There are three types of evolution that have driven the development of human societies. The first of these is biological evolution where nature very slowly adapts us physically to our changing environment. Whether one believes in the theory of dynamic biological change and evolution or a more static creationist model of biology, one cannot deny we are biological beings with certain characteristics that largely distinguish us from other animals. There are five major characteristics that make humans unique. One is our binocular and color vision that gives us depth perception and a more detailed view of our surroundings respectively. This sends a lot of information to our brains for processing, making us very much a visually oriented species with 90% of the information we take in coming in through the eyes. Second we have upright posture, which frees our hands. This brings us to the third factor, our hands with opposable thumbs, which allow us to manipulate various objects and our environment. That in itself would be worth very little if it were not for the fourth characteristic, our brain that allows us to use our hands in intelligent and creative ways. The brain also makes possible the fifth characteristic, speech which allows us to share knowledge and ideas quickly so each generation does not have to rediscover that knowledge on its own, giving it time to discover and develop new knowledge and ideas.
This unique combination of biological characteristics is the basis for two other types of evolution: cultural and technological. One can see cultural evolution as how people adapt their behavior to the environment. Since these are conscious rather than totally random, or non-existent, changes, they occur at a much faster pace than biological change. However, the force of tradition typically keeps people from rapidly changing long-standing cultural traditions that generally have served society well in the past. This is because people through most of history have barely survived with little or no surplus, giving them little or no margin for error if the new change does not work, and making them reluctant to change cultural norms very rapidly.
Technological evolution enables people to adapt or change their environment to meet their needs. This is often something that can be done without immediately changing cultural norms. Therefore, it tends to happen at a much faster rate than cultural change. Not only that, but each new invention, being developed consciously and often based on previous successful inventions, is likely to improve the standard of living. This makes people more likely to develop new inventions, further improving their standard of living, and so on.
One of the most important concepts to understand about history is how any particular event or development rarely has just one cause or just one result. Typically, if one part of a culture changes, it leads to changes in the other parts of the culture. One can visualize each part of a culture (social structure, political structure, technology, the arts, religion, economy, military institutions, etc.) as being connected to each of the other parts by rubber bands. If one part (e.g., the economy) changes and moves forward, it tries to pull all the other parts along with it. If any, some, or all the other parts do not move, the rubber bands connecting them stretch as the distance between them increases. If the distance and tension become too great, one or more of the rubber bands snaps, signifying some form of breakdown or dramatic change, such as a revolution.
The combination of cultural and technological change along with the Rubber Band Theory helps explain the overall flow of history. The process driving this comes increasingly from technological change. This leads to surpluses that lead, among other things, to wars and conflict since people have typically fought over material wealth. These surpluses and the wars they cause lead to efforts to find new and better technologies. These create even more surpluses and wars, more new technologies, and so on. Since there are more technologies on which to base new ones each time this feedback cycles around, technology growth continually accelerates in speed and intensity. This process has created four successive stages of development in human society, each of which feeds back into the cycle of technological growth, thus leading to the next stage.
First, through the vast majority of our species’ existence our ancestors followed a hunting and gathering way of life, with men typically doing the hunting and women gathering fruits and grains while watching the children. Such societies were highly mobile as they pursued wild game. They had little or no surplus and therefore virtually no private property since, being mobile, they could carry very little with them. By the same token, they had to be highly cooperative and share freely, since a man or the men as a group did not always bring home any meat and had to rely on what the women had gathered. All this made for a somewhat egalitarian society with little difference in status between men and women. At this early stage, with little previous technology to draw upon, new technologies developed slowly.
That changed somewhat with the next stage: the invention of agriculture (c.8000 B.C.E.). This forced people to settle down as they generated progressively larger surpluses. For the first time, people could amass private property, which led to different social classes distinguished by wealth. That in turn triggered conflict within the society and wars between societies. With survival based increasingly on brute strength, men emerged as the leaders and women’s status started to drop.
Social stratification and conflict accelerated during the next stage, pre-industrial civilization, which started c.3000 B.C.E. Two new inventions especially distinguished this stage. First of all, metallurgy, provided new forms of wealth and weapons with which to fight over that wealth. Writing helped people keep track of and amass larger amounts of wealth. More wealth led to wars of much greater intensity, frequency, and destructiveness. It also further reduced the status of women who had lost virtually all control over property by now.
The fourth stage, industrial society, started in Britain (c.1750) and has spread rapidly across the globe since then. This period has been especially marked by the rapid acceleration of technological growth. Unfortunately, this has been particularly true of military technology, which has increased the destructive power of warfare by several quantum leaps as seen in the two world wars which dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Ironically, the status of women has risen dramatically in industrial societies, largely because machines have reduced the need for or value of brute muscle, thus making women more competitive for jobs and opportunities, even in the military.
Technology is a double edged sword that has helped generate by far the highest standard of living and longest life expectancy in human existence. But the spiraling rate of technological growth over the past 200 years has created progressively greater stresses on the “rubber bands” holding human society together. This is because, compared to technological growth, all the other aspects of society (social structure, religion, morals, etc.) are much more dependent for their rates of change on cultural evolution which, as mentioned above, is very traditional and slow. This growing gap between the rate technological change and that of other parts of society has created ever mounting stresses and strains, and continues to do so as technological growth continues to accelerate. These problems break down into three main categories.
First of all, most aspects of society, being more bounded by traditional rates of cultural change, cannot keep up with and adapt to the rate of technological growth. All too often, new technologies are introduced without studying or trying to anticipate their long-range effects. An example of this is the birth control pill introduced in 1960. While the Pill did free women from being burdened with large numbers of children, which was the goal of its inventors, few, if any, people gave serious thought to how the Pill would change people’s attitudes toward sex and marriage, or how that would affect the status of women and the raising of future generations of children.
A second problem lies in the unbelievable destructive power of modern weapons, in particular hydrogen bombs. Before the industrial revolution, the destructiveness of war was largely proportional to the number of men directly engaged in it, and the number of those men was largely determined by the relatively low productivity of the pre-industrial societies that had to support them over time. This put distinct limits on how long and destructive wars could be, thus giving societies time to recover. Modern warfare, however, is by no means limited by such factors. A relatively few men can launch devastating destruction upon the planet totally out of proportion to their numbers. The technology of destruction has grown even faster than the technology of production, making total war as we understand it obsolete.
Finally, modern technology has transformed our economy from being mainly concerned with producing enough for everyone to being concerned with selling all it produces. This has spawned a pervasive culture of materialism and consumerism heavily influenced by advertising. Modern economies rely on more sales and consumption and sales to make the money to expand their production, which requires more consumption, and so on. Given the vastly larger population that is involved in this cycle and the ever growing levels of per capita consumption, there is no way the environment can support this level of growth.
All this adds up to a fairly grim prospect for the future. However, we are an ingenious and adaptable species that could very well see us successfully through our technological adolescence. For example, during the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union did manage to avoid a catastrophic third world war. While we are not out of the woods yet, there is still hope while there are still some woods left for us.
While human history is primarily concerned with cultural and technological evolution, we need to understand a possible scenario for the evolution of the biological characteristics that have served as the basis for the human species’ other advances. Maybe a good starting point would be some 75,000,000 years ago. This is a mere drop in the bucket of time, but we have a long way to go before reaching anything closely resembling humans. We pick up our story with the lowly tree shrew.
The tree shrew, which appears quite similar to a mouse, hardly looks like anything we would like to call our ancestor. Yet scientists think this little creature was our connecting link with the lower forms of mammals. Converting this animal into a human would tax the skills of the most imaginative artist. It lacked binocular and color vision, upright posture, hands with opposable thumbs, a larger better-developed brain, and speech. In other words, it had none of the five characteristics that distinguish humans as a species. It also had to lose its tail, fur, and long snout.
The first critical step was moving into the trees away from intense competition on the ground. Life in the trees was more three-dimensional, involving accurately judging distances from branch to branch or else taking some nasty falls. This helped the development of binocular vision. Life in the trees also required hanging on to things to keep from falling. As a result, a primitive grasping hand started to evolve. Also, the more three-dimensional world of the trees required more awareness of things in all directions. This stimulated brain size and development.
Some 25,000,000 years later some tree shrews have evolved into the prosimians. These included the tarsier and ring-tailed lemur, which are often seen at the zoo and mistaken for monkeys. The prosimians resembled humans much more than the tree shrew, having binocular vision, shorter snouts, hands of a sort, and bigger brains. However, they still lacked erect posture and speech, while their brains, hands, and eyes fell far short of human standards. Some 40,000,000 years ago monkeys evolved from the prosimians. Although showing no obvious new developments toward human characteristics, they were more intelligent than prosimians and had better developed hands and eyes.
Next, we come to the apes, our closest cousins. Apes practiced one activity, tree swinging, that helped lead to human evolution in several ways. First of all, since tree swinging put the ape in an upright position, its head had to switch its position in order to see where it was going. A quadrupedal (four-legged) animal's head connects to the spine at the back of the skull. If we were to stand a dog on its hind legs, its head's normal position would have it looking straight up. The same was true for the still quadrupedal ape when it started tree swinging, making it more prone to crash into trees. Therefore, the ape's normal head position moved to connect to the spine at the base of the skull in order to adapt to this new tree swinging posture. This also paved the way for the later adaptation of erect posture that would free the hands for tool use. Speaking of the hands, tree swinging also led to more use and development of the hands giving apes better hand dexterity. The fairly rapid speeds at which apes swung also meant a lot of things came at them quickly and forced them to react quickly, thus leading to further brain development.
If apes had so much going for them, why did they not all evolve into humans? In general, one can say that evolution and natural selection are conservative and do not favor changes unless forced to by circumstances. This was especially the case with chimps, who had an easy niche in nature and felt no need to evolve. It was also true of gorillas whose great size let them stay pretty much the same. Timing was also important. Gibbons and orangutans were swinging in the trees for so long that their arms became over specialized for tree swinging and could not adapt well to life on the ground where our ancestors evolved. On the other hand, baboons came out of the trees too early and had not swung long enough to develop their upright posture. Thus they remained quadrupedal.
Still, some three to five million years ago some apes did emerge from the trees into the African Savannah (grassland), and the question once again is why? The most likely answer is for food, and this is supported by the most plentiful and durable evidence we have from then: their teeth and jawbones. About this time their molars and jawbones got much bigger, suggesting they were eating lots of seeds and grains, which required massive jaws and molars to grind them up. This also meant that the canine teeth, their main defensive weapon in the harsh and dangerous Savannah, got in the way of chewing. Choosing between defense and eating, nature decided eating was more important and the canines were lost.
This of course created the problem of defense against predators. The solution seems to have been some sort of weapon. It was certainly nothing more than a stick, bone, or rock, but it apparently was effective. If it had not been effective we would not be here to talk about it. The importance of all this is that for the first time in the history of life on the planet, an animal was using a form of technology to extend its power dramatically and increase its chances of survival. The dawn of humans, or more properly, hominids had arrived.
