The World

Houses of Sargon and Ahmose: Ziggurats and Pyramids

POETESS, PRINCESS, VICTIM, AVENGER: ENHEDUANNA

Four thousand years ago, Enheduanna was at the height of her splendour when a raider invading the empire attacked her city, seized her and evidently raped her. Not only did she survive but she was restored to power – and recovered by writing about her ordeal. Enheduanna was the first woman whose words we can hear, the first named author, male or female, the first victim of sexual abuse who wrote about her experiences, and a female member of the first dynasty whom we can know as individuals. She was as privileged as you can get in the 2200s BC – a princess of the Akkadian empire (based in Iraq), high priestess of the moon goddess and favourite daughter of the first conqueror that we know of: Sargon. But like every empire, it all depended on power and violence – and when the empire tottered it was she, a woman, who endured that downfall in the form of sexual violence.

She was probably in her thirties, politically experienced as the long-serving high priestess of the moon goddess Nanna or Sin, and potentate of the city of Ur, but still young enough to bear children. Brought up at the court of her father, Sargon, king of the Four Quarters of the World, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, daughter of his favourite queen Tashlultum, she believed passionately in her patron goddess but she also enjoyed the luxury of royalty: she appears on a disk wearing a fluted robe and cap and tightly plaited hair, performing a ritual at her temple. She presided over a huge staff – as testified by the seals of ‘Adda, estate manager of Enheduanna’ and ‘Sagadu the scribe’ – but fashion and hairstyle were also important: one seal reads ‘Ilum Palilis hairdresser of Enheduanna child of Sargon’. In her temple complex, Enheduanna had her hair plaited by Ilum Palilis – the first named fashionista in history – as she dictated orders to Sagadu about her estates, the temple herds and her poetry. Her hymns praised the goddess – ‘when she speaks heaven shakes’ – and of course her father, ‘my King’. But then some time after his death, when his sons and grandsons struggled to hold the empire together, a raider, or a rebel known as Lugal (king), launched a coup and somehow seized the princess-priestess-poetess herself. Possessing her won him the prestige of Sargon the Great; if he could father a child by her, he might found a dynasty, ennobled by the blood of Sargon. Enheduanna knew what she faced: ‘Oh moon god Sin, is this Lugal my destiny?’ she wrote. ‘Tell heaven to set me free of it!’ It sounds as if she was raped by this upstart: ‘That man has defiled the rites decreed by holy heaven … Forcing his way in as if he was an equal, he dared approach me in his lust.’ She remembered it viscerally as any woman would: ‘a slobbery hand was laid across my honeyed mouth’. And he removed her from her beloved temple: ‘When Lugal stood paramount, he expelled me from the temple, flying out of the window like a swallow.’

But she was lucky: the empire struck back. Her brother or nephew routed Lugal and reconquered the Akkadian empire, thus liberating Enheduanna and restoring her as high priestess. How did she grieve for her pain and celebrate her survival? She did what writers do: she wrote. And she wrote proudly: ‘I am Enheduanna, let me speak to you! My prayer, my tears flowing like some sweet intoxicant. I went towards the shade. It shrouded me in swirling dust.’

The exact date and precise details of this episode are obscure but we know she existed and we know her words: in her survival as a woman, not to speak of her record as author and ruler, she represents the experience of women throughout history, as ruler, writer, victim, whose survival she herself celebrates unforgettably as a goddess ‘in a queenly robe … riding on leashed lions’, slashing ‘her enemies to pieces’ – quite an image and a voice both astonishingly modern and very much of the twenty-third century BC.

Enheduanna lived a long time ago, yet the human family was already very old in her time. It probably started in Africa. We do not know how exactly humans evolved and we probably never shall. All we know is that all humans were originally Africans, that the nurturing of children required teams that we call families and that the story of humanity from the beginning to the twenty-first century AD is an invincibly exciting and complicated drama. Historians have long debated when history began.^* It is easy to point to footprints, chiselled tools, dusty walls and bone fragments, but for the purposes of this book history started when war, food and writing coalesced to allow a potentate, usually a male one like Sargon but sometimes a female like Enheduanna, to harness power and promote his or her children in order to keep it.

Seven to ten million years ago, while our planet, itself four to five billion years old, was in the grip of ice ages that receded and returned, hominins of a currently unknown genus separated from chimpanzees. By about two million years ago, in east Africa, a creature who walked upright on two feet had evolved. This was Homo erectus, who lasted most of the next two million years – the longest period of human existence – and who lived by foraging and hunting. Soon afterwards, some of these creatures migrated out of Africa into Europe and Asia, where different climates caused them to develop into different branches to which scientists have given Latin names such as antecessor, neanderthalensis and heidelbergensis after the places where their bones were discovered. DNA suggests most were dark-skinned with dark eyes. They already used stone axes. By 500,000 years ago, from South Africa to China, they were hunting large animals and perhaps using fire to cook, and there is evidence of both caring and violence from the start: some disabled individuals lived to a good age, suggesting social care, while on the other hand several skulls found in a northern Spanish cave had head injuries inflicted 430,000 years ago – the first confirmed murders. Some 300,000 years ago, they started to make offsite fires, changing landscapes for the first time, and using wooden spears and traps to hunt large animals.

Hominin brains nearly tripled in size, requiring an ever-richer diet. Larger-headed babies were harder for females to deliver: the tightness of the female pelvis – a compromise between the form necessary to walk upright and that needed to deliver a baby – made childbirth dangerous for both the mother and the baby, a vulnerability that helped shape the family in history. We guess this meant that they needed a group of related people to help raise their babies – and, if correct, these small blood-related communities became the defining unit of human history, the family that we still need today even though we are masters of the planet, dominators of every other species and the creators of remarkable new technologies. Anthropologists love to project that families were a certain size, that men did one task, women another, but all this is guesswork.

Most likely, there was a mosaic of many different-looking hominin species, coexisting, sometimes isolated from each other, sometimes interbreeding, sometimes fighting. By about 120,000 years ago, as earth was in a warming period (so warm that hippopotami were bathing in the Thames), modern humans – Homo sapiens, wise man – emerged in Africa. Sixty thousand years later, some of these humans migrated into Asia (Europe came later), where they encountered the other hominin species on the way eastwards. The reasons for their travels are mysterious, but most likely they were a combination of quests for food and land, climate and environmental changes, spasms of disease, religious rites and love of adventure. Crossing seas as wide as 100 miles in boats, they reached Indonesia, Australia and the Philippines between 65,000 and 35,000 years ago. Then they ventured into the Pacific, island by island.

Sapiens coexisted with the other hominin families: over 100,000 years, they fought and killed some Neanderthals and raised families with others. Today Europeans, Chinese and Native Americans are 2 per cent Neanderthal in their DNA while some indigenous Australians, Melanesians and Filipinos have an additional 6 per cent of DNA, inherited from an enigmatic, ancient Asian population first identified from fragmentary fossils and DNA recovered from the Denisova Cave in Siberia. This pattern of migrating, settling and conquering – the mass movement of existing families and the generation of new ones by competition (sometimes murderous), nurturing and mixing – is the perpetual dance of human creation and destruction: it started early, is repeated throughout history and continues today. The humans who emerged were almost uniform – gracile faces, globular skulls, little noses, biologically almost identical. Yet the tiniest differences have justified centuries of conflict, oppression and racism.

