want to control everything, and people defending their rights to self-determination and liberty. When a government begins to curtail the rights of its people to determine their own destiny, whether it is your own government or the government of a country that wants to take yours over, the time comes when people must choose to either submit, or to fight back. History does not remember those who submitted. History remembers those who have said, ‘come and take them.’
History remembers those who have said, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” We’ll look at that document in a much later episode.
In the next episode we will look at the development of Athenian democracy, something that clearly had a big effect on the western world. But before that episode, we will take another quick side episode, to look at something that I find fascinating - Greek military and naval advancements, and how it was that they won these amazing battles against much larger forces.
Episode 7 - The Kingdom of Israel
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.
Welcome to Episode 7 - The Kingdom of Israel. Back in Episode 5, I mentioned that Israel had an outsized influence on the history of the Western world, considering its size and significance in Ancient history. If you were able to go back in time to the ancient world, and gone to visit someone in some other part of the Mediterranean, like Greece, and asked them about Israel, they would have said, ‘Who?’
Israel was really pretty insignificant in the ancient world, to be honest. It only really matters to the affairs of the great nations because it’s occasionally in the way, kind of like my small dog Chipper is often in the way when I’m trying to go to the kitchen. Assyria wants to attack Egypt, and on their way to the kitchen, I mean to Egypt, they have to go through Israel.
Later Babylon comes, and again, on their way to Egypt, Israel is in the way.
Despite being tiny, and weak, and strategically not that important, and not having a lot of resources or people, Israel manages to survive, when a lot of the other nations around them do not. Moab? Gone. Edom? Gone. Philistine? Gone. But Israel manages to stay around, and is still alive and kicking when it’s conquered by Rome in 63 BC. We will come back to that conquering in a bit, but for now, let’s take a look at what might have been the Golden Age of Israel: the Kingdom of David and Solomon.
After the exodus from Egypt, Israel had been a loose collection of tribes, living in land that they had taken from other tribes. Two things to mention here: First, territory and land ownership were really different back in the ancient days. Today, we kind of see ownership as this cut-and-dried thing: I own the land at this address, marked off by this fence, and it’s my land (once I pay off the bank). But land ownership in the ancient world was much less specific. It was much more like: our tribe has been on this land, from that palm tree over there, to the dry river bed over by that hill, and down to the edge of that line of small bushes. That has been our land. But there were huge areas of land where ‘who’s land is this?’ Was not a clear thing. And once your sheep had been grazing on a patch of land for a while, it was kind of seen as your land.
Second, ownership itself (especially before writing was invented) was much less clear, and there wasn’t quite the same concept we have today of ‘this is mine, and that is yours.’ You squat on some unoccupied land, and after a while, it’s yours. Sort of. And lots and lots of land was unoccupied. So if you’re not ‘occupying’ the land, it’s hard to say, ‘Hey, that’s my land.’
Anyway, Israel takes over a lot of land that is sort of bordered this way. On the west edge, the Jordan River (though there were a couple of tribes across the Jordan). On the north, the sea of Galilee. On the south, the desert south of the Dead Sea. And on the east, the edge was the end of the territory that was controlled by the Philistines. There’s a sort of line of hills that delineates what the Philistines controlled, but again, it wasn’t all that clear. The Philistines controlled the coast, and had built several large cites there on the shore of the Mediterranean.
For several generations, the Israelites are just this loose group of tribes, and they have consistent trouble from the other tribes around them. The Moabites, the Edomites, and the Philistines consistently raid Israelite territory, but a series of Judges lead Israel to defend themselves. Eventually, the Israelites decide that they want a king, and they choose a really tall guy named Saul to be their king.
Saul organizes the tribes, and creates an army to fight the Philistines.
The war with the Philistines goes on for several years, with raiding in both directions. The Philistines are a much better army, though, and have much greater resources, including chariots and iron weapons. They chase Saul’s army around for a while, and then at one point, both armies are camped on the hills with a valley between them. The Philistines send out their biggest guy, a huge guy named Goliath, expect tall Saul to come out and fight him. But Saul hesitates. Goliath comes out each day and yells challenges and insults at the Israelites.
According to 1 Kings, a shepherd boy, whose brothers are in Saul’s army, comes to the Israelite camp, and sees what is happening. And he utters what is one of the best lines in battle history: ‘Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?
This shepherd is named David, and he goes on to fight Goliath with just a slingshot. Goliath reportedly says to him, ‘Am I dog, that you come to me with staves?’ And David retorts, ‘Thou comest to me with a sword and a spear and a shield, but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, who thou hast defied. This day the Lord will deliver thee into mine hand, and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee, and I will give the carcases of the host of the Philistines this day to the fowls of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.’
David was good at taunts. And good with a slingshot, apparently. He kills Goliath, and becomes a hero. Eventually, he becomes the king after Saul. And this begins the real kingdom, and the sort of golden age, of Israel.
The tribes of Israel are united under David, he defeats a lot of the neighboring tribes, and captures the city of Jerusalem. He makes it his capital, and embarks upon a building campaign that included a palace. He also establishes a kingly dynasty, at least for part of the nation.
David seems to be the first Israelite that is historically recorded outside of the Bible. There’s a stone inscription from about the ninth century AD (that is, 800 BC), that records a victory by an Aramean king over the king of the ‘house of David.’ Outside of the Bible, that’s the oldest record of someone who is mentioned in the Bible. Just for context, David’s reign is about 200 years before Homer writes the Iliad and the Odyssey. He lived during the Greek dark ages. Again, the Philistines might have been descendants of the Mycenaeans who left Greece during those dark ages.
Anyway, David consolidates his power in Jerusalem, and it becomes the center of the nation of Israel. There are ongoing archeological digs in Jerusalem today, and they seem to have uncovered David’s palace, though there is some dispute about this.
David reigned as king from about 1000 BC to about 962 BC, so not quite 40 years. That’s a pretty long reign by ancient near eastern standards. David apparently had several wives, and a lot of children. According to the Bible, there was a lot of palace intrigue and scandal.
David also apparently was a gifted poet, and wrote many of the psalms. Many of the psalms start with the line, ‘A psalm of David.’ So early on, those who gathered up the collection of psalms recognized that David’s were important. David is also recognized in a unique way in the Hebrew Scriptures: he’s the only character that is described as ‘a man after God’s own heart.’ He is described that way several times, despite his many failings as a king and father. In some ways, he’s the third most important character of the Old Testament, after Abraham and Moses. He’s portrayed as the ideal king, even more so than his son Solomon, who is in some ways more successful than David. But David is described, despite his flaws, as kind of the ideal king. It’s again interesting that the chroniclers who wrote about David are pretty blunt about describing his flaw and failures. He comes off as a real person, who did some great things, and tried to follow his God, but also made some really substantial mistakes.
