Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick - Couverture souple

Walls Midwife to Civilization: Wall Builders at the Dawn of History

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST, 2500–500 BC

The great wall of Shulgi has not survived, but then, how could it? Time lay heavily across the landscape of Mesopotamia. Like some relentlessly pressing weight, it sought to smother everything that would rise up out of the flat alluvial plains of ancient Iraq. Its effects there were uncharacteristically swift, almost impatient; it destroyed things before it could age them. As early as the third millennium BC, the Mesopotamians already had a word—dul—for the shapeless lumps of dead cities that even then dotted the horizons, having long ago melted like wax under the sun. Dul eventually gave way to an Arabic word, tell, which reflected the growing obscurity shrouding the region’s past. To the Bedouins whose animals meandered around the unsightly mounds, the tells were nothing more than insignificant heaps of dirt. Only later did archaeologists realize that every one of those strange landmarks represented the ruins of a lost world.

In Shulgi’s day, some four thousand years ago, Mesopotamians battled ceaselessly against the work of time. They lived as if in sand castles, forever building and rebuilding a world that would inevitably be washed away. Nothing endured. The great fertile fields that fed the cities were a mirage. If the workers neglected the cleaning and repair of their vast irrigation systems for even a few seasons, the ditches would silt up, and the land would return to desert. Their buildings were no more permanent. For construction materials, the Mesopotamians had little more than the dirt beneath their feet. In this hot land made of silt deposited by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, there were no stones and few trees. Lacking sufficient fuel to bake all their mud bricks, the Mesopotamians settled for drying them in the sun, a process that created building blocks of such dubious quality that they could not withstand even occasional rain. To protect their brick walls, the Mesopotamians slathered them with a plaster of mud, and when that first outer coat washed away, they slathered them with mud again. If they were diligent at maintaining their walls, the resulting accumulation of washed-off plaster would eventually clog the streets, forcing them to knock down the buildings and start over. If they were interrupted in their maintenance, the result was much the same as for the unirrigated fields: temples, palaces, and even city walls crumbled away. Another city became a tell.

The impermanence of their mud-built world clearly troubled the Mesopotamians. A popular legend—possibly the most popular, judging from the variety of copies that have survived—tells of a king who refused to accept that he, like all mortals, must someday die and return to clay. The mythical Gilgamesh searched far and wide for a way to cheat death, but his efforts went for nothing. The Mesopotamian storytellers couldn’t conceive of any ending for their hero that didn’t require him to sink back into the soil.

In the end, the Mesopotamians defeated time in only one activity. The clay tablets upon which they inscribed their cuneiform writing have survived the passing centuries completely unchanged. If the planet endures another million years, those tablets will also endure, remaining in exactly the same condition.

Successful, therefore, in overcoming time only in their record keeping, the Mesopotamians naturally developed the bureaucratic urge to assign dates to events, and this led to the habit of kings giving names to years. Though perhaps not so elegant a system of chronology as our current one, it did serve a second purpose that has become quite useful to historians. It allowed the kings to commemorate their achievements—including the building of structures that they surely realized could not last.

Shulgi—who, as king of Ur around 2000 BC, ruled over much of Mesopotamia—was a builder of many things that didn’t last, and he was a few other things besides. It’s probably best to let his own words speak for him. The long-reigning monarch composed several extant hymns of self-praise, and these tell us a great deal about him, if we can shake the nagging suspicion that he has padded his résumé somewhat. Shulgi clearly wrestled with the constraints of modesty. In one hymn, he described himself as “a powerful man who enjoys using his thighs.” This was the sort of boast that probably shouldn’t have been committed to a medium that could still be read after four thousand years. Then again, Shulgi also referred to himself as the “god of manliness,” so it would seem he wasn’t easily embarrassed. He assures us that, as a youth, he excelled all other students. Grown to manhood, he slew every lion in Mesopotamia and defeated every human enemy as well. He mastered all weapons and musical instruments, and in a rare feat of athleticism, he once delighted his cheering subjects by running over two hundred miles in a single day. These, at least, are Shulgi’s claims, whether or not we choose to accept them. He was no stranger to boasting, and so it should come as no surprise that his year names comprise a rather predictable list of triumphs.

In the twentieth year of his kingship—“The Year the Citizens of Ur Were Drafted as Spearmen”—Shulgi apparently instituted a general draft, and this led to a particularly impressive series of victories. From that time forward, the bombastic monarch had Ur’s enemies on the run. The region was experiencing its great revival, duly reflected in the names of years, and the triumphal march seemed poised to continue indefinitely.