By 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had outcompeted, killed or absorbed other hominins, and wiped out many large animals. Long before this, they had developed vocal cords that allowed them to talk, and brains that sparked the wish and ability to tell stories. Somehow the appetite for comfort, the need for safety, the instinct to raise children and perhaps even the enjoyment of companionship encouraged people to settle in clusters of families. They lived by hunting and gathering, worshipping the spirits of nature, expressing their beliefs through paintings in caves – the earliest in Indonesia and Australia dating from over 40,000 years ago – carving figures of curvaceous women and lion-headed men, and ritualistically burying some people in graves with jewels and beads. They made the first linen cloth, which replaced animal skins as clothing; bows and arrows improved hunting; dogs were trained for hunting and then domesticated. These hunter-gatherers were tall and fit, their teeth strong, undecayed by grain or sugar. But throughout history the fate of an individual was decided by geography and timing: some lived in lush abundance, some eked out meagre lives in icy tundras.

Sixteen thousand years ago, the climate began to warm, the ice to recede, grasses and legumes along with herds of deer and cattle became more plentiful in some regions. Some bands of these hunter-gatherers crossed the icy land bridge between Asia and Alaska and entered the Americas, where in a glimpse of perilous existence, 13,000 years ago, the footsteps of a woman in New Mexico show her holding a child, sometimes putting it down and lifting it up again, as she was stalked by sabre-toothed tigers. Her footsteps came back alone. The tigers may have devoured the child.

Humans started to build first wooden then stone structures: in Russia and Ukraine, close to the edge of the ice, they raised wooden enclosures sometimes embellished with mammoth tusks and bones, possibly to celebrate hunts. They buried a few people in elaborate graves, many of them with physical deformities, perhaps regarded as sacred. The people of the Amazon used ochre to paint their world of mastodons, giant sloths and horses; those of Australia depicted bilbies and dugongs. In Japan, people made pottery; in China, they fired their pottery so that they could cook over fires. These were now fully formed people, not apes. Their families, like ours, probably shared sacred rituals and useful knowledge while nursing hatred for their close relatives and distant rivals. It is tempting to impose our wishful thinking that women for example were powerful, but actually we know virtually nothing about them.

The thawing of the ice accelerated 11,700 years ago; this marked the dawn of a warm age that is still continuing, and the rising waters cut off America and Australia from Asia, and Britain from continental Europe. Now there were perhaps four million people on earth. After most of the ice had melted, around 9000 BC, a few lucky ones found that they lived in regions where they could cultivate animals and plants. But even by 8000 human hunting and management of forests started to drive the large mammals – mammoths, mastodons, indigenous horses in America – to extinction. For several millennia, many people still lived seasonally, hunting game in one season, gathering grasses and fruits in another. Yet even before agriculture was fully organized, people across the world – from Japan to Finland and the Americas – were raising monumental structures that were both sacred and social. The temples acted as calendars linked to celestial bodies, and people possibly just gathered there to celebrate successful harvests, then returned to their hunting-foraging life. In south-east Türkiye, at Göbekli Tepe, structures that looked like temples, pillars topped with sculpted foxes, snakes and scorpions, were built by hunter-gatherers who did not yet farm yet already shared religious rites. Nearby, at Karahan Tepe, they built another monumental temple embellished with sculptures of people – including a small room featuring eleven statues of phalloi. Starting around 9500 BC the temples, built 4,500 years before Stonehenge, were used for over 1,500 years.

People started settling in villages – one of the earliest was at Jericho in Canaan (Palestine) – before agriculture became their chief source of nourishment: they still foraged and hunted. Contrary to the traditional image of a ‘revolution’, there was no sudden switch: many peoples moved back and forth between agriculture and hunting, fishing and foraging. Even though it only takes between 30 and 200 years to domesticate a crop, it took 3,000 years (the difference between today and the pharaohs) from the beginnings of cultivating cereals to full agriculture, and another 3,000 before the real emergence of states – while in most parts of the world such states never developed at all.

At first, this meant the diet of most individuals was worse, not better: these agrarian planters were shorter, weaker, more anaemic, their teeth worse. Women worked with the men, developing strong upper arms – along with deformed knees and bent toes – from working the land and grinding grain. Life may have been better before farming, but it worked because it was more efficient for the species. Competition was ferocious; farmer villages vanquished hunter bands who coveted their food stores. For unknown reasons, the Göbekli and Karahan Tepe temples were filled in and buried. In Jericho, the thousand inhabitants built the first walls to protect themselves. Under their houses, they buried their dead and sometimes, after removing the flesh, they remoulded the faces with plaster and placed stones in the eye sockets – skull portraits that were popular from Israel to Iraq, more confirmation that humans could mentalize supernatural and magical beings and recognize the difference between body and spirit.

Starting around 7500 BC, the villagers of Çatalhöyük (central Türkiye) – which housed over 5,000 inhabitants – lived by planting cereals and rearing sheep while starting to hammer copper into useful tools. Near Raqqa, Syria, villagers in Tell Sabi Abyad built granaries for their food stores and used clay tokens to record how much they possessed. The oldest intact cloth, found in Çayönü, (Türkiye) dates to 7000 BC. Safe in walled villages, women had more children who could be weaned and fed porridge, but 50 per cent of them died young because they lived in intimate proximity to people and animals which made them prey to diseases: then as now, epidemics were symptoms of the species’ success, not its failure. But they required more settlements to organize the growing of more food: between 10,000 and 5000 BC, the world population scarcely grew from four million to five million. For most of history – the next eight and a half millennia – life expectancy was around thirty.

Small towns developed in Iraq, Egypt and China, followed by Pakistan/India where fecund, moist riverine soils along with the most useful breeds of domesticated animals gave these four regions a boost in the formation of sophisticated societies that would grant them supremacy over Eurafrica for many millennia.

All over the world, people started to raise megalithic stone structures, often in circles: around 7000 BC, Nubians – not Egyptians but sub-Saharan Africans – pulled huge stones from far away and raised them at Nabta Playa in circles linked to the observance of stars. The first commodities and luxuries were traded or exchanged: from Iran to Serbia, copper, gold and silver were mined and crafted; lapis lazuli was used in burials; and in the Yangtze Valley, the Chinese started to make silk.

In Malta, Germany, Finland and later England, communities moved gigantic stones across long distances to build structures that were – possibly – temples to follow the sun, to predict rain, to sacrifice humans, to celebrate fertility. Faith was interlinked with power and family: both men and women did the hunting and farming, but the latter probably raised the children and spun textiles: the oldest cotton has been found in the Jordan Valley. In Africa, where families weaved raffia and bark cloth these clans may have been run by women with power descending through the female line.^* In Eurasia, the value of female skills began to be calculated: fathers charged a bride price to future husbands who if powerful could keep several women and protect their children. Originally families honoured both male and female lineages, but to avoid conflicts over land or grain they at some point started to favour the male lineage, though genetically all descendants were identical – a tradition that still endures in many places into the age of iPhones. Yet even in Iraq women could rise to power.

KUBABA: FIRST QUEEN

At Eridu, on a lagoon in Iraq near the mouth of the Euphrates River on the Persian Gulf, around 5400 BC, fishermen and shepherds founded a village where they raised a temple to the god Enki. So rich was this environment that other cities were built nearby, so close that they could almost see other. The invention of the spindle whorl – a sphere with a hole – to make cloth may have been the first gadget, developed as early as pottery and agriculture, with consequences far beyond its immediate usefulness. Difficult to create, cloth was essential but expensive: societies were arranged around food, war and cloth. Eridu was one of the first towns in Sumeria, followed by Ur and Uruk, where a terraced platform was built to Anu, the sky god, topped off with a temple – a ziggurat.

