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 Assyria and keeping them there for a few generations, resulting in the “lost tribes of Israel.” (More recently, Stalin used this approach in Chechnya while China has used the reverse technique in moving millions of people from China to Tibet where they will outnumber the rebels.)
At this time, empires were forming and interacting throughout the Middle East, Turkey, Egypt, and the Mediterranean region, including those of the Egyptians, the Hittites of Turkey, and the Phoenicians of Lebanon. Royal women were sometimes used as pawns to cement relations through international marriages. For example, the widow of Tutankamen (the famous Egyptian king "Tut") asked the Hittite king to send a royal prince to serve as king of Egypt, but the prince was murdered before he arrived. Through the centuries, the region saw the development of many empires, including those of Persia, Greece, and Rome. These empires grew in size and duration as they took turns sloshing back and forth across the region of the Mediterranean and Middle-East. Each perhaps learning something of the techniques of empire building and maintenance–murder and fear–from the trial-and-error attempts of its predecessors. This pattern of sloshing empires lasted in the region from 2000 bc until the fall of Rome in 450 ad. Rome was the last and the largest, and it had the longest duration. It unraveled in the fifth century ad for many reasons, including an 800% annual rate of inflation.
Once you've seen one pattern of sloshing empires, you've seen them all. The history of political power is a soap opera that is not as interesting as is the history of changes in our way of life. This book contains a summary of the series of initial developments of the largest aspects of our civilization, especially the origins of farming, cities, industry, and government. Once we shifted from gathering and hunting to farming and city life, no large change occurred in our basic way of life until the Industrial Revolution changed us from being farmers to wage-earning, laborer-customers during the last half of the eighteenth century ad. The sequence of political leaders, nations, and empires is not important to the story, presented here, of the origins of the largest aspects of our civilization and doesn't need to be discussed.
In The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840, Larkin says that the everyday life consists of everything that is taken for granted. Politics, the wider economy, and the more-powerful are never completely ignorable but are of concern to us only sporadically. What concerns women, men, children, farmers, laborers, and artisans are the routines and seasons of work, their home and the moments of marriage and birth, sickness and death, traveling, sex, singing and dancing, visiting and social gatherings. In Firsthand America the authors quote Mr. Dooley, who said in 1906 that "history is all about what people died for but not what they lived for." (See Chapter 15.)
It doesn't often matter which ruler, foreign or domestic, is collecting taxes from us. Notice also that the general population within the empire's home region benefits little from their own leader's foreign conquests. That is, they don't receive any food for their children or a weekly check in the mail from the "conquered" people. Is there any benefit to being a member of the empire's home region? Do the citizens of today’s superpower receive a weekly check in the mail from the citizens of every other nation? What is the benefit of being a member of the superpower nation? It has a really big army but health and education systems (see chapter 22) that are unaffordable to as many as one-quarter of its citizens.
These empires came into existence as power-seeking kings and queens convinced ever-larger groups of men to walk up to the men of an opposing group and commence to hack and chop each other to pieces. Men would fight face to face using clubs, swords, and anything else that would kill or do great damage. For a few hours they would bash each others heads, removing portions of skulls and limbs from each other's bodies. The "winning" army was simply five times larger than its opponent. For the ubiquitous and violent death of a more modern war, I'll refer you to Quentin C. Aanenson’s film A Fighter Pilot's Story–no glory, just the daily reality of friends and other people being blown apart, see http://pages.prodigy.com/fighterpilot.
Often, soldiers would head off to meet and kill an enemy presupposed to be ok to kill because they are "stupid, inferior, and subhuman," only to return home saying they instead found the enemy to be just as clever as themselves and just as capable of killing them. They were surprised to find the enemy was not stupid and easy to kill but instead showed the same human abilities against them. In another aspect of war, some recent soldiers have commented that being shot at gave them perspective on later life: "I find daily choices less agonizing because what can go wrong, there's nobody trying to kill me."
War is always the idea of our leader. New wars will continue to occur only for as long as our leaders can convince us that it will be somehow glorious. Today, we end war by flooding the television–in all nations and languages–with scenes of screaming and dying people who have had their limbs blown off. It hurts to be shot and bombed. It hurts to see your children shot and bombed. Do you know what our leaders do to maintain support for the war they are conducting? They keep images of wounded and dying people off the television. (In Chapters 19 and 20 we'll see that politicians within a democracy of balanced powers try to get their way by painting favorable pictures of their goals and actions). People go to war having little understanding of the culture of their enemy, only imagined stereotypes of “subhuman people.” We rarely know what we have done to make the enemy mad at us. Before voting for war, shouldn’t we understand our enemy’s culture and their complaints against us? If our leaders were unable to declare war unless the people specifically voted for it then there would be fewer wars? We know we are not yet in full control of our leaders when they still go to war on a personal whim. In Chapter 19, we'll see that civil war occurs when two groups with differing priorities refuse to compromise. The resulting Civil War later ends when both sides tire of daily death and destruction and decide that compromise is less painful than continued slaughter.
As empires come and go, people stay the same. People just want to laugh and joke with their spouse, family, friends, and neighbors and to pursue life and raise children. They have no interest in attacking the people of neighboring regions. The daily life of the people is not greatly affected by which persons or foreign king and queen are collecting their taxes. We saw that the farming villages of Mesopotamia lived in peace for six thousand years before we invented war. Since then, warring empires and states have existed for the last four thousand years. Throughout this time, each of us humans has simply continued the daily life of a farmer or factory worker no matter who collected the taxes.
Besides killing many persons, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler managed only to temporarily rearrange the map. They contributed nothing to the progress of civilization and in no way improved our daily lives. In the coming chapters we will see that the inventors of factories, steam engines, automobiles, and computers have had a larger impact on our way of life than most any king or queen. An indirect effect of some political leaders came from our reaction to their excesses–for example, in producing our idea of guaranteed individual liberties (see Chapter 14) that match our innate predispositions. Drastic changes in political systems can intrude on our lives, such as the introduction–or end–of communism within a nation. In Life in a Medieval Village, Frances and Joseph Gies describe how the Norman invasion of 1066 ad imposed a system of feudalism and manorialism onto the English countryside and changed village farmers into serfs.
In any particular region of the world, at any particular time, there are a handful of independent political units. Depending on the time and place, these might be tribes, states, or nations. The leaders of each unit are constantly trying to improve the status of their unit relative to the others and have nothing but their own interests in mind. There is a continual realignment of cooperations among them. The political-military history of the world consists of a long list of temporary aggressors–those of us who were the kings and queens and such–attempting to impose their will on nearby political units.
Whenever it occurs that one state begins to impose its will on a neighboring state, each of the remaining neighbors will then choose either to join with some others in mutual defense, to join with the aggressor, or to try to stay out of the conflict. Sometimes one state will find a clever solution that pits one of its enemies against another of its enemies. Sometimes a smaller state temporarily joins with the larger aggressor to decrease the status of an intermediate state. If the aggression cripples that intermediate state then the smaller state is left in a better position than that of the formerly-larger state. Sometimes a region has the fortune of living in peace. Sometimes an extended period of peace comes only after one state has conquered all of its neighbors. These are the relations among those of us who seek power. The course of action of each state is dictated by their own interests. They do whatever they think will increase their own positions relative to others. Each state simply plays all other possible states against all other states to get the best out of a situation.
In The Spanish Frontier in North America, Weber describes the ways in which some sixteenth-century tribes used their European invaders and other tribes to try to improve their own power status. Some tribes became friendly with the Europeans to gain protection from an enemy. Some tribes would join with their neighbors in mutual defense against the Europeans. Some tribes would temporarily join with the Europeans while the Europeans were attacking that tribe's enemy. (We saw in Chapter 11 that many tribes form in reaction to invaders.) These are the actions that all of us take when placed into such situations. The political history of states consists of a series of shifting alignments. The nations of Europe did this for centuries. The tribes of ancient Greece, China, Europe, America, and Asia have done this. The Christian Bible describes the shifting alignments of the groups of the ancient Middle-East.