However, Shulgi’s year list reveals a conspicuous absence of military successes immediately after his defeat of Anshan in the thirty-fourth year of his reign. Three years later, after what might have been merely a brief pause in the litany of conquests, we sense for the first time that something has gone terribly wrong. In his thirty-seventh year, Shulgi failed to record a victory yet again. For a notable achievement, he could highlight only a different sort of enterprise, one that seems oddly uncharacteristic, at least for someone with such splendid and busy thighs. It was the sort of achievement that would soon enough crumble and be washed away, returned to the soil and smothered by time. Shulgi’s thirty-seventh year was officially designated “The Year the Wall of the Land Was Built.”



* * *

In retrospect, Shulgi’s decision to build a wall was no great innovation. For a people such as the Mesopotamians, who were accustomed to the constant chore of construction and reconstruction, the first solution to any problem was building. They built temples to fend off the wrath of their gods and walls to fend off the wrath of their enemies. They built canals, dams, and irrigation channels so they could live.

Like early farming communities everywhere, cities in Mesopotamia focused their greatest efforts on surrounding themselves with fortifications. Massive bulwarks protected the people, their food supplies, their wealth, and their animals. Walls engulfed all man-made structures, swallowing up ziggurats and cities with equal appetite. Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh, was defined by its “all-encircling wall,” allegedly built by the great king himself. This may well have been an instance of art imitating life. Nearly every Mesopotamian king advertised having raised up at least one city wall, and many built more than one. They knew their works wouldn’t last for any great period, but the prospect of repeating the labors of their ancestors didn’t deter them. At least five different kings provided walls for Babylon, and at least four built walls for Ur. An individual born in Isin at the right time could have seen his city surrounded by three successive sets of walls—sand castles every one.

For the Mesopotamians, building was a sacred duty. On the first day of a new construction project, the king blessed a brick mold, then packed it with mud. Songs and the beating of kettledrums filled the air. The king brushed a brick stamp with honey, butter, and cream, then struck his mark on the wet clay. When the brick dried, the king himself ceremoniously lifted it out of the mold. Subsequently, the moment might be memorialized in a year name or even in art. Many of the greatest Mesopotamian kings—including Shulgi—were depicted in their official propaganda carrying baskets of bricks on their heads.

The drudgery required by all these enterprises must have been awful, but the Mesopotamians accepted it as their lot. An ancient Mesopotamian flood myth describes how the gods set out to dig the first irrigation ditches and wells. The work didn’t suit them. First, they complained; then they burned their tools and baskets. Finally, they created mankind to take over their chores. Someone had to move all that mud.

* * *

Not every Mesopotamian enjoyed a good wall raising. The words of a Bronze Age shepherd have come down to us, describing his feelings about life behind walls. Shepherds were the freest members of Near Eastern society. They inhabited Mesopotamia in great numbers, but unlike farmers they spent long periods far away from the city, accompanying their flocks to pasture. For much of the year—especially when crops were growing—shepherds had to steer clear of all sown land, and the obsessively bureaucratic administrators of the palaces and temples for whom the shepherds worked hardly kept track of them at all. To individuals such as these, the limited horizon of the walled city was worse even than a cage. “If I leave myself inside just one day,” our Bronze Age herdsman remarked, “until I leave the city walls to renew my vigor, my vitality ebbs away.”

It’s worthwhile taking a closer look at those particular Mesopotamians who had so little use for walls. They weren’t the most refined inhabitants of the plains. For the most part, the shepherds were illiterate, known to us only by the scribblings of city dwellers. The two groups were connected by kinship but little else. In the eyes of the townsfolk, the shepherds were quite distinct, a rough and somewhat fearless lot, skilled with slings, throw sticks, and staffs, inured to loneliness, dark, and the hazards of outdoor living. The daily life of the shepherd contrasted sharply with that of the farmer or factory worker. Shepherds contended with fierce sheep-stealing carnivores, whereas farmers merely fended off placid, skittish herbivores. Like the biblical David of 1 Samuel 17:34–36, shepherds lived with weapons, killing, and the mortal dangers of the steppe:

Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw, strike it down, and kill it. Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them.

In contrast to the people who dwelled behind walls, shepherds accepted little in the way of governance. Even those herders directly employed by the temple or palace had to report to their overseers only twice a year. For them, the temptation to drift away must have been strong. The authors of Genesis, writing in the first millennium BC, certainly saw nothing extraordinary about the idea that shepherds might head off with their flocks and never return. In biblical tradition, Abraham, a possessor of flocks, herds, and tents, simply abandons his original home in the Mesopotamian city of Ur and sets off with his animals and women and over three hundred fighting men. Abraham’s band subsequently wanders about, living wherever they pitch their tents, and forcing the urban kings of Canaan and the Jordan Valley to acquiesce to their presence on the land. They help themselves to water from city wells or, less frequently, dig new wells, which become such flash points for violence that they’re given names such as Contention and Enmity. They negotiate for women and occasionally slaughter whole cities for them. A generation removed from Abraham, his herding descendants are remembered mostly for their hotheadedness. Jacob, lying on his deathbed, fondly describes his sons: Simeon and Levi are angry, violent, and quick to sword. Judah’s hands are on the neck of his enemies. Gad is a raider, Benjamin a ravenous wolf, and so forth.