Their leaders were both patriarchs and priests. Their gods were partly playful hucksters, but they evolved into harsher judges who threatened rule-breakers and then policed something altogether greater still: the afterlife. The gods got bigger as the rulers and communities got bigger and the competition with others became fiercer.^*

It is not known how Uruk, now home to over 20,000 people, was organized – there were no palaces and there is mention of ‘the people’ – but there were priest-kings and the temples controlled the wealth: the idea of property probably started with reference to special treasure and artefacts set aside for the sacred within these temples.

To the north, on the Eurasian steppes, horses – the animals that would help humans dominate the terrestrial until the nineteenth century – were being domesticated. Around 3500 BC, horses were fitted with bits so they could be ridden. Soon, the wheel was developed in Ukraine/Russia, where the first linguistic references to wheels appear. It is likely the wheel reached Iraq before the horses: the earliest wagons were pulled not by horses but by another member of the equid family, the kunga – a sturdy cross between female donkey and Syrian ass, the first example of human interbreeding of animals – depicted in art pulling early four-wheeled wagons. The remains of one was recently discovered in Syria. The new technology spread to India; kungas vanished; and the horse empowered shepherds to become ferocious, nomadic cavalry and families to move across vast distances to settle in new lands. War already drove technology: wagons were weaponized as chariots, so prestigious that warband chiefs fielded charioteer armies. When they died, they were buried with horse and chariot. The steppe peoples found copper reserves too: at Sintasha, north of the Aral Sea, bronze was created by mixing copper and tin from Bactria (Afghanistan), used for weapons and decorations.

These horsemen were soon led by sword-swinging warlords who built strongholds with high audience chambers, perhaps the first palaces – one stands at Arslantepe (eastern Türkiye) – and buried heroic male warriors in extravagant tombs with food, swords and jewellery.

Around 3100, the people of Uruk – which meant the Place – may have invented writing, initially pictograms, but then took to marking clay with the wedge-end of a reed, a process that we call cuneiform, which means wedge-shaped. The first named people in history are an accountant, a slave master and two enslaved persons. The first receipt, confirmed by the first signature of the first named person – the accountant – reads:

‘29,086 measures barley. 37 months. Kushim.’

Another records the ownership of En-pap X and Sukkalgir, the first named enslaved people. These were slave-owning societies. We do not know when slavery started, but it was probably at the same time as organized fighting. Most enslaved people were war captives or debtors. Royal taxes paid for soldiers who captured the slaves who now built the cities or toiled within family households: a history of family is also a history of slavery.

Towards 2900, kings – starting as Big Men, Lugalene in Sumerian – appear as rulers of all the Iraqi cities that now engaged in vicious wars: ‘Kish was defeated and the kingship taken to Uruk. Then Uruk was defeated and the kingship taken to Ur.’ Kingship ‘descended from heaven’ and it soon became hereditary. The crown was not inherited by eldest sons; kings had many children by chief wives and junior women. They chose the most able – or the more ferocious son killed his brothers. What they gained in ability they lost in stability for the children fought for power, and often destroyed the very realm they coveted. As people in Britain celebrated their rites at Stonehenge,^* one of the first family rulers, around 2500, was Kubaba of Kish, the world’s first female potentate that we know of, who owned taverns and brewed beer, and who was succeeded by her son and grandson. We know nothing else about them but a lot about their world.

These kings now built palaces alongside the rich temples; they ruled with a hierarchy of courtiers, generals, tax collectors. Writing was a tool for ruling, recording the ownership of property, transactions in grain and promulgation of laws. The Sumerians created pictures of themselves, men and women, not just praying but also drinking – and loving. They recorded recipes, and both men and women celebrated their enjoyment of sex; they drank beer through straws and imbibed opium. Later they studied mathematics and astronomy.

Thousands of cuneiform texts survive to reveal a world where taxes, war and death were certain, but so were the prayers of the priests to ensure that the sun would shine and rain would fall, crops would grow, sheep would make more sheep, the palm trees would be beautiful at dawn, the canals full of fish.

Uruk and the Sumerian cities were neither unique nor isolated. Cities became the marketplaces, information exchanges, marriage agencies, sexual carousels, fortresses, laboratories, courts and theatres of human community, but there were compromises: city folk had to conform; they could not feed themselves, having lost the skills of the wild and the thrills of the steppe. If the harvests failed, they starved; in epidemics, they died in droves. Sumeria was already in contact with other worlds. Lapis lazuli, the first international luxury commodity, tells the story: mined in Afghanistan, it was traded via the cities of India/Pakistan, to Sumer – mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh^* – then on to Mari in Syria and all to the way to Egypt, where objects were made with lapis, found in the Abdju temple city.

Around 3500 BC, the villages of Egypt started to consolidate into larger polities. Fifty years later, the king of the south, Tjeni, who was known as Narmer – Catfish – united Egypt under one crown, celebrating his victory with religious festivals, where sacred beer was quaffed, and commemorated in objects: a palette, used to grind and mix male and female cosmetics, shows him killing his enemies with a raised mace, watched by a cow goddess, while on its other side Narmer, shown as a powerful sacred bull, tramples rebels under hoof. Nearby, Narmer marches to view his fallen enemies, who have been beheaded, their penises sliced off. Our first real glimpse of the refinement and brutality of Egypt is a cosmetics artefact – and a pile of penises.

KHUFU AND MOTHER: THE PYRAMID BUILDERS

Egypt was the first African kingdom that we can observe: Egyptian kingship reflected a life where everything depended on the Nile and the sun. Its towns and villages were spread along the thread of the river which gave the soil its richness. The sun crossing the sky every day was regarded as a god, and all life was played out in that daily journey. Kings travelled up and down the Nile – and to the underworld – on splendid boats.

Narmer and his family lived in mudbrick palaces and were buried in mudbrick tombs in the desert at Abdju, where large mudbrick enclosures contained boats to carry them across the sky on their journey to join the sun.

The Egyptian kings thought deeply about life and death and believed in their sacred role, affirmed by a network of temples and priests. Originally different gods were revered in different towns that were gradually agglomerated into a single story symbolizing the union of the two kingdoms – upper and lower Egypt – and the life of the monarch before and after death. Like so many sacred narratives, it was a story of family love, sex and hatred.^*

When they died, the kings did not really perish but instead became Osiris while their heirs became Horus. The power of the kings was absolute, demonstrated at this time by human sacrifice. The tomb of the third king of Narmer’s dynasty, Djer, was surrounded by 318 sacrificed courtiers.

Around 2650, King Djoser, also known as Netjerikhet, added a novelty to his tomb: instead of separating the tomb and enclosure, he built them on top of one another to create the step pyramid, six steps high – and it still stands. His minister, the tjati, possessed the vision of his master: his name was Imhotep, so trusted by the king that on the statue base in the entrance both of their names appear. Most probably the minister of the king was also his doctor because, later, Imhotep was worshipped as a god of medicine.