When he dies, he leaves the kingdom to one of his sons, Solomon. According to the Bible, when Solomon inherits the kingdom, he is visited by God, who says he will grant Solomon whatever he asks for. So Solomon wisely asks for wisdom. The rest of the biblical depiction of Solomon is a description of his wisdom, and also of the greatness of the kingdom he reigns over. A lot of the Psalms are attributed to David, but most of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are attributed to Solomon.
Another major thing is attributed to Solomon: the first temple. In the Mosaic books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, a lot of text is given to the construction, layout, and worship rituals of the tabernacle. The tabernacle was a huge tent that the camp of Israel camped around while it was wandering in the wilderness. It was the center of worship of Yahweh, and the place where the priests performed all the rituals that were described in the books of Moses. The tabernacle moved around for years, but it had eventually settled down more or less permanently at Shiloh, which is a bit north of Jerusalem, and kind of in the center of the Promised Land. David starts the process of creating a permanent temple for God in Jerusalem, but it’s Solomon who actually builds it.
The temple of Solomon was built around 957 BC. It was built on a high place within Jerusalem. There is strong archeological evidence of the existence of a temple from Solomon’s time in the spot where the Dome of the Rock now stands. There’s no doubt that a temple was built there by Herod just before Jesus’ time, and there’s evidence of another temple, possibly the re-built temple of Nehemiah, in between. The Bible records that Solomon’s temple was destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in about 587 BC, so it stood for almost 400 years.
I said that David was the third most important character in the Old Testament. It’s not a stretch to say that the temple is the 4th most important character. Having a permanent temple for their God is a HUGE deal to the Israelites. It’s one of the central themes of the whole rest of the Old Testament, and it clearly is of huge importance in the day of Jesus.
In addition to building the temple of God, Solomon also brings peace, riches, and expansion to the kingdom. It’s fair to say that the days of David and Solomon are the high point of the nation of Israel, or maybe its Golden Age.
After Solomon dies, though, the kingdom splits. David and Solomon’s descendants rule in the south, and the other tribes of Israel break off in the north and create their own kingdom. So the kingdoms become known as Israel in the north, and Judah in the south. The southern kingdom is still known as Judah when the Romans get there. The Romans called it the province of Judea.
After the kingdom of David and Solomon, Israel was never again an important force in the area. There’s a stone inscription from the reign of Shalmaneser III, one of the kings of Assyria, that mentions King Jehu of Israel, and has an image of Jehu prostrating himself before Shalmaneser. Neither the northern kingdom of Israel nor the southern kingdom of Judah would rise again to prominence in the region.
The Northern kingdom was eventually conquered completely by Assyria. The Assyrians were not kind to the lands they conquered. They tended to either kill or enslave all the conquered peoples, and then to populate their lands with native Assyrians. This is one of the reasons for the hostility we see in the New Testament between Jews and Samaritans. The Jews were descendants of Judah (hence the name Jew). The Samaritans were descendants of both the Israelites, who had split from Judah, and also the Assyrians who had settled there. So the Jews saw them as traitors and half-bloods.
The kingdom of Judah, in the south, continued for several more generations after Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians. But then, in 586 BC, Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, who destroyed Solomon’s temple, and took away all the ritual objects of the temple. The Babylonians took many of the Jews away to Babylon, though they let them keep some of their own ethnic identity. The Jews held on to their identity during the 70 years they were captive in Babylon. They call this time the Exile, and they saw it as God’s punishment for the nation turning away from God.
Eventually Babylon was conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia. We’ll come back around to that in a while, because those same Persians had some epic run-ins with our friends the Greeks, which we will be talking about in upcoming episodes. But for now, it’s enough to point out that Cyrus let many of the peoples who had been conquered by Babylon return to their homelands. This included the Jews, and they began to come back around 538 BC. As part of their return, they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and also rebuilt the temple, though it was not anywhere as glorious as Solomon’s temple had been. Still, it was a big deal to them to have their temple back, and they took the temple rituals and the Law much more seriously from then on. Until the Romans, of course.
As I said earlier, for being such a small nation, and being relatively unimportant on the world stage, Israel has an outsized influence on western history. That is due in large part because of the influence of the Bible on the history of the west, and since the Bible was, for a long time, the best preserved historical record of the ancient world, the history of Israel was well-known. From the fall of Rome until the 1800’s, there was very little known in the west about the history of the ancient near east. In the 1800’s, European archaeologists began to unearth ancient cities, and eventually ancient texts, that shed new light on ancient history. There was, for a long time, a strong bias among the 19th century academics that the Bible was all myth. They actually thought this about the Trojan war, too. But more and more archaeological excavations supported the stories of the Bible, and the Iliad, and so today, there is a grudging acceptance among even anti-bible academics that the Bible does preserve a valid history of the nation of Israel.
One other reason that the tiny nation of Israel has had so much influence in the west is that the Jews have always managed to survive, and to maintain their identity, even in very hostile situations. Eventually, after the Romans destroyed Judah in 70 AD, the Jews were dispersed all over the Mediterranean and also Europe. There were Jewish communities in all the major cities of Europe by the Middle Ages. And despite pograms, exiles, and a holocaust, the Jews managed to survive and keep their identity. So they have been a part of western society for quite a long time, and they have been spread throughout western society quite thoroughly, because they settled in so many different places, and have been successful in business, academia, science, and politics.
So, despite their small size and humble beginnings, the people of Israel have made a big impact on the western world, an impact that needs to be considered alongside much more prominent empires, like the Greeks and the Romans.
Speaking of the Greeks, in the next episode, we’ll look at some of the most famous battles in all of history, and two of the most bad-ass battle quotes of all time, when we look at the wars between the Greeks and the Persians.
History of the Ancient World, Susan Wise Bauer
https://www.timesofisrael.com/archaeologists-say-one-of-king-davids-palaces-found/
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-first-temple-solomon-s-temple
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon%27s_Temple
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Shiloh_(Bible)
https://www.britannica.com/event/Babylonian-Captivity
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.
Welcome to Episode 6 - The Iliad and the Trojan War.
One of the most famous events of the ancient world is war between the Greeks and the Trojans, which is told in the epic novel the Iliad, and then finished in the Odyssey. Funny thing is, we don’t know for sure if this war really happened!
Regardless of whether the battle really happened, the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the most important and famous written works in all of human history. So today we’re going to look at the stories, their author, their historical background, and the impact they had on Greek society, and on history.
