www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 12
The origin of farming, cities, and civilization
We have seen that it is in the nature of a human to form society and to create culture. Our societies most-naturally consist of a small number of extended families because that is the number of gatherer-hunters that a small land area can support. Our culture is our collection of recipes describing how to do everything in life. Our civilization is those recently added elements of our culture that are our recipes for organizing societies larger than those containing a small number of extended families. The amount of available food has always been the major factor in determining the size of a gatherer-hunter society. (We saw in Chapter 7 that for every animal species, food-packet size determines the size of social groups and that the total population is determined by the so-called carrying capacity of the group’s territory). Those of our ancestors who were the first to become full-time farmers were able to increase dramatically the size of the feedable population and thus begin to build civilization. This chapter contains an overall description of the beginnings of farming and of our civilization of cities and city-life, bureaucracy, government, states, priests, business, and technology. We’ll see that city life is less egalitarian than life in a band of gatherer-hunters.
The cultures mentioned so far will might seem pretty strange to today's big city dwellers but not to the members of another gatherer-hunter culture. The beginnings of the ways of city dwellers are described in this chapter. Today's city dwellers will recognize many aspects of their own daily life in the descriptions of this chapter, including streets, kings and queens, governmental policies, taxes, writing, arithmetic, public works projects, temples, religions that emphasize proper moral behavior, courts and legal codes, coins, and even spoons, dishes, and pajamas.
We will see that dramatic changes occurred in our social system and in our religion as our small bands of families combined into the political units of tribes, chiefdoms, and states. This happened because of the increase in population enabled by a climate-forced shift to full-time farming and would happen first for those of us humans who lived in the foothills of Mesopotamia. This is the region of ancient Iraq lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. For a map, see www.sumerian.org/map.htm.
We have seen that we humans are naturally adept at noticing many details of plant characteristics and animal behavior in order to harvest plant and animal food from a region (see the example of the Amahuaca hunter in Chapter 8). We can be sure that even the earliest humans noticed that seeds soon produce adult plants. It seems likely that every gatherer-hunter group that had a base camp would also have had a bit of a garden in which they would plant and harvest a small portion of their food.
Beginning about 10,000 years or five hundred generations ago, those of us humans living in certain regions of the world were forced to begin relying on planting and harvesting for an increasing portion of our food. Nobody ever sat amidst plenty of gatherable and huntable food and planned to become a full-time farmer; we were always forced to do so because of a decreasing climate or a population level that exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. Those of us humans who did not begin to farm until a much later date were not "backwards" but were simply not forced to make this change because the food supply of their region continued to be sufficient. Similarly, many persons living in the high-tech regions of the Earth mistakenly insult those of us still living as single-family farmers without realizing that the farmers were simply never forced to switch to being wage-earning industrialists. We know that people do not change their way of life unless forced to do so by changes in their environment or by some sort of migration or invasion. Since it took several thousand years for full-time farming to spread to most of the peoples of the Earth, it means that somewhere between your fiftieth and five-hundredth grandparents were living as gatherer-hunters. Today, each group of humans is living as either gatherer-hunters, village farmers, or city dwellers. People all have the same basic nature. The only differences between groups of people are the details of their culture.
As the climate dried in the foothills of Mesopotamia some 10,000 years ago, the population of gatherer-hunters was suddenly too high to continue living off the decreasing food supply within the region. They had to rely increasingly on the previously-known techniques of planting and harvesting for a larger portion of their food supply. Within a few generations, this further farming experience allowed them to move onto the still-wet plains near the foothills to become full-time farmers along numerous streams. This burst of farming resulted in an increased population who were living in hundreds of small, independent villages. Within a few centuries, the continued drying of the climate caused the number of waterways of the plains to shrink to just a few larger rivers, forcing those villagers to bunch up into fewer and more-populous "cities" along the remaining waterways. These were our first cities. Those of us humans who lived in these first cities within Mesopotamia began to develop most every aspect of our current civilization. Our large cities today are not all that different from the original Mesopotamian cities. This chapter contains a description of many of the largest aspects of everyday life in Mesopotamian cities because they are the origins of today's big-city way of life.
The switch to full-time farming independently occurred in several places around the world. By chance, full-time farming and its resulting food surplus can feed a much larger population than does gathering and hunting and enables the development of cities and civilization. But it takes somewhat drastic circumstances to force us to make this switch before we can accidentally discover its benefits. In each region of the world, the switch to full-time farming and the subsequent development of cities and states was due to a different combination of climate and population factors that required farming to be begun at that time and place. The specific example of Mesopotamia is described in this chapter.
The history of Mesopotamia, presented below, is mainly taken from the four books The Early History of the Ancient Near East 9000-2000 BC by Hans J Nissen, Life in the Ancient Near East 3100-332 B.C.E. by Daniel C Snell, Civilization before Greece and Rome by H.W.F. Saggs, and The Ancient Mesopotamian City by Marc Van De Mieroop. The portions dealing with the origin of the largest aspects of our civilization are summarized, especially those of our society and government. You will enjoy reading the additional information given in their books.
Visit the Met at www.metmuseum.org/explore/First_Cities/firstcities_splash.htm for online information about Mesopotamian and ancient art. You might visit www.sumerian.org/sumlinks.htm for a list of websites involving Mesopotamia and its language. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamia. An on-going archaeological excavation in Mesopotamia can be seen at www.hum.ku.dk/cni/mashnaqa. For Mesopotamian photos, visit http://cdli.ucla.edu/staff/englund/Images/Images.html and www.smc.qld.edu.au/mesopotamia.htm.
Generations of historians and archaeologists have spent their entire lifetimes studying millions of individual facts and have pieced together the larger picture of the economic and political history of the ancient world along with description of the culture of people who lived back then. (To see videos of archaeologists at work, visit
www.newton.cam.ac.uk/egypt/tt99/video.html.) These facts were obtained from excavations of thousands of archaeological sites containing millions of artifacts. Artifacts provide one fact at a time. For example, one artifact might be a piece of pottery, from a known place and time, that is painted with a picture of a cedar tree and a wheeled vehicle. This artifact might make us suspect that wheeled vehicles existed at that time in a region that also had cedar trees. The excavated sites also contained written records recorded on hundreds of thousands of small, clay tablets. The tablets describe the people, their culture, and history one sentence at a time. An individual sentence might record that "This year a particular person managed one thousand sheep for the king and was paid fifty lambs," or, "The leader asked the council for approval on the matter." The first sentence tells us that there was a king and that herders were hired and paid in animals. The last sentence tells us that there were both leaders and councils and that the leader had to get approval from the council. Imagine if a description of your way of life was written down in thousands of individual sentences–for example, "Vote Green"–that were then separated and buried in thousands of locations to be recovered later by other persons who would then attempt to reconstruct your way of life.
We have seen that it required our Homo Sapiens ancestors (see Chapter 8) about 100,000 years to spread from Africa to Asia, Europe, Australia, America, and then onto islands throughout the world. It was the success of our culture that allowed us to spread to every region of the Earth even though we were not physically matched to the encountered extremes of climate. Throughout this time we were living as gatherer-hunters in those small, cooperating bands of twenty to two hundred persons.
We humans would spread into a new region and then our population there would increase until it had reached that area's limit. The plants and animals of any particular region of the Earth are capable of feeding just a certain number of humans. If a group's population grows to the point that it can no longer be fed by their area, some persons from that group must move off to another area. It can also occur that the population of a region might reach a high level and then a downturn in the climate of that region result in there being too many persons for the land to continue supporting.
We most liked to live near a variety of food sources. An ideal location would be along a river in a forest that is near mountains, valleys, and lakes. This range in elevation experiences a range in climate that in turn provides a range in plant and animal types and a range in the time at which seasonal plants become edible. We are very adept at finding food throughout the changing seasons and in processing materials into utensils and decorations. Each person made most all of their own utensils and decorations from those raw materials that were readily at hand. Certain raw materials were also traded over distances of even 1,000 miles (1,600 km). Some trade routes are shown at http://cdli.ucla.edu/staff/englund/Images/ED/CitiesTrade_Roaf83.jpg.
Gatherer-hunter bands were largely nomadic until about the time that full-time farming began to become necessary. Small settlements in the hilly flanks surrounding the plains of the Middle-East begin to appear about 12,000 years ago. At first, these sites were seasonally occupied as people moved through their annual cycle of camps, each having its own seasonal food source. Later, these settlements became permanently occupied throughout the year. At this time, isolated settlements were beginning to appear throughout the Middle East and in other regions of the world, too.
The archaeological record shows that the round, temporary homes of nomads were replaced by square homes that are permanently occupied throughout the year. Permanent homes require and enable more furnishings than do portable, temporary homes. At this time, such items first become part of our way of life. Tree stumps and small boulders make handy stools and tables–and continued to do so until the Industrial Revolution resulted in fancier models. Nomads do not carry such items on their journeys.
To obtain a year-round food supply from necessarily seasonal harvesting requires a means of year-round storage. Archaeologists have found that the storage techniques of the earliest stationary settlements were pits dug into the ground and lined with clay. The clay was meant to keep rodents and insects away from the food. The clay lining was soon improved by fire hardening. Next, fired clay vessels or pottery were made. This means that the clay-lined storage pit had evolved into a clay vessel. The first known example of fired pottery was found in Mureybet on the Euphrates river and was made about 10,000 years ago. Some photos and links can be found at www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/middle_east/mureybet.html.We can imagine that people had noticed that sun-dried mud became hardened and that the result was even better if the mud was placed in the fire.