From 2000 bc until 2000 ad–a 4,000-year stretch of time–the main goals and concerns of government were the concerns of kings and queens for maintaining and extending their own power and territory. During these years, the form of government underwent a handful of changes. Most often, the government consisted of those individuals who were in control of the assets and means of wealth and power, and this meant that the concerns of government were wealth and power. These concerns do not match those of individual humans who simply care for their children, family, and society. Some of our governments took too much from the people and didn't let them freely pursue life; these governments were eventually changed. It is guaranteed that people will not stop changing the form of government until it allows them to be human and simply laugh and joke with their spouse, family, friends and neighbors, pursue life and their talents, and raise children. During the last century or two, the concerns of our government have been slowly changing from an expansion of power to the quality of life of citizens. For example, today we more often debate health-care than colonial expansion. We can safely predict that the characteristic of the last version of our government will be that its concerns fully match the concerns-of-life of individual humans.
Ten thousand years ago, the ways of the Mesopotamian farmers were known by their non-farming neighbors but by the time they realized, a few thousand later, that full-time farming also had benefits for them, Mesopotamia was filled with large cities. By a few thousand years ago, farming had spread throughout much of the planet. The surface of the Earth has room for the people of only about five different regions to independently invent farming. This is likely to have occurred in the Middle-East, India, China, South America, and in Central America. For example, farming is known to have spread along the Mediterranean shores and inland along the rivers and lakes of Europe and Africa. It is also informative that it took about three thousand years for farming to spread from the Middle East to northern Europe. This is a time-span of 150 generations and means that farming spread south to north across Europe at the slow rate of ten miles (sixteen kilometers) per generation. Visit http://cdli.ucla.edu/staff/englund/Images/Prehistory/Spread_farming_roaf16.jpg for a map showing the spread of farming.
Farming and urbanization do not always occur together. There are examples of sedentary communities that had no farming, and there are yet other examples of farming communities that had no urbanized city centers. For example, in Prehistoric-Britain Darvill explains that farming didn't lead to urbanization in pre-Roman Europe because its climate allowed for multiple crops per year and so required less stockpiling of food. (We have seen that much of an animal's way of life can be understood by "following the food.") The more northerly Europeans knew of the urbanized ways of the Mediterranean peoples because they traded goods with them but chose not to adopt their urban ways.
The large population increase within a newly-farming region sometimes resulted in a mass migration of farmers into nearby areas where they had archaeologically noticeable effects on the previous residents. The intermittent waves of immigrants often mixed their culture and language with those of the previous residents, but sometimes one group's culture instead submerged that of the other group. We saw in Chapter 6 that we humans first migrated out of Africa to spread throughout the Earth.
Countless migrations have occurred since then. Several thousand years ago, an Indo-European speaking group moved into both Greece and India. The many languages spoken in these two regions today share roots. Many groups from the Asian steppes moved into Europe; one moved into both Finland and Hungary so that still today, the people of these two nations speak a similar language. The Germanic peoples moved into Europe, the Spaniards moved into Spain, and some of the resulting Europeans eventually migrated to the Americas. We’ll see in Chapter 15 that during the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, typically 2% of Europeans were moving to the New World. We’ll see in Chapter 18 that about 1% of the world’s population is currently migrating, as people seek employment and a better life in today’s continuing Industrial Revolution. We are not migrating from the poorest to the richest nations but are leaving the most newly industrializing nations and moving to a nearby nation that has been industrializing for a longer time. (For more information about migration, visit www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/migrant.) By the way, only about 5% of those of us who are migrating are choosing to move to the U.S.
There are numerous examples of farming villages and city-states around the world–both recent and ancient. The culture and history of each group of people includes unique details. For example, since Ancient Egypt consisted of a single strip of land that was often just a few thousand meters (yards) wide along the Nile river, this region was easier to subjugate and became militarized earlier than did Mesopotamia. You might like to see panoramic views of Ancient Egyptian sites at http://guardians.net/egypt/cj98/pans/panindex.htm and at www.virtual-egypt.com. Also visit, http://showcase.netins.net/web/ankh and www.memphis.edu/egypt. For a list of other sites see www.cumbavac.org/Ancient_Egypt.htm. You might like to read a few examples of farming and village life from each continent, including the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, Olmec, and Inca in Central and South America, the Mahenjo Daro of the Indus river valley in India (2500 bc to 1500 bc), Zimbabwe in Africa, the Hittite in Turkey, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia (1000 ad.). A video clip of Angkor Wat is at the U.N. World Heritage website http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=668. Panoramas of museum rooms can be seen at www.nga.gov/exhibitions/camwel.htm. For a panoramic view of Chaco Canyon visit www.colorado.edu/Conferences/chaco/tour/chacomap.htm. See http://archaeology.la.asu.edu/teo for Aztec Teotihuacan. Visit www.harappa.com/har/har0.html for tours of Harappa and Mahenjo Dara. Visit the CSUH website at http://maya.csuhayward.edu/mayacosmos/index.swf for panoramic views of numerous Maya sites. Visit the Villanova website at http://www90.homepage.villanova.edu/lowell.gustafson/maya.htm for photos of Mayan sites. For information about Zimbabwe visit http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=364. Visit http://isis.csuhayward.edu/cesmith/incas/mpviewarticle.html for panoramas of the Incan site at Machu Picchu. For a video, visit www.archaeologychannel.org/content/video/machu_300k_R.html. For information about Zapotec culture, see www.famsi.org/research/pohl/sites/montealban.html. For virtual reality tours of Hittite shrines, see http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/Quicktime/catal.mov and also http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/Newsletter1/media.html. For a virtual reality fly-through of Catal Huyuk see www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/stonehenge.html. Visit http://ltc.smm.org/visualize/node/31 for a Hittite city in 3-D. See http://coas.missouri.edu/paloma for a virtual reality tour of the Paloma Village. For an on-line video of Petra in Jordan, see www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/petra. For extensive video reconstructions that transports one back in time to Ancient Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, Greece, China, Mexico, Rome, and Venice visit www.taisei-kodaitoshi.com/civil_e/civilization.html. Visit http://maya.csuhayward.edu/yaxuna for on-line movies of the Yaxuna Mayan archaeological site. Visit http://mayagis.smv.org for a map of the Maya area. See also www.mesoamerican-archives.com.Visit www.visit-fsm.org/visitors/gallery/panomras/non.html for a panorama of the Non Madol ruins on the island of Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia.
Each region of the world has had political structures containing elements common to many other regions and each region also has many unique details. For example, China has usually had a single, strong national government throughout its entire area, which is larger than that of the United States, while Europe was always divided into many separate cities and kingdoms. In the following sections we will have a slightly detailed look at the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Cahokians in North America.
Those of us humans who are Yoruba have lived in an urban, tribal government that has existed for centuries in what is now the nation of Nigeria. For a collection of photos and audio recordings from throughout Africa, including some of the Yoruba, visit http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/AfricaFocus. There are many internet websites to visit that contain Yoruba art, including www.metmuseum.org/explore/yoruba/htm/index.htm and http://class.csueastbay.edu/cesmith/virtmus/Africa/africa.html. For information about Nigeria today, visit http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/nigeria.html. Be sure to visit www.Yoruba.org. For an audio sample of drumming, visit www.nmafa.si.edu/exhibits/aud_art/htm/drum1.htm. You might also visit www.aaanet.org/committees/commissions/aec/rescontinent.htm. Visit http://mccoy.lib.siu.edu/jmccall/jones for photographs of the art and culture of Southeastern Nigeria. Visit www.learner.org/resources/series8.html for a documentary about Africa. For Yoruba religion, visit www.afrikaworld.net/afrel/ifetexts.htm. For Nigerian history, visit http://countrystudies.us/nigeria and for figures concerning Nigerian population, education, war machinery, imports, and exports, see http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/nigeria/ng_appen.html. See also http://worldfacts.us/Nigeria.htm and www.economist.com/countries/Nigeria. An on-line version of the text The Yoruba Today by J.S. Eades is available at http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/YorubaT/yt.html.
The following description of the Yoruba is a summary of William Bascom's The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria. The region of today's Nigeria includes many different cultures. Bascom mainly describes the way of life of the Yoruba who were living in the city of Ife during the years 1937 and 1938. The people he talked with could remember events that occurred since the year 1850.