The new king Sneferu, succeeding in 2613, signalled his swagger by his Horus name, neb Maat, lord of truth, righteousness and the sacred order of the universe – and that was not all. His other name, netjer nefer, meant Perfect God. A story in a later papyrus implies Sneferu’s hedonism – he had himself rowed out on to a palace lake by twenty girls wearing just fishing nets – and his aggression, noting that he sent a 170-foot ship Praise-of-the-Two-Lands to raid Nubia where he enslaved captives and seized 200,000 cattle.

Sneferu ordered the building of the Meidum Pyramid, built like all pyramids on an east–west axis, associating the king with the daily journey of the sun. When he attempted an even bigger pyramid at Dahshur, he demanded a steep angle of inclination of 60 degrees, but disaster struck: the foundations were not strong enough and cracks suddenly appeared as the pyramid collapsed in on itself. Now Perfect God ordered a perfect pyramid and it was built fast while the Bent Pyramid was finished (and it still stands 4,000 years later). The Red Pyramid, Sneferu’s third, was completed in record time. Sneferu was surely buried there: a body was found in modern times – but lost.

His widow Hetepheres, daughter, wife and now mother of kings, smoothed the succession of her son Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid at Giza, designed to outdo even his father’s works. She gloried in titles Mother of the Dual King, Follower of Horus, Director of the Ruler, suggesting that if Khufu respected anyone it was her.

Khufu must have been obsessed with his pyramid. It is still perhaps the greatest building of world history: 2.3 million blocks. Its height of 481 feet made it the tallest building on earth until the Eiffel Tower. His workers were arranged in teams which adopted playful names such as King’s Drunkards, perhaps just 10,000 in all, living in a special workers’ village beside the site, with food and medical care provided. He added little pyramids too for his female relations.^*

When Khufu’s mother was buried, her tomb was packed with imported treasures, real and depicted. Turquoise came from Sinai, cedarwood from Lebanon, lapis from Afghanistan, ebony and carnelian from Nubia, myrrh and frankincense from Punt (Eritrea/Ethiopia/Somalia, perhaps Yemen) probably brought on ships from Sumer, where a conqueror founded the first empire: his name was Sargon.

MY FATHER I KNEW NOT: SARGON KING-SMASHER

Sargon was a boy abandoned in a basket, rescued and nurtured. ‘My mother was a priestess; my father I knew not,’ he declared in a poetical inscription that may capture his own voice. After all, they were a family of poets as well as potentates. Sargon was born in the northern steppes, ‘the highlands of Azupiranu’, speaking a Semitic language like those that became Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, instead of Sumerian from the south. ‘My mother conceived me in secret, she gave birth to me in hiding.’ He was a self-creation. ‘She set me in a basket of rushes, she sealed the lid with tar. She cast me into the river but it did not rise over me.’ His enchanted birth, mysterious paternity, obscure concealment, charmed rise – to be repeated in the myths of many world changers, Moses, Cyrus, Jesus – explained the mystical process of how exceptional leaders, throughout history, could rise to power from nowhere.

‘A water carrier Akki rescued him,’ raised him as his own son and appointed him ‘his gardener’: in a society where all prosperity was based on irrigation and rainfall, the river, the water carrier and the garden all represent purity and holiness. Through Akki, young Sargon found service with the king of Kish, Ur-Zababa, descendant of Queen Kubaba, rising to become cupbearer. Power is always personal; proximity is influence; the more personal and absolute the power, the closer to the body the better: cupbearers, physicians, bodyguards and bearers of the royal chamberpot shared its glow. Inanna (later known as Ishtar), the goddess of love, sex and war, appeared to Sargon in a terrifying dream in which he was covered in blood. When he told the king, Ur-Zababa sensed that the blood was his own and ordered his assassination, but Inanna warned him. Sargon reappeared as if nothing had happened, ‘solid as a mountain. Ur-Zababa was afraid,’ unsure if Sargon knew of his duplicity. But then came alarming news.

The most aggressive king in Iraq, Lugalzaggesi of Umma, was marching on Kish: Ur-Zabada sent Sargon to negotiate with him. But his letter asked Lugalzaggesi to kill Sargon. Lugalzaggesi contemptuously revealed the request and unleashed Sargon, who seized Uruk. But then he routed Lugalzaggesi and around 2334 surges into history in his own inscriptions, taking the regnal name Rightful King – Sharrumkin.^* He paraded the fallen Lugalzaggesi through the Temple of Enlil, where he smashed his skull with a mace.

Sargon galloped south ‘to wash his weapons in the sea’ – the Persian Gulf – then eastwards. ‘Sargon King of Kish,’ reads the inscription on his tablets, ‘triumphed in thirty-four battles,’ invading the kingdom of Elam in Iran and, after advancing northwards, defeating the nomadic Amorites and taking the cities of Ashur and Nineveh, before turning west into Syria and Türkiye. He was now calling himself King of the Four Quarters of the World, and a later legend praises his fighting prowess in an unforgettable metaphor:

The writhing ranks will writhe back and forth,

Two women in labour, bathed in their own blood!

Sargon created the first power family which we can know personally: it was his daughter Enheduanna, who was the first poetess. But naturally she was also a connoisseur of paternal power: ‘My King, something’s been created here that no one’s created before.’ She meant empire.

ENHEDUANNA’S REVENGE

It was no coincidence that Sargon appointed his daughter Enheduanna as high priestess of the moon god of Uruk. Temples were rich complexes at the centre of Akkadian cities. Sargon himself may have been the first ruler to maintain a standing army – 5,400 men ate daily at his table in Akkad. He enforced law that was a mixture of reason and magic: water ordeals decided difficult cases. At her temple, Enheduanna presided over thousands of employees and estates. The relationship between the temples and the royal family was close: Sargon believed that Inanna (Ishtar) and her divine husband Dagan were his special protectors.

When Sargon died he left Enheduanna in charge of her temple, but the new king, her brother Rimush, immediately faced rebellions and invasions. These he defeated, killing 23,000 people, torturing, enslaving and deporting others, then he invaded Elam (Iran), and returned with gold, copper and more slaves. Rimush died in a special way, assassinated by killer scribes, stabbed either with the reeds used for writing or the copper pins used to attach the cylinder seals – the first death by bureaucracy! The Sargons lived by conquest: it was Sargon’s grandson, Enheduanna’s nephew Naram-Sin, who probably faced the revolt of Lugal – and the capture and rape of his aunt. Naram-Sin smashed the usurper and restored the high priestess to her temple. We do not know when she died, but Naram-Sin ruled for thirty-seven years, carrying out sorties into Iran to smash the Lullubi raiders, boasting of killing 90,000 and claiming that he ruled lands as far away as Lebanon. On his Victory Stele, Naram-Sin is a muscular, bare-chested warrior wearing a divine horned helmet and tight kilt, holding a spear and bow and crushing his enemies in Iran, with nothing between him, the Mighty, and the sun and stars: the first mortal to be depicted as equal to a goddess.