For the last 10,000 years there has been an evolving pottery technology. One early advance was the rotating table. Painting could be done more quickly if the pot was placed on a rotatable table. Instead of the pottery or the pottery-maker having to be turned, the table was simply turned. This soon led to the spinning potter's wheel. Since the properties of pottery depend on the temperature at which the clay is baked, changes continued to occur through the centuries as increasingly higher oven temperatures were obtained. This creates differing qualities of final products. For example earthenware is made with very low firing temperatures. In recent centuries, pottery techniques had been kept as national secrets. For example, Chinese pottery-makers were able to obtain the world's highest temperatures and create what Europeans called "China."
Endless varieties of pottery can be made that differ in size and shape and decoration, and the color of pottery depends on the mixture of earthen materials used in the clay. Each geographical region and each cultural group of persons has its own pottery fashions that rapidly go through short-lived generations. In addition, pottery is easily broken but the resulting fragments–called pottery shards–are nearly indestructible and leave valuable clues for archaeologists. Shards enable them to determine the time, place, and size of cultural areas and the changes in these areas. There are hundreds of volumes describing the sequences of pottery styles throughout the world, including both the location and date at which each existed. For example, if a farming village was occupied for just a generation or two then its pottery would allow the village site to be dated because it would consist of styles from that period in time.
Plant and animal domestication
There is much archaeological evidence for the existence of plant and animal domestication. Insect and plant species, pollen samples, and sea floor layers tell us how the climate of the Middle East has changed in the last 10,000 years (see Chapter 4). The worldwide distribution of wild species of plants is known. Emmer wheat still grows wild around parts of the Middle East–a family today could easily harvest enough to feed themselves through the winter. When population pressures force farmers to move to less productive lands, they take their familiar plants and animals with them. Domesticated plants are then moved to non-natural places and are protected from their natural enemies by the farmers growing these plants. This can be seen in the archeological record because plant seeds are nearly indestructible. Even after having been burned during cooking, they can still be uniquely identified and tell archaeologists what type of plants people were growing and eating.
Archaeologists count the age, sex, and types of animal bones that are found at each site. A wild population of animals has a certain distribution of ages and nearly equal numbers of males and females. As people began to raise animals, they quickly learn to eat the young males while allowing the females to grow old so they can continue to produce additional babies. Domestication of animals is evident by the unnatural distribution in age and sex indicated by bone remains and by the changes made to a wild species.
Cattle are able to eat the refuse from farming and so were early domesticates. Sheep were quickly domesticated. Since pigs, dogs, and cats eat the same food as do people, they were not domesticated until after a larger surplus of human food was available. In other places around the world, domesticated animals included llama and water buffalo and eventually horses and camels.
Domesticated animal species are changed within a few generations. For example, wild sheep have a mixture of long hair and shorter wool-hair. The earliest sheep raisers found that the wool-hair was useful and chose to increase the number of animals that had a larger portion of the useful wool-hair. A new breed of dog is developed in as few as fifteen generations.
In the same way, plant species are changed within a few generations. Farmers sustain mutant plant species having unnatural traits that would not last on their own. For example, wild barley naturally propagates itself by releasing seeds blown loose by the wind. The first farmers helped to propagate the naturally less-fit variety of barley that doesn't fall apart in the wind and so is less able to scatter across the world and naturally propagate itself. The early farmers planted large quantities of the human-preferred, stay-together variety and little of the blow-apart type. Archaeologists find that the stay-together variety was grown in large numbers in the fields of farmers while the blow-apart variety grew only in the wild.
More archaeological evidence of domestication is given by the appearance of stone sickles, pestles, mortars, and ovens. Sickles are used to harvest wheat and have a characteristic "sheen" that indicates they have been used to cut wheat. Pestles and mortars are used to grind wheat and such into powder. Bits of rock are then a common component of daily food and cause added wear on people's teeth as they eat this food. Archaeologists find this tooth wear in skeletal remains. Pestles and mortars were standard tools for every farmer throughout the world–gatherer-hunters and modern city-dwellers do not use or even recognize them. (Today, we don't recognize a chicken either until it has been placed in a clear wrapper with all of its hair [sic] removed.)
These first farmers and herders had to learn by trial and error which plants and animals could be domesticated. They also learned about the necessary procedures of crop rotation, when to plant and in which type of soil, and how much seed to keep for the next year. They had to learn for many years before they could rely on this process for a large portion of their food. News of a successfully domesticated plant or animal spread quickly. Goats are wild in Iraq but were soon found in Syria and Palestine where they were not wild. Similarly, emmer wheat from Syria was taken to Iraq.
Of the 4,000 species of mammals on the planet, only about a dozen have proven to be both domesticatable and usable by humans. Surprisingly, no new species of plant or animal has been domesticated since our earliest efforts. We have inherited the knowledge of our earliest farming ancestors. Another thing about us humans is that whenever someone on the planet learns something, it is soon known by everyone else and never forgotten. We have seen how trade and news travels from one gatherer-hunter band to another at the rate of about 100 miles per month (160 km), or about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) per year. Each region of the Middle East is in contact with all of the other regions. No single region had independently to invent everything for itself.
Even before there were cities, there was trade. Trade is evident from the movement of stones away from their geographical origins. For example, obsidian is found in just certain distinct geographical locations, and there are slightly different chemicals at each source. Archaeologists have run around the world measuring the chemical differences of these obsidian sources so that when an obsidian tool is found in an archaeological site, they can then determine the geographical source of the obsidian. They then know the distance from the archaeological site to the obsidian source and obtain information about trading networks.
Mesopotamia did not contain its own source of metals; instead, they were obtained through trade with distant regions, such as southern Egypt and Anatolia (Turkey). This trade is known to have occurred for the last 35,000 years. As Mesopotamian demand for these metals grew, Egyptian and Anatolian organizations developed to provide them. Trade included raw materials but not food.
Food could not be successfully transported for such long distances until the camel began to be used in the first millennium bc. Without the camel, people would have eaten their entire cargo before reaching their destination. When the transportation of food did become possible, overland food transport was still risky and expensive. In the late Roman empire, the price of a wagon-load of wheat doubled every 75 km (45 miles). Food could not be transported for the long distance of 1,000 miles (1,600 km) until about the year 1900 ad. Today, seasonal food can be trucked between the northern and southern hemispheres–for example, between South Africa and Norway or Uruguay and Canada–within about ten days.
Farming villages and irrigation
These first farmers were also the first people to become precariously dependent on the forces of nature for their daily survival. They began to humanize the age-old deities for water, earth, and sun and such. By "humanize," it is meant that deities are given human form and human personalities. Most every group of people deified many of the same aspects of nature, and it was common for people living as farmers to humanize them. As these villages grew into cities and then empires, the formerly-separate peoples of a region would merge and find that they each had different names for the same deities. We saw in Chapter 10 that they did not worship these deities or devote their lives to them, they simply hoped to receive the appearance of the beneficial deities, including the sun, rain, and earth deities, and hoped that the harmful deities would stay away.
In the hills and mountains bordering the plains of the Middle East, gatherer-hunters became sedentary and enjoyed the variety of foods provided by the plains and mountains. From 9000 to 6000 bc, the increasing farming experience of the foothills people allowed them to obtain a few percent of their total food intake from planting and harvesting. Their settlements still were located near a variety of food sources, and the settlements still had to be widely separated in order to guarantee enough food for all the residents. Since the settlements did not contain a wide range in house size or in their contents, we know that there was little range in the social or economic class of the inhabitants. This settlement pattern and way of life lasted throughout a 3,000-year span of time, which is about 150 generations.
The best areas were filled with settlements so that as the population level rose, new settlements had to be made in the valley areas having less varied food sources. This would have made the people more at risk if it hadn't been for their developed farming abilities, on which they had to increasingly rely. During a time of drying climate occurring around 5000 bc, some farmers moved from the foothills out onto the plains to become full-time farmers. Before this climate change, the region of southern Mesopotamia had been submerged under the Persian Gulf, but as the sea level lowered, the plains became available for habitation. This process has been studied and dated by drilling into the floor of the Persian Gulf and measuring the amount of organic material, through time, carried into the gulf by the Mesopotamian rivers. For a map showing the time-evolution of the enlarging gulf, see http://cdli.ucla.edu/staff/englund/Images/Geography/Gulf_expansion_Roaf20.jpg.
At first, both the northern and the southern plains had enough water to grow crops (it takes about twenty-five centimeters or ten inches of rainfall per year to grow crops without irrigation). Much of the southern plains were marshy due to the inland reaches of the gulf, though it was subsiding, and both the northern and southern regions were well-watered by many rivers and streams. This resulted in hundreds of small, independent farming villages located along the numerous sources of water. The people who had moved onto the plains continued to follow the same rituals and use the same pottery styles, even the same pottery makers, as the people who still lived in the foothills.
Within a few centuries of the spread of villages onto the southern plain, there was a further drying in the climate. As the southern plains began to have insufficient rainfall to grow crops, farmers had to begin diverting water from streams and rivers into the adjacent crop fields. This was the beginning of irrigation and was pretty clever. Try to decide how your group of family, friends, and neighbors would come up with this irrigation idea. Ancient irrigation canals can be seen at www.utexas.edu/courses/clubmed/irrigation.jpg.
The first irrigation areas of the plains do not contain any evidence of centralized control, so it is safe to assume that village decisions were still being made by the consensus of the family heads. Each village contained only a small number of families, and each family lived in a small, mud hut containing a single room. Villagers were planting, irrigating, and harvesting crops. Since the surrounding land was vacant, a family could freely choose its plot, and an entire village could easily move every few generations as land became worn.
Even if you live in the big city today, it is likely that your grandparents lived in a farming village that was similar to those of Ancient Mesopotamia. You might like to put yourself in their time and place by imagining your family living in a farming village with other families. Think about the sort of chores you would assign to each of your children–in between answering their "what and why" questions about the world. How many families do you think could join in this way before decisions could no longer be made by the consensus of the family heads? (In Chapter 15 we'll have a close look at the way of life of the farmers of early Nineteenth-Century New England.)