For centuries, the Yoruba had been living an urban lifestyle, commuting out to their farmlands, making earthenware pottery, making grass and reed baskets and mats, collecting herbal medicines, making granite or quartz monoliths, making blue-colored glass-beads, and making terra-cotta or lost-wax brass figures and heads, some of which are life-size. (Visit www.metmuseum.org/toah//hd/wax/hd_wax.htm for a discussion of the lost wax process.) The Yoruba have a hierarchical court system and use credit and money within their trading market. Many Yorubans raise herds, sometimes using territorial crocodiles to guard their livestock. Chickens and other farm animals are kept but meat is eaten only on special occasions or when it dies of natural causes. Some men fish or hunt but game is scarce.
In Yoruba society, men do the farming (we saw that women do the farming in Kalapalo society). A farmer uses leaves and wood ash for fertilizer and might plant alternating rows of corn, yams, and beans. The most common crops include cocoa (which is Nigeria's export cash crop today but grosses only 10% as much as does petroleum–see http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/nigeria/ng_appen.html#table13), yams, tubers, grains, plantains, vegetables, fruits, rice, cassava, beets, taro, corn, cotton, indigo, tobacco, calabash, sorghum, millet, bananas, sugar cane, bamboo trees, and oil palms. (For a video of oil palms transplanted to Costa Rica, see http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/FieldCourses99/TropEcoCostaRicaArticles/Final.TheNaturalHistoryof.html or for a photo, visit http://www.waado.org/cgi-bin/Aweto/scan/OilPalms.jpg.) Oil palms are used for many things, including wine. Beer is made from corn. Just as did the Mesopotamians, Yoruba farmers commute daily from the city out to their farmland and might remain there in a hut for a few weeks during the peak of the farming season. Cities are farming centers, with surrounding farmlands extending out up to fifteen miles (twenty-four km).
A farmer is helped by his sons and might join a work-club whose members jointly work the field of one member at a time while cycling through the fields of every member. When occasion warrants, a Yoruba man might invite friends, relatives, and club-members to perform a large task. The women of his family provide food and drink for the group. He is then obligated to return the favor when asked by one of his helpers. No strict accounting is kept but his absence would be noted. As currency and wage-labor emerged, this system of exchange began to disappear. In Chapter 15 we will see how the farmers of the early nineteenth-century northeastern United States would similarly cooperate to harvest and process crops, and we’ll see how these social exchanges similarly decreased with the emergence of wage-labor during industrialization.
A man does not own his farmland but does own the crops obtained from anything he plants there. If his farmland is assigned to another person he will continue to have the rights to the produce of the long-lived cocoa and palm tress which he had earlier planted. His heirs will continue to own these crops. One man might own a kola tree and its produce while another person farms right under it and cannot collect those kola nuts.
Yoruba men sometimes make specialty craft products. Specialties include wood carving, drumming, divining, circumcising, brass casting or working iron, bead, pottery, or leather. Some men are brickmakers, bricklayers, or tailors. The secrets of charm-making and medicine-making are known by just a few persons who protect their knowledge with religious sanctions. Craft specialization, trade, and town markets grew together and made every person economically interdependent.
Women trade the produce and products of their husband at the city market. Sometimes women will buy items from other men to sell. For example, she may contract with a cloth or wine maker to sell his product at his requested price and receive a portion in return. She will return any unsold items to him.
Thousands of people go to the city's market everyday but every fourth or fifth day there is a larger market with much larger crowds. Some Yoruban towns name the days of the week after the market held on them. The busiest time of the market day occurs just before sunset. A traveler describing these busy markets in 1850 said that after nightfall, the lamps of the traders appear as innumerable stars from a distance.
A man might obtain a loan to pay bride wealth by becoming an indentured servant. He would agree to work the farmland of the loaner for a certain number of days per week for so many years. We can imagine the resulting mutual teasing that would occur between spouses every time he left to do that work. Much of colonial America involved indentured servants who promised to work seven years for the person who paid for their transportation from Europe to America.
Savings clubs are another way to finance large transactions. Twenty persons might form a savings club in which each person contributes equal shares of money every month. Each month the entire pot is given to one member. This means that once every twenty months you'll receive the entire pot, which might be used to pay a large expense.
The Yoruba people consist of many clans and sub-clans, which typically include seven hundred persons and are based on patrilineal descent. Children belong to the clan of their father. When born, the sons of his children will also belong to his clan but the daughters of his children will belong to their own father’s clan because people can marry only someone from outside their own clan. Throughout their lifetimes, clan males generally live together within a neighborhood. The clan can be more important than the nuclear family.
The people of a clan cooperate for the common good and will communally own property, including living quarters and farmlands, and will communally own specific political and religious offices. A clan leader is chosen who administers and assigns living quarters and farmlands to each person or family. The leader sees to the upkeep of the living area, sacrifices to the clan founder, makes atonements to keep the members healthy and at peace, and settles disputes between families within the clan. A clan leader or chief can be asked to help collect a debt by placing certain symbols on the home of the debtor. The debtor must pay the outstanding debt that same day, perhaps by obtaining loans from his or her family. The chief then keeps a portion.
If a fight results in blood touching the earth then the parties are taken to a chief for reconciliation. If the chief is not able to resolve the dispute to the satisfaction of both parties then the case is taken to the so-called Ogboni house. It consists of several concealed members who vote in secret, allowing them to be impartial. The case can be further appealed to a joint meeting of the chiefs, Ogboni, and the king or queen. Contradictory claims are tested by oath or ordeal. British colonialists imposed their own criminal laws and court system but allowed civil matters to continue to be handled in the traditional way.
Simple disputes can be solved on the spot by members of the neighborhood and their chief. For example, as one woman walked past a tailor shop, the shopkeeper ran out with his assistants to ask her to pay the three pence she owed him. The assistants began clapping and chanting. An elderly man got between the woman and the tailor and called for a nearby chief. The chief arrived and told both to stop talking. If either did not they would lose the case. Each was asked to speak in turn. Any onlooker may ask questions and nearby witnesses might be called. Any person can give their opinion about the matter, going in order from youngest person to oldest. A solution is sought which is agreeable to both combatants so that the fight ends. Otherwise, the appeal process begins. It turns out that the woman had had the tailor repair a small cloth for her, but when she returned to pick it up he made advances to her in an attempt to hurt her husband. The judgement went against the tailor, who was told that further trouble would result in his being called before a higher court.
Yoruban cities were often surrounded by defensive earthen banks. (The Yoruba-Dahomey wars fed the slave trade). For example, the bank surrounding the city of Ijebu-Ode was eighty miles (125 km) long, fifteen to twenty feet high (five to seven meters), and is fifty feet (17 meters) wide at its base. It is surrounded by a ditch twenty to twenty-five feet (seven to eight meters) deep and forty feet (13 meters) wide. This mound surrounds the city at a distance of five to fifteen miles (eight to twenty-four kilometers) out from its center and is shown on a Portuguese map from the year 1500.
Each Yoruban city and region has its own political system. Since these systems range from dictatorships to democracies and theocracies, Bascom says one might write a comparative political science textbook and take every example from the Yoruba.
The people of the city of Ife choose a king or queen (there have been two queens in the recent history of Ife) by considering his or her character, generosity, and willingness to listen to advice. The age of the candidate is not too critical but the person is usually over thirty. The candidate must be married. Yoruba bow to their father; since the king or queen should not have to bow to anyone, the father of a candidate cannot be living. The selected person is simply notified without prior warning or campaigning. The new ruler is responsible for the spouse or spouses of the former ruler, who continue to live in their quarters within the palace. An unpopular king or queen will be removed by the request of a mob who send their chiefs in with a suicide potion. (Last week my children did this to me.) Sometimes the ousted ruler is allowed to live in exile at the home of the head diviner.
The king or queen of Ife lives in seclusion, is responsible for the good of the people, and performs the proper sacrifices that promote the well-being of the people. The ruler assigns land to each clan, which in turn assigns plots and rooms to its members. The king or queen also helps decide any issue not settled in the lower courts and approves or vetoes proposed changes in law. For example, the chiefs might suggest a new ceiling on the price of palm wine. If approved, a gong-beater will walk around town to announce the change.