Last week, we looked at the city-states and geography of ancient Greece. As we mentioned, the Greeks were sailors, adventurers, explorers and warriors. To the east of the Greek peninsula is the Aegean Sea, and across the Aegean was one of the rival cities to the cities of Greece - the city-state of Troy. The ancient Greeks called the city 'Ilium,' and it was one of the chief rivals for control of the Aegean Sea and the trade routes from Asia.
The Iliad tells the story of a Greek fleet that has already landed on the shores of the city of Troy, and the battles between the Greek heroes and the Trojan heroes. We’ll talk about the story itself in a bit, but let’s look at the background of it first.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were to the Greeks what the Bible is to Christianity. These are the works with which the Greeks identify with their gods, and their mythology. Even though it is mythology, that does not necessarily mean that the stories are untrue. It is most likely that there was a war at Troy fought with great heroes, but that the story was embellished and made into legend over hundreds of years until it was eventually written down.
The Iliad was supposedly written around 800 BC, by the Greek poet Homer. The thing is, we really don’t know much about Homer. Scholars aren’t sure he even really existed. There are lots of later legends about him, but there are no surviving records of him from around his own time. So it’s possible he’s just a myth - but there are really no other people who are mentioned as the possible author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, so it still makes sense to just go ahead and attribute them to Homer. The evidence about his authorship is a bit suspect, BUT, it’s the only account we have of the author of these two amazing stories, so let’s just go ahead an go with it.
Homer supposedly lived either in Ionia, which is in present-day Turkey, or he lived on Chios, one of the islands in the north part of the Aegean Sea. It depends on which legend you refer to. The legends all suggest that he was blind, and that he was a poet who recited his works orally. It wasn’t until a good bit later that his works were written down.
And on top of that, our oldest surviving copies of the Iliad aren’t until much later than that. Our oldest fragments of the story date to around 200 BC, and our oldest full copy of the Iliad dates to around 900 AD! But scholars who study these things have dated the language used in the Iliad to around 700 or 800 BC.
I said we don’t know all that much about the author, Homer, though his authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey are attested to by the historian Herodotus, who lived only 400 years later. Many scholars think that the stories were originally preserved as oral legends, and the finally written down by Homer, who put them into his own poetic style. The language and poetry of both stories is exceptional, and deeply influenced Greek writers and thinkers for many generations. In fact, it is hard to overstate how important these two works were to the development of the scholarship and philosophy of ancient Greece. Any ancient Greek scholar would have memorized the entirety of both books (which was nearly 30,000 lines of poetry total)
The story talks about a battle that happened during the Mycenaean period of Greek history, when the Greeks were led by the king of Mycenaea, which was the biggest city in Greece at the time. And the Iliad gets that part right - the Greek army is led by King Agamemnon from Mycenaea.
Historians for a long time thought that this epic battle story between Greece and Troy was just a myth, but in 1870 AD, a German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann found, in what is now Turkey, an ancient city that might have been Troy. Since then, more and more evidence has been found, so today experts are pretty sure that Troy really did exist. And apparently, in around 1250 BC, there was a battle between the Greeks and the city of Troy. We don’t know if this was the battle that inspired the Iliad and the Odyssey, but at least we know that there is some legit historical evidence behind the stories.
The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, why it happened, and the heroes and gods that were involved. The gods are heavily involved in the action of the story. In fact, as the story opens, the Greeks are facing a plague on their army, sent by the god Apollo. There was a major temple to Apollo at Troy, and the Greeks captured the daughter of one of the temple priests. Apollo shows his displeasure by sending the plague on the Greeks. Throughout the story, the gods have a direct effect on the outcome of battles, and direct influence on the thoughts and dreams of the heroes. It is in part from the descriptions of the desires and motivations of the gods in the Iliad and the Odyssey that ancient Greek theology and mythology develop.
The things that are shown as valuable to the gods and the heroes are honor, bravery, and loyalty. Both gods and heroes are shown to be fallible, selfish, and prone to anger, indignation, and pouting. The stories also give details about the relative importance of each god. For example, Zeus is the king of the gods, and Hera is his jealous wife. In fact, much of the trouble that led to the war is attributed to Hera. Hera consistently helps the Greeks, because she is mad at a Trojan prince named Paris. Besides valuing honor, loyalty, and bravery, the Iliad and the Odyssey also show the dangers of uncontrolled anger and unchecked pride.
These stories of the gods and the heroes became the most important sources of inspiration for later Greek mythology, theology, and philosophy. It is said that Alexander the Great, a Greek who conquered most of the known world, whom we talk about later, slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. The Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the oldest written stories, and are two of the greatest works of literature and poetry in all of literature. They influence writers, theologians, and thinkers throughout all of western history. They are truly epic stories, full of great characters, and they explore some deep topics, including the questions of honor, bravery, duty, how men interact with the gods, and the afterlife.
So how does the story go?
In the Iliad, it is very clear that Agamemnon, king of Mycenaea, is the chieftain among all the Greek kings: they all defer to him. Mycenaea was the largest and most powerful of all the city-states at the time, and thus Agamemnon was the most powerful of all the Greek kings. In addition to this, all the other Greek kings had sworn fealty to him and his brother Menelaus under the terms of what was called the Oath of Tyndareus.
Well before the Trojan War, Tyndareus was a wise old man, and all the Greek kings came to him asking who could have the right to marry Helen, the most beautiful woman on earth. Tyndareus proclaimed that they should hold a series of contests to see who was worthy to win Helen. He further declared that all the kings must swear an oath to uphold the marriage of Helen to whoever the victor in the contests was. Menelaus won, and thus all the kings of Greece were bound to honor and protect his marriage to Helen.
Paris was asked by the goddesses Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena to choose which goddess was the most beautiful. They all offer him gifts, but Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful woman in the world, a Greek woman named Helen. Paris picks Aphrodite as the most beautiful goddess, and takes Helen back to Troy with him. Besides making Hera furious at him and all of Troy, Paris also has infuriated the Greeks, because Helen was already married to Menelaus.
Thus, when the Trojan prince Paris stole Helen away, all the Greek kings were bound to help Menelaus win her back, and fight in the Trojan War.
Menelaus appeals to the main Greek king, Agamemnon, and they rally all the warriors of Greece to sail to Troy and take Helen back. Apollo sides with the Trojans, Hera sides with the Greeks, and many other gods and goddess influence what happens in the story. The Greeks camp on the shore near Troy, and begin to battle with the Trojans on the plains outside the city. The Trojans have a great warrior, Hector, who is Paris's older brother, and Hector defeats many Greeks. But the Greeks have one of the greatest warriors in history - Achilles. When he was a baby, Achilles' mother dipped him in the River Styx, which runs through the underworld. This made him invulnerable to any weapon (except where his mother held him - his heel). The Iliad ends after a battle between Achilles and Hector.