Irrigation turned out to be the key to abundance. The number of canals increased until they crisscrossed much of Mesopotamia. Since irrigation allows more persons to be fed from a smaller area, villages became more closely packed. Food surpluses increased with irrigation and as a six-rowed variety of barley suddenly appeared to replace the natural, two-rowed barley–doubling the yield of each field. For 1,500 years these farmers lived in abundance and stability and their population grew. (To help envision this long stretch of time, think of the 1,500 years that came before today.) The urbanization of Mesopotamia would now begin to greatly exceed the other regions of the Middle East.
As the amount of irrigated area increased, the construction and maintenance of the canals required the coordinated effort of many persons. For the first time in our history, managers were invented to direct these large-scale works; there had not been a need for such a person before this. Labor specialization begins where a few persons perform duties for the community and receive food as payment. For example, there were canal workers, craft-makers, builders, temple priests, job leaders, and leaders of leaders. For the first time, people could accumulate a village-sized food surplus by placing a portion of each family's crop into a communal storehouse. Since there will likely be arguments about who has and who hasn't contributed, bookkeeping procedures are quickly developed.
There is some debate over the initial reasons for accumulating a surplus. Will a farming family produce only enough crops for its own use or will they produce extra amounts for safety? How much extra will they produce for this safety? Does a higher authority have to force them to produce amounts that are multiples of the family's requirements? Does the family produce a surplus to barter for other foods in order to increase the variety in their diet?
Each village was politically independent until after 5000 bc. At this time, the numerous pottery styles being made in the numerous villages were suddenly replaced by a single pottery style that was spread throughout the foothills region. This indicates that a single political unit had developed to coordinate the many villages. This first chiefdom included a centralized redistribution center controlled by a single ruler. The farming villages of the Mesopotamian foothills region now formed ranked societies with prestigious positions and leaders but no permanent institutions to support them.
The large area of the plains was a factor in this political development. The small valleys of mountains have room for just a few villages, but in the irrigated plains there can be many nearby villages. Each area that contains a handful of villages will develop its own hierarchy with a particular village at the top. Soon, these top villages will begin to compete and form a multi-tiered hierarchy. Such a multi-tiered hierarchy is a more complex political unit. This multi-tiered hierarchy cannot develop in a small region, such as a mountain valley. Instead, the region's area must be large enough to hold enough villages for such tiers to occur, as on the plains.
The first cities of the civilization of us humans now began to develop and was a response to the further drying of the climate. Many small streams dried up in the southern plains, leaving only the less-numerous, main rivers as the only sources of agricultural water. This forced numerous, small villages to gather into fewer but more populous cities along the remaining, large rivers. These were our first city-sized population centers. The reason for the development of the first cities of the Middle East was that the farmers had spread out into numerous villages on the large well-watered plain and then the drying climate forced them to bunch-up into a smaller number of larger population centers. Each city contained the persons from many smaller villages. If the well-watered plains had not dried up then it would have taken a few more centuries before city-sized population centers would have existed.
This was the sequence of events that resulted in our first cities, and it happened first for those of us humans who lived in Mesopotamia. This is the birthplace of the city and the civilization of us humans. No cities existed anywhere else in the world until many centuries later. Imagine living as a nomad just a few days walk from the region of these first cities and hearing incomprehensible stories about such places.
The population density of people living as gatherer-hunters is around one person per square mile (2.5 per square km). The total population of the first permanent, few-acre villages grew to 300 persons by 5500 bc. Two thousand years elapsed before the population had grown by a factor of ten into the first city-sized urban areas of 3,000 persons around the year 3500 bc. The population grew by another factor of ten within another eight hundred years, reaching 30,000 persons by 2700 bc, and yet another factor of ten to reach 300,000 persons by 2000 bc, some seven hundred years later. In total, it required about 8,000 years for the population levels of the first small, seasonally occupied settlements to grow to urban centers having 300,000 persons. Throughout this period, we had no empires or emperors conducting war or large-scale invasions. Eight thousand years is a long expanse of time.
V. Gordon Childe points out several factors that distinguish the earliest cities from older villages. He says that cities cover a larger area and have a higher population density. Occupations emerge as people specialize into farmers, crafts-persons, carpenters, and shopkeepers and such. This collection of occupations results in the social stratification of people into classes, and class partially replaces kinship. People pay taxes in surplus goods or labor to a deity or divine king or queen who uses it feed the people while they are building monumental architecture. Cities develop writing and the sciences and arts and conduct foreign trade to import raw materials.
Robert McAdams describes the origin of a city and its ruler in the following manner, which describes the Mesopotamian case very well. (The integration and conflict scenarios describing the origin of states was mentioned in Chapter 11.) Agriculture increases the population and creates a surplus that leads to the need for a more formally organized state or city-state government. The redistribution of the surplus is controlled by a small group and this begins the stratification of people into unequal classes. Relations among city members begin to include class in addition to kinship. Those persons who control the surplus form the upper class and take hold of city administration. The priesthood was often the first group to do this and they justified their leadership through religion. That is, the earliest cults were based on fertility, and the priest's duty was to guarantee fertility by performing the correct rites. The redistribution of food occurred at the temple.
Just as a deity represents the power in the bush, the people of each city represented the numinous power of their city by a deity. (We saw in Chapter 10 that deities represent the power of the bush and thunderstorm and such.) In fact, the city was synonymous with its deity. This deity might also be given parental characteristics in that it protected the city. With the development of hierarchies of managers, people began arranging their collection of deities into a hierarchy. Since there were leaders of people, a god might also be given the additional aspect of serving as a leader of the people. The concept of leadership itself can be represented by a deity. Soon, the nearby Hebrews would develop the idea of a single God who was the leader of people, who represents leadership, who is a protecting and nurturing parent, and is the power of everything at once.
Each city built a temple to serve as the home for its god. The city's residents believed that the deity would naturally live in its home, thus insuring the beneficial presence of that deity. The people felt that there was a mutually beneficial relationship between themselves and the god of their city. The people worshiped the god in return for its protection. The god needed the people's worship and punished them if they failed to do so. In later Mesopotamia, each individual came to have a personal protector god.
Each city also retained its local pantheon from prehistoric times. All Mesopotamian gods were thought to dwell in the various city temples. There were no sacred streams, trees, or mountains and such as often occurred in other cultures. When Mesopotamian leaders attempted to promote fertility, they went to the temple, not to the crop field.
By 3500 bc, temples were 100 by 250 feet (30 by 80 meters) in size and were placed on hilltops for increased effects. The occurrence of these public buildings assures us of the existence of leaders. That is, someone had full control of the food surplus and used it to feed the builders of these public buildings.
Writing developed in the temple and palace. (The temple was the building in which religious practices were conducted, while the palace is the place where the rulers lived.) At first, writing was used only for bookkeeping purposes, but after a few centuries of improvements we used it to record events and thoughts, too. Early bureaucrats needed to know which person, on which day, brought which type of crop or animal and how much was brought. Writing and number systems develop simultaneously for daily bookkeeping purposes. You’ll likely write words and add numbers today for much the same reasons as required the invention of these tools in our past–for example, in making grocery lists and balancing your checkbook. (You might like to list the reasons you write or add numbers this week and compare it with the uses of these tools by Ancient Mesopotamians.) Numbers and mathematics seemed like magic to some ancient persons–and to some people today, too. For example, some people feel that the number seven is lucky but thirteen is not.
As people delivered animals to the temple or palace, a record keeper or scribe had to count them and make a note of who had delivered them. In the earliest bookkeeping approach, the person who was counting the animals would drop differently shaped pieces of hard clay as they passed (rocks were less available in this region so clay was used). The earliest generations of counters used different shapes of clay to indicate different types and numbers of animals, see www.sumerian.org/tokens.htm, but they soon began to instead draw pictures of animals and numerical symbols onto soft pieces of clay tablet. The figures were drawn using a sharp object that scraped lines into the soft clay. It took some time and effort to scrape out sections of clay.
The first form of writing used pictures (called pictographs) to portray meaning. (Can you think of a small picture that can represent the idea "paid" or "one hundred due." How about "closed, gone fishing" or "the king is great," or "reality is only a dream.") Forms of writing that use picture-symbols can often be read by people everywhere. For example, if the word "dog" is represent by a picture of a dog then everyone can read this symbol no matter which language they speak. Still today, Chinese writing uses symbols developed 2,500 years ago that are as much art as they are letters. The spoken language has changed since then, but since many written symbols have not, people today can still read ancient documents.
The people of each of the world's regions have found a local material along with suitable writing utensils and symbol shapes to use for making records. For example, Northern Europeans sliced straight lines into twigs, while American Indians painted on buffalo hide. Ancient Mesopotamians wrote on soft clay tablets and chose the appropriate symbol shapes that the clay could hold.
An early improvement in Mesopotamian writing was to press wedge-shaped marks into the clay rather than having to gouge lines onto the clay; that is, a pressing motion than a scraping motion made the process of writing much faster. Visit http://cdli.ucla.edu:591/cdli/im/index.html and the Library of Congress at http://international.loc.gov/intldl/cuneihtml/cuneihome.html for examples of cuneiform writing. The historical evolution, beginning with tokens, of the cuneiform symbols for sheep, cattle, and perfume and such are shown,at www.utexas.edu/courses/classicalarch/images1/tokentocuneiform.jpg. Archaeologists have found thousands of clay tablets throughout Mesopotamia. The earliest tablets had bookkeeping numbers written on them and were sometimes signed by marking with a so-called cylinder seal.