The palace is financed by taking a share from the city’s toll-gates. Each farmer pays a toll as they bring crops into the city for sale. Palace financing also occurs as the women of the palace go to the market each day to collect a little food–without having to pay–from each of several merchants. There are many palace officials who have specific jobs. For example, one gathers able-bodied men from a neighborhood to thatch the walls and roof of the ruler's home or to weed its grounds. There are many public works projects to build and maintain.
Young women are marriageable between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. She must marry a man who is older than thirty-five years in age because younger men do not have the means to pay bride wealth. There is a large number of women aged twenty to thirty-five but fewer men aged over thirty-five. About half the marriages are polygamous in which an older man has multiple younger wives.
In 1950, Nigeria was 40% Muslim, 40% Catholic, and 20% traditional–making a good mix of rituals and customs. By law, Catholic marriages must be monogamous. Bascom describes one man who tried a Christian church wedding for his sixth marriage. His fifth wife, inherited levirately, had died. His first and third wives had left him, and he had left his second and fourth wives. He could now be monogamous. His new wife turned out to be unfaithful, so he then married seven additional wives.
During childbirth, no person younger than the mother should be present. The newborn is sprinkled with water to make it cry; nobody speaks until then or it might become impotent. If it is the mother's first child, then it is taken into the backyard where its umbilical cord is tied with a thread and cut by a woman using a knife from the midrib of a leaf from the bamboo palm. A glass knife can be used but not one made from metal because that might cause stomach ache. The mother is not to speak while this is being done. Men dig a hole in which a woman places the placenta. The hole is filled and on that very spot the child is bathed with a loofah sponge and rubbed with palm oil. The child is then held by the feet and given three shakes to make it strong and brave; it then won't be afraid of noises or have spasms. Its head is gently touched to the ground so that it won't be hurt in later falls. The child is then carried back to the mother while saying the mother's name three times. These actions can be performed in the house for the mother's later children, and she is allowed to speak as they are being done. Many persons then come by to give congratulations and to see the new baby.
Special names are given to children born in certain circumstances. For example, certain names are given when a child is born face down or with its umbilical cord around its neck. Each of two twins are given traditional names indicating the order in which they were born. Normally, names are suggested during a ceremony six days after the birth. Mom and dad are first to give a suggestion, then relatives and friends will do so. Everyone uses their favorite name until one takes hold–usually the name earlier suggested by mom and dad. During the naming ceremony, the child is given some yams to eat. A parent might scold the child later in life by asking "Did you help plant the yams you ate on the day you were named?" Circumcision of both boys and girls is done within a month but without the group ritual of other cultures, such as that of the Kalapalo.
Children are nursed until they are two to four years old. It is believed that a child will die if weaned before the age of two. (In Chapter 15 we'll see that around the year 1800, infants in the United States would not be weaned until after the infection-prone hot summer had ended.) A Yoruba mother avoids sex until the child is weaned so as not to spoil her milk. Infants are given a purgative to drink each morning.
Youngsters are soon imaginatively imitating the activities of their parents. By age six, girls are encouraged to participate in the chores of their mother, and boys with those of their father. Education stresses social interdependence but psychological and economic independence.
If a child dies, it is said to be "one born to die" and is buried in the backyard without the ritual given to adults. Normally, funerals cannot be attended by anyone older than the deceased. Albinos and other special persons, such as someone killed by lightning, are buried in places sacred to the related deity. Everyone else is buried in a grave dug in the floor of their own room. Before being buried, the corpse is cleaned and washed and then her or his clothes are put on inside out so the soul will know its way back to earth when reborn.
Hull explains that Yoruba cities were unlike the big cities of the Western world today that are collections of strangers who don't know or even speak to each other. A Yoruba person was born, raised, married, raised children, and then died within the same town. Extended families lived together within their clan's section of town. Each person and family knew most every other person and family–and their personal properties–from nearby homes. A best friend is the person with whom you confide; funeral plans and last wills are told to the best friend, who is sought when death occurs.
Townspeople had a sense of being cooperative and responsible members of the community. They combined efforts in any situation requiring such efforts. For example, when the town walls needed to be expanded everyone met to do the work. Men, women, and children hauled water, mixed mud, and raised walls. The extent of area to be enclosed by the new walls was decided by the town council. Many community decisions were made as talk among family heads in turn involved extended family heads, ward leaders, urban chiefs, the town council, and then the king or queen. People felt they were members of the town because each person had a voice in its affairs. Voices were not equal because of age, gender, wealth, and the number of generations in which the speaker's lineage had lived within the city.
Many of the aspects of Yoruba life described above are very similar to those of the other people discussed in this book. Other aspects are very different. If such cultural details seems incredible to you, then you might like to read several ethnographic studies, such as those by Basso and Bascom.
We will see in Chapter 19 that Europeans colonized and despotically ruled Africa during the years 1850 through 1950, and then left randomly-bordered nations, each containing many cultures, to build new national governments and identities.
Many North and South American Indians were living sedentary lives in farming villages before the Europeans began arriving around the year 1500. (Visit www.csulb.edu/projects/ais/nae for numerous Native American images, and be sure to visit The National Museum of the American Indian at www.nmai.si.edu. Visit the National Parks service at www.cr.nps.gov/aad/feature/Cahok2.htm for a Cahokia marketplace image, and see www.cr.nps.gov/aad/feature/feature.htm for other moundbuilder sites.) European explorers also brought many Old World diseases that had been unknown in the New World. (In the same way, the unfamiliar diseases of Africa kept the Europeans out of that continent until the nineteenth century.) These diseases killed 50% to 90% of the Native American population as they spread across the continent. The effects of these continent-wide plagues drastically altered the societies and the way of life of all Native Americans. This fact is not widely known in the U.S., today. There were no horses in America until they too arrived with the Europeans, but the horse soon became an integral part of American life. European diseases and horses had tremendous effects on American peoples. In the reverse direction, many American crops–including potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco–had large effects on the way of life of Europeans. These plants did not exist in the Old World.
During the years 800 ad. to 1300 ad, those of us humans who lived along the Mississippi river just across from present-day St. Louis, built the town of Cahokia. Its population reached a peak of 10,000 to 20,000 persons around the year 1150 ad. This was a large city with a long life-span. The 500-year life-span of this city is more than twice the length of time in which the nation of the U.S. has existed. It would not be until the year 1800 that any U.S. city had become as populous as Cahokia had been. To see numerous panoramic views of Cahokia today, visit www.siue.edu/CAHOKIAMOUNDS. For a virtual reality flythrough of Cahokia and its Woodhenge, visit www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/stonehenge.html. A painting of Cahokia can be seen at www.mississippian-artifacts.com. Visit www.lostworlds.org for panoramic and virtual reality views of several other mound sites. Visit www.archaeologychannel.org/content/video/adena_300kR.html to view the video The Adena People: Moundbuilders of Kentucky. Visit www.umsl.edu/~anttbaum/Cahokia.html for images and information about current excavations.
About 10,000 years ago, the first culture in the area of Cahokia consisted of nomadic bands of twenty to thirty persons who followed the now-extinct, glacially-adapted mega-fauna. Anthropologists refer to this as the archaic period. Throughout most of Eastern North America, nomads were becoming sedentary villagers by about 1000 bc and were beginning to farm in what anthropologists call the Woodland culture. (For more details on the Woodland culture you might like to read Ancient North America, The Archaeology of a Continent by Brain Fagan.) The Woodland culture in Cahokia lasted from 600 bc through 800 ad, which is a 1,400 year span of time. As population grew through the centuries, social organization became more-complex.
The people of the woodlands culture built about 200,000 earthen mounds throughout the eastern United States. The mounds were built by carrying millions of basket-loads of dirt and piling them into a large structure as much as 100 feet (30m) in height. Today, archaeologists can still distinguish individual basket loads within those structures. We have seen that the peoples of various regions of the world had passions for different structures, including giant blocks and pyramids of stone. Mound building was an obsession for centuries all over Eastern North America. Your community might want to build a larger mound than that made by your neighbors. We can guess that this fashion of building mounds spread from one community to another, just as fashions spread today. There is a serpent-shaped mound in Ohio that is four feet high, twenty feet wide, and one-quarter mile long (1.3 x 7 x 400 m).
