Empire and Cosmopolitan Culture

Vids arriving soon, thought I'd give you definitions and correct spelling of the few terms we had in the last lecture. As you listen and as we proceed ask yourself a question: given that empires governed such large and diverse territories, and that their institutions by modern standards were so rudimentary, how was it that the universal agrarian empire survived as the Middle East’s principle form of political organization from around 2500 BCE until the modern era? Could any empire have survived for long had it tried to rule by force alone? Lacking detailed local knowledge, efficient communications, and police forces, could their institutions hold empires together?

        No empire in recorded history forswore the threat of violence; most, after all, all were brought into being by conquest. However, experience taught them that successful states functioned best as coalitions of elites. With some exceptions, the ideal was to keep the army on the parade ground and  to convince their influential subjects to  cooperate on most issues most of the time. But as a military strategy carried with it the danger of miscalculation, a political one risked over-familiarity and weakness. In any case, a subject’s loyalty to an empire was closer to an employee’s loyalty to her organization than  a modern citizen’s to her state, with little sense of dishonor or shame in advancing one’s own interests.  In short, if we look for pre-modern analogues of modern institutions and political strategies we’ll be left wondering how these empires could have functioned at all.

     This impasse leads us to a concept that is unfamiliar to modern ears: a cosmopolitan culture that was possessed by all the elites of a far-flung empire,  one that transcended place, ethnicity, and often enough both religion and historical memory.  Such a culture usually implied the possession of a  common body of knowledge, a common classical language, and shared tastes in everything from styles of clothing and food, to music, architecture, and literature. It had the allure of exclusivity and could be acquired only by those with the leisure to educate their children in it; once possessed it inspired more jealous loyalty than a state ever could. 

      Empires did everything they could to advance such cultures, through patronage, by making  their capital cities the cultural vanguards of empire, and, occasionally, by establishing the conditions that permitted rival high cultures to fuse.  An empire that expanded its borders without bringing their new subjects into its high culture was unlikely to hold onto them for long. Empires that united different cultural regions under a new central authority could help to make (and benefit from making) a high cultural ever more universal. The link between the expansion of empire and the fusion of high cultures goes back to the Akkadians and reached its culmination  in the century and a half following the Arab conquests. As we will see, under the early Islamic empire elements of African, Hellenistic, Persian, Arabian, and Central and South Asian civilizations were fused into a high culture more universal than any of its rivals or predecessors.

      Every human being has a culture; how to distinguish a cosmopolitan culture from this general property of out species? One sign of a cosmopolitan culture was that it was at home everywhere (one could move from the capital to a provincial city and find people just like oneself), but truly indigenous nowhere. In the Roman and Islamic empires, for example, one could move throughout the cities of the empire and feel at home. But outside the city gates, even perhaps those of your home city, the world of the peasantry was impenetrable. Another was that it was always changing, in part to separate the wannabe’s and fakes from the genuine article: to be seen to embody it one had to keep up.  Together with its quality of continuous change was its voraciousness: new  ideas, traditions, and styles could be easily incorporated as new subjects were added to an empire, and the elites of newly-subjected peoples could be thoroughly indoctrinated with (not to mention loyal to) an attractive cosmopolitan culture within a couple of generations.

       Contrast this with the modern world and you'll get a sense of what the words "universal" and "cosmopolitan" mean. Each nation has (or usually wants) its own legitimate state and high culture, both in its native languages. The assumption that sovereignty will be fragmented among states, not invested in a single individual, means that modern states do not have the "universal" pretensions of agrarian empires. The idea that there could be only one legitimate ruler on the planet, guiding its sole legitimate political community, has gone beyond oddity to incomprehensibility. The expectation that there will be a single truly cultivated culture within the universal polity is what adds the word "cosmopolitan" to "universal".

  

    The terms you will hear in the lecture are Sumerians, meaning the separate cities and their hinterlands ruled first by priests and then dynasts, beginning at the end of the 4th millenium, BCE. Interesting, no, that even as political functions became specialized (war leaders into generals, household servants into offices of state), rulers and priestly castes battled ever after over turf. True empire - the fusion of different language groups, ethnicities, etc. into a single political system, is most associated with Sargon of Akkad (d, 24th millennium). The Akkadians were a semitic-language speaking people who united northern and southern Mesopotamia under Sargon, laying a good claim to the title of the first true empire builders.

     Something else happened with the Akkadians: they didn't build from scratch or on their own, either in the arena of politics or in the domain of high culture. As was to occur again and again, by uniting disparate peoples into a single political system they also began to fuse elements of the cultures of those peoples into something new. Not entirely new as Sumerian high culture from its script to its written literature was adopted. One of Sumer’s literary classics, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was read not only by the Akkadians but for thousands of years more. The result of that fusion was a more universal high culture, though one restricted to present-day Iraq and Syria. Keep an eye open as we reach the broadest and deepest cultural fusion of them all.