Cylinder seals are made from a hard material shaped as a cylinder and have unique designs embossed onto their surface. To transfer that design onto a piece of clay, the cylinder seal would be pressed onto it and then rolled through one complete revolution, producing the "signature." These cylinders were rolled over the soft clay accounting tablets in the same way that we sign a document today. Notice that it would have been the job of certain persons to make these seals, while others made the material used in clay tablets. Society invented the rules that required these “signatures” and the occupations needed for their creation and use. For photos of cylinder seals, visit http://cdli.ucla.edu/staff/englund/Images/UrukPeriod/Seals1_Alfabeto256.jpg.
In the oldest forms of writing, different symbols were used for each word, resulting in thousands of symbols. A few centuries later, a different symbol was instead used only for each syllable. For example, in H.W.F. Saggs informative chapter on the history of writing systems he explains how one might represent the word "Neilson" with "kneel" plus "sun." Using the sound of "sun" in many words reduces the number of symbols needed in a system of writing. The fewest number of symbols occurred as we learned to represent each spoken sound by a single character. Less than fifty symbols are needed in such a system. Many of us today use a 26-letter alphabet; certain Polynesian systems use just thirteen. This form of writing was not developed until about 1000 bc. When archaeologists discover an ancient, previously unknown form of writing, they simply count the number of different symbols to quickly classify the type of writing system.
The oldest forms were so difficult to use that students spent many years learning to write. Many generations passed before we had advanced writing to a form that was easy to learn and use. Each region of the Middle East–including Crete, Palestine, Syria, the Caanite Hebrews, Phoenicia, Ugarit, and Greece–took turns inheriting and then improving the system of writing. Each time a group of previously illiterate people adopted the "advanced" system of writing of their neighbors they were quick to make improvements. As is human nature, those neighbors would insist on continuing to use their older, more difficult system. Our current system of writing, as you are now reading, was essentially put into its current form by the Ancient Greeks. You might like to know that one ancient Greek was quoted to say that writing would mean the end of civilization because we would no longer have to memorize.
For some persons, writing seemed like magic in that it could be seen to actually represent the object that was written about, in the same way that art works could be seen to represent the essence of the depicted object. Literate crafts-persons might write the name of a deity on a plaque which they then sold to an illiterate customer. Imagine that you could purchase such a plaque to hang in your home; you would then have the continued presence of that deity looking over your home. If your own name was written on a plaque, your name would last forever. Throughout history, many kings and queens have boasted wildly about their power, feats, and accomplishments as if they had only to be written down to be believed. (Today it is the advertisers and campaigners who think that it has only to be written down or said in order for it to be believed.)
To learn to write, the first scribes had to attend school for many more years than is needed today because their writing system was so much more complex. Schools wrote instructions tablets, including instructions on how to write. In fact, these language guides are used by modern scientists to learn to speak ancient and forgotten languages. Scribes began school at the age of four, five, or six. Most often, they were the children of the highest officials, such as governors, temple administrators, army officers, tax officials, and priests. Archaeologists have found countless practice tablets made by these students. Since students memorized ancient literary works by reciting them aloud in outdoor classrooms, everyone in town could hear as they walked past. Students also practiced writing the technical terms used by each specialized field of activity. They received beatings when they did not pay attention–just as I did during graduate school. After four years of training they went on to more advanced work. Some scribe-to-be children were sent to live with foreigners to become bilingual. (Would this work today with dolphins and other "outer-space aliens?")
Literacy was as highly a respected skill then as it is today; in fact, it is still used as a measure of the social progress of a nation. Many ancient kings and queens boasted that they could read and write but the literacy level of the general population was usually low. Ancient Athens was a rare exception. During the fourth and fifth centuries bc, about half its male citizens were able to read and write. Such a high literacy level was not again reached until the last two centuries.
Saggs explains that scribes felt they had the best jobs in the city because a scribe had the opportunity to advance through the hierarchy. The scribe of a food storage facility could become the chief scribe and then progress through junior judge, town ruler, district ruler, and then regional ruler. (We can see that this was a stratified and complex society unlike that of any gatherer-hunter group–and not totally different from our own.)
Scribes learned arithmetic and geometry also. (Visit http://it.stlawu.edu/~dmelvill/mesomath/index.html for information about Mesopotamian mathematics. For a tablet containing multiplication tables, visit http://it.stlawu.edu/%7Edmelvill/mesomath/tablets/5times.html.) They would calculate the amount of earth to be removed, the amount of stone to be cut, and the labor needed for a public works project. They handled business contracts, court decisions, and the written communications between royals and officials along with hymns to the gods, prayers and laments, and spells and rituals. We see that the administration of the city was collecting, counting, and redistributing a variety of items and paying salaries. Salaries were paid in food and in material goods.
Humans invented writing as a tool to solve certain problems. We then modified it through the next several centuries as we learned by trial-and-error how to make it simpler to learn and to use. Writing, or any other part of our civilization, was not a gift from the gods but was invented by us humans for our own use. Each new generation of us humans inherits all of the tools and procedures that the previous generations have produced and then we make them even better. Right now, you are reading the current form of our system of writing. This connects you to the humans of the first cities, as do the roads and buildings that you use and the food that you eat.
We humans naturally count only in terms of one, two, three and many, and research shows that other animals do the same. Before the redistributional farming villages, we had no reason to count much higher than the number of persons in our band. We then invented arithmetic so that we could count sheep, baskets of grain, and buckets of earth and such. Arithmetic built ancient cities and their buildings. It took several years of training for a scribe to learn to do simple arithmetic. Some people wondered what sorts of things could be done with their new numbers and tried to find new ways of combining them–into fractions, for example. We continue to this day to expand the fields of mathematics. As our civilization has become more complex, we require increasingly complex mathematics. We use calculus, differential equations, and computer techniques and such to build our modern civilization. Today, our children learn to do arithmetic while still in elementary school. Arithmetic would enable them to count sheep and such, if there were any around, but it does not enable them to understand or to extend modern civilization. This illustrates the importance of teaching modern mathematics, such as calculus, to every child before they graduate from high school; if all they learn is arithmetic then all they can do is count sheep and would be 5,000 years behind the times.
This first cities of 3,000 persons occurred in southern Mesopotamia around 3500 bc. The first urban area classifiable as a city may have been Uruk (Erech of the Bible). By 3200 bc its size was 100 hectares (200 acres), and by 2800 bc its size had increased five-fold to 500 hectares. By comparison, this was twice the size of later Athens and half the size of Hadrian's Rome when it was the capital of an enormous empire some 3,000 years later, see www.ust.ucla.edu/ustweb/Projects/trajans_forum.htm. By 2500 bc, small villages were beginning to occur along the equator from the Indus to the Aegean.
The first city had to invent everything that a city is. Many brand-new occupations became necessary, some of which still exist today (for a list of jobs that existed in the villages of North America two centuries ago, you might like to read Little Book of Early American Trades by Peter Stockham). For example, city-dwellers soon found it best to separate living areas from craft and manufacturing areas. The people of the first cities were also the first people to encounter the new problems of disease caused by having large population densities around waste and decaying food. Many cities let freely roaming pigs control the trash problem.
In 3000 bc, Mesopotamia was still the only region of the world to have cities. There were no cities in Egypt, India, China, America, or Anatolia, or in any other area around the Mediterranean. Much of the world’s regions had not yet adopted full-time agriculture simply because they had not yet been forced to do so by climate changes and high population levels; their millions-of-years-old gatherer-hunter way of life still worked just fine. Mesopotamia was the only civilized area of the world and so exported the "idea of civilization" to the surrounding areas. The strange sight of a city would have gatherer-hunters spreading rumors from one band to the next, all the way across the continent.
The author Daniel Quinn says that the Biblical story of the fall from Eden was actually the viewpoint of the farmer's neighbors who were still living off the land. It was the non-farming neighbors who thought that the farmers had fallen. Their neighbors were happy with their own ways and did not see any reason to adopt the farmer's ways. The peoples who lived on the fringes of the near-east took thousands of years to learn that full-time domestication was advantageous for them, too. In Civilization Before Greece and Rome, H.W.F. Saggs says that the Biblical flood story is the culture's own memory of the origin of agriculture. We fell from Eden as we became farmers and, to obtain our food, had to begin working five times as many hours per week than had been necessary as gatherer-hunters, who average just fourteen hours per week collecting food.
By 2800 bc there were several city-states of various sizes between the Persian Gulf and the region of modern-day Baghdad. Most cities grew in population and area by expanding their irrigation system so that the amount of farmed land was increased, which in turn increased the total crop yield and the population level. Many tables record the promises of leaders to expand the irrigation works. Some cities grew by being trade centers or by simply being located at canal crossroads.
Small villages developed earlier in northern Mesopotamia than they did in southern Mesopotamia, but cities developed first in the south. This happened because the northern villages were so much more self-sufficient agriculturally that less redistribution was needed. Later, imperial cities from the south would create northern cities to coordinate the extraction of food from the north. This means that southern cities would be political, military, and commercial centers more than they would be agricultural centers, as was the case in the north. Also, the survival of the south depended on rivers that flowed from the north. Southerners worried that since the rivers were shallow in the north, their course could too easily be changed by an enemy and that this would mean an end to the southern cities lying downstream.
Since the Mesopotamian region had little stone and wood, each city required permanent trade with the surrounding regions that did have these materials. For example, cedar was brought from Lebanon. To handle trade, many Mesopotamian cities established colonies in Syria and Iran. The wheel appeared for moving goods. While goods can be transported for long distances, food can not.
Each city was fed from the crops grown in its surrounding area, but the surrounding farm land could not be as wide as a day’s walk. It typically extended for about ten kilometers (six miles), which is a distance that can be walked in an hour or so. Often, farmers lived in small satellite villages outside the city. Inter-city conflicts did not occur until the areas of neighboring cities began to overlap.