The capital Akkad flourished under House Sargon. Its location is unknown, but standing somewhere on the Tigris it became a new sort of city. ‘Its population dine on the best of food, draw the best of drinks, make merry in the courtyard and throng the festival grounds,’ recounts The Epic of Gilgamesh, probably referring to Akkad.^* ‘Acquaintances dine together. Monkeys, mighty elephants … dogs, lions, ibexes and sheep jostle each other in public places …’, while its stores were packed with ‘gold and silver, copper, tin and blocks of lapis’. Grandees dressed richly, both men and women wearing cosmetics and taking trouble with their hair. Fashions changed as quickly as they do today – Sargon had worn a shaggy coat; the Naram-Sin elite preferred a robe tied with a pin at the shoulder. Akkadians consulted diviners – using extispicy, the reading of animal entrails – to advise on their decisions. There was a culinary cult: tablets record the variety of food eaten, from sheep and pigs to deer, rabbits, fieldmice, jerboas and hedgehogs. Beer was the favourite drink, enjoyed by men and women, made from fermented barley, drunk through a straw, at taverns run by independent women. Elite girls attended school and could write both Sumerian and Akkadian. In glimpses of family life, women gave birth in a seated position; children are shown playing with rattles, wheeled sheep and mini-wagons. Love spells were common: girls wore love charms around their thighs.

Foreigners wandered its streets, admiring its wonders. ‘Tigi drums, flutes and zamzam instruments resounded,’ says The Epic: ‘its harbours where ships moored were full of joy,’ trading with the entire Indian Ocean: ‘at the wharf … ships moor from Meluhha [India/Pakistan], Magan [Yemen/Oman] and Dilmun [Bahrain]’. Amorites, Meluhhans, Elamites bore goods there ‘like laden donkeys’, traders paying for their goods in barley or silver: there were so many Meluhhans that they lived together in their own village.

Meluhha – land of ivory – was centred around two cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, on the Indus (Pakistan but extending into India and Afghanistan), so well planned that they were built in grids with standardized bricks and even boasted public rubbish bins, and public lavatories and sewers that London would not possess until the nineteenth century and that are not universal in south Asia today. Using their own (still undeciphered) script, their workshops made jewellery in ivory, gold, carnelian, as well as textiles and ceramics. Mohenjo-daro may have housed as many as 85,000 people, the biggest city in the world, but its largest building was a public bath – no palaces, no ziggurats.

These Indian cities were not ruled by single kings; more likely they were governed by councils – perhaps Pakistan/India invented democracy – but the bathhouse stood in a sequestered citadel which might suggest it was the precinct of a priestly elite. Versions of urban life were being sampled simultaneously on several continents. In China, there were towns on the Yellow River and in the north, at Shimao (Shaanxi). In Ukraine, Taljanky, containing 10,000 people, was larger and maybe even earlier than the first city at Uruk. In America, long since separated from Asia, people in Mexico and Guatemala were building towns with as many as 10,000 inhabitants and pyramidal mounds that reflected their sacred calendar, using a form of writing, storing surplus maize in storehouses, and sculpting giant heads, probably of their rulers, who seem to be sporting helmets worn for their ballgames.^* On the Mississippi, people were raising monumental earthworks that somehow linked stars and calendar: the inhabitants of the largest of these – now called Poverty Point – were not farmers but nomadic hunters who somehow came together to build massive structures.

In west Asia, the Sargon family illustrated a paradox of empire. The bigger it grew, the more borders had to be defended; the richer it was, the more tempting a target it became for less settled neighbours – and the greater was the incentive for destructive family feuds. Drought brought hunger; nomads swooped on the cities. In 2193 BC, the Sargons lost control: ‘Who was king?’ asks the Sumerian king list. ‘Who was not king?’ By 1800, west Asia was in turmoil – even Egypt ceased to be a player in the most humiliating and gruesome way. It started with a row about hippopotami.

THE SHATTERED HEAD OF SEQENENRE THE BRAVE

The king stood no chance. His hands were tied behind his back. He was likely to be kneeling. Seqenenre Taa, ruler of southern Egypt, had been captured in battle and now Apophis, Asiatic ruler of northern Egypt, was leading the squad of killers. There were at least five of them. The first blow of the Asiatic axe smashed into Seqenenre’s royal face, severing his left cheek, a wound that would have opened his entire face. A second slash shattered the back of the skull before a javelin penetrated his forehead just above the eye.

It was the sacred hippos of Thebes who provided the pretext. Apophis told Seqenenre that their grunting far away in Thebes was keeping him awake in Avaris (Hutwaret): he ordered them killed, a declaration of war. Seqenenre seized the gauntlet and marched north, leading his troops from the front. But something went wrong. Seqenenre was captured and Apophis devised his public demolition. A final fifth blow from a sword sliced straight into the brain. For those who looked upon the shattered body of the king – as we still can today – it must have seemed as if his family and Egypt itself were finished. In fact, this nadir was the moment the recovery started.

In 1558 BC, when Seqenenre the Brave, son of Senakhtenre Ahmose and his commoner queen Tetisheri, succeeded his father as king in Thebes, Egypt was already broken. The chaos was accelerated by stampede migrations where the movement of one people forced others to advance. Tribes of pale-skinned, dark-eyed, aquiline people on the Black Sea steppes migrated from their pasturelands, driven by changing climate, the lust for conquest and the pressure of other tribes behind them. Speaking an Indo-European language, they were cattle-breeders who had become expert horsemen. Three pieces of technology made them deadly adversaries: the bronze bit meant horses could be controlled; swift chariots with bladed wheels added a heavy punch to their charges; and they could fire composite bows – new killing machines made of laminated wood, sinew and horn – from the saddle at the gallop.

These horsemen galloped westwards into the Balkans and eastwards towards India. They shattered established kingdoms but also settled into them. In Iran, this horde – whom scholars later called Aryans – brought their Avestan language and holy scriptures, the Avesta; in India, the Aryans may have overwhelmed the Indus cities and then settled, merging the Indus Valley culture with their own rituals and language, and formulating the stories, prayers and poems of the Vedas written in what became Sanskrit. Their warlords and priests imposed a hierarchy of castes, the varnas.^* This culture long afterwards formed the Sanatana Dharma – Eternal Way – later called Hinduism by Europeans. Some tribes rode southwards through the Caucasus into eastern Türkiye where they founded the kingdom of Hatti – the Hittites of the Bible – while others hit Canaan, stampeding its peoples, known as the Hyksos, to invade Egypt.

Around 1630, an Asiatic warlord Apophis, whose tribes had invaded Egypt, ruled the north from his capital Hutwaret in the Nilotic delta, while Seqenenre held Thebes in the south. Just four years into his reign, Seqenenre was in his prime, tall, athletic, with a head of thick curly black hair (that is still on the skull of his mummy today). Not only did he face Asiatics to the north, a new southern kingdom of Kush had subjugated the Nubian city states. Based at Kerma (Sudan), its kings co-opted the old Egyptian gods, even worshipping Osiris and Horus, as well as Egyptian kings.

Kush left vast monuments. Enriched by their gold mines, ostrich feathers, leopard furs and spices, its kings built massive royal tombs in which hundreds of courtiers and relatives were killed with them. Kushite fortresses were impressive and their main shrine, in Kerma, was a colossal pre-Kushite temple built of mudbrick that still survives.

Somehow the Egyptians reclaimed the carved-up body of Seqenenre, but there was no time to mummify him to the usual standards. His brother Kamose the Strong mourned him: ‘Why do I ponder my strength while … I sit squeezed between an Asiatic and a Nubian, each holding a portion of Egypt?’ But Kamose had a mission: ‘No man can be calm, when despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatic: I will grapple with him. I’ll rip open his belly! My wish is to rescue Egypt and to kill the Asiatic!’ Kamose attacked his enemies in both directions.