Achilles and Hector fight an epic battle before the gates of Troy, and Achilles eventually defeats Hector. In his anger, Achilles ties Hector’s body to his chariot, and drags him around the battlefield in front of the city, as the horrified Trojans look on. It was an incredible dishonor done by Achilles, and even the gods are mad at him.
Hector’s father, King Priam, comes to Achilles later in the Greek camp, and begs for his son’s body. Achilles is moved to tears, and gives Hector’s body back to Priam.
That is the end of the Iliad, as a story, but there’s a bit of unresolved tension here. There’s still a war going on, and the story just kind of ends with the war unresolved. Some of that story is recounted in the Odyssey, some of it in other, later epics. So to continue the narrative of the Trojan war, we have to pick up bits and pieces from other places besides Homer.
After Achilles gives back Hector’s body, apparently the Greeks and Trojans went back to fighting. Achilles, being invulnerable, kills a lot of Trojans. But the gods are still not happy with Achilles.
So Apollo incites Paris to shoot an arrow, and guides the arrow to Achilles’ one weak point - his heel. The arrow pierces him there, and Achilles bleeds to death in front of Troy. Interestingly, that part of the story, where Achilles is shot in the heel, is NOT found in the Iliad or the Odyssey, but it does show up in other, later epics.
So both heroes are dead, and the Greeks still have not captured the city.
Let’s call it a draw.
The Iliad ends with the battle still a stalemate, but the story continues in the Odyssey. The Odyssey is mostly a story about the hero Odysseus, and his ill-fated journey back to his home island of Ithaca. But the Odyssey starts just after the battle has ended, but later in the Odyssey, Odysseus has a blind singer named Demodocus tell the story of what happened.
The real trick of what happened to Troy is actually also recorded in a later epic poem, the Aeneid. The Aeneid tells the story of a Trojan warrior named Aeneas, who ends up going on his own journey. More on that in a moment. But the Aeneid also explains how the Greeks defeated the Trojans.
Odysseus thinks of a trick, and the Greeks implement it. They build a giant wooden horse, and leave it in front of the city gates. Then the Greeks all get in their ships and leave. But they have a trick up their sleeves - they’ve left some of their best soldiers, including Odysseus, inside the wooden horse.
The Trojans wake up one morning, and the Greek army and navy are gone, but there’s this huge wooden horse. The Trojans think that it’s an offering to the goddess Athena, so they wheel the horse inside the city, to Athena’s temple. Then that night, the city begins a celebration, because the Greeks have left.
Ah, but beware of Greeks bearing gifts, right? This is where the saying comes from. The Greek soldiers inside the horse sneak out, and open the city gates. The Greek navy has come back and all the Greek soldiers are waiting. The Greek army storms the city, and destroys it.
That is the end of the story of the Trojan war. After the war is over, the Odyssey begins.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus’ wanderings across the Mediterranean, as he tries to get back home. He runs into the Cyclops, the goddess Calypso, the witch Circe, the Sirens, and to Scylla and Charybdis, among other troubles, before he finally gets home.
When he gets home, his own house is full of suitors, trying to woo his wife, because everyone thinks him dead. Odysseus goes full John Wick on them all, of course, and the story ends with him at home with his family.
So back to the the story of Aeneas, one of the princes of Troy. There’s not a whole lot said about him in the Iliad or the Odyssey, but later, a Roman poet named Virgil writes a Latin epic poem to rival Homer’s Greek epic poems. Virgil’s story is called the Aeneid, and tells the story of Aeneas wandering the Mediterranean (yes, a lot like Odysseys, nothing is new under the sun), and then landing in Italy. According to Virgil, Aeneas becomes the founder of a small tribe who eventually become a good bit bigger, and eventually come to play a big part in the history of the Mediterranean and the western world. You might have heard of this tribe. They were known as the Romans.
As I mentioned in Episode 5, after the height of the Mycenaean culture and its decline, there’s a bit of time where Greece doesn’t produce much history or literature. This is knows as the Greek Dark Ages, and lasts from about 1100 BC, to around 800 BC. But somewhere around 800 BC, there’s this guy born, named Homer, and he wrote these two epic poems. So you could say that’s the beginning of the end of the Greek Dark Ages, and the beginning of the Golden Age of Greece.
Next time, before we come back to Greek’s golden age, we’re going to hop back over to Israel for a bit, and look at their own short-lived golden age, and their two great kings: David and Solomon.
- https://www.openculture.com/2018/07/archaeologists-think-theyve-discovered-oldest-greek-copy-homers-odyssey-13-verses-clay-tablet.html
- Usborne Encyclopedia of Ancient History
Episode 5.1 - The development of written language and literacy
[intro music]
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.
Welcome to Episode 5.1 - The development of written language and literacy.
Next time, we’re going to be taking a look at one of the great stories of the ancient world - the Iliad. But before we get dive into that, I wanted to step aside for an episode, and discuss the something that’s crucial to our understanding of history: written languages. As I’ve said before, it’s really hard to nail down the dates of ancient events before about 1000 BC. Part of that is because there really isn’t that much written documentation of the events before that; at least not a lot of documentation that has survived.
Once written languages became more common, a lot more stuff got recorded, and so our study of history gets more accurate, and much easier to cross-reference between cultures.
So today, I thought we’d take a side journey into something that I find really fascinating: the development of written languages. And we’re also going to do something else a bit different - this episode will be an interview, with someone with much more experience in ancient languages than I have.
Welcome to Episode 5 - Early Greece and the first City-States. Last time, we looked at one of the great civilizations of the ancient world - Egypt. Our modern culture was not all that directly influenced by Egypt, though you could say our modern culture was very influenced by the Israelites that came out from Egypt. It’s interesting to me that a small, relatively powerless, backwater nation as Israel was for most of its existence, had such a profound effect on the western world. One could argue that it was one of the 3 most influential ancient cultures, at least as far as influencing the modern world. One of the others, not surprisingly, was Rome. We will get to Rome in due time. The other major influence on the western world was Ancient Greece.
It’s hard to overstate how important ancient Greece was in terms of influencing the western world. Art, government and politics, literature, philosophy, athletics, math, architecture, and worldview - all of these were hugely influenced by ancient Greece. Who is the most influential philosopher of all time? Well, it’s either Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. They were all Greek. Where did democracy originate? Greece. You could maybe argue that Rome was more influential for a longer period, but you could also argue that Rome was simply spreading Greek learning and values. Rome had its own valuable contributions, as we will see, but Greece was incredibly influential to the western world.