Each city's sphere of influence typically extended twelve to fifteen km (ten miles) beyond the edge of its urban area. As neighboring cities grew in size, their spheres began to overlap. This began to produce arguments between neighboring cities, especially over the bordering farm lands and canals. Such squabbles were recorded in the tablets for several generations before any inter-city argument had brewed into a major fight. The first artistic depiction of warfare occurred around 3200 bc, but it was not a common theme until about 2500 bc. From this point on, conflicts between cities were incorporated into the political system of Mesopotamia. The inter-city canal conflicts were not caused by power hungry rulers and could not be solved militarily. Instead, the Mesopotamian political system changed to include the interactions of pairs and groups of cities. For example, one city might act as an arbitrator between two other cities. The individual city-states began to see that a higher authority was needed and formed many short-lived political unions. This means that regional states were beginning to develop. In fact, nothing could stop them from occurring.
During the century 3100-3000 bc, many small villages on the Iraqi plain were abandoned as people moved into walled cities for protection from other cities, leaving about a ten-mile (sixteen km) radius of surrounding farmland. This made for easier defense and increased both the amount of craft specialization and the stratification of wealth. About five hundred years had elapsed since the first city-sized urban center existed–and about 4,500 years since the first permanent settlement existed–before full-scale inter-city conflicts began to occur.
Citing the increased competition between adjacent urban centers, secular and military leaders began to take the city-leadership away from the priests. Usually these first kings and queens were to have been temporary, military leaders but they soon managed to secure permanent positions for themselves. Most often they had been leaders of the city’s newly emerging defensive organization but sometimes they had been canal or ceremony chiefs. No leader has ever governed without the support of the people. In order to provide a religious basis for their rule, secular rulers claimed descendence from the city god or performed sacred intercourse with the fertility deity so that the fertility of the city and of its agricultural land would be guaranteed.
The earliest kings and queens were seen to be ordinary persons and were not considered to be divine. They were described in the tablets simply as "great" people. In contrast, priests had long been considered to be servants of the city gods and were seen to have a close relationship with those gods. The Mesopotamian people believed that their kings and queens were descendants from the city gods, but the people never believed–as did the Egyptians–that their rulers were divine gods. The Mesopotamians instead felt that the gods had devised the institution of kingship for the benefit of the people.
The earliest kings and queens did not rule with absolute power. To receive the support of the people, they were expected to protect the people's ownership of land and to protect people from personal attack or from being economically exploited by the more powerful. The king and queen were expected to maintain and expand the city's irrigation system and to provide justice in disputes among the citizens. The primary functions of the king and queen were to uphold these conditions and to defend the city from external attack. The king and queen did not intrude into the everyday lives of citizens. As in the earlier days of bands of families, family elders still dealt with the disputes occurring between people living within the neighborhood and also with any other matter that did not involve the temple or palace. Within a few generations, people could no longer remember a time when there wasn't a king and queen, just as today’s children can't imagine a time when there were no cars.
Tablets show that in addition to a king and queen, many cities also had some form of governing council or an assembly of residents. An example is given in the story of Gilgamesh, who was king of Uruk (Erech) around 2700 bc. In this story, the city of Kish came to Uruk and demanded submission. The council of Uruk directed its king Gilgamesh to submit, but he disagreed. He instead convinced the general assembly of fighting-age men to back him in his war plans. This story indicates that the king of Uruk was below a council of elders and that the council could be overruled by a more general assembly. (For a translation of the text, visit www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh.)
The city contained temple priests, citizens, and the king and queen, and it operated through the interdependent relationships between these three groups. The temple's agriculture and trade depended on the king and queen's ability to provide stable government and defense. The citizens needed the king and queen to enforce just laws and they needed the temple gods to provide fertility. The king and queen needed the approval of the gods and the support of the citizens.
The city consisted of trade networks and markets and served as a regional shrine. It contained councils, bureaucrats, crafts-people, and shopkeepers, but the city was more than an urban place. Mesopotamians saw their city as the religious and political center and the heart of life in the area. Its residents felt a deep emotional attachment to their city and developed a sense of identity that created a powerful social force holding them together as thoroughly as kinship binds the extended family. (Do you feel this binding force in your city or nation today?) They people of Mesopotamia knew that their cities were powerful and that no other group of people had such things within a distance as great as could be traveled. The city was contrasted with the desert or the steppes where no cities existed. The non-urban nomads were considered uncivilized because they wore sheep skins and lived in tents instead of permanent homes. A few generations after the existence of the first cities, Mesopotamians considered them to be places that were "old and respectable." Today, cities are often viewed to be "new and modern." Mesopotamians felt that cities were civilization, not a part of it. The city was considered a divine creation, not a human one.
The connection between city, city-force, and city-god was so complete that when the city of Babylon came to control much of Mesopotamia around 1800 bc, it meant that Babylon's god Marduk had demonstrated that he was more powerful than the deities of the other cities. As Babylon rose to prominence in all of Mesopotamia, so did Marduk. Similarly, the decline of a city was viewed as the abandonment of the city by its deity. An invading army would carry off the conquered city's divine statue to weaken the power of that city. Since the Mesopotamians believed that the city was the source of power for its surrounding region, conquerors might choose to level a city so that the region would be left without its source of power. As its former residents moved off to another location, the city was without power, the city was no more, and its god was no more.
When King Sennacherib conquered the city of Babylon, he dug canals that lead the Euphrates river directly into Babylon, see http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/ED/TRC/MESO/cities_large.html. When the residents of other cities saw Babylon washed away, they were filled with fear and submitted to Sennacherib in order to avoid a similar fate. Conquerors learned such horrifying tactics fairly quickly and throughout history have practiced total destruction whenever they could. For example, the entire area of the Phoenician colony of Carthage, which was located in northern Africa, was once salted by a conqueror so that it could no longer produce crops to feed its residents. An Egyptian army once confiscated the entire wheat harvest of one city to force its residents to surrender. But it has always been the case that as long as an invader doesn’t kill you and your loved ones, he will have little affect on your way of daily life consisting of spouse, children, family, friends, and community.
As you approached a city, you would encounter cultivated fields and the villages of the farmers. As you got nearer you would see large monuments, gardens, date palm orchards, and suburbs. The city consisted of citizens, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, priests and the temple, and the king and queen with their palace. The city temple, such as the Zigarut of Ur, was built on high ground so that it dominated the skyline. (The Zigarut of Ur can be seen in an aerial view at www.classics.unc.edu/courses/clar047/UrZigAir.JPG and in a virtual reality fly-through at www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/stonehenge.html. The Taisei Corporation has created an extensive video reconstruction that transports one back in time to 2,000 bc Ur; this can be seen at www.taisei-kodaitoshi.com/civil_e/civilization.html.) Inside the city, different areas were used to produce different products, including pottery, clay figures, stone amulets, jewels, and cylinder seals. The tanning area was easily identified by its smell and was located away from the living quarters.
Homes were often built around a central courtyard. Since their stone walls had no windows, people slept on the roof when the weather was suitable. Rooms were built small because Mesopotamia lacked trees that could provide long enough beams to support large roofs. On average, there were 1.3 persons per village room, just as in a modern village. A model of a two-story home can be seen by visiting http://cdli.ucla.edu/staff/englund/Images/OldBabylonian/EmarHouse_Alfabeto.jpg.
In the earlier and smaller Mesopotamian villages, an extended family lived together and acted as a single economic unit–just as the previous gatherer-hunter bands had done. The family unit of the bands had simply moved onto the farm. For example, the sale of land required the approval of the siblings of the owner. As villages grew into cities, family members instead began to pursue individual economies–just as do ours today. As cities grew, tribal membership became forgotten also.
Many aspects of the life of a woman have been much the same in any city around the world. Childhood was short before work began. Girls were married around age twelve to an older man of their family's choosing. Divorced, abandoned, or widowed women could next marry whomever they wanted. Monogamy continued to be the normal practice, but a king might have many wives. Women usually had two or three children and would breast feed each child for three years (this has been found to postpone the next pregnancy). Women wove, were priestesses, bought and sold land, made legal contracts and claims, and went to court–in later Greece and Rome they could not. Some women ran taverns; one of which is known to have also lent money to farmers. The government had a propaganda concern for widows and orphans but no aid system existed. People were buried either underneath their house or in a cemetery and the inheritance was divided between all the male and some of the female children.
The price of land remained stable for many centuries, with a typical hectare (one-half acre) of land selling for the price of one cow. Land was cheap because so much was available. Frequently, land was owned communally by a group of persons.
A wide variety of food was collected and eaten. This following list of food items is presented so you will recognize that you still eat the same foods today. Mesopotamian food resources include herds, crops, orchards, gardens, hunted animals, plants and roots, fish, birds, bird eggs, and turtle eggs. Crabs and turtles were collected from marshes, irrigation canals, and the Persian Gulf. Hunted animals include gazelles, mountain goats, and wild pigs. Plants and roots include bulbs, berries, date palms, pomegranates, figs, grapes and wine, apples, and nuts. They gathered salt from the marshes and rivers. Bees were kept for their honey. Trees supplied the shade to grow vegetables, including onion, garlic, lettuces, cucumbers, lentils, peas, and many others. Domesticated herds consisted of sheep and goats. Cattle were more rare. Cattle, sheep, and goats were raised for their milk, wool, and hair but not for their meat. The domesticated pig was eaten until a later religious taboo forbidden the practice. The city played a central role in the exchange of goods between farmers, fishers, herders, and shopkeepers. Excavated texts deal with many details concerning the production and exchange of goods.
