The Fertile Crescent's Political Evolution: City, Kingdom, Empire, Diaspora

The idea

The exam's phrase for the Ancient Near East is political evolution, and units 01 and 02 together supply its four stages, each solving a weakness the last one exposed. The first stage is the city-state. Mesopotamia's cities had walls, patron gods, priests and then kings, and they warred for a thousand years without any one holding the others, because walls beat armies of conscripts. The second stage is the kingdom, and Egypt is its model. The Nile's predictability, the king's divinity and a redistributive economy held one long valley for centuries at a time, with no drive to expand until the Hyksos taught the New Kingdom that harmony must be defended abroad. The third stage is the empire. Sargon showed a conqueror could hold many cities by force and governors, and lost them to resentment. Ur III showed offices and records could hold them longer, and lost them to invasion. Assyria combined both with a standing army, permanent cavalry, iron weapons, deportation and terror, and held its neighbors for centuries, the first empire that did. It fell in six twelve and six oh nine to a coalition of the peoples it had terrorized. Neo-Babylon kept the methods and added trade, and Persia, which the next unit teaches, replaced terror with leniency. The fourth stage is the diaspora, and it is the one the exam notices least and history remembers most. When Neo-Babylon burned Jerusalem in five eighty-six and carried Judah away, a people without a state kept its identity through customs, a written Torah and teachers, and when Cyrus let them return in five thirty-eight many stayed. A tradition had become portable. The anchor's claim that Judaism introduced the first egalitarian ethic is its own, but the survival of a community without a territory is the record.