So let’s take a quick look at how it got that way.
Do you where the first civilization in Europe started? It was on the island of Crete - one of the islands of the Greek archipelago. A civilization known as the Minoans began to arise there, around 2000 BC. This is just a little before Abram makes his journey out of Ur, and also just a bit before King Hammurabi of Babylon. Not much is known about the Minoan civilization, but archaeologists have found large cities, lots of fresco paintings, and lots of pottery. Archeologists have also found Minoan writing, including hieroglyphs, and a system of script writing called ‘Linear A.’ So far, no one has been able to translate any of the Minoan writing, which is one reason we don’t know too much about the Minoan culture.
The Minoan culture seems to have begun to decline around 1600 BC, which is just about the same time that we begin to see civilization develop on mainland Greece.
[recorded to here]
The earliest civilization on the mainland of Greece was known as the Mycenaeans. This culture is named after one of their important cities, Mycenae.
Mycenaean culture is important for a couple of reasons. Big reasons, actually. The Mycenaeans developed a culture of city-states. Why did their culture develop this way? Some of it has to do with geography.
There are two distinctive features to the geography of Greece that influenced its development. First, it is a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides, and with thousands of small islands all around it. So it was natural that the Greeks would become sailors, explorers, and traders.
The inland parts of Greece, however, are rocky and mountainous, and so it was harder to develop a continuous, connected civilization. Each region developed its own government, usually centered around a main port city. These regions were called city-states.
A city-state is a small nation, centered around a main central city. Each city ruled the region around it, and developed its own type of government and culture. Some of the major city-states, besides Mycenae, were Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Argos. Each city-state had its own way of doing things, but all the Greek city-states did have some things in common: They all spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods (though each city had its patron god), and they usually banded together to fight off outsiders. They also fought each other at times.
This fighting is the other reason that the Myceneans are important. One of the most famous books of all time tells the story of a great Mycenean battle. You might have heard of this one: It’s called the Iliad. We’re going to look at that story next time, but for now, I’ll just mention that the king of Mycenaea plays a big role in that story. That was King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army.
The Mycenaean culture was a very well-developed culture, with large cities, art, and their own form of writing. The Myceneans, in addition to being famous soldiers, were also great sailors, and their trading ships travelled all around the eastern Mediterranean Sea. They established colonies and trading posts in what is now Turkey, Lebanon, Crete, Sicily, and Italy. They were the first pan-mediterranean trading culture. In other words, they travelled all over the Mediterranean.
Why is this important? They Mycenaeans were the first culture that really had contact with a lot of other cultures. They traded with cultures in Europe, including even Scandinavian cultures; they traded with Egypt, with other African cultures, with several different cultures in Asia, and maybe even Babylon. It was the beginning of all of these cultures being aware of each other, and establishing regular trade between them.
But around 1200 BC, things started to fall apart. There was a long period of poor harvests, which led to famine and starvation. As the Mycenaeans got more and more desperate, they began to raid other places. There are Egyptian records of migrations and raids from a group called the Sea People. We don’t know exactly who these Sea People were, but migrating Mycenaeans are the leading suspects. It’s also possible that the migrating Mycenaeans became the Philistines, who ruled a sea-side culture on the coast east and north of the kingdom of Israel.
In any case, Mycenaean culture seems to have petered out about 1100 BC. Many of their cities were abandoned, including Mycenaea. From about 1100 BC until about 800 BC, Greek culture went through a period where very little of written records, artifacts, or history was preserved. This is known as the Greek Dark Ages, but after about 800 BC, Greece begins a monumental comeback, which will produce one of the richest, most influential cultures of all time, and some of the most famous people the world has ever known.
Next time, in episode 6, we will look more closely at the Iliad, and the story of the Trojan war.
- Usborne encyclopedia of the ancient world
Welcome to Episode 4 - The Gods of Egypt, and the Law of Moses. Today we are going to look at one of the more important, and durable, civilizations of the ancient world - Egypt…
While most of the world was living in tents and small towns, scraping out a meager existence, Egypt started building huge cities of brick and stone, with massive monuments and even pyramids. Did you know that the Great Pyramid at Giza was the tallest building in the world for over 3800 years? It shows their abilities as builders. When the pyramids were being built, most of the rest of the world was living in small villages barely surviving on subsistence farming and livestock.
Egypt developed into a civilization around 3000 BC, along the banks of the Nile River. The Nile is a remarkable river - it is one of the longest rivers in the world, and it flows from south to north, which is rare. In the south, heavy rains each year bring floods to the lands up north. In the places where the river floods, very rich soil is deposited, making the banks of the river excellent for farming. Most of the Nile is also easy to sail on, so boats could sail up and down the river, which made it easy to travel and trade. Beyond the fertile lands on the banks of the Nile, there was mostly desert in both directions, which made a natural defense for Egyptian civilizations.
In the Ancient world, prosperity depended on water, farmland, resources, and protection from your enemies. Egypt had all that. So for most of its history, Egypt was one of the strongest, most stable civilizations of the ancient world.
The Egyptians developed a very sophisticated system of government, built large cities and of course monuments like the pyramids, developed a written language, had an advanced understanding of astronomy and mathematics, and a very elaborate religious system. All of these things require time, peace, and prosperity in order to develop. That’s why you don’t see all the other ancient cultures develop as far as Egypt did.
Both the government and religious systems were built around worship of the pharaoh, who was considered to be both king and a god. The Egyptian religious system included a hierarchy of gods, and different priesthoods served different gods.
One of the chief gods was Ra, the sun god. They also worshiped Osiris, the god of the underworld and afterlife; Anubis, the god of the dead; Horus, the god of war and the sky; and Isis, the goddess of magic and marriage. The Egyptian religious system was well-developed, with rituals, temples, priests and priestesses, festivals, and rich stories. Their rituals included festivals, prescribed worship rituals for specific gods, and elaborate burial rituals for those who could afford them.
The Egyptian worldview included the idea of an afterlife. They believed a person’s life force, or ‘ba,’ would journey into the Next World. The Ba would journey to a place of judgment, and there the person’s heart would be weighed on a scale. Opposite the heart was a bird’s feather - the feather of Truth. If the person had led a good life, their heart would be light as a feather, and they would pass on to meet Osiris and their ancestors. However, if their heart was weighed down by bad deeds and guilt, their heart would be eaten by a crocodile monster called Ammut, and they would not pass on to the Next world.