The term hominids refers to modern humans (i.e., ourselves), our most direct ancestors, and collateral branches of our family tree that came to a dead end, such as the Neanderthals. . The earliest of these hominids, known as Australopithecines, lived from one to five million years ago. They were somewhat human in that they had better developed eyes, posture, hands, and brains than the apes. However, scientists do not generally call them humans because their brains were still much smaller than ours (about 450cc compared to around 1400cc for modern man). Their hands also had little or no precision grip, and they probably could not speak. Many see Australopithecines as the missing link between apes and humans.
There were several varieties of Australopithecines. The earliest, Australopithecus Afarensis, provided us with one of the most amazing discoveries in archaeology: forty percent of one skeleton. That may not sound like much, but it was unheard of to find that much of such an old skeleton intact. The scientist who found it, Donald Johansen, was so struck by this find that he even gave it the name Lucy after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
Australopithecus Afarensis was the likely ancestor of two other branches of Australopithecines. One branch, the larger in size, was vegetarian. The other branch ate both meat and plants. The importance of this is that hunting for meat required more inventiveness than did collecting vegetation. As a result, the meat eaters developed tools (possibly including containers for better gathering) and weapons much more than the vegetarians did.
Eventually the meat eating Australopithecines evolved into what many scientists call the first true humans, Homo Habilis ("handy man") with a brain capacity of 650cc. They used and made very crude tools, although they still could not speak. For that reason, other scientists reserve the honor of the first humans for people known as Homo Erectus who had a brain capacity of some 750cc., which gave them the ability to speak.
A good deal of controversy surrounds the evolution of humans and their family tree. However, our evolution over the last million years has revolved increasingly around our technological and cultural innovations rather than biological changes. This is largely because on the one hand, biological changes are purely random, thus making evolution quite slow. However, technological and cultural changes are the products of more conscious and focused efforts to solve problems or create something. Therefore, such innovations happen at a much faster pace and accelerate the pace of change since they build upon previous efforts.
There were two main types of technological development our prehistoric ancestors came up with early on: flint tools and fire. Flint is unique among rocks because, when hit in the right way, it shatters, leaving very thin and razor-sharp pieces that can be worked into blades. Over time, as people spread to areas with little available flint or used up once plentiful supplies, they had to make more efficient use of this precious resource. At first, people were somewhat wasteful of it, maybe making only one hand ax out of a block of flint. It is estimated they got only 2-8 inches of blade for every pound of flint they used. Early Ice Age peoples came up with a method of knocking chips off of a piece of flint and using each chip for an ax or spearhead. As a result, they were able to get up to forty inches of blade per pound of flint. Their descendants would further refine this to get forty feet of blade per pound of flint.
Of all the things that our ancestors invented or mastered to protect themselves from the harshness of the physical environment, none was more important than fire. As the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote, it was the "brightness of fire that devises all” To the Greeks, it was the source of their crafts and civilization itself. It was what distinguished humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and gave them so much power; too much power as far as Zeus, king of the Greek gods was concerned.
The first people who mastered fire could use it, but probably not make it. As a result, they depended on natural sources such as a volcanoes or forest fires caused by lightning for their fire. Considering animals' natural fear of fire, we must admire the courage of that first individual who dared to pick up a burning ember and take it home. Once our ancestors had harnessed fire and found a way to keep it burning, they discovered some important uses for it.
The first use was probably for hunting and defense against wild animals, since it was obvious that animals feared fire. A common hunting technique would be to start a brush fire and use it to drive game toward other hunters or over a cliff. The value of fire for light and warmth soon became apparent, especially after our ancestors migrated out of Africa into the cooler climates of Europe and Asia. Fire could also harden sharpened sticks into better weapons. Finally, fire was useful for cooking food with several important results.
Cooked meat in particular held several advantages. The heat caused a chemical reaction that created proteins out of the amino acids in meat, thus making it more nutritious and leading to a healthier population. Fire also killed microbes in the meat, making it safer to eat. Finally, fire softened meat, making it possible for the very young and sick to chew it and thus be nourished. Altogether, cooking led to a healthier population that could grow and spread across the globe. We today are so concerned with overpopulation that we lose sight of how important and difficult it was to maintain a stable or growing population until very recently. Back then the average life expectancy was probably no more than twenty years, and half of all children died before the age of five. Thus extinction was a very real possibility. Cooking removed that possibility a bit.
Around 200,000 years ago, the planet started turning much colder. The cause of the ice ages is still unknown and subject of several theories including variations in the tilt of the earth's axis and its orbital path, continental drift, and clouds of cosmic dust blocking some of the sun’s radiation. Whatever the cause or causes, glacial sheets of ice moved south, covering much of the Northern Hemisphere. Summertime temperatures in England probably reached no more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit. By the same token, winters were horribly cold.
Such harsh conditions forced important changes in our ancestors and the various other life forms then. Keep in mind that physical adaptations were not planned or conscious. Rather, natural selection just accelerated the process whereby genetic mutations would be favored. What emerged was a whole new array of animals: giant cave bears, saber toothed cats, and woolly mammoths and rhinos to name a few. Our ancestors also went through some changes as well. Homo Erectus, as our prehistoric ancestors from then are called, had moved into cooler climates in search of game and living space. However, when the glaciers came, they were forced to adapt. What had been a fairly stagnant culture and species in stable conditions now changed at a relatively rapid rate. Even more rapid than their physical evolution was the evolution of their technology and culture.
At this point, we see a cycle of technological development emerge to accelerate our evolution. Tool use stimulated brain development, which helped lead to more successful hunting and gathering. The improved diet and resulting brain development stimulated more tool development, better hunting, and so on. This basic feedback set in motion by hunting and tool use continued to repeat itself through the ages and is still at work today. Each new invention we come up with extends our power and also stimulates us to come up with more new inventions. This was a process that had started long before with the Australopithecines and continues now.
One of the effects of a bigger brain was the evolution of speech. This allowed both closer cooperation and more efficient sharing of information in such ventures as hunting. Therefore, each generation could easily learn the skills its ancestors had developed and perfected over the years instead of spending most of its time re-discovering them. This stimulated more brain development and ability to speak, encouraging more cooperation and sharing of knowledge, and so on. This feedback also fed back into and further accelerated the previous cycle of technological development, stimulating more sophisticated speech, etc.
However, there were severe limits to early humans' speech. For one thing, their pharynx, or voice box, did not drop enough to allow the full range of sounds we are accustomed to making now. As a result, their physical ability to speak was only about one-tenth of ours in terms of the sounds they could make and the speed at which they could make them. Their mental ability to speak was also severely limited. It takes a brain capacity of about 750cc to reach the ability to speak. Babies today reach that threshold between one and two years of age. Many prehistoric humans may never have reached that capacity. Or if they did reach the threshold of speech, they probably reached it much later in life than children today do. Combining that with their short life spans, prehistoric peoples had little time to develop anything profound to say, greatly impeding cultural and technological progress for a million years or so.
Better hunting and gathering technology. The Ice Ages also reduced the amount of vegetation available for gathering, thus increasing our ancestors’ reliance on hunting and develop more powerful weapons. When a better ability to speak combined with the process of each invention stimulating ideas for even more new inventions, a dramatic leap in technology and culture also took place. By 10,000 B.C.E., our ancestors, known as Cro Magnon but essentially Homo Sapiens Sapiens (i.e., ourselves) in a primitive setting, had learned to use other materials, notably wood, bone, and antler, in combination with flint, thus vastly expanding their range of tools and weapons compared to the crude and limited tool kit of the earliest hominids:
the use of bone, antler, and ivory for making tools that flint was unsuited for;
the sewing needle that led to warmer, better fitting clothes;
the spear which both extended the range and power of the hunter as a throwing weapon while maintaining a safe distance from dangerous animals when used as a hand held weapon;
barbed and grooved spearheads, which, being more deadly, led to better hunting;
the bolo for tripping up game;
the ability to make fire, giving them a stable source of warmth;
grooved air channels under the fire which led to hotter fires (which would lead to fired ceramics, which led to pottery and the kiln, and eventually to the furnace for smelting metals with all their contributions to civilization;
flint sickles, with bone or wood handles, which led to better gathering and a healthier population;
the burin, the first tool used for making other tools;
woven baskets, which also led to better gathering and more food;
fishing with spears, nets, and gorges (a type of hook), which led to a more stable food supply; and
crude shelters, built at first as wind breaks in the entrances of caves, and later as free-standing structures
Looking at all these inventions, Cro Magnons seem to tower over their ancestors, much as we see ourselves towering above them. This is deceptive, however, because we are building on what our ancestors built. Without the accomplishments of Cro Magnon and those who went before them, our own civilization could never have evolved.
All these new advances had profound implications for the future. For one thing, our ancestors’ larger brains would help lead to the development of the human family. Secondly, increasingly efficient hunting, gathering, and fishing made possible a more settled lifestyle, giving people time and opportunities to notice certain things around them, in particular the way seeds grow into plants. This revelation was the basis for the next great step in human evolution, the food producing revolution, or agriculture. Finally, better brain development and technology inspired and made possible new activities and behaviors that make the Cro Magnons seem much more modern to us.
Our ancestors’ behavior over the last 100,000 years or so also shows a much higher degree of intelligence than ever before. For example, they seem to have first realized the inevitability of death and created a religion to prepare for it. We have found people buried facing east and west, and also with the pollen of flowers in their graves. Our ancestors apparently worshipped the spirits of cave bears with whom they competed for living space. One Neanderthal cave has the skulls of some eighty bears arranged around it.
Prehistoric people also seem to have cared for their sick and infirm as evidenced by the skeleton of one man who lived to about forty years of age (old for back then) with the use of only one arm. They also apparently practiced female infanticide (killing female babies) as a form of population control. This is a comment not so much on our ancestors’ brutal nature as on the brutal conditions they had to deal with in order to survive. Not practicing such a measure might have meant extinction for the whole tribe or species.
Cro Magnons seem more modern to us culturally as well, especially in their art. In southern France and Spain they left a number of cave paintings that are amazing for their artistic touch and sensitivity. These paintings depict the various animals people then hunted. Their function may have been some sort of sympathetic magic in which portraying a successful hunt would cause a successful hunt. Whatever their purpose, these paintings are striking in the way they depict these animals in motion. They also can make us feel much more akin to these people we call our ancestors.
The dramatic physical changes our ancestors experienced also triggered equally significant social changes that led to the evolution of the most basic social unit of our species: the family. One likely scenario involved two lines of development converging to create the family. First, as our ancestors moved out of the trees into the savannah in search of grains and grasses, they occasionally came across a carcass that they would pick clean for the meat. This casual scavenging gave them a taste for meat that developed into more intentional hunting. With the females tied down by the children, the males were generally the only ones free to hunt. Meanwhile the females and children would gather edible plants. Most likely, hunting was rarely successful, providing only about 10-20% of the food our ancestors ate, although the meat did provide valuable protein. The need to supplement the usually meager returns on their hunting may give us another clue as to why the males kept returning to the rest of the group. This pattern of food sharing created bonds vital to the evolution of the family.
Another development had to do with the evolution of a large brain and head which made the birthing process for humans more difficult. As a result, nature compensated by having human babies come to full term prematurely, making them among the most helpless animals at birth in all of nature. This greatly increased and prolonged children’s dependence on their mothers, who in turn needed protection and help getting food, especially in the harsh environment of the savannah.