His heir was his young nephew Ahmose, just ten years old, who adored his grandmother. ‘His love for her was greater than anything,’ he declared on the stela he raised at Abdju. But his mother Ahhotep was even more important – King’s Daughter, King’s Great Wife, King’s Mother, she was a commander and international arbiter. Her title ‘The Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut whose reputation is high over every foreign land’ suggests she cultivated links with Aegean peoples.

Egyptian kings had already launched expeditions to ‘hack up Asia’, raiding ‘Iwa’ (Türkiye) and ‘Iasy’ (Cyprus), but Hau-nebut was Crete, with which the Egyptian family had a special relationship. Knossos, Crete’s capital, and its other cities boasted unfortified palatial complexes decorated with ecstatic, playful frescoes of naked male athletes leaping over sacred bulls and bare-chested women in patterned skirts.^* A maze in Knossos was surely the basis for the legend of the monstrous Minotaur said to demand the sacrifice of children, but it was not just a legend: children’s bones found with cooking pots suggest these stories were based on reality; and Labyrinthos, the name of the maze, may have been the name of the city itself. For around 250 years, between 1700 and 1450 BC, these Cretans traded throughout the Mediterranean. They brought home Egyptian artefacts, and Cretan griffins and bull-leaping frescoes decorated the palace at Hutwaret. Ahmose may have married a Cretan princess.

Some time around 1500, a volcanic eruption at Thera, the Greek island of Santorini – the most explosive catastrophe in world history, more powerful than the hydrogen bombs, a boom heard thousands of miles away – shot clouds of poisonous sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and sent a tsunami across the Mediterranean, drowning tens of thousands. It changed the climate, blighted harvests and devastated kingdoms. Crete was wounded by Thera, but regained its vigour for a while before warlords from mainland Greece took control. Egypt recovered.

As soon as he came of age, in 1529, Ahmose married his own sister Ahmose-Nefertari and marched on Hutwaret, finishing off the Asiatics then pursuing them across Sinai. When he faced uprisings, his mother Ahhotep crushed the rebels. ‘Give praise to the Lady of the Land,’ Ahmose wrote on his stela at the Temple of Amun at Ipetsut. ‘She has pacified Upper Egypt.’ Ahhotep’s grave goods included a necklace of golden flies – for courage in battle. When Ahmose died in his thirties, his sister-wife Ahmose-Nefertari ruled for their son, Amenhotep, who also married his sister: these incestuous marriages intensified the sanctity of the family and emulated the gods. But ultimately interbreeding was disastrous, destroying the very family they were meant to strengthen.^* The Ahmoses faced extinction, a problem they solved by adoption: they chose a general, Thutmose, as heir.

Thutmose had crushed the Nubians and invaded Syria, a hoary but tough commoner who married a daughter of Ahmose, though he retained his non-royal wife Ahmes, mother of his favourite daughter, Hatshepsut.

‘Enraged like a panther’, Thutmose was determined to ‘destroy unrest throughout the foreign lands, to subdue the rebels of the desert region’, and invaded Kush. This was no raid but the deliberate devastation of a kingdom and culture: the king, accompanied by his wife and daughter Hatshepsut, led the army himself. While former kings had been stopped by the rapids on the Nile, Thutmose built a fleet and had the boats, including his personal yacht the Falcon, dragged overland. He defeated Kush in battle, burning the splendid capital Kerma – a triumph celebrated in his inscription boasting of ‘extending the frontiers’ on the sacred rock of the Kushites.

The real prize was the gold mines. It was Nubian gold that funded armies, built temples and crafted the sumptuous funerary regalia for the tombs of royalty, to be worn in the afterlife – and it was Nubian prisoners who worked the mines. Thutmose expanded the temple of Ipet-isut (Karnak) and prepared a new location for the royal tomb in the Valley of Kings. Before he returned home, he hunted down the ruler of Kush, whom he killed personally with his bow; then he hung him upside down on the bow of the Falcon, leaving him to decay in the sun, an arrow still stuck in his chest.

Thutmose loved his first non-royal wife, Ahmes, most – she was his chief consort and no doubt their daughter Hatshepsut grew up with the confidence of the favourite child of the favourite wife of a warrior king. But his marriage into the royal family, to Mutneferet, King’s Daughter, was no less important. This had produced an heir, a young Thutmose, whom the king married to his beloved Hatshepsut.

The old paladin died in 1481, and Thutmose II followed him soon afterwards, leaving his half-sister/wife Hatshepsut in charge of a baby stepson. Taking the regency, Hatshepsut – Foremost of Noblewomen – was exceptional in all things.

HATSHEPSUT: FOREMOST OF THE WOMEN – FIRST PHARAOH

She believed she was born to rule. ‘The God’s Wife Hatshepsut conducted the affairs of the land, the Two Lands being in her counsels,’ read one of her inscriptions from her regency. ‘She is served; Egypt bows the head.’ After seven years, she declared herself king in her own right. But it was a challenge to fit her vision of herself within the traditions of male kingship and she solved it in a bewildering display of sexual fluidity that the twenty-first century should find understandable: she presented herself first as male, King Maatkare, even appearing as a man, though often with female epithets, sometimes as a beautiful woman with a broad intelligent face but a male body; at other times she depicts herself in traditional male kilt and headdress but with breasts. The word for palace – peraa – was used to describe Egypt’s sovereign: Hatshepsut became the first ‘pharaoh’.

She adored her father, projecting herself as the King’s First-Born Daughter but simultaneously as the daughter of Amun (originally the god of air, increasingly the senior deity), who was Thutmose too. Her father had declared that Hatshepsut would make a better king than a weak son. ‘Then His Majesty said to them: “This daughter of mine, Hatshepsut – may she live! – I have appointed as my successor,”’ she claimed in her mortuary temple. ‘“She shall direct the people … Obey her.”’

She was not alone. Her intimate adviser was one of her father’s courtiers, Senenmut, who climbed from obscurity to Steward of the King’s Daughter – tutor to Hatshepsut’s daughter, Neferure, a position that gave him access to the queen. When she herself was promoted to king, he became High Steward of Amun and Overseer of the King’s Works, mentioning himself in inscriptions at royal temples.^* Rumours spread that he was her lover – partly a reflection of the chauvinistic belief that behind a clever woman there must be a cleverer man. Ministers often boasted that they were ‘beloved of the King’, but he went further: ‘I entered into the mysteries of the Lady of the Two Lands.’ At their greatest monument, cheeky Theban workmen drew graffiti of a figure penetrating a slim woman from behind, presumed to be Senenmut having sex with Hatshepsut.

Assisted by Senenmut, Hatshepsut built monuments all over the empire, from Nubia to Sinai, dispatching an expedition in 1463 BC to the Land of God – the Egyptian name for Punt – to procure materials for her buildings and festivals, including incense, ebony, cosmetics and pet monkeys. Five ships, each with a crew of 210 including marines and 30 oarsmen, were led by her keeper of the seal, Nehsi, a Nubian. In a world that now boasted around 30 millions, there was a regular trade route down the Red Sea to east Africa and probably another to west Africa where, over the next centuries, the Nok people would create exquisite terracotta statues, later using furnaces to make iron, and a third route through the Gulf to India. Nehsi met the rulers of Punt, King Parahu and his enormously proportioned wife Ati, and returned with frankincense and thirty-one myrrh trees, which Hatshepsut replanted at her temples.