This view of the afterlife shows up in their burial rituals. I mentioned, back in Episode 2, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Book of the dead includes spells that were intended to help the dead find their way through the afterlife. Two of the spells that were frequently included in the book were spells that described the judgment of the dead, when the heart was weighed against the feather. Many wealthy Egyptians were buried with copies of the book of the dead.
In addition to these burial rituals, there were rituals for weddings, births, religious occasions, and special offerings to the gods for things like ensuring a good harvest.
Compare this with the simple religious beliefs of the Israelites - they knew the stories of the God of their fathers (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), but they had none of the elaborate trappings of the Egyptian religious system. It is no wonder that after 400 years in Egypt, many of them were confused about God, who He is, and what He wanted from them. To the people of Israel, the Egyptian system of gods and worship must have looked much more well-developed.
From the point of view of the Old Testament, the nation of Egypt is the most powerful kingdom in the world. Other kingdoms rise and fall throughout the Old Testament, but Egypt is always there, a great power alongside the Nile. In fact, a lot of the trouble that befalls the tiny kingdom of Israel is a result of other great powers like Assyria and Babylon heading through Israel on their way to try to attack Egypt.
It is not really until they are conquered by the Roman Empire that Egypt ceases to be a great power of the ancient world. So it is important that God chose Egypt to be the nation that He called His people out of, and over whom He showed His power and authority. Again, from the point of view of the Hebrews and the Old Testament, Egypt is The power in these waters.
The book of Exodus tells the story of God using Moses and Aaron to confront Pharaoh, and God showing his power over the gods of Egypt. Some of the plagues that God sends, to show His power, seem to be directed specifically at one Egyptian god or another. For example, the first plague, in which the waters of the Nile were turned to blood, might have been directed at Hapi, the god of the Nile, or perhaps Osiris - the Nile was considered to be his bloodstream. The plague of frogs might have been directed at Heket, a goddess often represented in pictographs as a frog. The pestilence against the cattle might have been directed at Hathor, the mother and sky goddess, often depicted as a cow. Sorry, Hathor. The hail and locusts might have been directed at Min, a god of harvest, and Exodus 9:31 seems to point to the hail coming right at the time of a harvest festival for Min. And the plague of darkness, which lasted for 3 days, was perhaps directed at Ra, the sun god. Exodus 12:12 says, as God describes the Passover to Moses, "...and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments - I am the Lord."
So the plagues come, God shows his power, and the Egyptians let the Israelites leave. The story shows both the beginning of Israel as a nation, but also the humbling of Egypt and the Egyptian gods.
The Exodus is where Israel starts. There are many speculative dates for the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, but it most likely happened around 1446 B. C. As I write this, it’s 2021 by the Gregorian calendar we use in the west, but it’s the year 5782 by the Hebrew calendar. By their calendar, the exodus happened around year 2448. The Exodus and the Passover celebration are really the most important events in the Jewish calendar - those, and the Day of Atonement: Yom Kippur.
Once the Exodus starts, the nation of Israel is called to leave behind their Egyptian heritage, and worship only the God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His name, in Hebrew, is Yahweh, which means I AM. The Israelites are called to worship Him alone. This the consistent message of the first 5 books of the Bible, and of course, the Israelites struggle with this call.
Exodus describes Israel as journeying with the very presence of God in their midst, but they consistently grumble and fail to follow God’s instructions. Despite this, over the course of the 40 years that they wander in the wilderness, the Israelites go from being a loose group of immigrants in Egypt, to being a distinct people, with their own laws, traditions, and history. It is from this forty year period that they get the name ‘Hebrews,’ which means ‘wanderers.’
Another unique thing that happens to them out in the wilderness is that they are given laws. God appears to Moses, and hands down a long set of laws, which are recorded in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These will become the Law of Israel.
This is an amazing, and often overlooked event. The law of Israel isn’t the oldest set of laws that we have record of - that would be the Code of Hammurabi, which dates to about _1750 BC. The Law of Moses in the first 5 books of the Bible dates to about 1500 BC, or a bit after.
But what is amazing about the Law of Moses is the content. The oldest laws we have, including Hammurabi’s, are about the rights and powers of the king, and the things that he requires, and forbids, his subjects to do. The Law of Moses is quite different. It is a set of laws that is build around the idea, again, that humans have turned away from God, and need to acknowledge Him. The 10 commandments starts with the law, ‘I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.’
Most of the 10 commandments are law designed to protect the poor, the elderly and women. There is nothing else like this in the ancient world! Nothing. And the rest of the law, besides the 10 commandments, continues with these themes. It’s a set of laws that tell the nation of Israel to take care of the poor and widows, to take care of the priestly tribe of Levi who own no land, and to take care of foreigners and slaves. It’s suffused by the idea of equal justice for all the people, and caring for the needs of the people, rather than the rights of the rulers. It’s unique in this. Nothing else in the ancient world is like it.
The next set of laws that protect the rights of the people against the rulers comes from Ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and even those were designed to protect the rights of the wealthy citizens, rather than the common people.
The Law of Moses is a weird and unique set of laws, very different from the laws of Egypt that they just came out of, and full of a sense that truth and justice (not just the ruling powers) are what is important. So Israel comes out of 40 years of wandering with this amazing set of laws about justice, the poor, worship at the temple, and the festivals that they need to observe. They leave Egypt as a band of immigrants, kicked out of their recent homes, but they arrive in the Promised Land 40 years later, a nation with laws, leaders, and a unique sense of identity. Despite their failings over the next generations, they never quite lose this identity, nor their sense of the importance of God’s law.
When people say that our modern American legal system is a Judeo-Christian system, this idea is what they are referring to. Our political structure is much more modeled on the roman republic, but our laws, at least originally, have always been much more focused on justice for all and protecting the rights of the poor. We haven’t always been perfect about enforcing those laws or ideals equally, but the laws themselves reflect these values. Though America does not follow the Jewish law, there are very overt overtones of the values that suffuse the Jewish Law in much of the law of our land.
So how does this apply to our world today? Again, part of the point of this podcast is to take a look at the events of the past, and see how they affect our world today.
I think it’s becoming apparent that in today’s America, the federal legal system is no longer reflecting the values of the Old Testament Law, but is more and more becoming a tool of the government to control the people. That was never the intent of the Law of Moses. It wasn’t created to subjugate the people, but rather to protect them.
Subjugating the people was a tendency of the other laws of the ancient world. Should law uphold the rights of the people, or should law enforce the rule of the rulers? This struggle, between the rights of the masses and the control or tyranny of the rulers, will be an ongoing issue throughout all of human history. Rights? Or Tyranny? Read the laws of Moses, and you will see a thorough protection of the rights of the poor against the rulers. Read the most recent laws from our Congress, and you will see the federal government trying to absorb more and more power for itself.