The question is: why did males keep returning to the females and children? According to one theory, the answer lies in the evolution of year round mating in females to replace the seasonal estrus cycle that occurs in most mammals. The females who developed this pattern (by a purely random mutation) were better able to attract males to help them with food gathering and protection. As a result, more of their children survived to pass this characteristic on to future generations until it became the prevailing trait in humans.
Over time, these factors (year-round mating and food sharing) created permanent bonds that we have come to know as the family. Strengthening these bonds were two other factors. One was the added companionship and security of family life. We know, for example, that our prehistoric ancestors would feed and care for crippled members of their group despite their inability to contribute significantly to everyone else’s survival. Secondly, there was the emotional satisfaction that children gave their parents in terms of companionship, care in old age, and as an extension of themselves.
For centuries there has been a controversy over the source of differences in male and female behavior and values within our species. Oftentimes described as the “Nature vs. Nurture” debate, it focuses on whether differences between men and women are the result of genetic or environmental factors. Coming largely from the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, the pendulum swung heavily to the side of nurture, the assumption being that aggressive tendencies in boys were the result of cultural factors and upbringing. The hope and belief was that if boys could be raised in an environment that didn’t stress aggression and violence, they would be no more aggressive than girls. Unfortunately, more recent research shows things are not quite that simple. While the environment is important in determining the way aggression is channeled, there are also inherent genetic factors influencing the equation. Testosterone levels in an individual are one factor. How men and women’s brains are structured is another. This may be the result of the hunting and gathering lifestyle our ancestors followed for the vast majority of our species’ existence and the different roles men and women played in it.
For men, who typically did the hunting, stalking and waiting for game required two main mental abilities: staying focused on one goal for long periods of time and keeping quiet during that prolonged period of waiting. This discouraged verbal socializing that could scare off any game. Nature would favor males whose brains were adapted to these qualities by awarding them successful hunts while killing off the more chatty ones through unsuccessful hunting and starvation.
Women, who performed very different tasks, required very different qualities. While looking for and gathering any edible vegetation, they also might have to keep track of several children and look out for predators. Unlike men, who had to stay quiet, those women who cooperated with one another (especially in looking out for one another’s children) and communicated verbally would be much more successful than women who operated quietly and independently of one another. For one thing, the sound of a number of women talking might be enough to scare off some potential predators. Such cooperation and communication would also create strong social bonds between the women, providing much of the glue that has kept societies together down through the ages. And just as nature would favor men with brains adapted to focus quietly on one goal, it would favor women whose brains were more adapted to verbal socializing and keeping track of several things at once.
Indeed, recent research has shown that men and women’s brains are largely structured in those ways. Women will typically use five times as many words in a situation as men will. Also, while men will listen with just one side of their brains, women will use both sides, indicating more of a talent for multi-tasking. It is important to note that these are general, not absolute, tendencies in men and women. Within each gender there is a wide range of differences between individuals, thus creating a large gray area that one certainly could not describe as absolutely male or female. Thus one should not use these general tendencies as supporting a “biology is destiny” argument for locking men and women into certain rigid roles. By the same token, these are tendencies we cannot afford to ignore in discussing issues of gender differences.
Cursed is the ground for your sake; in sorrow shall you eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to you; and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread till you return to the ground; for out of it were you taken; for dust you are, and unto dust you shall return.(Genesis)
Some 10,000 years ago, only 5-10,000,000 people inhabited the planet, certainly no more. Our ancestors’ technology had taken them a long way, but they still lived as part of nature, not in any way as its master. They did not realize it, but the last one per cent of our existence so far would see unbelievable changes sweep across the planet and change its face forever. Humanity stood on the verge of over-running the earth with vast numbers of its species. Supporting those vast numbers was possibly the greatest revolution in our history: agriculture, the ability for people to produce their own food supply. The agricultural revolution had two parts: the domestication of plants and the domestication of livestock.
Starting with the birth of agriculture most of history’s major developments have taken place in the vast land mass known as Eurasia and extending across the Mediterranean and North Africa. Europeans who dominated the globe in the late 1800s and early 1900s claimed religious, cultural, and even biological superiority as the basis for their predominance. While such ideas hold little favor today, there still remains the question of why Asia and Europe have held central place in the history of civilization. Much of the answer probably rests in geographic and biological factors.
The underlying factor is that Eurasia lies along an East-West axis in mostly temperate zones. In contrast, Africa and the Americas are oriented from north to south and thus straddle a variety of climates. As a result, crops found in Eurasia are more adapted to the same diseases, climate, and seasonal variations in sunlight (which determine when plants germinate, flower, and bear fruit). Therefore, domesticated crops and intensive agriculture can spread more rapidly across Eurasia than they can across the vastly different climactic zones in Africa and the Americas. For example, because of intervening tropical zones, the cultivation of corn in the Temperate Zone of Mexico in the northern hemisphere never spread to Peru in the southern hemisphere until after 1500 when Europeans conquered both regions. Similarly, crops adapted for temperate zones in northern parts of Africa did not reach the southern tip of Africa until Dutch settlers introduced them in the 1600s.
Of course, there are also topographical and even climactic barriers within Eurasia, such as the Tibetan Plateau, Himalayan Mountains, and Asian steppes isolating East Asia from the rest of Eurasia. Therefore, agriculture probably developed independently in China and spread from there to Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan. However, despite topographical barriers, the similar climates of East Asia and the western half of Eurasia ultimately allowed crop sharing in both directions, thus helping both civilizations advance more quickly.
More specifically, it was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) where agriculture first evolved in Eurasia and then spread westward across North Africa and Europe and eastward to the Indus River Valley. Environmental factors favored this specific region as the birthplace of agriculture. First of all, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East in general, have cool rainy winters and hot dry summers, encouraging plants, especially cereals, to develop large seeds for rapid growth in the limited growing season. This produces relatively small plants without woody stems, which, in turn leads to cereals with lots of large seeds (i.e., more food) that are easy to harvest (without woody stems).
Another factor is that Mesopotamia has many self-pollinating crops (six of them exclusive to that area) that can reproduce without pollination with other plants. The importance here is that recessive traits that are vital to farming but harmful to the plant in nature do not get bred out of the plant through cross-pollination. For example, along with the dominant trait for grains and pea pods to shatter in order to spread their seeds is a recessive trait for a few plants not to shatter. This made it easier for people to harvest them, plant more of them next season, and spread the varieties with the normally harmful tendency not to shatter.
Along with the spread of agriculture from Mesopotamia, other ideas and technologies could spread as well, leading to the relatively rapid development and spread of civilization across Eurasia compared to other regions of the globe whose environments prevented or greatly slowed down such exchanges. And, of course, after the impetus started by Mesopotamia, the exchange of new ideas became two-way, further accelerating the rise and spread of civilization in Eurasia.
In addition to factors unique to Mesopotamia,two other converging factors led to the domestication of plants. First, better hunting and gathering technology provided a more stable food supply. Second, warmer and wetter conditions in the Near East at the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago led to the spread of cereal grains. Together these provided more stable food supplies that allowed people to settle down in more permanent villages. These villages produced two very different effects that together helped lead to the discovery and triumph of agriculture.
One was a growing population that needed more food than the hunting and gathering lifestyle could supply. This may have been partly due to earlier weaning of the young. Since women in hunting and gathering societies were always on the move, they could deal with only one highly dependent child at a time. Therefore, so they have only one small child to carry at a time, they would nurse their young up to age four to interrupt their fertility until their youngest child was less dependent on the mother. More settled village life made such strict birth control less mandatory, allowing earlier weaning and a higher birth rate as a result.
Settled village life also was gave people the opportunity to watch seeds in one place for a long time and notice how seeds grow into plants. Exactly how and when this happened is not known, but women probably made this discovery since they gathered the seeds and had more opportunity to notice how they sprouted and grew. Possible scenarios of this discovery include seeds spilled near camp or a wet grain supply sprouting and growing. However it happened, the realization of the potential of this discovery was probably gradual.
So was the transition to a completely settled agricultural lifestyle. While later civilizations would see agriculture as a gift of the gods, hunting and gathering peoples, such as the early Hebrews quoted above, saw it as a curse since it involved much more work and went against the traditional ways of life they had followed for countless generations. Whereas tradition today is generally shoved aside and scorned, we should keep in mind that until very recently, it was a major force in people's lives. They did not take change so lightly as we do since it disrupted the fragile stability of their lives. So the question arises as to why did people turn to farming.
The most likely explanation was they had to. For a long time after the discovery of agriculture, people continued to follow a hunting and gathering lifestyle mixed in with some casual agriculture, such as scattering seeds along a riverbank or in a field and coming back in a few months to harvest it. This did improve the food supply, and dramatically increased the number of people that could be supported. Even the primitive agriculture practiced then could support up to fifty times more people than hunting and gathering could. However, those extra people put a growing strain on the natural environment’s ability to feed them. One solution was to expand the agriculture. Of course, that led to more food and more population, causing even more strain on the natural food supply and leading to further expansion of the agriculture. In time, both men and women had to devote more and more time to tending the crops and less time to their traditional hunting and gathering ways. Eventually, they settled down and became full-time farmers.
Settled agricultural life had dramatic effects on human society and the environment. First of all, farming required less cooperation and sharing than hunting and gathering did. Before, all members of a tribe had to hunt together and share the results. Since there was no private property or anything to fight over, hunting and gathering societies were (and still are) relatively peaceful and harmonious. In contrast, agriculture allowed individual families to farm their own lands. As a result, private property evolved which led to social classes and more conflict in society between rich and poor.
New agricultural techniques, which replaced the more primitive slash and burn agriculture, also had their effects. The two-field system, which left one field fallow each year to replenish the soil, and crop rotation, which used different crops to take different nutrients out of the soil, reduced soil exhaustion. Both of these, combined with one other technique, irrigation, also created a surplus of grain and the need for a high degree of organization and cooperation. That surplus and level of organization in turn would lead to the rise of the first cities and civilizations with specialized crafts and technologies such as writing and metallurgy.
In the process of farming, our ancestors also inadvertently disrupted natural selection. There were two varieties of wheat they collected on the hillsides of the Near East. The dominant type shattered upon the slightest touch, scattering the seeds so the species could spread and survive. The other, recessive type, did not scatter its seeds so easily, and thus was harder to find. However, it was easier to harvest since the seeds did not scatter. As a result, a higher proportion of this variety was collected and planted than occurred in nature. With each succeeding year a higher proportion of the non-scattering wheat was harvested and planted. Natural selection had been reversed.
About the same time as the invention of agriculture (c.8000 BC) another revolution occurred: the taming of wild animals for domestic use. As with agriculture, the more settled lifestyle that better hunting and gathering allowed at the end of the last Ice Age was important, because it gave people the time and opportunity to keep and domesticate animals.
However, while animals of many different species have been tamed and kept as pets by humans, only a very few have been big enough (100 pounds or more) to be useful as sources of food and labor while meeting three basic criteria for true domestication. First, they must be herbivorous (plant eaters) and fast growing so they use up a minimum of our food resources and quickly become useful to us as a food source. Herbivores directly convert the plants they eat into meat, while carnivores require at least one extra level (i.e., other animals) in the food chain to survive. Therefore, pound for pound, it will take up to ten times as much plant nutrition to raise and support a carnivore as it does to for an herbivore.