Mounds of various shapes and sizes are found from Florida to Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ohio and are sometimes as high as the treetops. Since this entire area is very flat, with almost no hills, the treetops are the highest objects nature built in this area, and this may have something to do with the decision of us humans to build mounds to that height. Climbing a mound raises you above the treetops and takes you to the sky. Many of us today feel awe-struck and humbled when standing on a mountain top and viewing below nothing but billowing white cloud tops in every direction for as far as we can see. Similarly, when looking out from the summit of some earthen mounds, you see nothing but billowing green treetops. It is awe inspiring for a people of a community to have the home of their leader placed on top of such a mound. One mound at Poverty Point in Northeastern Louisiana was built in the year 1800 bc and is seventy feet high (25 meters) on a base 600 by 800 feet (200 by 270 meters). While standing on its summit and looking down at the treetops, I felt as if I was seeing the world below from the vantage point of a sacred bird and wondered if that was the reason that the mound was built in the shape of a bird. (You can see a video of Poverty Point by visiting www.archaeologychannel.org/content/video/poverty_300kR.html.)
Three very large rivers–the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois–meet in the vicinity of Cahokia to create a fertile flood plain covering an area 12 by 70 miles (20 by 110 km). The people of Cahokia obtained most of their food by farming corn. They ate a lot of corn, day after day–just as we saw that the Mesopotamians ate a lot of wheat-bread, day after day. The corn diet was high in carbohydrates and low in protein, and teeth were heavily worn by the pieces of corn-grinding rocks that remained in the food. The domestication of corn had originated in Mexico 4,000 years earlier and had spread throughout the New World. In the Americas today, corn fields extend for thousands of miles, and in the world today, corn, wheat, and rice still provide two-thirds of the world’s food supply.
Those three rivers provided a means for long-distance trade. Copper was obtained from the Upper Great Lakes area, mica from the Appalachians, and more-precious seashells from the Gulf of Mexico. Cahokia had much commerce. There were specialized crafts makers, large-scale public works, and stratified social levels. We see that life in Cahokia included many of the elements in the archaeologist's definition of advanced civilization described earlier in this chapter, including stratified social, political, and religious organizations.
Cahokia was located near a variety of food and material sources. (We have seen that humans prefer to live near a variety of food sources.) The Ozark mountains to the southwest provided both stone for tools and deer for meat and clothing. The forests to the east provided wood for buildings, tools, arrows, spears, canoes, and firewood. These forests also contained many types of food, including nuts, berries, salt, and several kinds of animals and birds. The plains to the north and west were the source of grass for homes. The rivers provided fish, shellfish, beavers, and birds. This region was naturally well suited to provide for a large population and a complex society.
Large-scale public buildings occurred in the form of 120 earthen mounds. The most important mound in Cahokia was 100 feet (30 meters) tall and had a base area of fourteen acres (six hectares). This mound contained 22 million cubic feet (630,000 cubic meters) of hand-piled dirt. It had been repeatedly enlarged through the years 900 ad. to 1200 ad. The building placed on top of the mound measured 50 by 100 feet and may have been 50 feet high (17 x 33 x 17 meters).
Cahokia had a circle of wooden posts, nicknamed "Woodhenge," that served an astronomical, religious, and political purpose and had a diameter of 400 feet (130 meters). From within Woodhenge, the equinox Sun appeared to rise out of Cahokia's largest mound: the chief lived on top of this mound and was considered to be the brother of the Sun. We can guess that it was a pretty awe-inspiring event to see the sun rising out of the chief's hilltop home. A few thousand persons crammed into the 12,000 square foot (1,100 square meter) Woodhenge circle on these mornings. On that day, we might guess that some families preferred to be near the center but others instead choose to avoid the crush and watch from the edge of the circle.
The communities surrounding Cahokia came in four different sizes, consisting of sixty-five small villages, eight larger communities, four others that were still-larger, and then the main city of Cahokia. This hierarchy is similar to what we saw had occurred in Ancient Mesopotamia. There were small, moundless farmsteads that consisted of a few structures surrounding a court yard; these farmsteads occurred in clusters around larger communities. There were also villages of a few hundred persons that were often located near lakes or side-rivers. (Which might make me guess that some families liked to live in the center of activities while others preferred the "suburbs," just as occurs today.) In these outlying villages, homes were built around a small plaza that often had one mound. Family heads interacted with a clan leader. The village's clan leaders in turn had a leader who may have lived on top of the village mound. This leader would have interacted directly with the Brother of the Sun and his close relatives and associates. There were also temple-towns that had populations of thousands of persons who built an impressive plaza and several mounds.
The largest community was Cahokia itself. Cahokia was the capital of the area's politics, religion, commerce, and art. The central part of Cahokia was enclosed by a two-mile wall (3.2 km). Since no evidence of invasion has been found, the wall may have had a non-defensive purpose. The entire city covered an area of seven square miles (seventeen square kilometers) and had a population density of 4,000 persons per square mile (6,500 per square km). A region having 250 persons per square mile is considered to be a city. Communal buildings included elevated grain storage structures, menstrual-seclusion huts, sauna-like sweat lodges, and a neighborhood meeting house. Within the city of Cahokia, individual neighborhoods often contained an occupational specialty, as is commonly done in cities throughout the world. Specialists included priests, astronomers, merchants, and various crafts persons.
Cahokians made tools, performed strenuous work, hunted, set governmental and religious policy, made beads and necklaces and art, raised children, loved, grew crops, gathered plants, processed animal skins, and made pottery. During ceremonies and festivals they played music, sang, and danced. Archaeologists obtain clues about the ways of Cahokians through the scenes of daily-life depicted on pottery. These show the faces of people, their manner of dress, and their style of body tattoos and paint. Many pots were given human or animal shape. To build further understanding of the Cahokian way of life, archaeologists combine these pictorial clues with the physical artifacts left behind, including tools, walls, and homes.
The homes of related families were often clustered together. Each home was about twenty by twenty feet (seven by seven meters) and had a doorway covered by a mat or an animal skin. The homes did not have windows. Homes were constructed by first digging trenches along their perimeter, standing vertical poles into the trench, and then refilling the trench. Next, horizontal poles were tied to those vertical poles to create the skeletal structure of the walls and roof. Tall prairie grass was tied into bundles to make the roof, and it was also combined with clay to fill the gaps between the poles.
The city wall was similarly constructed. A trench, four or five feet (1.3 to 1.6 meters) deep, was dug and then refilled after standing about 17,000 vertical oak logs within the trench. Each of these logs was one foot (25 cm) in diameter and 15 feet (4m) high. The logs were packed together so that each was touching its two neighbors, and then the entire wall was covered with clay. The wall had periodically-spaced projections.
The funerals of the most important persons were held on top of conically shaped mounds while other persons were buried in a communal cemetery. A funeral structure was built on top of the mound to hold this person and then the structure was set on fire during the ceremony. Additional layers would be added to the mound as new funeral structures were built on top of the previous. Items made from distant and exotic materials were found only in the burials of the leaders, not in the burials of the communal cemetery. There is evidence of a high infant mortality rate and of some wintertime starvation.
Tools were made from many different materials: needles were made from catfish spines, beads from river and ocean shells, bowls from turtle shells, fabric from plant fibers, bow-strings from strips of rawhide, and rope from inner tree-bark. Shrink-drying sinew was used as string for binding, and hooves were made into rattles, glue, and medicine. A stump-shaped pot has been found that may have been used to hold other pots over the cooking fire. Canoes ranged in length from twelve to seventy feet (4 to 23m) and were made by repeatedly scraping, burning, and chopping one side of a single log.
Cahokians enjoyed games of skill and chance. A hollow bone was tethered to a stick by a long string. A person would hold the stick to swing the bone, trying to catch the bone on the end of the stick. They also played hoop-and-pole, and La Crosse. The favored pastime was to roll a stone disk along the ground and try to throw a spear into the ground at the point where the disk was predicted to stop. Some persons were buried with their favorite disks.
