Ever looked through an old yearbook, or maybe stumbled across a faded Polaroid photo tucked between expired insurance papers and wondered “Whatever happened to that guy?” Or that girl, or that goat, or whatever, but you understand what I’m getting at, there seems to be a natural inclination to wonder about the lives of those whose paths we’ve crossed in the past but haven’t seen in a while.
I get the same way reading history sometimes. No, I’m not so old that I sit around going “Mark Anthony . . . yeah . . . great guy . . . wonder whatever happened to him? Wasn’t he dating that Egyptian girl . . . Cleo-something?” But I do sometimes consider the fate of the great disappeared civilizations from the past. Those people who dominated their own times, filling our history books in the process, yet leaving precious little behind which can testify to their great achievements.
I’m not talking about peoples like the Mongols, the Huns, the Turks, or the Greeks, each of which stood conspicuously in the spotlight on the world stage yet managed to carve out for themselves modern nation states that survive still today. No, I mean those cultures that were giants in their own time but now virtually cease to exist beyond DNA markers found among the populations of foreign civilizations.
I’ll only mention a few here, as that should be enough to make the point, and will resist the urge to again discuss the 500-lb gorilla in the room, the Romans. Between research for my next novel and a natural love of the topic in general, I spend far too much time talking and writing about that culture to belabor it further, though they certainly fit the type I’m talking about today.
No, I’ll start instead with another fan favorite, the Assyrians. This Northern Iraqi people existed as an empire from 2500 to 609 B.C. Nineteen HUNDRED years, and in a REALLY tough neighborhood! For the vast majority of that time, they were the big dogs on the block, and fought countless wars against the Hittites, Babylonians, Elamites, and Egyptians just to name a few of their more famous—and more powerful—opponents.
Go back 3,000 years and tell anyone in what we today refer to as the Middle East that in the future there would be no Assyria and nearly no Assyrians, and they’d have locked you up. It would be like walking into a bar in rural Alabama and proudly informing the patrons there that you’d seen the future . . . and America wasn’t in it. It’s inconceivable, and not just in Alabama, but in London, Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi. The United States currently has such a presence on the world stage it would be all but impossible to imagine it disappearing completely. In the same way, nobody at that time living anywhere from the Nile to the Caspian Sea could ever have even hoped for a world not dominated by the brutal Assyrians. And yet here we are.
Assyria’s death in 609 B.C.—falling inevitably on the heels of the destruction of Ninevah in 612 by the Medes—left a huge hole in the region’s perception of order, of normalcy. But right up until it actually happened, the event itself was in all ways, to all people, unimaginable.
The remaining Assyrian population continued to be yoked for their military strength by successive Achaemenid Persian rulers, but the empire disappeared from the world stage as an independent political and military actor. The Assyrian people survived Alexander’s invasion and conquest, and then were ruled over by the Seleucids, the Romans, the Arabs, the Mongols, and the Ottoman Turks in whirlwind succession and now play a part in the continuing drama surrounding Post-Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
But Assyria is just one example of a dominant people that disappeared from the pages of history. How about the Aztecs? Archaeologists believe that when the Spanish landed on the coast of Mexico in 1519, the Aztec population was over 16 million. This doesn’t count the many states the Aztecs had conquered and who owed them allegiance. This was a huge empire at the time and ruled most of what we today call Central America, trading with entities in both North and South America.
Smallpox, carried by European invaders, decimated the Aztecs and all other Central American tribes with casualty estimates as unbelievably high as 90% of the total population. Still, one wonders how the surviving ten percent—1.6 million people using rough math—wasn’t able to thwart the colonial intentions of some 600 Spanish soldiers and sailors. Regardless, the end result was another dominant empire fading away to relative nothingness, surviving only in the hearts and minds of an ethnic minority of Mexico, and in pictures of crumbling city ruins promoted by travel agencies around the world.
Last but certainly not least, what of once-mighty Carthage? This powerful city-state—founded in 814 B.C. by Phoenecian traders originating in the Levant—lorded over the western Mediterranean until the city’s destruction at the hands of a growing Rome in 146 B.C. That said, it took three wars over the course of 119 years to finally defeat the Carthaginians, including one fought mostly on the Italian peninsula, right in Rome’s back yard. That invasion of Italy by one of history’s greatest generals, Hannibal Barca, was probably the closest Rome came to national extinction until the Visigoths sacked the city in 378 A.D., contributing significantly to the demise of the Western Roman Empire in 476.
The capital of Carthage lay near today’s city of Tunis, on the northeastern coast of Tunisia. It was protected by an incredible 33 kilometers of 13-meter high stone walls, numerous locally raised and mercenary troops, and a double harbor serving as the home base for its impressive fleet of merchant and warships. At its height the Carthaginian Empire stretched from Western Libya to the Gates of Heracles—modern Gibraltar—including most of modern Spain and a healthy chunk of both Sicily and Sardinia. Carthage also owned Corsica and the Balaeric Isles, virtually ensuring military dominance over the entire region and control of the maritime trade routes throughout.
Our enduring—if apocryphal—image of Carthage is that of the Romans salting the fields of the defeated empire to ensure it never rose again. Not the most impressive of portraits, to be sure! Yet written between the lines of that account is the fact that Rome truly feared Carthage might return from the dead . . . as it had after each of the first two Punic Wars. This, the Roman Senate determined, must not happen again, and so Carthage vanished from history, its army slain, its people sold into slavery, the city itself demolished, and perhaps the surrounding lands turned intentionally barren. The Romans even took away the grand Carthaginian name, restyling it the province of “Africa” from which the continent gets the name it carries still today.
The ultimate disappearance of Carthage was virtually unthinkable in 265 B.C., the year before the First Punic War. So too that of the Aztecs in 1518, a year before Cortes’ arrival in Mexico. And the fall of mighty Assyria, after two millennia of regional dominance, must have been all but impossible to comprehend when it actually happened, much less imaginable ahead of time.
We take for granted so much of what we see around us today, the wealth, ready access to food, shelter, and clothing. They’ve always been there for us, and so they always will be, right? I’m not exactly convinced. Is the United States and the world order that’s adjusted to fit our economic, political, and military dominance something new, or are we simply the empire of the month, here today and, perhaps, gone tomorrow; just a part of the flowing, long-term human narrative? It’s worth considering as the things we as a nation do and say today have an impact on the world of tomorrow.
I guess the question is whether the average Assyrian looked out on crumbling bridges over the Tigris River—you know, the ones built by those shiftless Elamite slaves back in 608—and thought maybe, just maybe, the empire could fall apart? Did the Aztecs see the festering of racial and ethnic divisions in their over-populated city and wonder if it heralded the beginning of the end? Did the Carthaginians see the handwriting on the wall as the Republic of Rome grew increasingly powerful? Do you think they ever imagined it would wipe away their world order, everything they considered normal? I don’t think so. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they thought just like we do today . . . life is good . . . and always will be.
History teaches in no uncertain terms that no culture, no people stays on top forever. An end will someday come to U.S. dominance on the world stage. The question is not whether we’ll be ready for it—nobody ever is it seems. The real question is whether our society will live on or join the sad rolls of the disappeared.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider. Might even help us to appreciate what we have, what our ancestors—our Founding Fathers and all those who came after—built for us.
M. G. Haynes