At Karnak, already expanded by her father,^* she created a national shrine to Amun-Ra, the god associated with her father, adding a mudbrick palace designated ‘The Royal Palace – I am not far from him’.^*

As Thutmose III grew up, Hatshepsut felt the pressure to hand over power to her stepson/nephew, whom she married to her daughter. As she entered her fifties, suffering arthritis, then diabetes and cancer (revealed by a mummy recently identified as her), after twenty successful years in power, she must have reluctantly watched Thutmose III develop into a vigorous pharaoh with the courtiers increasingly turning to the rising sun. When Hatshepsut was dead, Thutmose III defaced her monuments, but she had laid the foundations for his successes. Every year he campaigned in Canaan and Syria, eighteen campaigns altogether, defeating the Syrian kingdom Mitanni and its Canaanite allies at Megiddo, where he addressed his troops with the words, ‘Be steadfast, be steadfast! Be vigilant! Be vigilant!’, returning with booty of 2,000 horses and chariots, 1,796 male slaves and uncounted females, among them three Syrian girls who became special for him. The Ahmoses were bombastic, militaristic monarchs who were expected to look and live the part: Thutmose III’s son Amenhotep II was the model of the athletic prince of a martial empire: he rode faster than anyone else, rowed harder than 200 rowers and could shoot an arrow through a copper target one palm thick.

BOY RACER, MARKSMAN, HORSE WHISPERER, BULL BREAKER: AMENHOTEP

Amenhotep and other royal children were brought up in the Family Palace next to the main palace where the royal wives resided with the pharaoh. Marriage in Egypt was a sacred bond, based on pragmatic arrangements, but divorce was permitted and ex-wives could remarry. Most Egyptians were not polygamous, but pharaohs had multiple wives, led by the Great Royal Wife, and thousands of concubines. Foreign conquests increased the number of royal wives, their sanctuary run by an Overseer of the Family Palace, which itself adjoined the Royal Nursery where ordinary children were brought up with the princes and princesses. The key carer of a royal baby was the ‘great nurse who brought up the god’, whose own children were brought up with the family; these Children of the Nursery were likely to become ministers in adulthood.

Princesses were taught weaving, singing and reading. They were never sent abroad to marry foreign kings, as they were too superior for foreigners. Princes were taught to read first Egyptian by the Scribe of the House of the Royal Children, using pen ink on papyrus, then Babylonian cuneiform, the language of diplomacy. Their tutors and nannies were – like childhood mentors through the ages – well positioned to become trusted advisers. Princes hunted bulls, lions and elephants – and they were obsessed with horses, introduced into Egypt by the Hyksos. Out near the Geza pyramids, Prince Amenhotep – who ‘loved his horses … [was] strong-willed in breaking them in; he raised horses without equal’ – practised shooting his bow and then went hunting: ‘His Majesty appeared again in the chariots. The number of wild bulls he took: 40.’ Hunting was always training for war: the spearhead of his army was a fifty-strong corps of chariots, each manned by a team of three, an officer with a composite bow, a driver and a guard with a shield.

As pharaoh, the horse-crazy marksman Amenhotep II expanded his domain eastwards towards Iraq, while in the Mediterranean Egypt traded with the Mycenaean peoples of Arzawa (Greece) and Alashiya (Cyprus). In 1424, after crushing local kings at Kadesh (Syria), he killed seven of them personally and hung their corpses upside down. Troops were rewarded by the tally of penises and hands heaped at the feet of pharaohs or skewered on spears like kebabs. Amenhotep II returned after one Syrian expedition with three-quarters of a ton of gold, fifty-four tons of silver, 210 horses, 300 chariots and 90,000 prisoners. Only the best was ever good enough for the sardonic, exacting Amenhotep II,^* pharaoh for twenty-six years, who said: ‘If you lack a gold battleaxe inlaid with bronze, why make do with a wooden club?’

Not everyone could be so ferociously macho: his grandson Amenhotep III was more fixated on a religious vision that changed Egypt, a vision he shared with one remarkable woman. To call it a love match would be an understatement.

MISTRESS OF EGYPT: GOLD, WIVES AND DIPLOMACY

When he was a teenager, Amenhotep III married Tiye, aged thirteen, who became the most prominent wife in Egyptian history. She was not his sister but the daughter of a cavalry officer. Great Royal Wife Tiye was tiny, four foot nine, with long hair, still lustrous on her mummy, and her portraits show her beauty. Married for thirty-five years, the couple had nine children together.

Amenhotep promoted the state religion in processions of barques and statues, and ever more gigantist temples where his inscriptions described how Amun-Ra himself had crept into the bedchamber of the Great Wife: ‘She awoke because of the god’s scent and cried out with pleasure.’ And the god announced, ‘Amenhotep is the name of the child I have placed in your womb.’ Amenhotep III was himself a god and Tiye was his divine partner, enthroned beside him on colossal statues, known to the ancients as the Colossi of Memnon. Presented as the equal of her husband, Tiye corresponded with foreign monarchs from the Greeks of Arzawa to Babylon. ‘Tiye knows all the words I spoke with your father Amenhotep,’ wrote King Tushrata of Mitanni to their son, suggesting, ‘Enquire carefully of Tiye.’ He even wrote directly to the ‘Mistress of Egypt’.^*

Tiye was a female potentate, but the next queen, Nefertiti, would be even more powerful and her husband, Amenhotep IV, was not like anyone else: if the portraits of the couple are accurate they were an extraordinary pair and their eccentricities would almost destroy the empire.

* Archaeologists have not: they identify the start of history as the point when writing was invented.

* In the Andes, in 7000 BC, a female teenaged warrior was found buried with her spear; out of twenty-seven buried hunters discovered in south America from this period, eleven were female. Women may have led and fought as well as nurtured and nursed, or the burials could be merely ritualistic.

* Competition was brutal: in Europe around 5500 BC, the villages of early farmers were annihilated by invasions or wars, with unknown enemies leaving mass graves of tortured, scalped, cannibalized bodies.

* Around 3000 BC, at Waun Mawn, in Wales, the inhabitants created a circle henge of bluestones, some of which were later dragged a long way to build a new and larger circle at Stonehenge.

* One of the rulers of Uruk named in its king list was Gilgamesh, whose mythical story – The Epic of Gilgamesh, written down around 2000 BC and known by most Sumerians – recounts the rise of a single family and the development of cities. Gilgamesh is part god, part man, who travels with his wild friend Enkidu in search of eternal life. Such travels reflect early trading that allowed flint and obsidian to reach Sumer from Anatolia. Enkidu, creature of nature, is seduced by a divine harlot, Shamhat, but their sexual passion depletes his savage power and he settles in the dazzling city of Uruk. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, a flood threatens all mankind, revealing a theme of world history: the ever-present fear of the world’s end felt as strongly then as today. Only the family of Utnapishtim/Ziusudra, a Noah-like figure, survives – the definition of an elite family. The story, which inspired many sacred books, ends with the gods teaching Gilgamesh the limits of human supremacy, a lesson that Sapiens still struggles to learn: ‘You were given the kingship, such was your destiny; everlasting life was not your destiny.’

* Different versions of the Osiris myth were favoured during different periods. Osiris ruled the earth, but his brother Seth seized power and murdered him. Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris, found his body and resurrected him – perhaps the origin of mummification. His death and revival were linked to the annual flooding of the life-giving Nile. He impregnated Isis but, barely alive, fell to Duat, the underworld, which he then ruled. The world was inherited by their son, Horus, god of the sun, moon and stars, the personification of life and power. There were thousands of gods in the Egyptian pantheon, but the kings were protected by Horus; in some ways they were themselves Horus. Like Osiris they could marry their sisters.