The beliefs and organization of the people of Cahokia provided for the physical, social, emotional, religious, political, and economic needs of each individual and for the society as a whole. Their beliefs gave life meaning and balanced perfection and confusion, light and dark. They divided the universe into an upper and a lower world and had characteristic plants and animals for each division. For example, falcons and eagles represented the upper world while frogs, fish, and lizards represented the lower world. Beaver, owl, and cougar had characteristics of both divisions. They would certainly explain specific aspects of the world in terms of the interplay between these two divisions and their intermingling boundaries.
The people of Cahokia had to continue obtaining their food from the surrounding area even as their population grew. The nearby forests and grasslands needed to provide the materials for an increasing population. In such a densely populated area, just the smoke from all the family's fires must have been enormous. How did they dispose of waste? It is not yet known why people began to move away from the city after 1250 ad. Since only 1% of the site has been excavated, archaeologists may later find evidence of disease, war, or long-term famine. As the population exceeded the area's food and resource capacities, there would likely have been tightened political controls and increasingly limited access to goods and services. Individual families would begin to move away when they saw that the city was losing the "favor of the gods." From measurements of chemical levels in the bones of the deceased, archaeologists know that the people of Cahokia suffered from periodic malnutrition. Most every densely populated group of us humans has suffered periodic malnutrition because of farming cycles. Long after the city had been abandoned, the area of Cahokia was successively occupied by the Oneota, the Kawa, the Missouri, the Oto, the Winnebago, and then a mixture of people from most every region of the world.
Now that we’ve reviewed the major aspects of plant and animal domestication, you might now like to re-read Ralph Linton’s essay about the diffusion of inventions quoted in Chapter 9.
Farming developed throughout the world and was the beginning of our civilization of technology, cities, and government and was the beginning of our religions of morals. These things are the largest external aspects of our lives. Civilization is our cultural solution to the problem of coordinating numbers of people greater than the twenty to one- or two-hundred-person bands of our biological heritage. Civilization is also the tool of our culture that involves large-scale society and consists of our trial-and-error solutions to a succession of problems. For example, an agricultural surplus is followed by a procedure for surplus management. We humans have solved every problem that has developed. We know this is true because we are still here.
Those of us who lived during the times of the first cities had to invent everything required in the operation of a city. We see that today's cities have much in common with our very first city and that Mesopotamian society shares much more in common with that of your own city today than it does with that of any group of gatherer-hunters. We can readily see that there is much continuity in our civilization between Mesopotamian times and today and that there is much the same about life in a city no matter where in the world the city is located or when it existed. Today's city dwellers can recognize many aspects of their own daily lives in those of the first city-dwellers of ancient Mesopotamia. City-dwellers have complained about fast-paced city life and unkempt streets since the time of the first cities. The same complaint was heard in ancient Rome, in New York city in the 1850s, and today, too. Some city-dwellers would have it no other way.
We saw that a collection of a handful of bands of people forms into temporary tribes in reaction to a generating situation. Chiefdoms often develop to coordinate food production and the food reserves required by a group of full-time farmers. For the first time in our history we had to organize large public works, such as irrigation canals. The farming village grows into a city with a population of thousands of persons. When the efforts of those persons are building large religious temples and governmental palaces, we can tell that a state has formed. Dramatic changes occurred both in our social system and in our religion as our small bands of families grew into the political units of tribes, chiefdoms, and states. This happened because of the dramatic increase in population that was an accidental benefit from a forced shift to full-time farming, and this happened first for those of us humans who lived in the foothills of Mesopotamia.
The adoption of full-time farming in Mesopotamia resulted in a dramatically increased population (populations will again increase dramatically as the Industrial Revolution occurs) and the beginnings of village life. The first permanent villages of the Middle East occurred about 5500 bc and began with populations of 300 persons. The first city-sized urban areas occurred around 3500 bc and contained about 3,000 persons. Kings and Queens began to rule these individual city-states but had little direct intrusion on the lives of city residents (nothing compared to today's detailed regulations of occupations, automobiles, and building codes and such). By 2500 bc, one-quarter of the people of Mesopotamia lived in cities, and by 2000 bc, there were around twenty city-states each containing 100,000 to 500,000 persons. It then took three thousand years for farming villages to develop into cities and then into empires (2300 bc). Throughout this three-thousand year stretch of time, Mesopotamian farmers were living in peace and simply caring for their children, families, and societies–as we had been doing since the time of the first humans–because that is our nature.
For many centuries, cities continued to grow in population and expand in size until the surrounding canals and farmlands of two neighboring cities began to overlap. This overlap resulted in some border disputes between those cities. Nissen explains that these disputes were often negotiated by a third city. From this point on, conflicts between cities were incorporated into the political system of Mesopotamia. The canal conflicts were not caused by power hungry rulers and could not be solved militarily. Instead, the Mesopotamian political system increased in complexity to include the interactions of pairs and groups of cities. The individual city-states began to see that a higher authority was needed and began to form political unions. (Just as today's globalization has shown that larger political cooperation is needed to solve today's global problems involving all nations.) It had not yet occurred to any person to conquer the neighboring city or to attempt to be emperor of the entire world. We didn't invent this aspect of our civilization until after seeing that the cities of a region were already interacting.
The cities of Mesopotamia had been independent entities for centuries and farming villages had existed for 3,500 years before it occurred to anyone that they should attack neighboring cities to extract payments. Some of our kings and queens then began trying to build multi-city empires. Today, we sometimes think that there has always been war and that there will always be war. Full-scale war, where cities are destroyed and thousands of people are killed, did not occur until the city-states of us humans had grown to contain hundreds of thousands of persons. The power-seeking empire has not existed since the beginning of time. Like everything else in our civilization, it did not exist until it was invented by us humans. From 2000 bc until 400 ad, the empires of the Middle East and Mediterranean region increased in size and duration, culminating in the Roman empire, which existed from 50 bc to 400 ad.
At this point in our story, we have seen how the first cities, states, and empires developed. In the last 5,000 years, the peoples of the world have invented many machines and procedures. These technological advances are one aspect of our civilization. There has also been a handful of changes in our collective ideas of government, of science and industry, and of individual liberty. These ideas will be discussed in Chapter 14.
Only a social species can develop technology and civilization because its members cooperate and pool knowledge; a solitary animal cannot invent everything for itself in a single generation. As the size of our social groups began to exceed the twenty to one-hundred-person bands forming our natural, biological inheritance, and as we simultaneously invented civilization–or stumbled into it–we were taking a step away from having a biologically controlled way of life and a step toward choosing it for ourselves; the details of our culture and of our civilization are being chosen and developed by us.
While living in bands, our religions expressed our sense of amazement and awe for the seemingly magical powers of nature, including the earth, the sky, and the thunderstorm. We saw the "power in the bush" as that which allows a bush to just grow out of the ground where nothing before existed. Our religion also explained the origins of our ways of life. Part of being human is having a need for such explanations: this is the reason for this book. We saw that all persons have the same needs and that our religions help us satisfy those needs. For this reason, all persons should take the religious views of others to be as serious and sacred a part of their life as our own religion is in our own lives. Others are not "toy people."
When we became farmers, we also became much more dependent on the forces of nature, particularly rain and the sun. In the next chapter we will see that we began to give human form and characteristics to the deities of nature and that our myths were not soap operas about deities but were descriptions of the forces of nature and their interactions given in human terms. The increase in population within our cities and empires also saw a shift from the religions of awe for the powers of nature to religions of proper behavior.
In the past we knew each member of our band well enough to be able to predict their behavior in various situations. As the population of our cities grew from 300 to 300,000 persons, we began to encounter mainly strangers. (If you have lived in towns of varying sizes–from 300 to 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 persons–then you have some experience of how life differs in towns in which you know 100%, 10%, 1%, or 0.1% of the population and how our sense of community differs, too.) Our social environment had changed from that of gatherer-hunter bands into those of city and empire dwellers. At this time our first empires were waging large-scale wars that would kill thousands of people and destroy entire cities and states. If you lived during the time at which such large scale murder first occurred, you too would be deeply shocked by its occurrence. War is not glorious and serves no purpose–not even for those who thought of it and encouraged some of us to go along with them. This is also about the time at which today's ethical religions developed to reemphasize and institutionalize our innate, proper behavior–to do as the other did, and to expect the other to do what you did; surely this development came as a response to the times. We'll see in the next chapter that we also began to define the proper behavior of our rulers–that the character of a ruler is measured by the well-being and quality of life of the people.
