36 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)cooperates with the other, with no defections by either. And the best way of
bringing this about is a strategy of simple and straight reciprocity. Nor does
this striking result have anything to do with the biological makeup of the
rivals, which were computer programs rather than fl esh- and- blood humans.
(Oxytocin was altogether absent from the proceedings.) Th e lesson seems
clear: that mutual cooperation on the basis of reciprocity, even between total
strangers and rivals, makes sense on purely rational grounds, without any
regard to backgrounds of shared moral or cultural values. Th ere may be no
deity promoting law between nations— but there is evidence that reason
alone can do the job every bit as eff ectively.
Th e problem remains, of course, to fi nd ways of putting this reciprocity-
based ethos into practice in the world outside of cyberspace, where factors
alien to those of computer programming play a large role. Language is per-
haps the most obvious barrier to be overcome. An interesting solution to
this challenge was related by Herodotus, in his description, in the fi ft h cen-
tury bc, of “silent trading” between Carthaginian merchants and some
unnamed North African tribes “beyond the Pillars of Heracles.” Th e Car-
thaginians would unload their cargo onto the beach, send a smoke signal to
the natives, and then retire to their boats. Th e natives would then inspect
the merchandise and leave a quantity of gold as their off er of a purchase
price. If the Carthaginians thought it a fair off er, they would take it and sail
away. Otherwise, they would patiently wait for the natives to increase their
deposit. Th e historian assures us that the system worked fl awlessly. Never,
it would appear, was silence more golden.
At the level of state- to- state contacts, intercourse between parties from
diff erent cultural areas has been found to be feasible in various ways. Treaty
making, for example, appears to have posed no undue diffi culty, given that
treaties only involved back- to- back unilateral commitments by each mon-
arch to his own deities. In fact, the oldest treaty to have survived in its en-
tirety is one between Hattusilis III of the Hittites and Pharaoh Ramses II of
Egypt in about 1270 bc. It was inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphics on a
wall of the Temple of Amun (the leading Egyptian god at that time) in Kar-
nak. A portable version of it exists in Akkadian (the lingua franca of the
Middle East at that time) on three tablets, two of which are in Istanbul and
one in Berlin. It was an impressively thorough arrangement, providing for
mutual nonaggression, combined with a defensive alliance, while also mak-