Secondly, animals suitable for domestication should live in herds or packs with a strict social hierarchy of which humans can assume leadership. The third criterion for domestication is that animals must be easy to tame and willing to breed in captivity. This also rules out most carnivores, who are typically aggressive hunters and less easily domesticated than herbivores. An obvious exception is dogs who, being relatively small, must hunt cooperatively in packs, making them more social and easy to domesticate.
As with agricultural plants, what few animal species that are suitable for domestication are found predominantly in Eurasia and especially in what we call the Middle East of the Fertile Crescent. There were five such animals. The first two of these to be domesticated were sheep and goats, largely because they were the most docile and easy to tame. Sheep provided meat, milk, and fur. They also were ruminants, which meant they could digest the cellulose from grass, thus making previously useless land (e.g., rocky hillsides) useful.
As with plants, our ancestors also tampered with natural selection, using selective breeding to produce animals that were fat, meaty, slow, and with long wool rather than fur that is shed seasonally, qualities that are useful for us but normally harmful to a species in the wild. Eventually, this process would produce sheep and goats that differed considerably from their cousins in nature.
The next animal domesticated was the pig (c.7000 BC). Unlike sheep and goats, the pig was not a ruminant and providing no milk or fur. However, pigs did provide meat and, being scavengers, had several advantages. Whether scavenging in the local woods or city streets, they were cheap to keep. They also needed little or no supervision, making them easy to keep compared to flocks of sheep and goats that needed constant shepherding. Finally, until very recently, towns and cities rarely had proper sanitation facilities, making them extremely unclean and unhealthy. Pigs scavenging in the streets helped keep them a little cleaner. In fact, many towns had laws protecting them, despite their mean dispositions and occasional habit of attacking children.
Cattle were next (c.6500 BC), which gave milk, meat, hides, and could eat grass. However, they were bigger, wilder, and tougher to tame than sheep, goats, and pigs, causing some civilizations, such as the Minoans on Crete, to see the bull as a symbol of power. Probably the most innovative use for the cow was to hitch it up to a plow, tapping a non-human energy source that increased the power at our disposal and the amount of land under cultivation many times over. However, the earliest farmers hitched the plow up to the cow's horns, not the most efficient use of its power.
Somewhat later (c.3000 BC), horses were domesticated with three far-reaching effects. First of all, they could be used as a source of labor like cattle although their full potential wouldn’t be tapped until the invention of the horse-collar (c.900 AD) which pulled from the chest rather than the neck. Secondly, mounted warfare made armies much more mobile, dangerous, and destructive. This was especially true of nomadic horsemen who would occasionally be the scourge of richer and more sedentary civilizations. Finally, mounted messengers dramatically quickened communications, making it possible to keep in touch with and rule much larger empires.
Agriculture and domestication of animals created two basic types of lifestyle: settled farmers tending their crops and livestock in the richer farmlands, and nomads wandering with their herds of sheep, goats, and horses across the dry grasslands on the fringes of civilization. As we shall see, these two ways of life, nomads and farmers, have clashed repeatedly throughout history. We shall also see how the infectious diseases domesticated herds of animals carried would play a critical role in Eurasia’s dominance of the planet.
To a nomad, first encountering an ancient city must have been much like walking into one of our science fiction movies, only more incredible. After all, we have cities on which to base our concepts of science fiction movies. The nomad really had little or nothing to give him the idea for our ancient city. One should see what a remarkable leap forward it was when the human animal started changing the face of the earth with cities. If agriculture, with its surplus that frees other people for other pursuits, is the backbone of civilization, cities are its heart and soul. Cities are where those extra people congregate to practice the arts and skills of civilization: pottery, metallurgy, weaving, art, architecture, literature, commerce, and so on. Even the word civilization shows the importance of cities to it, since it comes from the Latin word, civitas, meaning city.
The earliest cities arose around 8000 B.C.E., soon after the birth of agriculture, although they do not always seem to have been dependent on farming to survive. The oldest know city was Jericho, dating back to c.8000 B.C.E., making it twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Jericho was a desert city, located around a fresh water spring and largely owing its existence to that spring, since traveling caravans would trade their goods to the people of Jericho for its water. Jericho probably had several thousand inhabitants, who were well enough organized to build a fairly impressive city wall, citadel, and reservoir and dig a moat out of solid rock. Another early city, Catal Huyuk, in modern Turkey, dates from about 6500 B.C.E. It was a religious center, living off of a combination of hunting, farming, and trade.
Isolated cities such as Jericho and Catal Huyuk did not create civilizations. That accomplishment depends on a number of cities spread out over an area and sharing a common culture: language, technology, religion, art, and architecture. The first civilizations arose along hot dry river valleys in Egypt, Mesopotamia, northwest India, and China. The importance of rivers to these civilizations has given rise to the term : hydraulic civilization, coming from hydra, the Greek word for water. Such rivers provided easy transportation and trade for people in their valleys. Such people traded goods and also ideas. In time, a common culture would emerge, as each village would tend to adopt the better ideas and techniques of its neighbors along the river. The rivers and the hot dry climate spawned another activity critical to early civilizations: irrigation.
Let us focus on Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were the only reliable sources of water for farming. The fact that these rivers flooded annually gave the farmers the idea of bringing river water to their fields. At first, it involved nothing more than catching floodwaters and letting them gradually run back to the fields. In time, as the population and need for more farmland increased, the irrigation got more involved and complex. Such a project required a high degree of organization and cooperation, and that required leadership. Keep in mind, ancient peoples viewed rivers as gods. This meant that cutting into them and tapping their water supplies had religious implications. As a result, the local village priest supervised the irrigation.
In return, the priest would get offerings of grain and farm animals. Since these offerings were much more than he could consume himself, the surplus food served as the earliest form of "capital", that is wealth that can be invested in operations beyond what is needed for survival. Naturally, the priest put the "capital" back into his "business", building a bigger temple and storehouse to hold the extra grain and animals. This involved hiring extra accountants, builders, and guards who would settle with their families around the temple. Over time, the irrigation would lead to more crops, which led to more people, which led to the need to develop more farmland and irrigation. This, in turn led to more offerings and further expansions of the temple and the settlement around it. Once the town was large enough, craftsmen would move in who would provide needed goods such as pottery and tools to the temple's workers. Thus, a third level of population below those of the priest and their workers would emerge. Over the centuries, as the population, irrigation, and temple kept expanding, what was once a small farming village evolved into a thriving city gathered around the temple. Such a city would need or want wood, limestone, metal, and other goods that the area could not supply. As a result, some men would become merchants, traveling far and wide to trade the city's surplus for other goods. In this way, the city would grow even more populous and wealthy.
The long, continuous river valley of Mesopotamia meant that not just one village priest, but dozens were faced with the problems and rewards of irrigation. Thus, the process of cities growing up around temples was repeated over and over throughout Mesopotamia. Since the rivers tended to create a common culture, these cities resembled each other quite a bit in how they grew up and even in how they looked. For example, temple expansion generally took the form of building additions on top of the older temple. This gave the temples, or ziggurats as they were called, the appearance of pyramids. At this point, with dozens of cities united by a common culture springing up throughout Mesopotamia, we can say civilization has emerged. Its first people, the Sumerians, step onto the stage of history around 3000 B.C.E.
Civilization brought problems as well as blessings. For one thing, the continued expansion of population and farmland to feed it eventually led to cities clashing over new lands. With civilization came the first wars. Since priests were ill suited for fighting, they would choose a lugal, ("great man") to lead them in the fight. After the war, the lugal would be expected to resign his office. However, either because of ambition or the fact that another war was always around the corner, the lugal would keep his office. In time, he became a permanent official, the king, who led the city-state in war and administered justice in peacetime.
This often led to tension with priests who felt their own positions threatened. The temple (or, more technically, the gods) controlled most of the land. This often made the temple unpopular with the people, who looked to the king for protection. Eventually, the king would emerge as the most powerful figure in the city, although the temple would remain quite influential, still controlling much land, patronizing the arts, and acting as a grain bank and redistribution center during times of famine.
Another problem brought on by civilization was that the larger population of cities (sometimes 20-30,000) meant that people did not always know one another. This led to distrust and oftentimes crime. The influx of wealth also meant more clearly defined social classes since the wealth was not distributed evenly. This, plus all the different types of jobs being done, led to distrust and disagreement. Law codes had to be formed and courts of justice maintained, which also led to the need for a king's strong central government.
Cities and civilization also gave rise to new arts, crafts, and technology. Weaving was certainly one of the most remarkable crafts if we consider how much imagination it took to see a fabric in the fiber of the flax plant. Its importance should be obvious to anyone who wears clothes. Pottery was another craft of great significance. Sealed pottery jars could keep bugs and vermin out of peoples' food supply, preserving it in terms of quantity and hygiene. The rise of civilization also saw the evolution of two other types of technology vital to our way of life: writing and metallurgy.
Like so many other aspects of our civilization, we take writing for granted since we grew up with it. Therefore, consider the story of John Cremony, an army officer in the American southwest writing a letter to his mother back home. A Navajo Indian saw Cremony writing the letter and asked what he was doing. Cremony replied that he wrote words on the paper and sent it home. His mother would look at the paper and get his message. The Indian just laughed at such a ridiculous story. Therefore, in order to prove his story, Cremony wrote a note and told the Indian to take it to another officer who would read it and give him a piece of candy. The Navajo took the note to the officer who read it and, to the Navajo's astonishment, gave him a piece of candy.
Before we condemn the Indians or anyone else for not having writing, we should keep in mind that no one thought of the idea until about 5000 years ago. At that time, the first civilizations were emerging, and with them, a much more complex way of life. The temple of the Sumerian city of Lagash provides a good example. It employed some 1200 people, including 300 slaves. The temple employed 205 cloth workers in addition to sailors, millers, bakers, cooks, guards, fishermen, herders, and scribes. Such a complex operation was beyond one man's ability to keep everything straight in his head. A more efficient record keeping system had to be developed.
People used to think that writing developed overnight in response to the needs of civilization. Actually, it gradually evolved with the increasingly complex society that started to develop with agriculture. At that time, people started making little clay tokens in various shapes to represent the types and numbers of goods they possessed. For example, a man might have ten small clay discs or one large disc to represent the ten bags of grain he owned. It was such a simple system of record keeping that sometimes the tokens had holes in them and were strung together in a necklace.
Around 3500 B.C.E., cities and much more complex economies were evolving. As a result, we find the number of types of tokens expanding dramatically as new types of goods were being produced and traded. Long distance trade was also starting with merchants and temples sending caravans with large amounts of goods from city to city. The caravan drivers would be entrusted with tokens representing all the goods they were travelling with. They would present the tokens along with the goods to a merchant in the next city after making a transaction. Unfortunately, it was apparently easy for the caravan driver to steal a few goods and the tokens for himself without the first merchant knowing he had done that instead of selling them honestly. As a result, the first merchant started putting the tokens in a sealed clay ball or envelope. If the second merchant found the seal broken, he knew the goods had been tampered with. However, the sealed envelope made it difficult for the caravan driver to remember how many items of each type of merchandise he was travelling with. Therefore, the merchant started making impressions of the shapes of the tokens on the outside of the clay envelope while it was still wet. Before long, someone realized that the envelope and tokens were not needed as long as there was an impression of them in the clay. The tokens were dispensed with, the envelope was flattened into a tablet, and writing was born.