By 1,500 years ago, our most influential teachers had settled the matter of moral instruction. Zoaster, Plato, Aristotle, Moses, Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad are among these most-influential persons. For the rest of time we will always refer to the teachings of these people. They did not invent these behaviors but were the persons who came around at the time that we first needed to have our Golden Rule and our proper behavior reemphasized because our stranger-filled cities experienced growing social and economic inequality and our emerging, warring empires were committing mass slaughter. These moral leaders institutionalized our Golden Rule. The religion of each of the three social environments of gatherer-hunters, the first farming-villagers, and of the people of empire-building cities satisfies certain basic emotional needs for security in an insecure world of mysterious phenomena, food collecting needs, illness, enemies, and death. These religions are the topic of the next chapter.
Questions
1. How is your city life different from that of the Mesopotamians?
2. Compare a Mesopotamian’s pride for their city with your pride for your own social structures. Is your city or nation sacred to you?
3. Your city contains roads and sewers and such things. List several of these things and describe how they are maintained and managed. Would the list of city things have been different in Mesopotamia.
4. Do you have any pottery or dishes?
5. Do you eat wheat, corn, or rice?
6. Make a list of the twenty most-common foods that you eat and then find out which region of the world they come from. How much of your food comes from the surrounding area? How is the food surplus handled today? How many day's supply of food does your society keep on hand? What are the geographic limits of your society? Do you get any food from the other side of the planet?
7. To make and sell items such as pottery or clothing today, one needs materials, a person to prepare the item, and stores for selling the finished item. Was the manufacturing and marketing procedure different in ancient Mesopotamia? If very few persons could read words, what sorts of signs were placed in front of Mesopotamian stores?
8. If you were raised in a gatherer-hunter band in Mesopotamia and then moved into a city and began having children, would your children think that the old ways of the band or the new ways of the city were "right." What would your grandchildren think?
9. Do you know of a nearby area that has many different food sources because it contains mountains, valleys, rivers, and lakes?
10. What were some similarities and differences in the daily life of Mesopotamian, Yoruban, Cahokian and Kalapalo people?
11. What do you use writing and arithmetic for today? Are these uses different from those of a Mesopotamian?
12. How many different writing systems are being used today?
13. Which occupations have replaced that of the scribe's in today's cities?
14. Name some persons from ancient times. Why are they still known today?
15. Compare the legal status of Yoruba, Kalapalo, and Mesopotamian women with that of your own people today.
16. Why do farmers use plows and when did they learn to do this?
17. How is the craft industry in your city different from that of Mesopotamia, Yoruba, and Cahokia? Compare their agriculture, cloth making, and money lending activities.
18. In what way does your extended family cooperate economically?
19. How is kingship different today than it was in Mesopotamia, Yoruba, and in Medieval Europe? How do king-citizen relations compare then and now?
20. Would neighborhood courts serve any purpose in your city?
21. Why do regions go to war today? (Typically, there are about fifty wars occurring at any moment in today's world of two hundred nations.) Do gatherer-hunters have wars? As the population levels of our gatherer-hunter ancestors began to reach the carrying capacity of their regions, did some groups begin to live by attacking other people to plunder their food? Do gatherer-hunters have plunderable surpluses? How far can plundered food and other items be transported? Are the weapons of plunderers found in the archaeological record?
22. Was the industry of Ancient Mesopotamia producing goods for the general population or just for the temple and the King? Did the producers make goods only as they were ordered by the King or were consumers driving production levels?
23. Is Mesopotamian government a form of band, tribe, chiefdom, or state? How about those of Cahokia and of the Yoruba?
24. Is the Mesopotamian form of religion related to its form of government? Are Yoruban or Cahokian religious and governmental forms related?
25. Compare your own way of life with those of Mesopotamia, Yoruba, Cahokia, and the Kalapalo. Compare the societies of these peoples with your own.
26. What can you say about the levels of social and economic equality in Mesopotamian, Yoruban, Cahokian and Kalapaloan society? Are some persons richer or poorer? Can some impose their views or preferences on others? Compare the health of Mesopotamian, Yoruban, and Cahokian infants and those of your own group, today? Does each Mesopotamian, Yoruban, and Cahokian individual have equal access to education and the benefits of society? Do the Mesopotamians, Yorubans, or Cahokians have a sense of belonging to a community? Do they have a feeling of control over their own lives and over their own continued well-being?
27. Do you see any manifestations of the primate social system in Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian society? Do you see the Golden Rule at work in Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian society? In which ways do the Mesopotamians, Yorubans, and Cahokians behave like mammals or primates?
28. Do the Mesopotamian, Yoruban, and Cahokian societies have business, governmental, or religious aspects? Compare their commercial, governmental, and religious practices to those of your own culture.
29. Do Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian persons have innate talents for becoming engineers, artists, or doctors? Do Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian persons pursue the limits of their talents and interests?
30. What can you say about crime among the Mesopotamians, Yorubans, and Cahokians? Can you compare reasons for crime, amount of crime, and deterrents against crime among the Mesopotamians and your own people?
31. What can you say about poverty among the Mesopotamians, Yorubans, and Cahokians? Can you compare reasons for poverty and the amount of poverty between the Mesopotamians, Yorubans, or Cahokians and your own people?
32. Do Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian persons care for their family, friends, and society? For a Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian person, what are the most important things in life? What are the most important things in your own life?
33. If farming was our solution to the overcrowding of a gatherer-hunter's region, what will be our solution to an overcrowded planet? Will we farm the entire surface of alien worlds and haul planet-sized harvests to the Earth and other places? Will our population be limited to the number of persons feedable by farming the Earth alone? Will we produce food in chemical factories rather than growing it in fields?
34. Describe the exchange of goods between the Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian city residents with neighboring gatherer-hunters and distant, mineral miners.
35. Compare the age of marriage among the Kalapalo, Yorubans, Cahokians, and Mesopotamians with that of your own people today? Also compare the number of children per family and the length of time that children are breast-fed.
36. Compare the functions and cooperations of extended family members among the Kalapalo, Yoruban, Cahokians, and Mesopotamians with that of your own people today?
37. List some aspects of your city-life and of your city, its operation, and occupations that can be represented by a deity.
38. Compare elements of your city-life with those of the Mesopotamians, Yorubans, and Cahokians, including apprenticeship systems, occupations, systems of long-distance trade, courts and legal codes.
39. Lists today's empires and kingdoms. Are they at war? If so, why are they and whose idea was it?
40. Compare the worldwide spread of agriculture, democracy, industrialization, Christianity, Islam, cars, and computers. Compare the manner of spread, the driving forces behind the spread, and the speed at which they were spread.
41. What sort of products did the Mesopotamians make, sell and buy? List the twenty most commonly owned products in your neighborhood–for example, furniture and clothing. How do you think the list of furnishings, utensils, and decorations found in a typical Mesopotamian home compared with those of your own home? How do the number of these items compare?
42. Was Mesopotamia an industrialized region?
43. List today's forms of activities for "predicting the future." Describe a recent news article about an unusual relation between a pair of different animals, for example between a cat and a mouse or between two zoo animals. Can you explain this event in terms of deities for corporations, governments, or their agencies?
44. Our ancestral species migrated in groups to spread throughout the world's surface. For the last five hundred years we have been migrating as individual persons and families around the world in search of a better life. Compare the reasons for entire groups to migrate to those of a single family.
45. A crop field must be harvested on a singularly appropriate day. What sort of cooperation existed among the members of Mesopotamian, Yoruban, and Cahokian villages in harvesting crop fields? Could a single family handle their entire field? What sort of field size and cooperation occurred in a Medieval farming village, or in the U.S. around the year 1800? In various regions of the world today?
46. What can you say about unemployment in Mesopotamian, Yoruban, or Cahokian cities? What portions of the population were involved in farming and commerce? Did Mesopotamian, Yoruban, and Cahokian cities go through economic cycles of boom and bust as occurs today? Can you relate the magnitude of business cycles to the portion of a population involved in commerce?
