A young sailor tilted her head to the side and studied the golden walls of Nyandei. They towered over the nearby marsh, dwarfing every tree she'd ever seen. "Are there many wars here?" she asked, bloodthirsty and eager as only the innocent can be. "Barbarian attacks?" Her father — the ship's navigator, and the reason she was aboard — smiled indulgently. "No, Kayci. But you should see the city during flood season. Snowmelt runs right up to the top of the corbels, some years." "Why don't they move to higher ground?" Her father laughed. "Why, then they'd have to fight the barbarians." --- ## AFTERWORD The first time I read about ancient walls being built to defend against water, not warfare, it blew my mind. I grew up reading books and watching movies firmly centered in the Medieval European paradigm; castles and forts are strategic requirements and critical for withstanding siege warfare. That's the whole point of the Great Wall of China — the grandest wall ever built for defense. I don't remember learning about the Great Wall of China; it feels like I always knew it existed. It's an enormous defensive wall built to help keep Chinese civilization safe from barbarian invasion, and for a few years, American journalists and politicians talked about it non-stop. Stopping "invasions" is what enormous walls are for, right? Or at least that's what I always thought... The more I read, though, the more I realize that the idea of a big, tall, thick wall being used for defense — especially siege defense — is a lot more complex than I ever realized. For one thing, many sieges get broken because of political betrayal, not military might. I touched on this lightly back in July of last year, when I wrote the [City Walls](https://eleanorkonik.com/city-walls/) %% ( [[2021-07-19 City Walls (DRAFT)]] ) %% edition of this newsletter, but the situation is way more complex than I managed to fit into the "overview" format. Plus, I've learned a bunch since I sent that newsletter. Lately, I've stumbled across a bunch of references to the idea that, given a choice, many people throughout history have preferred barbarian lifestyles to "civilized" ones. It came up in [Against the Grain](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300182910/against-grain) by James C. Scott as well as in [The Dawn of Everything](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything) by David Graeber & David Wengrow. What does this have to do with walls? Well, according to Christopher Beckwith (a "distinguished" professor and the author of [Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691150345/empires-of-the-silk-road)),  the Great Wall(s) were built as much to keep the Chinese taxpayers in as to keep barbarians out. See that pluralization? It turns out the Great Wall is actually a series of walls, built over the course of about a thousand years, some of which don't connect to each other at all. - [i] Additional Image * [[43b6b48d-a8b5-42de-8494-6a58ebee1578_955x768.png|Map of Great Wall]] - Map of the Great Wall of China via Wikimedia Commons One of my favorite quirks of the Great Wall of China is that some sections are just... sort of silly; they aren't connected to anything (because funding or political will for construction ran out, I guess?) so the enemy can kind of just ... go around it. This isn't unique to China, though. The first wall not built around a city was Sumerian and built around 2000 BCE. It was the first known example of a territorial boundary wall. It was also remarkably ineffectual despite generations of successive kings trying to maintain it; as one might expect, enemies just went around, until in 1750 BCE, when it was breached. The Great Wall of Gorgon was a similar wall built by the Parthian Empire and restored by the Sasanian Persians, and it was really useful for letting armies observe the surrounding territories — more because it was tall than because it was a wall. But I'm not here to evaluate the relative effectiveness of famous walls — I just like thinking about all the uses of walls that aren't obvious. For example, I'll note that [Hadrian's wall was probably better at serving as a tax collection point than actually stopping Pictish incursions](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fears-fueled-ancient-border-wall-180963025/)). For those who don't remember a newsletter from over six months ago, it turns out that the earliest walls probably weren't intended for defense against people at all — they were basically levees. Cities in the Indus River Valley had massive dirt walls, which were probably pretty similar to the ones common in the Mississippi valley region in America — even today. Levees and dikes are designed to protect cities from floods and, _secondarily_, also put attackers at a "downhill" disadvantage. Mound-building in places like Cahokia may have had more to do with defending against floods than defending against military attack, for the same reason that the embankments outside of St. Louis have more to do with Mississippi floods than defending against military attack — one of these things is more likely than the other. When I hear phrases like "take the high ground" my mind immediately goes to military strategy, so when I read about places like "Nob hill" I tend to instinctively assume that the wealthy elites in ancient Rome liked to live on Roman hills because they functioned as fortifications at some point — but what if it was really more about making it easier for waste water to flow away from their homes? What if it was more about avoiding flooding in their villas? I know that one of the reasons I like _my_ house is that it's got good drainage and no basement to worry about... ... but kids like Kayci haven't ever had to worry about that sort of thing, so their first thoughts turn to situations they have context for, and they've usually heard more stories about wars than environmental calamities. ## Further Reading - My article about [Transporting Information in Low Tech Socieities](https://eleanorkonik.com/transporting-information-sending-messages-in-low-tech-societies/) goes into further detail about how the Great Wall of China helped with communication.