Since farming produced mostly barley and wheat, these two cereals formed the major part of the family’s every meal. The family purchased grain from a shop and then ground it by first laying it on top of one stone and then rubbing back and forth over it with another stone until it became flour. Every Mesopotamian family spent a good portion of every day laboriously grinding enough grain to produce ten liters (ten quarts) of flour and then baking it into bread. Bread was baked into unleavened loaves using clay ovens. These now-petrified loaves have been found throughout Mesopotamian excavations. (Archaeologists who have eaten these excavated loaves say they taste just like my little brother's apple pie.) They also made fancier breads and cakes having dates and such added.
Barley flour was made into beer by brewers able to carefully control the temperature and humidity throughout the process. Most brewers were women, as was their deity Ninkesi, until men took over the process around 1500 bc. After 1000 bc they were making beer from dates instead of cereal. In every city throughout history, processed beer and wine have always been safer to drink than water, and so more commonly consumed.
Household water was carried from either city wells or from the canals that brought water into the city. Cities were always elevated above the level of the surrounding plains because, through time, a city accumulated on top its previous levels. This meant that steep banks had to be climbed to reach down to the canal water. (We can imagine children making that funny face as they tried to lift heavy buckets.) Some persons had to walk hundreds of yards (meters) to get from their home to the water sources, and this distance was surely an important criterion in choosing a home site. Some homes have been found to contain interior, private wells. Since they were building canals to bring water from rivers to farmlands, it took no extra thought to bring water to farming villages and cities.
Mesopotamian institutions left written records of the seeding, irrigation, and harvesting of the fields in April or May along with the threshing, winnowing, seiving, and storing of cereal. In each city, a large portion of farmland was owned by the palace and the temple. Urban residents often owned farm land too but might contract tenants to work the land. The tenant, who received more than half, and the landowner each took their share of the harvest the moment the entire crop was placed onto the threshing floor.
Threshing floors were owned by the largest organizations and a fee was charged for their use. (We can be sure that a typical conversation in a Mesopotamian grain-threshing shop was "Who brought in those eight baskets of wheat yesterday?") Each farming village had at least one threshing floor and a substantial amount of storage space for crops and a variety of other items, including tools, wheels, maces, cloth, oils, milk, cheese, dates, wine, ovens, and mills. After threshing, grain was transported to the city to be stored in silos. Some crop was transported to the city by chariot (see www.mesopotamia.co.uk/tombs/explore/w_char2.html) or pack animal but most was taken by canal in boats having a 16,000 liter (quart) capacity. Canals connected farmlands directly to the city and led right to the doors of the palace and temple silos.
A typical grain silo would be eight meters (yards) deep and four meters wide and have a capacity of one hundred cubic meters (yards). Its contents could feed 20,000 persons for six months. The silo was lined with two layers of bricks to protect the enclosed grain from moisture, insects, and rodents. The silo doors had no locks; instead, a clay band was pressed with a cylinder seal. The storage official was the only person who was allowed to break the seal and open the door.
Temple and palace workers were given a monthly ration of grain. Each man received sixty liters (quarts) per month, each woman received thirty liters (quarts) per month, and some older persons may have received a ration without having to work. They were also given rations of wool and other goods, some of which were bartered at the market for other items. (In Chapter 15 we'll see that people were still bartering their surplus goods in the farming communities of 1820 ad Northeastern United States.) In the highly organized, official religion, temple and palace personnel ground grain and cooked food every day for select personnel who would ceremonially give it to the gods before eating it themselves. Temples, like the palace, were the largest landholders. Some of the temple's land was farmed by its own staff, while other plots were lent as payment to workers and the remainder rented to others. Some persons performed their labor-tax in the great temple households.
Craft specialization occurred in the early stages of urbanization. Mesopotamian villages and cities brought in local supplies of reed, wool, animal skins, luxury goods, and foreign metals to serve as the raw materials used by craft-persons. The main crafts were pottery, reed working, weaving, leather working, utensil making, carpentry, stone cutting, metal working, boat building, felting, engraving, perfume making, gardening, milling, jewelry making, and a little glass making. Later cities had neighborhoods for each different craft. There were specialists for each craft, and parents taught their specialty to their children. One text from a leather shop indicates that they produced shoes and blade sieves from the raw materials they received from herders. This particular record extended for a number of years and showed little effects from a major political change that occurred.
Adolescents learned a craft by trading their labor for lessons from an expert. An apprentice weaver would be trained for five years, cooks for sixteen months, but bleachers, carpenters, seal engravers, leather workers, shoemakers, and builders were each trained for eight years. Documents show that trainees were legally bound to their trainer. In the coming chapters we will see that this sort of contract between trainer and trainee remained the same until after the origin of the factory in the year 1760 ad.
Work contracts existed in many forms. A group of craft-workers could hire out to any institution but would sometimes sign a contract in which they agreed to work for just one institution for a certain period of time. Many tablets record temple craftspeople working on reed baskets, leather works, statues, and small art objects while being paid the standard, legal ration of food. Legal codes sometimes regulated the fees paid to specific craft-workers and also the wages paid to forced laborers, but other workers, such as those in the agricultural fields, were usually hired for an agreed upon wage. If the king and queen wanted a new chariot then all the required craft-workers would work together in one shop combining wood, leather, felt, metal parts, and inlaid, semiprecious stones to build the chariot. One text explains that a certain contractor was paid a one-time, up-front, lump sum to dig canals. The contractor then had to pay for everything and hoped to have some money left over as a profit.
The wool industry involved many persons. Professional herders raised enormous numbers of sheep and goats that were brought once a year into the village for shearing. This would have filled the streets with sheep. Wool was kept in storage houses until it was taken to be washed, combed, spun, and then woven into cloth. (In the coming chapters, we will have a look at the cloth industry of Medieval Europe, the United States during the nineteenth century, and of Southeast Asia today. We will see how these steps have remained the same clear to this day except that they were combined into a single water-powered factory during the Industrial Revolution that began in the year 1760 ad.) There were 13,200 weavers in the city of Ur by the year 2200 bc. Each woman would weave about 30 cm (12 inches) of cloth per day and was paid in food and cloth rations. (Visit www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/naga/index.php to view a video of a Kabui woman of India weaving with a backstrap loom.) The palace and the temple were the largest consumers of finished cloth because they used them as wages to pay their enormous staffs. The wool, leather, reed, and clay industries involved rural producers, village processors, and urban consumers. In contrast, the hardwood, stone, ore, gold, silver, and gem industries involved trade with foreign sources for materials processed with local labor.
By 2500 bc, a huge number of documents were being recorded on tablets, most of which contained economic (for an example, visit http://it.stlawu.edu/%7Edmelvill/mesomath/tablets/NBC5828.html.) and administrative records. For example, there are 1,600 tablets describing temple administration. Archaeologists found the royal archive, from 2400 bc, of a small city-state that was heavily involved in trade. These documents record the production of vast amounts of textiles using wool obtained from herding nomads. (Nomads were often a source of social tension in Mesopotamia.)
Thousands of tablets record loan contracts. The loaner or the borrower might be an individual, groups of persons, or an institution. Gold or silver, or dates or other crops were loaned for a period of days or sometimes years. Sometimes interest was charged and sometimes not. Some legal codes prescribed a 20% interest rate for silver and 33% for grain. For example, a group of fourteen persons loaned fifteen kg (seven pounds) of gold to one person to use to buy tin and textiles to take to Anatolia (modern Turkey). The borrower kept one-third while the loaners made one-third on their investment after paying for the tin. The contract stated that if some loaners withdrew before the trip was finished, their investment would be returned but they would receive no profit. A person could also arrange a loan in return for working for the loaner for a period of ten years. At the end of this time, the borrower might take a spouse from the loaner's household and once again be a free person, as happened to the Biblical Jacob. (Would you make such an arrangement today? Did your great-grandparents do this in order to move from Europe to the New World?) Other tablets record loans to private persons with interest paid in silver and grain. When farmers bought land, they might contract to pay a price of one cow per hectare (half-acre) after the first harvest was sold. Farmers contracted with produce merchants who would retail the farmer's newly harvested crops, but the merchants didn't pay the farmer until after the crop was sold to the customer (in Chapter 14, we’ll see that the same system of retailers paying wholesalers after the sale of goods was used in Medieval China). For a sale of land recorded on a stone document, see http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/ED/TRC/MESO/math.html.
A farmer might receive a loan that was to be repaid at harvest time. To guarantee the loan, the farmer might pledge the use of a tool or boat or the labor of a spouse or child for a specified period of time. (It would have taken quite a greedy person to have been the first loaner to come up with the idea that he would give you a loan only if you guaranteed it with your child’s labor.) Farmers sometimes paid so much interest that they were forced to obtain a series of loans. When this occurred, the loaner was getting so much of the farmer's money that he or she had none left to pay taxes. Occasionally this reached such an extreme level that the king and queen were forced to cancel all outstanding debts just to free up money for them to collect as taxes. The king and queen could make these adjustments but didn't have the ability to correct permanently the injustice of the system.
Around 2000 bc, palaces, temples, and urban landowners began selling to entrepreneurs the rights to collect and market the harvests from their land holdings. Before harvest, the entrepreneur paid the palace, temple, or urban landowner one-third of the crops estimated value, and after selling the produce, the entrepreneur paid them one-third of the money received. Since grain, fish, and milk have short shelf-lives, the palace and temple wanted to have easily-storable silver and let the entrepreneur worry about collecting, preserving, storing, and selling the perishable crops. Temple and palace bureaucrats had managed this process in the past, but control was being turned over to entrepreneurs who, in effect, became managers of the agricultural estates and served as a go-between to the farmer and those estates. Many such contracts and transactions are recorded in the clay tablets unearthed by archaeologists.
