Chapter 1: From the Origins of Agriculture to the First River-Valley Civilizations, 8000–1500 b.c.e. 13
CHAPTER 1
From the Origins of Agriculture to the First River-Valley Civilizations, 8000–1500 b.c.e.
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter students should be able to:
1. Describe the ways in which early humans adapted to different environments and be able to differentiate between hunter-gatherer and food-producing economies.
2. Analyze the environmental causes and effects of the transition from hunter-gatherer to food-producing economies.
3. Describe the relationship between the development of different economies (hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and pastoral) and their different social and cultural characteristics.
4. Explain how the earliest civilizations developed in challenging environments.
5. Draw connections between the organization of labor resources in early civilizations and their social and political structures.
6. Assess the impact of new technologies on the social development of early civilizations.
7. Trace the development of social and political institutions and religious beliefs in river-valley civilizations and understand the relationship between these institutions and beliefs and their experiences with the natural environment.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Before Civilization
A. Food Gathering and Stone Technology
1. Stone toolmaking, the first recognizable cultural activity, first appeared around 2 million years ago. The period known as the Stone Age lasted until around 4,000 years ago. It is subdivided into the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age-to 10,000 years ago) and the Neolithic (New Stone Age).
2. The diet of Stone Age people probably consisted more of foraged vegetable foods than of meat. Human use of fire can be traced back to 1 to 1.5 million years ago, but conclusive evidence of cooking (in the form of clay pots) can only be found as far back as 12,500 years ago.
3. Researchers believe that in Ice Age society, women would have been responsible for gathering, cooking, and childcare, while men would have been responsible for hunting. The hunter-gatherers probably lived in fairly small groups and migrated regularly to follow game animals and to collect seasonally ripening plants.
4. Migrating hunter-gatherer groups built huts of branches, stones, bones, skins, and leaves as seasonal camps. Animal skins served as clothing, with the earliest evidence of woven cloth appearing about 26,000 years ago.
5. Hunter-gatherers probably had to spend no more than three to five hours a day on getting food, clothing, and shelter. This left them a great deal of time for artistic endeavors, toolmaking, and social life.
6. The foundations of what later ages called science, art, and religion also date to the Stone Age. Gatherers learned which local plants were edible and when they ripened, as well as which natural substances were effective for medicine, consciousness altering, dyeing, and other purposes. Hunters learned the habits of game animals. People experimented with techniques of using plant and animal materials for clothing, twine, and construction. Knowledge of the environment included identifying which minerals made good paints and which stones made good tools.
7. Cave paintings appear as early as 32,000 years ago in Europe and North Africa and somewhat later in other parts of the world. Because many feature food animals like wild oxen, reindeer, and horses, some scholars believe that the art recorded hunting scenes or played a magical and religious role in hunting. Some scholars suspect that other marks in cave paintings and on bones may represent efforts at counting or writing.
8. Cave art suggests that Ice Age people had a complex religion. Their burial sites indicate that they may have believed in an afterlife.
B. The Agricultural Revolutions
1. Agricultural revolutions—the domestication of plants and animals—were a series of changes in food production that occurred independently in various parts of the world.
2. The first stage of the long process of domestication of plants was semicultivation, in which people would scatter the seeds of desirable food-producing plants in places where they would be likely to grow.
3. Early farmers used fire to clear fields of shrubs and trees and discovered that ashes were a natural fertilizer. After the burn-off, farmers used blades and axes to keep the land clear.
4. The transition to agriculture took place first and is best documented in the Middle East, but the same sort of transition took place independently in other parts of the world, including the eastern Sahara, the Nile Valley, Greece, central Europe, and along the Danube River. Early farmers practiced swidden agriculture, changing fields periodically as the fertility of the soil became depleted.
5. The environments in which agriculture developed dictated the choice of crops. Wheat and barley were suited to the Mediterranean area; sorghum, millet, and teff to sub-Saharan Africa; yams to equatorial West Africa; rice to eastern and southern Asia; and maize, potatoes, quinoa, and manioc to various parts of the Americas.
6. Domestication of animals proceeded at the same time as domestication of plants. Human hunters first domesticated dogs; sheep and goats were later domesticated for their meat, milk, and wool.
7. Like domestic plant species, varieties of domesticated animals spread from one region to another: cattle in northern Africa and/or the Middle East, donkeys in northern Africa, water buffalo in China, humped-back Zebu cattle in India, horses and two-humped camels in central Asia, one-humped camels in Arabia, chickens in Southeast Asia, and pigs in several places.