Writing was first developed for keeping records of goods. In time its uses expanded, and that meant new ways to express and interpret the symbols had to be developed. There were five basic stages in the history of writing.
Pictographs(c.3500 - 3000 B.C.E.). In this stage, one pictograph or symbol means what it looks like. For example, a picture of the sun means the "sun". This stage was well suited for straight record keeping, but little else.
Ideographs(c.3000 - 2100 B.C.E.). Here the symbols can also mean something a bit more abstract than their literal meaning. A sun can mean "day" as well as "sun". A picture of legs can mean "legs" or "walk". Thus the uses of writing were greatly expanded, although there are severe limits on what one can write this way.
Rebus writing (c.2100 - 1000 B.C.E.). This was a critical turning point. Up till now, one related to what the symbols looked like to tell the meaning. With rebus writing, one used the phonetic sounds of words created by symbols to create new words. For example, a word like "Neilson" would be very difficult to write with pictographs unless everyone knew what Neilson looked like as distinguished from other people. However, with rebus writing, one could use the sounds suggested by a picture of a man kneeling plus a sun to build the word "Neilson". Rebus writing, by making the reader relate to the ears, not the eyes, made it possible to write just about anything. It was a complex system, however, since it required hundreds of symbols, one for each syllable used in a language. Both Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics used about 700 symbols.
Phonetic alphabet (c. 1000 B.C.E. to the present). This system is based on the fact that we can only make about twenty-five or so different sounds, while we can combine those individual sounds into hundreds of symbols, each requiring a different rebus. The alphabet simplifies the process vastly by using just one symbol for each individual sound we make (e.g.--B, D, K, etc.). Although we generally give credit for the alphabet to the Phoenicians (thus the term "phonetics"), it seems the Egyptians also had an alphabet of sorts that the Phoenicians drew upon. The Greeks completed the process by adding vowels, which the Egyptian and Phoenician systems lacked.
Along with writing, mathematics also evolved to help keep records. The Mesopotamians in particular had some sophisticated math, using base 60 instead of base 10 which we use. Mesopotamian influence is reflected even today in our 360-degree circle with 60 minutes in each degree. They seem to have developed the Pythagorean theorem for figuring out the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. They also figured a number of square and cube roots. The ancient Greeks, who gave us much of our math, drew heavily upon the Mesopotamians for their math.
Before the invention of a much simpler alphabet, only a small group of men had the time to learn how to read and write a system using some 700 symbols. These men were known as scribes.
Scribes usually came from middle class families with the money to pay for their sons' education. In Egypt, the temple oversaw education, but in Mesopotamia private teachers ran their own schools. Education started around age six and lasted about twelve years. Students went to school from sunrise to sunset about four days out of five, twelve months of the year. Younger students' lessons involved memorizing long lists of symbols that represented various sounds and syllables. Older students memorized the rules for combining those symbols into words. They also learned math for keeping records and surveying fields. At the end of their schooling, they took an exam. If they passed, they became scribes. If they failed, they could only find employment in such lowly jobs as writing letters for people in local villages.
Fully qualified scribes could look forward to a promising career working for the king, temple, or rich merchants. They had high status in society, since their skills were so specialized. In some 2500 years of Mesopotamian history, only one king, Ashurbanipal of Assyria, is known to have been able to read. Society was completely dependent on this narrow class of scribes to keep the machinery of government and business running smoothly. In fact, their dependence was so complete that there was always the danger of scribes taking bribes to misread letters or tamper with government records. Oftentimes, letters were introduced with a plea or threat to the scribes reading the letters to read them accurately. We can easily imagine the palace intrigue that resulted from this situation.
The invention and spread of the much simpler alphabet meant that more people could learn to read. As a result society was less dependent on scribes, whose status declined accordingly. The alphabet also meant the uses of writing could expand to such things as literature, poetry, and history. Before the alphabet the small number of scribes had to devote most of their energies to running government and business. With the alphabet, more people were literate and free to pursue more cultural applications of writing. We should keep in mind that the vast majority of people, especially the lower classes, remained illiterate until about a century ago.
The importance of writing to history is hard to overestimate. Without it, kings, priests, and businessmen would not be able to keep track of anything beyond their immediate surroundings. With it, trade routes could expand and kings could keep the tax and census records necessary for expanding their city-states into empires. Two subsequent inventions have built upon writing and expanded our capabilities as a species by quantum leaps beyond what they had been before: the printing press and the computer. Today, with the computer, we are witnessing a revolution every bit as dramatic as writing was 5000 years ago. But it is important that we keep in mind that the computer traces its lineage back to those first clay tokens used to keep rudimentary records.
The time is around 9000 B.C.E. A Stone Age hunter picks his way through a riverbed looking for flint suitable for tools and weapons. His eye is caught by the sight of a rock that glimmers "far, as from the moon" as the Greek poet Homer would put it over 8000 years later. It certainly is not flint, but it is interesting, so he takes it home to see what he can do with it. The rock bends, but does not break or chip under the blows of his hammer stone. Our hunter can shape it into some little trinket such as a pin that will probably make quite a stir with his friends and family and be a valuable item in trade. In such a modest way was metallurgy born.
Today it would be hard to imagine our civilization without metals. After all, just about every manufactured object we have either has metal in it or was made by metal machines and transported on ships, trains, or trucks made of metal. Without metals, we would literally be living back in the Stone Age. The development of metallurgy was a long, and sometimes devious process that involved five basic steps.
Identifying and discovering its usefulness . There is little in nature to suggest the existence of metals or their usefulness. Our Stone Age hunter managed to find a small copper ingot. Unfortunately, metals rarely occur in such a pure state. Instead, we find them mixed with other minerals in rocks called ore. Ores usually do not present the appearance of anything resembling metal, so the question arises as to how people discovered them. As with so many discoveries, it was probably by accident. One likely scenario is that potters would put some minerals containing copper on the pottery to give it a glaze when fired. The kiln's heat would separate the copper from the rest of the glaze, leaving little beads of copper lying around. Further experiments would lead to the realization that other rocks were also ores containing copper.
Locating metals in quantity. Our potters, wanting larger amounts of the copper ore, find there is little to be found lying on the surface. As a result, they start digging near the surface deposits and find more copper ore in the ground or the sides of hills. Eventually, they will find that copper mixes with different minerals to produce a variety of ores rarely resembling each other.
Mining the ores. Now that they know where the ores are, they have to mine them. This is one of the more unpleasant aspects of ancient metallurgy. In fact, work in the mines will become the most brutal and demoralizing job in the ancient world, being reserved for slaves and condemned criminals. It is unfortunate that the glories of ancient civilizations and the modern civilizations later built upon them would have to depend so much on the intense suffering of slaves whose life expectancy in many of the mines was no more than six months to a year.
Smelting the metal. Smelting means heating an ore to a high enough temperature that the metal will separate from the rest of the ore, known as slag. As stated above, the first incidence of smelting was probably by accident in a pottery kiln. Over the years, metal smiths would come up with various innovations that created hotter fires and the ability to smelt stronger metals such as bronze and iron. Bellows were invented for blowing air into the fire. The kiln was enclosed to trap heat. And charcoal, partially burnt wood that burns at a higher temperature than regular wood, was developed as a fuel.
Shaping the metal into something useful. There were two basic methods for doing this. One method was to pour the molten metal into molds. The other was to pound the metal into the desired shape, such as a sword.
There were three basic ages of metals in the ancient world, named after the dominant metal used for tools and weapons in that day and age: the Copper Age (c.4000 - 3000 B.C.E.), the Bronze Age (c.3000 - 1000 B. C.), and the Iron Age (c. 1000 B.C.E. to the present). They followed this sequence from the easiest metal to smelt and shape (copper) to the hardest to smelt and shape (iron).
The Copper Age saw fairly limited use of copper in the Near East, because copper is a soft metal and not useful for many tools and was also quite expensive for the average person. Therefore, most people continued using stone tools.
The Bronze Age, during which such civilizations as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Minoan Crete reach their zenith, saw metals come into their own in the Near East. Bronze is an alloy (mixture) of copper and another metal, usually tin, that is much stronger than either of its components. The first bronze used was a natural alloy of copper and arsenic. Unfortunately, arsenic fumes are deadly, and blacksmiths found it quite unpleasant to work with this variety of bronze. But it did give them the idea of mixing copper with other metals to develop a bronze of copper mixed with a small amount of tin, usually only 1-4% of the total mixture. However, even that much tin was scarce and had to be sought out in Europe and central Asia. This was important because trade routes spread ideas as well as goods. Therefore, we see civilization spreading to Europe and central Asia by way of the tin routes. One drawback of Bronze was its expense, which made it available to a limited number of people. As a result, Bronze Age civilizations were highly aristocratic societies of narrow classes of nobles and priests ruling over masses of peasants still using stone tools.
Around 1200 B.C.E., a massive upheaval of nomadic peoples swept through the civilized Near East, toppling or severely weakening the older cultures in that area. The Hittites in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and Mycenaean Greeks of Trojan War fame disappeared from history at this time. In fact, the Trojan War was probably part of this upheaval. As far as our story is concerned, this wave of invasions seems to have disrupted the trade routes that supplied the Near East with its bronze. This put a rather abrupt end to the Bronze Age.
By this time, people were quite hooked on the idea of metals, and started looking for a substitute for bronze. That substitute was iron. However, iron presented a severe drawback. It has a smelting temperature much higher than ancient furnaces could obtain. All these furnaces could produce was a spongy mass called bloomery iron. This had a tensile strength little better than copper. Fortunately, smiths kept working with bloomery iron and learned how to use it. Hammering out the impurities led to an improved bloomery iron that was much better than copper, but a poor substitute for bronze. Heating it next to charcoal made the carbon in the charcoal combine with the iron. This created a crude form of carburized steel with a tensile strength twice that of bronze. Even without being able to smelt iron, ancient metal smiths had found a way to make it useful.
Iron has been called the democratic metal because it is so plentiful and so many more people could afford it compared to those who could afford bronze. It could well be that iron is the metal that pulled most people out of the Stone Age. It was not until the masses could arm themselves with iron that democracy could evolve in such places as the Greek city-states. Although we today use many other materials such as plastics, steel made from iron is still the metal that we make our machines from. Even today, we live very much in the Iron Age.
Metals have been very important to civilization throughout history by creating tools that could do old jobs better than ever and new jobs never done before. For example, iron tipped plows in medieval Europe would lead to more land under cultivation, more population, and the rise of towns and civilization in Europe. Metals allowed for more extensive clearing and exploitation of forests since an iron axe can fell trees much faster than a stone axe can. The better housing and food supplies made possible by metals led to a higher standard of living for people who could be better fed and housed because of metal tools.