* Khufu’s favourite dwarf and jester Perniankhu, with his short twisted legs, lived in the Great Palace with him, nicknamed ‘One who delights his lord every day, the king’s dwarf’. His royal favour was underlined by his tomb close to the Great Pyramid itself and he may have achieved great wealth – and have been a member of a dwarf dynasty. Another court dwarf, Seneb, who served Khufu’s son King Djedefre, was buried at Giza very near Perniankhu: it is possible Seneb was Perniankhu’s son. Seneb was a high court official with many titles, owned thousands of cattle and was married to a well-born priestess, who was not a dwarf, with whom he had children. A beautiful statue shows them together. Next to the Great Pyramid, Khufu buried a barque, 140 feet long and made of Lebanese cedar, for his voyage into the underworld. When he died in 2525 BC, Khufu was succeeded in turn by two sons Djedefre and Khafra. Neither attempted to outdo their father, but Khafra built a funeral pyramid that was smaller but on a higher site. It contained twenty-five statues of himself sitting on his throne with the falcon Horus behind his head in white stone. But his masterpiece was the sculpture of a recumbent lion with Khafra’s own face: the Sphinx.

* This was mistranslated by the Jewish authors of the Bible as ‘Sargon’ – though they were referring to the much later king Sargon II, Neo-Assyrian king circa 720–705 BC.

* Some scholars argue that this is a description of Akkad; others insist it depicts Babylon, the greatest city when later versions of The Epic of Gilgamesh were written down.

* Their rulers lived in plastered palaces with large basalt columns and their ordinary people in wattle houses on massive terraces. They pierced their bodies with thorns; they may have practised ritual bleeding and sacrifices; and they used rubber to make the balls used in their ritualistic games. We do not know the name of the city – we call it San Lorenzo – nor of the people. Much later the Mexica called them Olmecs – the Rubber People.

* The rise of Aryan culture occurs between 1500 and 500 BC, though there may be more continuity between the Aryan and Indus Valley cultures than was previously supposed. Three millennia later, in Europe, Nazi ideologues commandeered the word Aryan for their racist ideology. At the same time, Reza Shah, whom we will meet later, changed the name of Persia to Iran (Aryan). In today’s India, Hindu nationalists reject the idea that Indian, especially Hindu, faith or race can possibly have European origins. But in central Asia, long known as the Aryavarta – Abode of the Aryans – this concerns not race but language and culture: Old Persian (Avestan) and Sanskrit are still closely linked; the stories and rituals of the Persian Avesta are similar to those of the Indian Rigveda and other Vedic stories, and to the Ramayana with its tales of ideal kings and families. The latest DNA research in India reveals that most Indians are descended from a mixture of the original southern Indians, the Harappans, and steppe peoples related to Iranians.

* Though nineteenth-century historians named it after a mythic king, Minos, there is no evidence of a monarchy and its ‘throne room’ may have been a council chamber or a temple for rituals. Cretans may have worshipped goddesses portrayed on their frescoes. Some suggest these were female rulers, but there’s no evidence either way. Their language has still not been deciphered.

* If the Egyptians did not grasp the dangers of incestuous marriage, they did produce guides to medicine and gynaecology, written on papyrus, which together with other papyri reveal how much they knew – and how little. Illness was caused by demons and bad spirits that were cured by both magic and treatment. Doctors, often also priests, were specialized, ranging from ‘Physician of the Eyes’ to ‘Shepherd of the Anus’; Djoser had Hesy-Ra, a ‘Chief of Dentists and Doctors’, in 2700 BC, and there was a chief female doctor Peseshet in 2400. Babies were delivered with the mothers in a kneeling position, supervised by female midwives. Their physicians believed channels led from the heart to the rest of the body. Pain was treated with opium, burns with aloe, epilepsy with camphor; wounds were bound with bandages. Tests for pregnancy used female urine on barley and emmer seeds; if they grew the woman was pregnant; if it was barley, it would be a boy, if emmer a girl. Fertility was tested with an onion in the vagina; if the woman’s breath smelled in the morning, she was fertile. Other measures are more sensible: if the perineum was ‘very swollen due to childbirth you should prepare for her: oil to be soaked into vagina’. Contraceptives for females included pessaries of sour milk, honey, natron or acacia gum, the latter a known spermicide. Crocodile dung would have acted as an indirect contraceptive. After rape: ‘Instructions for a woman suffering in her vagina and limbs having been beaten … You should prepare for her: oil to be eaten until she is well.’

* The titles reveal the complexity of the court – Royal Seal Bearer, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Fan Bearer of the Lord of Two Lands – but security was vital: Master of the Secrets was ‘Eyes of the King’. The royal bodyguards were made up of Nubian but also Mycenaeans from the Aegean. The police were often Nubian.

* The definition of life after death had changed since the days of Sneferu. Then, only kings had been worthy of afterlife; now high officials too inscribed their tombs with the sacred texts to achieve divinity and resurrection. The new royal family promoted the cult of Osiris, god of earth and the lord of the underworld, who oversaw the rebirth after death assisted by Ra and Horus, the two gods of the sky. The Egyptians embraced different concepts of the soul of the dead: the ba existed in parallel to the individual, but in death by day travelled with the sun and by night rejoined the mummified body with Osiris. The ka was a deathless spirit that needed food to survive and allowed the dead to travel to the underworld for judgement by Osiris, a terrifying voyage that, according to the so-called Coffin Texts, led them to the Field of Offering. There they faced fearsome alternatives between eternal life and damnation to hell where they had to eat excrement and drink urine. But if chosen, they entered a paradisiacal world. All of this depended on the survival of the mummy in the grave: just in case, Egyptians were now buried with a shabti, a burial figurine, to serve as a substitute in case the mummy was destroyed, so the ba could return every night.

* On the base of one of the three pairs of obelisks, which Senenmut chose and transported from Aswan, she inscribed her rationale for accession: ‘I have done this with a love for my father Amun … I call this to the attention of people who live in the future who shall consider this monument that I made for my father … He [Amun] will say, “How like her it is, loyal to her father!” For I am his daughter.’ No daughter has ever loved a father so splendidly. But her masterpiece was Dkjeser Djeseru, Holy of Holies, her mortuary temple, a complex of terraces cut into the rock face.

* It is rare to hear the actual voice of a pharaoh. Amenhotep II witheringly mocked the louche entourage of his Nubian viceroy: ‘You, in faraway Nubia, a charioteering hero who brought booty from every foreign country, are now master of a wife from Babylon, a servant girl from Byblos [Lebanon], a young girl from Alalakh, a hag from Arapkha. These Syrians are worthless – what are they good for?’ When the viceroy was too trusting of his Nubian subjects, he was told: ‘Don’t trust the Nubians, beware their people and witchcraft. Beware that servant whom you’ve promoted …’

* Some 380 letters discovered in the House of the Pharaonic Correspondence in the city of Akhetaten reveal the fascinating correspondence, written in Babylonian in cuneiform, with the powers of west Asia. The Great Kings of the time gloried in their membership of the club of world arbiters – rather like today’s G7 – who called each other ‘brother’. Like today, all were very touchy about their status. Egypt and Hatti were the leading powers.