Many texts deal with the management of animals and their products. For example, the palace or temple would consign a herd of sheep to a herder who might agree to keep 20% of the lambs as payment of wages. The texts record the agreed percentage of young male lambs to be eaten and the percentage of young females lambs that would be allowed to mature and bear further generations (recall the similar Amahuaca technique). The yield of one pound (two kg) of wool per sheep was similar to today's harvest of 0.7 - 1.2 pounds per sheep. The contract also specifies the division of milk, wool, and hides between the herder and the palace or temple. (Hides were made into cloth and tents and such.) Oxen, cows, donkeys, and pigs were managed through similar contracts.
Long distance trade with lands outside Mesopotamia was well established. Mesopotamia always had a great surplus of grain and wool to export but this export was a small percentage of its entire economy. Imported products included honey, raisins, bitumes, precious metals, gypsum for constructing buildings and boats, resin and spices from Iran and Syria, wood from Lebanon, gold from southern Egypt, stone from Turkey, blue lapis-lazuli stone from Afghanistan, and various goods from India. By 2000 bc, there was plenty of trade between these distant regions. The people of each region knew of the peoples of each of the other regions. Mesopotamian trade did not uniformly complicate the social systems of nearby people.
Trade moved mainly by water until the domestication of camels in the twelfth century bc. One text involves the record of a merchant who took Mesopotamian textiles to the Hittite Kingdom in Turkey and exchanged them for tin. The merchant made this two-month journey on many occasions, sometimes making a 100% profit, and sometimes losing everything. The Arabian kingdom of Saba (Sheba in the Bible) exported frankincense and myrrh as far north as Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. To protect their monopoly of these products, they spread rumors that the sources were guarded by monsters and flying serpents.
Prices were usually given in terms of weights of grain or silver but any sort of goods might be exchanged in the bartering process. (Prices in the city of Umma, where a large number of merchant's tablets were found, are known to have remained fairly steady throughout an extensive period.) Since silver had to be weighed during each transaction, cities eventually began to make "pre-weighed coins" in standardized sizes to speed up transactions. These first coins were made in Lydia around 640 bc. Forgeries quickly followed, but cities continued to mint coins because of the prestige it brought. Barter remains in practice to this day in many parts of the world.
We see that this is a more complex society than that of a group of gatherer-hunters and that it was about as complex as our own. For each person, the main elements of life continued to be spouse, children, family, and community. All that changed was that our food-getting technique changed from mostly gathering to mostly farming. We humans have an innate predisposition to form society and culture, but nature has less control over the exact form of the society and culture that we do form. We see that our cultures vary much more than do our business practices, which involve training, teaching, exchange, and legal redress everywhere in the world.
King and queen, palace, and government
Several websites include videos and animations of palaces. A fly-through of the Palace of Ashurnasirpal III can be seen at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/arth/asrnsrpl.html. For 3-D renderings of palace interiors, see www.learningsites.com/NWPalace/NWP_renders_index.html. A virtual reality tour of a palace can be seen at www.learningsites.com/NWPalace/NWPal-VR.htm.
The king and queen held political power, sometimes shared with a council and assembly of sorts, and they tried to satisfy the needs of the people and the concerns of the gods. Since everyone knew that farming formed the basis and enabled the existence of the city, city rulers always write about their desire to irrigate and cultivate as much land as possible and to open up new land to agriculture. (What forms the basis and enables the existence of your city?) The city ruler was also the head of the redistribution system. Around 2500 bc, a text from the city-governor of Largus-Girsu promised to alleviate oppressive taxation and extensive government supervision and to return the fields his predecessor had taken from the temple. Snell explains that this was more a promise to the gods than to the people and that it reveals that government burdens had already increased to unwelcome levels, that the government thought it was ok to tinker with the economy, and that tinkering was an old practice.
The king and queen had obligations to the people that were considered to be similar to the responsibilities of a shepherd for a flock of sheep. The king and queen had to ensure that the people were fed and that they were protected from enemies. Royal inscriptions show that the king and queen thought that their subjects expected them to deal with every crises. The king led in war, guaranteed the fertility of the land by digging and maintaining canals, provided justice in disputes, and averted divine wrath against the people by promoting the religious cult. Kings and queens acknowledged the influence of the gods who had selected them for leadership. They made decisions about general policies, security, the cult, and agricultural conditions but never considered the opinions of the citizens. They were the head of the palace organization, which might incorporate a large portion of the city's population. In this role they were like the head of a large household in that, when needed, they would even take care of petty matters occurring in the lives of their dependents. Often, a people view their relation with their king and queen as that of caring parent and child. (In Chapter 19 we'll see that our form of government–no matter what is its form–becomes ingrained within our culture. For example, after having a king and queen for a couple generations, a people will come to feel it is the only "natural" form of government. In fact, children born under a brand new form of government will feel that “it has always been that way,” while older people remember and mat even prefer the old ways.)
The palace was a major landholder, owned large herds, and consumed and produced much to feed, clothe, and equip its large staff. Many scribes conducted a careful accounting of all that was involved. For every aspect of palace operation, they knew how much there was and how much would be needed. A governmental palace might have as many as 75,000 sheep. Some of these animals were eaten by the king and queen along with the staff and their families, but most were used for wool because its sale locally and to other cities was a major source of income. The palace staff processed the animal products from its own herd into the leather items and such that were needed in daily operations. The palace also took in various raw materials for its staff to process and it took in some of the supplies it needed to conduct its operations. To obtain these specific materials and supplies , the palace contracted with agents who would twice a year be sent with cart loads of silver, grain, and wool to buy them from sources at home and abroad.
Ever since the first redistributional chiefdoms, city leaders have collected taxes from the residents. Taxes might be paid in grain, animals, or labor. (Only in recent centuries have business and taxes been conducted in cash.) Typically, each person gave one week's labor per month working the palace or temple crop fields or helping to build large public works, such as canals, religious temples, and governmental palaces; the Egyptian pyramids were built this way. When needed, the government might hire additional persons and pay them in grain or silver, but every worker was fed the legal ration of about 3,000 calories per day while on the job. A labor tax was used by every state throughout the world to build large structures. After inter-city warfare was invented, many cities required each man to serve a specified number of years in the military. Governmental administrators also monitored the herd levels of the residents and collected a portion of each herd in taxes. Other than taxes, the daily lives of citizens were mostly unaffected by their king and queen. One exception is known to have occurred in the city of Ur when forty male and female workers were buried along with an “important” person. Such burials rarely happened in Mesopotamia.
Slaves were not supplying a large portion of labor because they were too expensive, costing as much as ten hectares (five acres) of land. One document tells of slaves sold in 2430 bc. Slaves were foreigners who had been captured in war, mainly from the northeast, and were allowed to marry and to have families. They were mostly used for household labor because it was too difficult to supervise slaves in the fields. To combat defections, those of us who were slaves had to wear identifying metal arm bands and were given a haircut in the style of a knob of top-hair. One king might give another the names of escaped slaves, asking him to watch out for them.
The people of the city’s bureaucracy carried many titles including mayor, chair of the assembly, overseer of the merchants, governor, bailiff, barbers, overseer of the barbers, gatekeeper, doorkeeper, and the one who hires contracts for harvest labor. These titles give us a glimpse into the occupations and operation of the city. There were also weavers, launderers, butchers, sun-dried brick makers, ferry operators, gardeners, and orchard tenders. Which of these jobs would you prefer?
The King of Arrapha sent a letter to the mayor of Tashuhhe to remind him that it is the mayor's duty to keep the city free of robbery, murder, and foreign invaders seeking plunder. The mayor was also responsible for the territory surrounding the city and for any fortified settlement in the countryside. If any runaway left the city, if a robbery or a murder occurred, or if any of those fortified settlements became abandoned then the mayor would be fined. Another tablet contains the story of a mayor who was found to be keeping some of the collected taxes instead of sending it onto the higher, central authority.
Much effort was spent in the palace attempting to predict the future. For example, a network of scouts were posted throughout Mesopotamia to watch for omens that might help the royal court predict the future. If a scout learned of the birth of a two headed goat then a report would be sent to the court for interpretation. With a large amount of personality traits and mythological events for each god and goddess, any event–that is, any omen–could be matched to the responsible god or goddess. The omen could then be explained and the future "predicted." In an imaginary example, the two-headed goat might have been born while the moon was in the constellation of a god whose mythology showed that he ate goats–or maybe fed goats to another deity. This might be interpreted to mean that this god was about to eat the village in which the two-headed goat was born or that the god was about to give that village to another god. There could be a different interpretation of the event if the goat was a special symbol of the city and the two-headed goat was born while the moon was in the constellation of the god of power. Since the goat had two heads, this might mean that the city was going to “double” in power. An event that could be matched up to a characteristic of each of several deities would be the most difficult to interpret. (You might like to try interpreting an "omen" that you see today.) Imaginative astrological interpretations of celestial observations began to occur in the seventh century bc. (We’ll see that astrology was still dictating the timing of many tasks on nineteenth-century New England farms.) Mesopotamians began to record the positions of the moon and planets along with observations of the weather and the level of the Euphrates river and such.
Each city and each district within each city had its own court, and everyone received a trial by a jury of their peers. In cases involved persons from two different cities, each person brought judges from their own city. The courts saw fewer criminal cases than civil cases, which usually involved property disputes or divorces. Many smaller problems were handled in a personal manner by the neighborhood's family heads. As had occurred since the first primate social groups, squabbles were broken up by neighbors. No city had a sizeable police force until the Industrial Revolution both funded and caused their need during the nineteenth century ad.