Next week, we will look at Ancient Greece, the beginnings of greek city-states, and then the birth of democracy, which was an early attempt to protect people against tyranny.
- Usborne Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World
Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world. Welcome to Episode 3 - The Biblical creation narrative. Today we’re going to take a closer look at the creation story that’s found in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The story in Genesis is very different from the other creation narratives of the ancient world, in tone, content, and scope.
Every ancient culture had creation narratives, but not all of them survived. Some of them we have good chunks of, and others mere fragments.
The biblical narrative of creation, in Genesis, may only be part of a larger oral Hebrew creation story.
N We might see some other fragments of this story in Job, and perhaps also in the Psalms. There’s even some additional parts of the story that are told in the Talmud and the Mishnah. The Talmud and Mishnah are very old Hebrew commentaries on the biblical text, plus comments on comments on what the earlier commentators were saying. The Talmud and Mishna may also preserve an older oral tradition, outside of what was written in the Bible. But the core of the creation story is told in Genesis.
As I mentioned last episode, it is really, really difficult to fix a date to the really ancient events that we have a record of, because the records that have survived don’t line up very well. We don’t have all the records that were written down, because many of them didn’t survive. They crumbled into dust over time, and were lost. But copies were apparently preserved, and the copies we do have are copied very carefully, so we don’t see a lot of changes from the oldest copies to the most recent.
Even the Bible has this issue - we don’t have really ancient written copies of it. The oldest piece of the old testament that we know of dates from around 600 BC, even though the oldest parts of the Bible date to well before that. Our oldest piece is a fragment from Numbers 6: “May Yahweh bless you and keep you; May Yahweh cause his face to Shine upon you and grant you Peace.” (1). After that, the next oldest fragments are from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The oldest of those are dated to about 250 BC. (1)
The oldest complete old testament that we have is from around 1150 AD, more than 2500 years after the nation of Israel left Egypt. We do have a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah, and the copy is dated to about 150 BC. It’s very, very close to the modern version we have of Isaiah, showing that the scribes were super-careful when they copied these things down.
The Bible’s creation story is from a very Israel-centric point of view, but it is quite different from the other creation narratives in the type story that it tells. It’s also unique in the story it tells of the character of God, and of its story of the condition of man.
What does the biblical narrative say? First, it’s important to point out that there seems to be two stories - the story of creation, followed by the story of Adam’s family. They seem to be making different points, too. The first chapter of Genesis is about God. He’s the main character. Starting with the second chapter, the main characters are Adam, Eve, and their family. The story starts to be about them. Let’s look at both stories separately.
In Genesis 1, we have the story of God creating the world. This chapter is unique in the ancient stories of creation in a number of ways. In most of the other stories, the gods were created out of things, like the sea or the darkness. In Genesis, there is no ‘creation’ of God. He just exists, and then he creates. The other stories usually involve cataclysmic battles between the gods and some force or monster, but in Genesis, we see God almost tenderly creating all that is. And the refrain ‘he saw what he had made, and it was good,’ happens after every act of creation. Including mankind. Genesis alone among the creation myths shows a God who cares about and deliberately crafts his creation, and a God who loves what he has created. It also shows a God who loves his creation, including men and women. Many of the other myths start with the gods and men at war.
The Genesis story of creation is the Hebrew origin story of the world, and it provides them with a much different worldview than many of the other cultures around them in the ancient world. The Hebrew worldview includes a God who interacts tenderly with men. Besides Adam, we see him extend kindness to even Cain, and then shows favor to Noah, and later to Abraham. He is a god who interacts with his people in very personal ways. The tone of the interactions between god and men in the Hebrew bible is starkly different from how gods and humans interact in EVERY other culture.
The first chapter of Genesis ends with God looking at all that he had made, including people, and calling it good. As it says in the King James version: ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning - the sixth day.’
Once Genesis 1 is over, the story changes paths dramatically. In Genesis 1, the main character is God. He does all the acting. He has all the agency, he’s the one on stage. In Genesis 2, though, God’s a supporting character. The main character of Genesis 2-4 is Adam. We switch from the story of God creating, to the story of one particular part of that creation.
The second chapter of Genesis starts to tell the story of Adam and his family. This too is different from many other creation stories. One of the more unique aspects of the story of Adam is the description of the fall of man. Genesis 2 and 3 make a really big deal of mankind turning away from God, and the consequences of that action. Unique in all the creation stories, the account in Genesis sets the stage for a many-generational arc of redemption.
We see the first of that redemption in the story of Noah. There are other flood narratives with a character like Noah, but only in the Bible is Noah’s story part of a reconciliation between man with God. Noah is introduced in Genesis 5, and then as his story starts in Genesis 6, there is this astounding statement: ‘And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and the every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’ Apparently, except for Noah and his family, everyone else had turned completely away from God, and turned completely to evil.
That’s an astounding condemnation of humanity - that they had all become completely turned away from God and turned only to evil. Again, it’s an indication that the ancient world was much, much more dangerous and difficult than we imagine it. Maybe that’s why there was so much fighting in the ancient world narratives? maybe.
Also, there’s the biblical account of the flood in Genesis. The biblical account of the flood is unique in that it attributes the reason for the flood to man’s sinfulness. Anyway, in Genesis, the flood is sent by God to wipe out humanity, because of their wickedness. But of course, Noah and his family survive, and go on to repopulate the earth, and it seems after this that wickedness, while it still exists, is a bit less.
After the flood, the narrative expands from one person to follow the expansion of man in the post-flood world. The bible recounts the story of Babel, as a way to explain all the different languages of the world. Then, the narrative focuses on Abram - the father of the nation of Israel.
If you look at the book of Genesis as a whole, the main character is clearly Abram - who becomes Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel. The book of Genesis is about him. All that happens before him is just build-up to him, as the main character.
Now I find this kind of odd, for the following reason. Genesis is clearly the story of Abraham, written from a Hebrew point of view to explain the founding of the nation of Israel. Most cultures, when they tell a story of their founder, make him into a great hero. Think Gilgamesh, or maybe Aeneas. Or the stories of George Washington. The biblical depiction of Abraham is that he is, well, kind of a bumbler. He really doesn’t do anything right, except follow God’s call to leave Ur and go to the Promised Land. He’s not depicted doing heroic things. We see him lying repeatedly, hiding, having an affair, and not being a very good parent. Not really the kind of depiction you expect for a description of your founding father.