Metals also created new sources of wealth in their own right. The value that people placed on gold, silver, and even bronze led to a common medium of exchange that everyone agreed was valuable. This made trade much easier. For example, a leather tanner wanting grain might not be able to find any farmers that wanted to trade their grain for leather. But if the tanner could sell his leather to a third party for silver, any farmer would be willing to trade grain for the tanner's silver because everyone recognized silver as something worth having. As a result, all three parties got what they wanted without having to take the trouble of finding someone with exactly what they needed and willing to trade exactly what they wanted. Precious metals made trade easier, expanded trade, and usually benefited all parties involved. As a result, just about everyone's standard of living went up.
One final stage was the invention of coinage around 700 B.C.E. The advantage of coinage was that a government guaranteed the weight and purity of its metals. As a result, people did not have to worry about being cheated with fixed scales or ingots of gold or silver debased with other less valuable metals. The higher level of trust coinage generated further expanded trade.
Metals did create problems also. The new wealth that metals created also led to more wars and conflicts over that wealth. The need for charcoal as fuel led to deforestation, erosion, and possibly climactic changes in such areas as Asia Minor and the Indus River valley. One theory suggests that the Indus River civilization declined because deforestation caused a hotter, drier climate and crop failures. For the first time, human use and misuse of power was backfiring against us. Metals have indeed proven to be a mixed blessing, but one we would not want to live without.
With the end of this unit around the year 1000 B.C.E., we see the human race has attained most of the skills that will help it survive for several thousand years. Not until the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700's will we see many new technological innovations changing people's lives. Until that time, most innovations will be refinements of the skills first developed in the centuries when civilization first emerged.
Until about 1500 C.E. history largely revolved around the relationship between two ways of life that people have followed since the birth of agriculture: nomadic herding and settled farming. Environment largely determined how these peoples lived, with wetter climates or river valleys favoring settled farming and drier climates leading to the nomadic way of life. These peoples often co-existed peacefully, exchanging goods and ideas in peaceful trade. But at other times, clashes would frequently occur either because of population pressures forcing the nomads to try to take more land, nomadic jealousy of the richer civilization’s goods, or just mutual hostility between the two ways of life.
Each side had its own advantages in such conflicts. On the one hand, civilized peoples usually outnumbered the nomads since agriculture could support more people than nomadic herding could. Also, their armies generally had better organization, discipline, equipment and technology. On the other hand, the nomads, being more involved with animals, had more meat and protein in their diets, making them bigger and stronger than the farmers.
Probably even more decisive was the nomads' mobility, which let them choose the time and place in which to attack the more settled farmers and cities. Mobility also made it harder for slower civilized armies to catch them. Finally, since nomads often lived on land unsuited to farming, it was not usually worth the civilized armies' time and trouble to try and conquer them, even if they could catch them. This, plus their size, often gave nomads a psychological edge against the farmers, which in any given battle, could be the most decisive element in determining which army would break and run.
Still, as long as a civilization was well governed, its economy healthy, and its armies well trained and disciplined, it was very difficult for a few nomads to prevail. Not until civilization experienced internal troubles such as civil wars, famine, or a breakdown in the government and military organization, could the nomads strike effectively. Typically, they would do this in small-scale isolated attacks, not in one overwhelming wave. Repeatedly raiding the farms, stealing the livestock, and burning the crops, the underlying basis for civilization, over a period of years would trigger a further breakdown in the government, economy, and defense. This, of course, would lead to further raids, more serious breakdowns, and so on. At the same time, the nomads often infiltrated civilization as merchants, settlers, slaves, and mercenaries (professional soldiers). Eventually, the civilization would be so weakened that the nomads could take over. However, this was just the start of a cycle of civilized decline, revival, and expansion that would repeat itself throughout most of recorded history.
After a nomadic takeover, civilization would continue to decline either because the nomads did not care to keep it going, or they cared but just did not know how. What largely determined their attitude toward civilization was the length of contact they had had with it. Generally the longer the contact with civilization, the more it influenced the nomads and made them want to try to continue it. For example, the Saxons who conquered Roman Britain had little prior contact with the Romans and were quite willing to obliterate any signs of Roman civilization they found. On the other hand, such tribes as the Franks and Visigoths who had been exposed to Roman culture for two centuries tried to adopt Roman titles, copy Roman government, live in Roman style villas, wear Roman togas, and even speak Latin.
However, even if the new nomadic masters tried to carry on the old civilized ways, they usually failed because they did not fully understand how the government, record keeping, and technology worked. As a result, the civilization would continue to break down despite their efforts. The damaged economy might not be able to support schools to train civil servants, or the new masters might not even understand the schools' importance. Therefore as civil servants died off, there would be no new civil servants to take their place. Such vital public works as roads and irrigation canals would not be kept up, and the economy would further decline, making it even harder to maintain an efficient government. For whatever reasons, either neglect or the inability to understand how civilization worked, the decline would continue for decades, generations, or even centuries, as was the case with Europe after the fall of Rome.
Despite all this, there were forces working in favor of civilization's recovery. First of all, extended contact with civilization gradually made the nomads more willing to try to preserve it. This at least slowed the rate of decline. Also, the greater material comforts of civilization, such as sleeping on a soft bed or in a warm dry house, might change the nomads' attitudes toward civilized life. Finally, and possibly most important, many nomadic men would take civilized wives. Their sons, although part of the nomadic ruling class, would also be influenced by their civilized mothers to be more accepting of civilized ways. They might also marry civilized women and further dilute the nomadic influence in their children. Eventually, the distinction between the nomads and the civilized people they ruled would virtually disappear, and with it any nomadic hostility toward civilization.
Gradually, the semi-nomadic masters, with their still somewhat restless nomadic spirit, would rebuild civilization to its previous level and expand it beyond that to new frontiers, both culturally and geographically. Of course, the revived civilization would meet new nomadic tribes, and the process would start all over again: new clashes with nomads, their eventual victory in a time of civilized weakness, the further decline of civilization, its revival largely through intermarriage, and its further expansion to new frontiers.
This goes a long way toward explaining much of human history. Of course, each situation had its own particular twists and turns. But the pattern has repeated itself again and again, spreading civilization from such isolated centers as Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mexico, and Peru. For example, from Mesopotamia and Egypt, civilization would spread to Syria and Palestine, up to Asia Minor, and from there to Greece. The Greeks would bring civilization to Rome and the Western Mediterranean. From there it would spread to northern Europe, and eventually the Americas. If we add other important elements such as colonization and trade, we can view history as the gradual but steady march of civilization across the planet. Taken in that light, one might see history as progress rather than an endless series of wars.
In modern day Iraq, along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, lie the deserted ruins of a civilization that lay forgotten for centuries until its rediscovery in the 1800's. Looking at these ruins, one finds it hard to imagine a thriving civilization full of people haggling in the market place, fighting wars, dancing in festivals, celebrating births and marriages, mourning their dead, and going about their daily routines much as we do today. Yet, that is exactly what went on here when these were not ruins, but the center of the first human civilization.
Every culture is largely a product of its environment and must be understood within the context of that environment. We use the term geopolitics to describe an area's geography (physical and climatic) and the effects of that geography on the area's history and politics. Mesopotamia, from the Greek words meaning "land between the rivers," presented a harsh environment to inhabit, but also an ideal one in which to build the first civilization. Its geopolitics consisted of three basic elements:
It was a hot dry river valley. This forced the inhabitants to organize irrigation projects that led to civilization.
It had virtually no natural resources except for mud and water. This forced its inhabitants to be very resourceful. Basically, just about everything about early Mesopotamian civilization was made from mud: its houses, temples, palaces, fortifications, writing tablets, and the crops which were traded for the resources needed to build up this civilization to new heights. Underlying all the glories of this civilization was mud.
It was flat and open terrain with virtually no natural barriers. This led to jealous nomadic neighbors constantly invading Mesopotamia, either breaking up already existing empires or forcing the Mesopotamians to build strong empires at each other’s expense in self-defense. Mesopotamian history was nothing if not violent.
The Sumerians were the people who built the first civilization, living in the southeastern end of Mesopotamia known as Sumer. Our knowledge of the very early Sumerians is much like our knowledge of the early Hebrews in the Biblical book of Genesis. In each case, the dividing line between dim misty legends and a clear historical account was a great flood. In the Bible before the flood, we find patriarchs who loom larger than life, living for well over 900 years each and coming across more like stiff and lifeless statues than real human beings. The same is true of Sumerian heroes or patriarchs before their flood (c.2800 B.C.E.), except they live for tens of thousands of years and seem even more fantastic than the Biblical patriarchs. After the great flood of 2800 B.C.E., we see more written records and, consequently, real personalities emerge. The Bible is the same way after its great flood and Noah. The larger than life patriarchs give way to more human ones, such as Abraham.
The myths that often fill the gaps in the historical record can help us understand real history. If we carefully interpret them, they can tell us about historical events and the values that civilization held. For example, the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible is seen by some as symbolic of the ongoing struggle between farmers and nomads. Only this time it is told from the nomadic Hebrews' point of view rather than from the farmer's point of view. Thus the nomadic shepherd Abel is good and his farmer brother, Cain, is the murderer. In Mesopotamian myths, the roles are reversed. The many similarities between Biblical stories and Mesopotamian myths suggest early contacts between the two cultures. Both have stories of a great flood and of a paradise, or Garden of Eden, from which humans are driven because of their folly. If a new god replaces an older one, this often signifies that one culture has conquered another. Such was the case when the Babylonian Marduk replaced the Sumerian Enlil as the chief Mesopotamian god, signifying Babylon's conquest of Sumer.
When the Sumerians finally emerge into history, we find them divided into thirteen major city-states who spent a good deal of their time fighting each other. Although they shared a common religion centered around their holy city of Nippur, that religion seems to have done more to spark wars than prevent them. Each city-state had its own patron god or goddess that made it feel superior to the other city-states. Each city-state also wanted to control the holy city of Nippur, which led to constant fighting that caused Nippur to change hands nineteen times in twenty-four years! For centuries, Sumerian chariots and infantry battalions ranged across Mesopotamia, raising its dust in battle. Whenever one city-state, such as Kish, would gain the upper hand and seemed on the verge of conquering Sumer, the other cities would gang up on it and restore the balance of power. And so it went on for centuries.
It should come as no surprise that all this fighting wore down the Sumerians and left them open to attack from one of the many nomadic desert tribes surrounding them. In this case, it was a people known as the Akkadians. The story goes that its founder, Sargon of Kish, much like Moses, was set afloat in a reed basket as a baby to save his life. He was found by the royal gardener and raised in the palace where he rose quickly to power and influence as the king's cupbearer. At last, he murdered the king and seized the throne, calling himself Sargon, which meant "legitimate king." What this legend most likely tells us is that the Akkadian takeover of Sumer was a long process of gradual infiltration by the Akkadians into Sumerian society rather than the result of one big invasion. The fairly smooth transition to power also suggests that the Akkadians had absorbed much of Sumerian culture and become civilized. Thus the Akkadian Empire signified the spread of civilization more than its overthrow.
