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Early Diplomacy: From Cavemen to Consuls

While other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill – little better practised now than three or four thousand years ago.

John Adams, 1813

We don’t know the name of the first diplomat, but let’s call him Ug.

At some point, Ug – perhaps slower or smaller than his peers (diplomats often are) – persuaded a fellow Neanderthal to stop clubbing him over the head for long enough to work together against a common rival. A survival instinct in Ug prioritised co-operation over conflict. He was, probably literally, a naked diplomat.

And so diplomacy is almost as old as humanity.

Centuries later, one of Ug’s many descendants – for Ug had found that diplomacy increased the survival prospects of his otherwise feeble genes – found the beginnings of language. He and his fellow palaeohumans began to communicate sufficiently to begin to create basic societies. The most primitive of these communities quickly developed systems to guarantee freedom of movement for messengers to avoid them being bludgeoned or eaten.1 Around 4000 BC they developed basic forms of writing to help divide resources, especially grain and beer. Diplomacy was under way, and alcohol was already playing its part.

The most important difference between humans and the rest of the animal world is that we can cooperate flexibly in large groups.2 And not just to feed or protect ourselves. That’s why, for better or worse, we run the globe. Outside of Disney films, the animal kingdom doesn’t do big conferences. There is no Security Council for owls and dolphins. There is no Lion King. We, not the fish, design the treaties on fishing quotas. We have dramatically reduced the threat from our fellow species (bar the mosquito, though thanks to Bill Gates we are getting there too).

Part of our vital biological make-up as humans is that we can cooperate with people we don’t know, or who share little of our DNA. And part of our survival instinct is that there are people able to make the case, not necessarily always true, that cooperation is better for us than killing each other. That means that there is a biological case for diplomacy. All Ug was saying, long before and (slightly) less melodically than Lennon, was give peace a chance. Diplomatic uniforms, titles, protocol and platitudes aside, the basic concept since Ug’s first grunts and gestures has not changed as much as we might think.

Technological innovation always precedes political change and diplomacy. The sickle and plough allowed settled living, and the domestication of animals. Social structure and a basic rule of law followed, creating more space and time for innovation. The invention of the wheel and of writing, several thousand years BC, made diplomacy both more necessary and more possible. Both took place, ironically, in the graveyard of much modern diplomacy, Iraq. Some of the earliest traces of more formal diplomacy are from the bureaucratic records of imperial China, where poor Shen Weiqin plied his trade before he was so slowly sliced up.

In the third century BC, Chanakya, the key adviser to the founder of the Indian Maurya dynasty, wrote in Sanskrit the oldest detailed guide to diplomacy: Arthashastra, or The Science of Politics.3 His advice on diplomacy and espionage is pretty robust: violence, torture and spying dominate the text. The best way to deal with neighbouring countries is to appease, bribe, divide, punish, deceive, ignore or bluff, a set of approaches that have dominated Anglo-French relations for most of history. But Chanakya also sees part of the diplomat’s role as preservation of wildlife and the rule of law, an idea retained in much diplomatic work today. In sage advice that could equally apply to modern spies dodging honeytraps, he advises envoys to ‘always sleep alone’, and to avoid strong liquor and hunting.

Diplomacy also started to take root elsewhere. In Egypt, following the battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, Pharaoh Rameses II and ruler of the Hittite empire Hattusili III created the first known international peace treaties, on stone tablets.4 Some of the covenants in these early treaties bear a strong similarity to the Ten Commandments that Moses was given, probably between the fourteenth and twelfth centuries BC – a fairly one-sided diplomatic treaty between God and Man. The messenger was not always welcome. The Bible records envoys of King David having their heads shaved and buttocks exposed by an unimpressed monarch – a punishment self-imposed by many modern football fans when travelling overseas.

Rival Chinese states in the first millennium BC started to draft more detailed treaties to enforce conquest and avoid unnecessary conflict. Others in Asia, such as the Japanese and Koreans, drew from this example, including by establishing temporary embassies. Records remain of Chinese Song dynasty ambassadors who were able to outfox opponents through guile and cunning rather than force. Theories of human interaction, such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, demonstrate how leaders spent an increased amount of time considering how to subdue their enemies without the cost in blood and treasure of fighting them. As the Chinese empire expanded by sea from the second to thirteenth centuries AD, they sent resident envoys as far afield as India, Persia, Egypt and Africa, often despatching two – as they did to Japan in 653 – in case one never arrived, as was all too often the case. It must have been interesting when both did.

By the time the Chinese invented gunpowder in 900, they had already used diplomacy to create an empire so large that they did not have to use the gunpowder as an instrument of warfare and statecraft. If they had done so, as the Europeans started to do to such devastating effect in the fourteenth century, all our treaties and diplomatic language might now be in Chinese.

In Europe, meanwhile, the first Greek city states also found a need for diplomats to negotiate with rivals and allies. The basic rules and conduct of diplomacy they adopted in the Congress of Sparta in 432 BC were a template for much of the diplomacy of the next twenty-two centuries until the aftermath of Waterloo. The Spartans, in a sign of extreme confidence, even invited the adversaries – the Athenians – that they were considering attacking.

The Greeks tended to send diplomats on short missions rather than making them resident in other countries. Heralds would venture out to pass messages and to report back, if they had not been executed, on the quality of the reception they received. The forefather of the modern consul, often a resident of the city who happens to have a particular link to another, can be found in the Greek proxenos, who acted as informal sources of information and message carriers.

It was the Mongols who first put diplomacy on a more sophisticated footing. In 1287, Prince Arghun sent the first embassy to the West under Rabban Sauma, an elderly monk turned diplomat, as part of his effort to form an anti-Muslim alliance against Syria and Egypt. He promised the French the city of Jerusalem, and generously suggested that he would be ‘very willing to accept any samples of French opulence that you care to burden your messengers with’. He even tried to broker an accord with the distant Edward I of England. But Europe, or the Vatican at least, was clearly well behind their Mongol visitors – Sauma reported back that he was underwhelmed by the ‘lack of worldly intelligence among the cardinals of Rome’.5

As communication, travel and trade developed, it became necessary to establish rules for diplomatic interaction that went beyond protocols on exchanges of gifts. Like the Japanese, the Byzantine and Sasanian (modern Iran) leaders took the precaution of sending messages with two envoys in case one was lost or misplaced in unforgiving new environments. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols took this idea further and developed a new form of diplomatic passport, granting their envoys special status and protection. Genghis Khan, a historical figure usually more associated with ending rather than protecting lives, introduced diplomatic immunity. For messengers to do their job, it helped that they occasionally returned intact. That principle remains in place today, thankfully.

Six hundred years ago, it was the East that could claim to be the centre of diplomatic understanding and political power. But an unknown goldsmith in Strasbourg was about to change everything.