Which oddly enough adds some level of credence and believability to the story. The story of Abraham has a very, very different tone than the stories of other founders. It also has this sort of first-person narrative feel to it, like it was written by someone with intimate knowledge of what happened. In fact, all of the early books of the Bible have that feel - which is NOT the feel you get from reading other works of the ancient world. Those often feel bombastic, exaggerated and overblown. While the Bible clearly has some miraculous elements, it feels much more intimate, and subdued in its story-telling style.
When it gets to the story of Abraham, the biblical story is full of intimate details of his life, many of which really don’t seem to advance the story in any important way. But they are included anyway, which adds to the sense of intimacy, and the sense that it’s a story of a real person, and their real life.
It’s at this point - Abram’s story - in the biblical narrative that we can begin to conceivably date the flow of events against other histories. The bible mentions the city of Ur as Abram’s home. Archaeology confirms that there was a city named Ur - located along Tigris, south of modern Babylon. From there, Abram journeys to Canaan, to what is called the Promised Land. Eventually, archaeology shows us that a semitic people lived in the area of Canaan. This seems to correlate with the timeline of ancient Egypt as well, but as I said, it’s hard to pin this stuff down this far back in history.
Anyway, Abram shows up in Canaan, and begins to establish himself and his family. God makes a very specific covenant with Abraham. In fact, this might be the most important point that is made in Genesis. God has made a covenant with Abraham, that He will be Abraham’s God, and that Abraham’s children will be as numerous as the sand on the sea shore (which Abraham may not yet have actually seen). Here again we see the God of creation looking out for a specific person, and a particular tribe. We see that in other myths as well, but the tone is different. For example, in the Odyssey, we see some of the Greek gods assisting Odysseus, but it’s not personal like it is with Abraham.
A reasonable date for the time when Abraham arrives in Canaan is around 1800 BC. The is about the same time as the Egyptian
As the biblical narrative goes forward from this point, we can be more and more sure of the timeline.
By the time we get to the Exodus, which was around 1500 BC we can place events in the other things that are going on in the world. As I’ve said, it’s very hard to accurately date what is going on in the ancient world, but the Hebrew narrative does try very hard to be, well, if not chronological, at least it’s sequential. This guy begat that guy, on and on from Adam to Noah to Abraham to eventually Joseph and his brothers, who go to Egypt.
If you look at it like it’s a novel, a true historical novel, it’s finally at this point that we are kind of in the present tense. It seems like Genesis, exodus, Leviticus, numbers, and Deuteronomy are written to an audience that is has just recently been in Egypt, that is familiar with the idea that the Hebrews are in Egypt. It’s like Genesis is ALL backstory, and we pick up in the ‘present day’ at the beginning of Exodus. There’s a sense of Genesis being backstory, to EXPLAIN the meaning of events that the audience is familiar with - that is, the nation of Israel living in Egypt, the plagues, the exodus, the wanderings. And even Exodus etc is explanation of these ‘familiar’ events. The story has a couple of points, all of which are relevant to the Hebrew audience of the story.
The bible is a unique history of the Hebrew people, tying them back to their forefathers, back to Noah, and even back to Adam.
It also proposes these very unique ideas: That is is just ONE god, who created everything, and that mankind has turned away from God, and has thus descended into sinfulness and wickedness. And this sinfulness permeates everything that mankind does. It’s a very different worldview than that of the other ancient cultures. Most other cultures look at the difficulties of the world, and answer the question of ‘why is the world so hard?’ with the answer ‘the gods are against us.’
The Hebrew bible answers the question of ‘why is life hard?’ with the answer ‘well, man has turned away from God.’ But it also begins to create a narrative of redemption, as a loving God brings about a solution to the problem of mankind’s sinfulness. That story goes on throughout the rest of the old testament, and is continued in the new testament. We will eventually get to the new testament as we walk through history, but for for now, know that both testaments tell one long story of redemption. Again, different from all the other creation narratives.
The books of the old testament also seek to make a case for the nation of Israel as God’s Chosen people. That idea that a creation narrative also seeks to explain how a god has favored a nation is common in the other stories, but it is told in a very different way in the bible.
A couple of distinct things here: The bible consistently portrays the founders of Israel as making mistakes, and turning away from God. They don’t come off as looking like heroes. The only really heroic figure in the early stories is Moses, and even he makes some mistakes. We’ll come back to that later. And yet God honors his promises to the people of Israel anyway. The depiction of God is very, very different in the Bible than the depiction of the gods in other narratives, too. The gods in other stories are depicted as squabbling, fighting, full of their own selfish agendas, and usually only peripherally involved in the affairs of mankind. They have their limited powers, and they are often created by other gods. They are often pictured as glorified humans. But not the God of the Bible.
The god of the bible, by contrast, is not described as created, he just is. he’s also all-powerful, not limited like the gods of the other stories. However, He’s also depicted and tender and loving towards his creation, especially mankind, even after they have turned from him.
The Bible, especially Genesis, portrays the world as a place where God cares for the humans he has created, but they have turned away from him. So he creates this grand redemption arc that will bring them all back. The bible portrays humans as fallen, and thus broken, and makes the point that all of our difficulties come from having turned away from a loving God. Again, this is very different than other creation narratives. Sin and wickedness come from having turned away from God. This is why life is hard. That point, that very salient point, is unique in the literature of the ancient world.
The bible’s worldview, begun in Genesis and consistently supported throughout the Bible, is this: God is good and loving. Mankind has turned away from him and brought sin, wickedness, and difficulty upon ourselves. God is still pursuing us. And we keep turning away. Well, to be accurate, some of us do turn back towards him at times (which is known as repentance), but overall, mankind is running headlong in the direction of AWAY from God (which is known as ‘Progress.’)
To sum this up: There are a lot of creation narratives in the ancient world - and there are several in the modern scientific world as well - but none of them capture this idea of a loving God, sin, and redemption that the Bible captures, even from its first few chapters.
Next week: The Gods of Egypt
The creation narratives of the ancient world, including the biblical book of Genesis, were written in part to answer both of these questions: Why are we here? And also, ‘Why is life so hard?’ People in the ancient world had to wake up too, and they probably asked that same question, especially on school days. Many ancient cultures had creation stories that sought to answer why the world is the way it is. Why does the world exist? And, Why is life so hard?
We’re going to look at some of the creation narratives, and a couple of elements that they have in common. We’re also going to talk about just how hard it is to piece together the earliest bits of human history.
An introduction to the ideas of this podcast, and an overview of where it's going. Also, I talk a bit about tyranny. Which is a bad thing, generally.