47. Do you think the elders within an early farming village warned youngsters about the "dire consequences" of the ongoing loss of knowledge needed for gathering and hunting? Do you think some children complained that they had twice as much to learn as their grandparents because they now had to study farming in addition to gathering and hunting?
48. Describe the roles of integration and conflict (as described in Chapter 11) in the creation of Mesopotamian farming villages and city-states.
49. Describe the history of roads. Who builds them? Who pays for them? Why are they built?
50. How many different peoples have contributed to our knowledge in each of house building, clothing materials, mathematics, and science?
51. How have houses changed during the last 30,000 years? How is a house type related to climate and culture?
52. When is it ok for the people of one region to harm the people of another region?
53. How much have telephones, cars, radios, televisions, and computers changed our daily life? How are the effects of these inventions different from the effects of the inventions of farming, the city, writing, or the empire? Have any of these inventions changed us biologically into persons that are different from what we were before their invention? Have they made us biologically different from the Kalapalo people? Are you and a Kalapaloan, Yoruban, Cahokian, or Mesopotamian person biologically the same?
54. Shortly after World War I, some soldiers who had bayoneted the head of another person developed uncontrollable head-ticks; if they had bayoneted another person's shoulder then they instead developed a shoulder tick. What sort of ticks did ancient clubbers and choppers develop? Do you think news reports should include pictures of mangled and dying persons?
55. Create a piece of art involving the origin of farming and civilization or explaining how war makes you feel.
56. Could you use a Yoruba style savings-club today?
57. Compare the role and importance of the Yoruba clan to the nuclear and extended family.
58. What portion of human cultures are polygamous? Do they always combine numerous, marriageable young women with fewer marriageable older men because young men are not able to marry?
59. What sorts of simple disputes in your neighborhood could be handled by a Yoruba street-trial? Why do today's nations have legal courts instead of neighborhood settlement courts?
60. Describe the blending of Muslim, Christian, and traditional religious rituals in Nigeria today.
61. Compare a Mesopotamian canal digger's contract with the government to a similar contract made with your government today.
62. Did single, independent families become the first farmers of any of the world's regions or was it always a community of farming families? How many farming families must combine their efforts to be self-sufficient and able to survive off nothing but their own crops? Can a single family farm alone? How frequent are crop failures? Will a single family survive a crop failure? Will several families survive?
63. Writing and books were developed with our city-states. What is the history and role of sacred books?
64. Is it more likely that everyone could watch the equinox sunrise from within Woodhenge or would just a small number of privileged persons be allowed to do this? Describe the scientific centers and religious sanctuaries that are visible near your home today and the influence they have on you.
65. Compare the reasons for the origination of the city of Cahokia with those of Ancient Mesopotamia and the Yoruba. What role did the number and size of the rivers and their change through time play in this process?
Primary sources for the chapter
The Ancient Mesopotamian City, Marc Van De Mieroop, 1997, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Life in the Ancient Near East 3100-332 b.c.e., Daniel C Snell, 1997, Yale University, New Haven.
The Early History of the Ancient Near East 9000-2000 BC, Hans J. Nissen, 1988, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Civilization Before Greece and Rome, H.W.F. Saggs, 1989, Yale University Press, New Haven.
The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria, William Bascom, 1969, Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, Illinois.
Cahokia, City of the Sun, Prehistoric Urban Center in the American Bottom, Claudia Gellman Mink, 1999, Cahokia Mounds Museum Society, Collinsville, Illinois.
Suggestions for further reading
You can take a virtual tour through Cahokia in the DVD 500 Nations, 1994, Warner Video.
Introduction to Archaeology by James J Hester, 1976, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.
The Archaeology of North America, Dean Snow, 1976, The Viking Press, Inc., New York.
The Rise of Civilization by David and Joan Oates, 1976, Elsevier.
The People of the Stone Age (volume two), and Old World Civilizations (volume three), of the five-volume Illustrated History of Humankind, general editor Goran Burenhult, 1993, Harper SanFrancisco. You will enjoy reading all five volumes.
Early Civilizations, Bruce G. Trigger, 1993, The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo.
The Origin of Agriculture An International Perspective Edited by C. Wesley Cowan and Patty Jo Watson, 1992, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.
The Spanish Frontier in North America, David J. Weber, 1992, Yale University Press, New Haven. Weber also includes a few unbelievable but true stories of the adventures of some sixteenth-century New World conquistadores and of some native American captives. These true stories are better than movies. 1) Cabeza de Vaca's group lost their ships and equipment in Florida. They spent a few years walking from Florida back to Mexico City, becoming prisoners, shaman, and traders along the way. A movie has been made of this story. 2) One girl was taken prisoner in New Mexico. Her captors made her accompany them on their journey to Kansas, where she escaped. But she then had the misfortune of wandered into another European group–the only one within thousands of miles–and was captured again. 3) A man was taken prisoner near Boston. He learned the sailing ways of his captors as he sailed with them many times between Europe and Mexico. He escaped several years later when he was once again near his homeland. He then taught his home people how to dress like friars and wait at the seashore to get passing ships to stop, which they then attacked.
Old World Civilizations, Volume 3 of the Illustrated History of Humankind, general editor Goran Burenhult, 1993, Harper SanFrancisco.
World Prehistory 3rd Ed by Grahame Clark, 1977, Cambridge University Press, London.
A History of the Ancient World, Chester G. Starr, 1991, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization, Soviet Excavations in Northern Iraq, Edited by Norma Yoffe and Jeffrey J Clark, 1993, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, Arizona.
Mesopotamian Civilization, The Material Foundations, D.T. Potts, 1997, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, Alexander Heidel, 1949, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
The Sumerians, Their History, Culture, and Character, Samuel Noah Kramer, 1963, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Babylon, Joan Oates, 1979, Thames and Hudson, London.
Ancient Mesopotamia Portrait of a Dead Civilization, A. Leo Oppenheim, 1977, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Mesopotamia. Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, Jean Bottero, 1992 The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Stephan Bertman, 2003, Facts On File, New York.
Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Jean Bottero, 2001,Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty, Hugh Kennedy, 2004, DeCapo Press division of Perseus Books, Cambridge, Massachusettes.
The Great Human Diasporas, The History of Diversity and Evolution, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, 1993, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Massachusetts.
In Search of the Indo-Europeans, Language, Archaeology and Myth, J.P, Mallory, 1989, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London.
A History of Ancient Egypt, Nicolas Grimal, 1992, Blackwell, Oxford.
Egypt Before the Pharaohs, Michael A. Hoffman, 1979, Alfred A Knopf, New York.
Ancient Lives, Daily Life in Egypt of the Pharaohs, John Romer, 1984, Henry Holt and Company, New York.
Religion in Ancient Egypt, Byron E. Shafer et. al. 1991, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
The History of Ancient Israel, Michael Grant, 1984, Charles Scribnor's & Sons, New York.
Ancient Israelite Religion, Susan Niditch, 1997, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
The Phoenicians and the West–Politics, Colonies and Trade, Maria Eugenia Aubet, 1987, Cambridge University Press.
The Hittites, J.G. Macqueen, 1986, Thames and Hudson, London.
The Might That Was Assyria, H.W.F. Saggs, 1984, Sidgwick and Jackson, London.
History of the Persian Empire, A.T. Olmstead, 1948, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
The Etruscans, Massimo Pallottino, 1975, Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN.
Virtual Archaeology, Re-creating Ancient Worlds, Edited by Maurizio Forte and Alberto Siliotti, 1996, Harry N. Abrams Inc Publishers, Thames and Hudson, London.
Prehistoric-Britain, Timothy Darvill, 1987, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Angkor, Splendors of the Khmer Civilization, Marilia Albanese, 2002, Barnes & Noble Books, New York.
Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, Georges Jean, 1987, Harry N Abrams, Inc Publishers, New York.
League of the Iroquois, Henry Lewis Morgan, 1962, Corinth Books, Inc, New York.
Little Book of Early American Trades, edited by Peter Stockham, 1976, Dover Publications, New York.
Copyright © 2009 Robert Dalling, www.UsHumans.net