Sargon managed to take over all of Sumer and probably gave it a greater degree of peace than it had known for most of its history. He used Akkadian governors and garrisons (occupation armies) to keep the city-states in line. He would also take hostages and tear down the walls of any rebellious cities to ensure their good behavior.
Once his hold on the Sumer was secure, Sargon fought against the ever-troublesome Elamite tribes in the mountains to the east. He then marched northwestward, subduing all of Mesopotamia and even reaching the Mediterranean Sea, which seemed like the ends of the earth to people then. To commemorate this, Sargon took the title "King of the Four Quarters" (of the known world). His realm was history's first empire.
Sargon's grandson, Naramsin, further extended Akkadian power. However, he supposedly committed the fatal mistake of sacking the holy city of Nippur, which resulted in a series of revolts. These revolts weakened the Akkadian Empire enough to allow some other nomads, the Gutians, to attack and take over. Agade, the Akkadian capital, was so thoroughly destroyed in this turmoil that its location is still not certain.
Partly, through a process of absorbing the nomadic Gutians and partly through popular revolts, Sumerian civilization revived in one final flowering known as the Third Dynasty of Ur. Much of Sargon's old empire was reunited, while new cities and expanded trade routes spread civilization northward. The most impressive monument of the age was the ziggurat of Ur. It was 120 feet high with a base of 260 feet by 175 feet. Even today, its mere ruins strike us with awe.
Once again, nomadic tribes, this time the Amorites, weakened and eventually overthrew the Sumerians. As with the earlier Sumerians, civil wars and revolts set them up for this. Gradually, the nomads settled down and new city-states rose up in the north. One of these city-states would build a new civilization grafted upon the old. That city was Babylon.
Certainly one of the most famous figures in Mesopotamian history was the Babylonian king, Hammurabi. When he came to the throne around the year 1750 B.C.E., his city, Babylon, was just one of several city-states vying for power in Mesopotamia. Surrounded by aggressive and warlike rivals, and with a territory only fifty miles in diameter, Babylon needed a shrewd and tough king. Hammurabi fit the bill marvelously.
Over the next twenty-five years, this Babylonian king masterfully maneuvered his city-state among all its hostile neighbors. At one point, he would ally with one state to eliminate another. Later on, he would make a new ally to help him destroy the first. In such a way, he steadily expanded Babylon's borders and swelled its army's ranks with troops supplied by subject cities. One final showdown with the city-state, Larsa, left him master of Mesopotamia and "King of the Four Quarters."
It is one thing to conquer an empire. It is an entirely different thing to hold it together. Hammurabi proved himself an excellent ruler as well as a conqueror. Following the example of the Akkadians, he put governors and garrisons in the subject cities to prevent revolts. But he clearly saw that those measures alone would not be enough to build a lasting empire. Therefore, he worked to establish a code of laws and one language for government and business to tie his empire together. He also constructed public works projects, such as temples and irrigation canals, throughout his empire. By providing jobs and a greater degree of prosperity, he hoped to build loyalty to Babylon or at least reduce resentment to his rule if they saw him working for their welfare.
Little is known about the Babylonian Empire after Hammurabi's death. It seems that his empire entered a period of decline after his death. Usually, the reasons for an empire's decline are numerous, and they interact with each other in a way that makes them feed back upon one another. This creates more problems, making them interact even more intensively, and so on. For example, Hammurabi's building and irrigation projects were very expensive and ate up a good deal of royal revenues. This left the crown with little money to pay its local officials. That led to a greater degree of freedom for those officials. As a result, their abuses grew, and royal revenues declined further. This process would then repeat itself with greater intensity again and again.
This feedback also led to even more problems. Extra officials were created to gather more taxes, which added further to the burdens of society. In order to pay those extra taxes, farmers started abandoning the two-field system, irrigating and planting both fields each year instead of leaving one fallow. The extra irrigation raised the water table and poisoned the soil with minerals such as salt, while the extra planting without giving the land any rest exhausted the soil's fertility. Crop yields, the underlying basis for civilization, went down and intensified all the other problems feeding into and off of the agriculture. Bit by bit, Babylon's empire crumbled to pieces. And waiting in the wings, as always, were the nomads. Only this time they had a new and frightening weapon with which to terrorize the Near East.
As far back as the Sumerians, Mesopotamians had driven in war chariots pulled by wild donkeys, called onagers. However, the old Sumerian chariot had been quite cumbersome, with four solid wheels that added weight and reduced speed and mobility. As a result, such a chariot probably did not play too decisive a role in Mesopotamian warfare. Then, around 1650 B.C.E., nomads from the north appeared with a new type of chariot. It had two wheels mounted on the back, which made it more maneuverable. Also, its wheels were spoked, not solid, making it lighter and faster. Finally, it was pulled by a strange new beast, the horse, which was faster and more powerful than the onager.
Armed with the horse and chariot and the much more powerful composite bow, the northern nomads burst upon the civilized world with a ferocity that sent its kingdoms reeling back in confusion for a century or more. Peasant infantry were totally unprepared for the spectacle of maybe hundreds of chariots drawn by these strange beasts bearing down on them, stirring up clouds of dust, and making strange and terrifying noises. At times, they broke and ran at this sight alone, leaving their cities as open prey to the victorious nomads. All across the Near East, one civilization after another fell prey to the nomads armed with this terrifying new weapon. A people known as the Hyksos conquered northern Egypt. The Hittites overwhelmed the cities of Asia Minor and even raided as far as Babylon, sacking it in 1595 B.C.E. Another people, the Kassites, conquered Babylon and ruled it more permanently. Further east, the Indus River civilization fell to the Aryans, also armed with the horse and chariot. For a century or more civilization was thrown into turmoil.
Eventually, these nomads would follow the example of other nomadic conquerors by adopting civilized ways and merging their identities with the cultures they had conquered. Civilized people had also learned a lesson: the value of the horse and chariot. For several centuries, the elite corps of Near Eastern armies ruling the battlefields of the Near East would be their battalions of horse drawn chariots.
Assyria lies at the northern end of Mesopotamia where many of the trade routes of the Fertile Crescent and the Near East converged. This made Assyria a prosperous land for trade. It also was a dangerous place, since trade routes are also convenient invasion routes. As a result, Assyria had an especially warlike history, and its people were known for two occupations: trade and warfare.
Since they lived in such a rough environment, the Assyrians became quite capable empire builders. Their first empire seems to have encompassed most, if not all, of Mesopotamia, and bordered the newly emerging civilization and empire of the nomadic Hittites. They also conquered the kingdom of Mitanni, originally founded by another chariot driving group of nomads, the Hurrians.
Once again, a new wave of nomads swept in with a devastating ferocity that toppled civilized empires and kingdoms far and wide. To the northwest, a mysterious people known as the Sea Peoples overwhelmed the Hittite Empire. Some of these Sea Peoples, the Peleset (the Biblical Philistines), seriously weakened the Egyptian Empire and conquered Palestine, thus giving Palestine its name. To the west of the Hittites, the Mycenaean Greeks fell to Dorian invaders from the north. The Trojan War was probably part of these upheavals. The Assyrians themselves were not immune, being conquered by the Aramaeans coming out of the desert. Among the results of these invasions, the trade routes bringing tin to the Near East were cut. This brought the Bronze Age to an abrupt halt and ushered in the Iron Age.
The Assyrians were a tough resilient people. Once the dust had settled from the latest round of upheavals and the nomads had started to assume a degree of civilization, the Assyrians reasserted themselves and built what amounted to the greatest Near Eastern Empire up to that point in history. At the height of their power, they ruled over Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. There were several reasons for their success as empire builders.
They had a plentiful supply of iron with which to equip their armies . Other less well-endowed peoples, such as those of Egypt, would be at a decisive disadvantage when fighting the Assyrians.
Refinements in siege warfare . Up to this point in history, about the only effective method for besieging a city was to starve it into submission. This made sieges long, tedious, and often unsuccessful endeavors. The Assyrians changed all that. They designed rolling siege towers from which they could assault city walls, and battering rams that could pound mud brick walls to dust. Armed with such weapons, the Assyrians were able to reduce city after city and establish a much firmer control over their empire.
A deliberate policy of terror to keep people obedient. The Assyrians are largely remembered in history as being extremely cruel. To a large extent, this reputation is justified. Cities daring to defy them in a siege or subject peoples desperate enough to revolt often suffered large-scale massacres. The Assyrians themselves who wanted to scare other people from defying them may have exaggerated the extent of this bloodshed. Also, the greater degree of success in besieging cities gave them more opportunities to sack cities than other peoples had. Keep in mind that most ancient peoples indulged in wholesale plunder and slaughter of cities that had tried to resist them and failed. Another Assyrian terrorist tactic was to uproot rebellious peoples enmasse and settle them away from their home in order to disorient them in strange surroundings and prevent further revolts. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were lost by this process of being resettled in a new land and gradually losing their culture and identity in the new cultures surrounding them. Contrary to their expectations, the Assyrians' terrorist policies seem to have inspired more revolts than fear.
Cavalry. At first the horse was seen as useful only for pulling chariots. Eventually, some nomads caught on to the fact that horses could be ridden. This involved solving several problems. First of all, the horse had to be bred up to a size where it was capable of carrying a man. Secondly, it had to get used to someone riding it, since no animal takes kindly to another animal jumping on its back. Finally, people had to figure out where to sit. For some reason, maybe height, men first rode the higher, but precarious, rump. Finally, someone figured out that the lower, but safer, back was a better place to ride.
Nomads to the north especially took to the horse. The speed with which the Plains Indians adapted to the horse when the Spanish introduced it to this continent shows what an impact it probably had on other nomads as well. Nomadic horse archers, controlling their horses with knee pressure, gained a mobility that civilized peoples could never match. Supposedly, a Comanche Indian could fire twenty arrows a minute while hanging under the protection of his horse's neck and moving at a full gallop.
When large civilized armies, such as that of the Persian King, Darius I, tried to conquer such nomads, they usually failed miserably in just trying to catch them. One measure to contain the nomads was the maintenance of long expensive fortified frontiers, such as the Great Wall of China, to stop their raids. Occasionally, the problem of nomadic raids would become a serious threat when various nomadic tribes would be united into one empire, such as that of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan. Luckily for civilization, such empires were usually dependent on the personality and leadership of their founders and fell apart soon after their deaths.
The Assyrians were the first civilized people of the Near East to mount the horse for military purposes. Cavalry were more maneuverable and versatile than chariots. For one thing, they could operate on rougher ground than chariot wheels could. Possibly more important, riding the horse led to much faster communications. This allowed kings to build and hold much larger empires than before, since they could learn of revolts and react to them much more quickly. The fact that the Assyrian Empire was three times bigger than any empire, which preceded it, was probably due in large part to the horse.
Assyria administered its empire somewhat harshly but efficiently. States close to the Assyrian homeland answered directly to Assyrian governors and garrisons. States farther away, such as Egypt and Israel, could continue to exist under their own rulers as long as they paid tribute and loyally supplied troops for Assyrian wars. If they rebelled, massacres or mass deportations would result, followed by direct Assyrian rule.