In Mesopotamian myth, the goddess Inanna is asked to choose between a farmer and a shepherd, both of whom seek to marry her. In her deliberations, she rudely criticizes the herder. He is too brash and his clothes are coarse. Without the gods of civilization, she declares, the shepherd would live roofless in the steppes, a mere nomad. It’s a rather harsh assessment, but in the end, she marries him anyway. Apparently, she prefers a bad boy.

Inanna’s decision—the sort that has baffled countless generations of “nice guys” left alone on a Friday night—would have raised few eyebrows in Shulgi’s day. Shepherds were widely admired in the ancient Near East. They occupied a place in the imagination much like the cowboys of the Old West. “I am a hero!” a king such as Shulgi would boast. “I am a shepherd!” But, of course, Shulgi was no such thing, and neither were any of those other Sumerian kings who carried baskets of mud bricks on their heads. The shepherds, who disdained walls, were rootless, rough, unpredictable, and often violent. They were the sort of men who could defend a city—and they were often asked to do so—but they could never build one. On the other hand, nothing in the description of the shepherd applies particularly well to their cousins who raised a civilization out of mud. Mesopotamian townspeople were as monotonously reliable as they were settled. In the city, survival depended on the unwavering commitment of citizens to their wearisome chores—the digging of wells, the constant removal of silt from the irrigation ditches, and the building and rebuilding of walls. They enlivened the tedium of this work with music and festivals and prostitution, but these diversions did not compromise their efficiency.

The townspeople’s acceptance of a life of labor—replete with governors, supervisors, rules, and records—had innumerable implications for Mesopotamian society. The most obvious was that it rendered men less capable as protectors. Workers, bound by their day-to-day responsibilities, couldn’t go off on hunts that might have honed their fighting skills. Ensconced behind their walls, they became accustomed to a life of comfort and security. They exhausted their energies in labor rather than saving it for bursts of violence. Those few townsmen who were forced into battle fought like men unaccustomed to war, being perhaps the first soldiers anywhere to protect themselves by donning rudimentary armor that fortified the spirit more than the body. Like the timid amateurs that they were, they fought in tightly packed rows of infantry. Slow moving, inflexible, and easily targeted or pursued, these early phalanxes embodied a natural tendency to seek safety in numbers and for the weak to crouch behind the strong. Few men were willing to brave military service at all. The men who carried baskets had not been socialized to embrace battle, and they had no taste for it. They preferred instead to contribute to the defense of their cities by doing what they did best: build things out of mud. In a world of farmers, priests, sculptors, surveyors, drummers, prostitutes, master builders, silo managers, throne bearers, accountants, masons, musical-instr...

"[Told] with eloquence and panache . . . [Frye] is enviably good at turning historical and archaeological evidence into vivid prose, and his writing is as clear as on any wall."
—Wall Street Journal

“[A] lively history.”
—The New Yorker

 "These are good stories and Frye tells them well...a timely and interesting book."
—Financial Times

“Insights abound in every chapter...The book is helpfully peppered with maps and a timeline for historical orientation and packs an impressive amount of scholarship and storytelling into its relatively compact perimeter. Walls could add a level of context to the current heated discussion of walls in the U.S.”
—Booklist

"Readers will find Frye's rumination—on the reasons walls exist and will continue to exist, what they can and cannot do, and their contribution to the growth of civilization—informative, relevant, and thought-provoking."
—Publishers Weekly

“A sturdy historical tour of walls and their builders—and their discontents as well. Provocative, well-written, and—with walls rising everywhere on the planet—timely.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society.”
—Library Journal

"A colorful crash course in world history . . . insightful and entertaining, [Frye] offers a perspective for understanding the reemergence of these barriers today."
—Shelf Awareness

“I walked Hadrian’s Wall as a teenager, ran some miles along China’s Great Wall as a fit young man, stood transfixed in horrified awe beneath the Berlin Wall...I love stories of walls, and David Frye’s marvelous book—timed to coincide with the building of yet another engagingly hateful structure on our southern frontier—was a perfect delight.  A mur de force, indeed.”
—Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, and The Map That Changed the World

"David Frye's Walls turns 5,000 years of history outside in. Instead of focusing on the centers of civilizations, he illuminates the boundaries where civilizations collide. From ancient Mesopotamia through Rome to the presidency of Donald Trump, Frye brilliantly crafts a unique view of history with valuable lessons for today."
—Jack Weatherford, New York Times bestselling author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World