The courts were called "assemblies," but it isn't clear if every citizen could speak in the assembly. An assembly would sometimes be a meeting of citizens discussing many topics, including lawsuits and town business. (Does your neighborhood have such meetings?) The occupations of each assembly speaker was recorded in the tablets and typically included gardeners, bird-catchers, potters, commoners, and soldiers, and such. This shows that a wide range of persons had the right and the time to attend the assembly. It isn't known if the assembly consisted of open debate or if participation was meant to bring public prominence. The assembly may have remained from earlier tribal or village days. (You might like to compare this assembly with that of the Kalapalo and with your own, too. The assembly of Ancient Athens will be described in Chapter 14.)
Hammarubi's legal code appeared around 1750 bc and is typical of many others throughout the world. (Visit http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/hammurabi.htm to read a translation and get additional explanation at www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/hammurabi.html. For a photo of a diorite stone stela, visit http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/ED/TRC/MESO/law.html.) It contained specific penalties, such as property offenses or the number of years that a debtor should serve in the home of the loaner. It also had descriptions of land tenure, trade agreements, adultery, marriage rules, divorce rules, adoptions, inheritance, wages for services, slavery, planting or flooding another's field, and the failure to cultivate or to harvest a leased field. There are also records of murder cases and many other things. (You might like to compare this code with the sixteenth-century Constitution of the Iroquois Nations that can be read at the University of Virginia website at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/IroCons.html.)
The basic goal of the court was to obtain a settlement satisfying both parties and to allow each party to relieve their minds by saying what they came to say. At the end of the discussion, both parties had to swear to having been satisfied. The court procedure consisted of examining documents and hearing statements made by both sides and by any witnesses. Before making a statement, each person took an oath by the gods. A conflict of statements was resolved by ordeal. It was hoped that the fear of certain death during an ordeal would cause people to tell the truth. (Notice that bands and chiefdoms did not have the authority to order and conduct an ordeal. We’ll see that the ordeal was ridiculed out of use during the Middle Ages.) Legal documents show that prisons did not exist and that penalties were usually paid in monetary form and less , sometimes in labor. For example, two persons who were found to have stolen two ducks from outside a temple were each required to repay thirty ducks.
Do legal codes make you refrain from doing bad things? Do you refrain from bad behavior because the law says so, because it is a basic part of human nature, because of your respect for other humans, because your religion (see Chapter 13) has taught you that these things are wrong, because you'll be punished and put into jail, or because your parents have taught this to you? Do written laws codify your own natural behaviors? Are business transactions outside our own natural morals and so uncontrolled except by law? Would you obey the law if it said that persons walking past each other must exchange coats whenever the person walking east is wearing a green coat and the person walking west is wearing a blue coat? Each group of us humans agrees on the same basic ethical and moral behavior. Some of us have written down our laws and then elaborated on them for centuries. Everyone knows the unwritten laws of proper behavior that guide our interactions with other humans. In Chapter 6, this was described as being a necessary aspect of the biology of our primate social system. The written laws of any group of persons describe the same types of wrong behaviors and simply assign different penalties for each.
Invention of war: by the leader, for the leader
We saw that inter-city squabbles over bordering farm lands and canals became common around 2500 bc. On the plains at that time, the population of many cities had grown to be as large as a few hundred thousand persons. Since their origins, each city had always been an independent, sovereign, political entity, but those first-ever squabbles resulted in the formation of temporary cooperatives among some city-states. Before then, there had been no political ties between any cities because no one had ever thought of a reason for such relations to occur. The political consolidation of Mesopotamia began during the years 2300 to 2000 bc.
While holding a bureaucratic position in an early cooperative and seeing that the cities of the region were in fact interacting, Sargon of Agade (2334-2279 bc), see www.utexas.edu/courses/clubmed/sargon.jpg, got the idea that an empire could be created. Sargon was the first of us humans to think of forcibly uniting the entire Mesopotamian region under a single rule. His political union lasted for one hundred years. He also made some attempt to culturally unite the northern and southern regions–for example, by equating the southern goddess Inanna with the northern goddess Ishtar. (In the next chapter we will see that Inanna was the goddess of the storage house. You might like to visit http://inanna.virtualave.net/inanna.html for information about Inanna during later Mesopotamian history and http://classics.unc.edu/courses/clar047/BabGtRest.JPG to see an image of Babylon’s famous Ishtar Gate.)
These were Mesopotamia’s first large-scale, inter-city wars in which thousands of persons were killed. We did not invent the inter-city-warring and empire-seeking aspects of our civilization until after seeing that the cities of a region were in fact interacting. Before then, it had neither occurred to a person to conquer neighboring cities to extract payments nor to attempt to be emperor of the entire world. Large-scale warfare had never before occurred in the history of our species. With these first battles, the public expressed its objection to the mass murder of other humans. What would your reaction have been to the news of the first-ever massacre of thousands of persons?
Our political and religious developments are related to the size of the urban centers. A leader of a small village of 3,000 persons is not likely to be able to command the villagers to attack their neighbors. The first empires began to develop after the largest urban centers had grown to contain about 300,000 persons, around 2500 bc. Rulers then began to seek such conquests to expand their personal power. The first permanent settlement had occurred 5,500 years earlier and there had been farming villages for 3,500 years before the city-ruler Sargon decided that he wanted to control more cities and taxes. Throughout the four or five thousand years elapsed since these first wars we have seen much warfare with steadily increasing numbers of persons killed, but the first farming villages saw no war at all for an equally long stretch of time. It is not a coincidence that our most important teachers began to reemphasize our rules of proper behavior and begin our modern religions of morals at about the same time that our cities grew to contain populations of one hundred thousand persons, all but one hundred of whom were strangers, and our cities came to contain a certain level of economic and social stratification or injustice, and our first empires were directing mass murder in unjust invasions. These injustices still anger us today.
Since a band of gatherer-hunters has only a few day’s supply of food and no assets to steal, neighboring bands have never gone to war to demand payment. What good would it do your band to steal a dozen blades and a basket of berries from a neighboring band and have one person from each band killed in the process? You’d have to carry more food to make the three-day trip than you would be able to steal. Some bands are peaceful while others become involved in a cycle of inter-band raids seeking revenge for murders that occurred during previous raids. Sometimes a person is killed during such a raid but never does one band murder all the members of another band. We saw in Chapter 7 that fights between two members of a species of mammals does not normally result in the death of one of the pair because soon there would be only one individual left alive and the species would disappear. Neither do we humans normally fight to the death. (In recent centuries, somewhere between 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 of us have murdered another person, see Chapter 22. These fractions mean that we do not normally murder one another.)
Our individual behavior has always been governed by the social primate's Golden Rule, but the behaviors of our organizations of people have not always been as socially controlled or produced mutually beneficial results. The leaders of our governments and businesses sometimes put benefits to themselves above all other aspects of our interrelated lives and behave as though the ends for themselves justify the means required to be used by their followers. In Chapter 14 we will see, as Bronowski and Mazlish point out in The Western Intellectual Tradition, that some rulers believe the tenants of morality don't apply to their state organization. Suppose a person comes to your home and says "I must kill you for your food to feed my children." We all agree that the person's lack of food is no excuse for this immoral behavior. But sometimes a state will kill others to obtain a seaport, a raw material, or some other object. Most of us agree that this is an injustice. This one-sided behavior goes against our nature to exchange assistance in a mutually beneficial society. Why do we humans carry out the unjust plans of our leaders? Is it because of the fact that we can have just one emotion at a time? Are we thinking of loyalty to our leader and group while murdering other people? Whatever the case, shame on us. What good does it do any of us to make war on ourselves. Occasionally, we have leaders who think it will do them some good.
Other than sometimes forcing people to kill and be killed, emperors mostly left their followers alone. Royal power had become absolute but did not interfere with people's daily lives. For example, citizens could freely congregate and debate. In what way did we–that is, all of us–benefit from killing and being killed in our first wars? The answer is that from the time of Sargon’s empire through the year 400 ad, the amount of irrigated farmland continued to decrease. During the years 2000-1600 bc, political disunity within Mesopotamia impeded the repair of the canals. There were reductions in population levels and in the amount of available farmland but social and economic institutions continued as before. No persons felt they were living a bad life until things got even worse through the next few centuries. The decline through that four-hundred-year period was followed by a three-hundred-year "dark age" lasting from 1600 to 1300 bc. During this time, trade nearly disappeared and people once again grew their own food. Government controlled very little area and could not protect people from raiders or properly maintain the irrigation canals. During this period, slaves were more often debtors instead of captured enemy soldiers. In this less-centralized period, legal texts show that decisions were again being based on local tradition rather than on the codes of kings and queens. At the same time, tablets and texts show that there was concern for social and economic norms, that people valued responsibility for one's work, and that they expected justice for the weaker members of society. Our first empires set us back a couple thousand years. Social and technological progress occurs only when we are not being constrained politically and economically. Remember that we will change culturally only when we have to solve problems that are large enough to force us to change culturally. We don’t change our way of life because we can; we change only when some development forces us to do so. Luckily, as empires and self-seeking leaders have constrained many regions of the world, there have usually been a few other unconstrained regions that are advancing civilization. Through time, every region of the world has oscillated between being constrained and unconstrained.
From 2500 bc through 400 ad, each successive emperor demanded both tax and warriors from conquered cities and dictated their foreign policy. Some border cities were given exemption from taxes as an incentive to stay with the emperor and in exchange for guarding the border. Emperors have used this sort of tax exemption throughout their history to persuade a particular city either to fight the emperor’s enemy or to surrender during his attack on that city. For example, the Ottoman Turks used this technique in their conquest of the Balkan region (see Tilly and Blockman's book in the references of Chapter 15).
The Assyrians of Mesopotamia were the first military empire to exist in the world. They are discussed in the Old Testament, for example, as they attempted to squash a rebellion in Israel by forcibly moving the rebels to Assyr