Assyrian history was quite turbulent. It was under constant pressure from nomads to the north, and always quelling revolts within its empire. People objected as much to the Assyrian merchants who flooded their market places as they did to their army and ruling methods. As the Biblical prophet, Nahum put it: "Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of Heaven" (Nahum III, 16). Assyria's subjects apparently had a wide variety of complaints against their masters.
As long as the empire had able and energetic kings, it survived all these wars and revolts, although they must have been a terrible strain on Assyria's economy and resources. The death of the last strong king, Ashurbanipal, in 625 B.C.E., touched off one last round of popular revolts and invasions that the Assyrians were not destined to survive. An alliance of Babylon with the nomadic Medes to the north finally brought the Assyrian Empire crashing down in ruins. In 612 B.C.E., despite heroic resistance to the last, the Assyrian capital, Nineveh was taken and destroyed. The biblical prophet, Nahum, certainly expressed the feelings of many when he wrote: "Woe to the bloody city!...All who hear of your destruction shall clap their hands over you; for upon whom has your wickedness not passed continuously." Such celebrating was somewhat premature, for the Israelites and others like them would merely be trading one master for another. One state that recognized the danger was Egypt. Strangely enough, they allied with the hated Assyrians to stop the advance of a resurgent Babylon. The issue was decided at Carchemish in 605 B.C.E., the last great chariot battle in history. The result was a decisive victory for the Babylonians, who largely took the place of Assyria in the Near East.
In dividing the spoils of victory, the Medes got the vast lands to the north, while Babylon got the more compact, but richer and civilized lands of the Fertile Crescent. The Neo-Babylonian or Chaldaean Empire, as it is variously called, encompassed most of the old Assyrian Empire with the exception of Egypt. This period saw Babylon at the height of its power and glory.
Babylon's most famous king during this period was Nebuchadnezzar. His main concern was controlling the Western end of the Fertile Crescent: Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Egypt. He never did conquer Egypt, although it no longer presented a threat to him. The remaining two tribes of Israelites in Judah made the mistake of rebelling. As a result, Jerusalem was sacked and destroyed in 587, and the Jews were hauled to Babylon for a captivity that lasted some seventy years. Fortunately, they kept their identity and were allowed to return home by the Persians who overthrew the Babylonians.
One other people Nebuchadnezzar had trouble with were the Phoenicians who had helped the Jews in this revolt. Although most Phoenician cities surrendered, Tyre did not. This city sat on an island about one-half mile from shore. Supposedly, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Tyre for thirteen years without taking it. The main reason was he had no navy with which to blockade Tyre and cut off its supplies. Finally, the Tyrians paid Nebuchadnezzar some tribute if he would leave them alone.
The showpiece of the empire was Babylon, which contained some of the most wondrous sights of the ancient world. The Greek historian, Herodotus, has given us a second hand description of the city at its height. Even taking into account that Herodotus exaggerated a bit, we get a picture of a marvelous city. The Euphrates River split the city into two halves that were connected by a 400-foot long masonry bridge. A massive double set of walls protected the city from invaders and floods. Herodotus claimed a four-horse chariot could drive on top of the battlements and have enough room to turn around! The main ceremonial gateway was the beautiful Ishtar Gate. It was made of blue glazed bricks and decorated with relief sculptures of various animals. The palace complex covered thirteen acres and supposedly the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon were placed here. Their purpose was to comfort the queen who was homesick for the lush hills of her homeland. Finally, there was the fabled Tower of Babel, the largest and most elaborate ziggurat of its day. It was eight stories high and, according to Herodotus, the sanctuary on top was filled with tons of gold.
Babylon's final glory was short lived. Various factors combined to weaken it and set it up for a final fall. For one thing, religious disputes over trying to replace Marduk with the moon god split the empire. Even more important were economic factors. Babylon seems to have lost much of its trade because the Medes cut the overland routes to the north. The southern sea routes also suffered when the ports were silted up, preventing ships from coming in or going out. All of these triggered a feedback cycle much like that which wrecked Babylon after Hammurabi's death some 1200 years before. Heavy expenses from building projects and declining revenues from trade caused the government to raise taxes. This extra burden on the peasants caused them to abandon the two-field system and farm and irrigate both fields each year. The soil again became salinated as a result of too much irrigation, which raised the water table and brought salt with it, poisoning the crops in the process. This damaged the economy and lowered tax revenues even further, bringing on more tax increases and so on.
The final blow came in 539 B.C.E. when the Persians took Babylon in a night attack. The center of power shifted away from Babylon to the Persian Empire in the north. Mesopotamia's glory days were over, although its culture heavily influenced the Persians, who in turn heavily influenced Muslim civilization, the dominant culture in the Near East today. As a result, Mesopotamia is very much with us. Its culture has just changed and evolved with the times.
Egypt was the scene of the other great hydraulic or river civilization of the ancient Near East. Like its Mesopotamian counterpart, it evolved in a hot dry river valley that required irrigation which in turn required organization and a strong government that led to civilization. In fact, Egyptians depended so much on the irrigation and the high level of organization and authority needed to maintain it that they considered their rulers, the pharaohs, gods. The power and effectiveness of these god-kings corresponded directly to Egypt's prosperity, which itself depended on the floods' regularity and the effectiveness of the irrigation system.
However, Egypt, unlike Mesopotamia, which had no natural barriers and was open to attack, was isolated by desert to the east and west and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. As a result, its history was relatively peaceful compared to Mesopotamia's, allowing the Egyptians to build a strong centralized state without external disruptions. Egypt's more peaceful environment tended to make the Egyptians optimistic about life, but also suspicious of strangers and new ideas.
More than anything else, the Egyptians realized quite well that their prosperity and welfare depended on the Nile which provided its people with most of what they needed to survive: fish and wildlife, mud for building materials, a "highway" for easy transportation, and papyrus for paper. Most importantly, the Nile floods annually from June to October, watering the ground and replenishing the soil with a rich fertile layer of silt. The Egyptians called their land kmt ("the Black land") after this layer of silt. The real essence of Egypt consisted of a long thin strip of land along the Nile that was never more than a few miles wide. Outside of this strip was the "Red land", the desert. Today one can still stand literally with one foot in the "Black land" and one foot in the "Red land". To the ancient Egyptians, this symbolized the sharp contrast between life and death.
The Egyptian peasant's yearly schedule revolved around the Nile's cycle. During the flood season, he might work on the pharaoh's projects, such as pyramids. When the floods subsided, he would repair any damage to his home and the irrigation canals and then plant his crops. Harvest time would come in time to gather the crops right before the Nile flooded, and the cycle would start all over again.
Egyptian history overall followed a basic cycle corresponding to and ruled by the Nile's flood cycles. Regular floods led to prosperous agriculture, which would increase the pharaoh's tax revenues and his status in the eyes of his subjects who saw him as responsible for the floods as well as irrigation. As a result, his power and the ability to control the local governors and priests in the various city-states ( nomes) stretched out along the length of the Nile River valley would grow. Pharaoh's increased authority would bring the irrigation system under even tighter and more efficient control, which would further improve Egypt's agriculture and prosperity. This cycle would keep repeating itself as long as regular floods continued.
However, when irregular floods started, the cycle would reverse itself. The agriculture would decline, lowering the pharaoh's tax revenues and discrediting him in the eyes of his subjects. His power and status would decline, as would his control over the provincial governors and priests. As they got increasingly out of control, the efficiency of the irrigation system would decline, further damaging the agriculture and so on. This cycle would also keep repeating until regular floods would return, and the first part of the cycle would start over.
As a result, Egypt's history is divided into six periods whose prosperous times corresponded roughly to regular floods of the Nile and whose troubled times corresponded to periods when the Nile's annual floods were either too high or too low:
| The Old Kingdom (c.2850-2150 B.C.E.) | Regular floods (c.3000-2250 B.C.E.) |
|---|---|
| The First Intermediate Period (c.2190-2052 B.C.E.) | Low floods (c.2250-1950 B.C.E.) |
| The Middle Kingdom (c.2052-1778 B.C.E.) | Regular floods (c.1950-1840 B.C.E.) |
| The Second Intermediate Period (c.1778-1570 B.C.E.) | High floods (c.1840-1770 B.C.E.) |
| The New Kingdom (c.1570-1085 B.C.E.) | Regular floods (c.1770-1170 B.C.E.) |
| The Final Decline (c.1085-525 B.C.E.) | Low floods (c.1170-1100 B.C.E.) |
Egyptian civilization started much as Mesopotamian civilization did, with the rise of independent city-states, called nomes, organized around irrigation projects. These city-states often fought each other for land and power. Bit by bit, different nomes absorbed each other in these wars until there were only two kingdoms left: Upper Egypt in the south, and Lower Egypt in the north. Finally, a king of Upper Egypt, known variously as Menes or Narmer, conquered Lower Egypt and united the land. Soon afterwards, the period of Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom began. Generally, during periods of prosperity such as the Old Kingdom, Egypt would be united under one pharaoh. However, during times of turmoil, it would split back into Upper and Lower Egypt until a strong ruler reunited the land.
The Old Kingdom was a peaceful and prosperous period. It was also the great age of building pyramids, massive tombs to preserve and protect the dead for the afterlife. Tied in with this was the involved and expensive process of mummification, which preserved the body for the next world. Contrary to popular belief, the pyramids were not built using slave labor, but rather the labor of peasants who were free for such work during the flood season. At this time, the pharaoh was seen as a god who embodied all of Egypt and was the only one entitled to an afterlife. However, Egyptian peasants could feel that they were sharing in some of that afterlife by working on the pyramids. Pyramid building also provided peasants with employment and some income from the pharaoh during the flood season when they could do little else anyway.
There were about eighty of these monumental structures built. The largest of these, the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, contained some 2.3 million limestone blocks, each weighing several tons. Even in the best of times, building such structures would be a huge burden on the economy. In times of low floods, such as started around 2250 B.C.E., the strain proved to be too much. As a result, the Old Kingdom went into a period of decline.
There were several reasons for this decline. The huge cost of the pyramids coupled with low floods and the resulting poor crops have already been mentioned. There were also religious, economic, and political factors. Since the pharaoh mainly worshipped Re, the sun god, at Heliopolis, the priests of Re gained power and prestige. Eventually, they undermined the divinity and status of the pharaoh himself, referring to him merely as the "Son of Re". The pharaohs' status also diminished because they often married women of non-royal blood, which made them seem closer to the people and less god-like.
Besides the economic strain of building pyramids and maintaining priests for the benefit of previous pharaohs, the royal treasury also suffered from giving out lands to various priesthoods and nobles. Consequently, they could establish their positions more independently of the pharaoh. The king's officials ruling the different nomes were often of royal blood themselves. Many of them established hereditary positions in their nomes, passing the governorships on to their sons. In time, they became virtually independent rulers, splitting Egypt up into a number of separate city-states. Symbolic of the pharaoh's decline was the fact that these governors started claiming afterlives for themselves, building their own tombs in their home provinces rather than in the shadow of the pharaoh's pyramid.
As often happens, decline bred further decline. The poor harvests hurt the pharaohs' power and prestige since they were supposedly responsible for good crops. This bred turmoil and civil war, further weakening the agriculture and economy. Nubian tribes