8. In the Americas, domestic llamas provided meat, transport, and wool, while dogs, guinea pigs, and turkeys provided meat. Scholars believe that these were the only domesticated American species. However, despite the geographical isolation of the Americas, domestic chickens first appeared before the coming of the Europeans, presumably by way of Pacific Ocean seafarers.
9. Pastoralism came to predominate in arid regions such as the Sahara. Moving large herds of grazing livestock to new pastures and watering places throughout the year made pastoralists almost as mobile as foragers and discouraged substantial dwellings and the accumulation of bulky possessions.
10. Most researchers agree that humans made the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural or pastoralist economies because the global warming of the Holocene period (beginning 11,000 b.c.e.) brought with it environmental changes that reduced the supplies of game and wild food plants.
11. The agricultural revolutions brought about a significant increase in the world’s human population—from 10 million in 5000 b.c.e. to between 50 and 100 million by 1000 b.c.e.
C. Life in Neolithic Communities
1. Evidence that an ecological crisis may have triggered the transition to food production has prompted reexamination of the assumption that farmers enjoyed a better life than foragers. Early farmers probably had to work much harder and for much longer periods than food gatherers. Although early farmers commanded a more reliable food supply, their diet contained less variety and nutrition than that of foragers. Skeletons show that Neolithic farmers were shorter on average than earlier foragers. Death from contagious diseases ravaged farming settlements.
2. Some researchers envision violent struggles between farmers and foragers, while others see a more peaceful transition. In most cases, farmers seem to have displaced foragers by gradual infiltration rather than by conquest.
3. Kinship and marriage bound farming communities together. Nuclear family size (parents and their children) may not have risen, but kinship relations traced back over more generations brought distant cousins into a common kin network. This encouraged the holding of land by large kinship units known as lineages or clans.
4. Some societies trace descent equally through both parents, but most give greater importance to descent through either the mother (matrilineal societies) or the father (patrilineal societies).
5. The early food producers appear to have worshiped ancestral and nature spirits. Their religions centered on sacred groves, springs, and wild animals and included deities such as the Earth Mother and the Sky God.
6. Early food-producing societies used megaliths (big stones) to construct burial chambers and calendar circles and to aid in astronomical observations.
7. Most people in early food-producing societies lived in villages, but in some places, the environment supported the growth of towns in which one finds more elaborate dwellings, facilities for surplus food storage, and communities of specialized craftspeople. The two best-known examples of the remains of Neolithic towns are at Jericho and Çatal Hüyük. Jericho, on the west bank of the Jordan River, was a walled town with mud-brick structures and dates back to 8000 b.c.e.
8. Çatal Hüyük, in central Anatolia, dates to 7000–5000 b.c.e. Çatal Hüyük was a center for the trade in obsidian. Its craftspeople produced pottery, baskets, woolen cloth, beads, and leather and wood products. There is no evidence of a dominant class or centralized political leadership.
9. The art of Çatal Hüyük reflects a continued fascination with hunting, but the remains indicate that agriculture was the mainstay of the economy. The remains also indicate that the people of Çatal Hüyük had a flourishing religion, having one religious shrine for every two houses. Rituals involved burning dishes of grain, legumes, and meat but not sacrificing live animals. Statues of plump female deities far outnumber statues of male deities, suggesting that the inhabitants venerated a goddess as their principal deity. The large number of females who were buried elaborately in shrine rooms may have been priestesses of this cult.
10. The remains at Çatal Hüyük include decorative or ceremonial objects made of copper, lead, silver, and gold. These metals are naturally occurring, soft, and easy to work, but not suitable for tools or weapons, which continued to be made from stone. The discovery of decorative and ceremonial objects of metal in graves indicates that they became symbols of status and power.
II. Mesopotamia
A. Settled Agriculture in an Unstable Landscape
1. Mesopotamia is the alluvial plain area alongside and between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The area is a difficult environment for agriculture because there is little rainfall, the rivers flood at the wrong time for grain agriculture, and the rivers change course unpredictably.
2. Although the first domestication of plants and animals around 8000 b.c.e. occurred nearby, in the so-called Fertile Crescent region of northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia, agriculture did not reach Mesopotamia until approximately 5000 b.c.e. The hot, arid climate of southern Mesopotamia calls for irrigation, the artificial provision of water to crops. Just after 3000 b.c.e., people began constructing irrigation canals to bring water to fields farther away from the rivers.
3. By 4000 b.c.e., farmers were using ox-drawn plows and a sort of planter to cultivate barley. Other crops and natural resources of the area included date palms, vegetables, reeds and fish, and fallow land for grazing goats and sheep. Draft animals included cattle and donkeys and later (second millennium b.c.e.) camels and horses. The area has no significant wood, stone, or metal resources.
4. The earliest people of Mesopotamia and the initial creators of Mesopotamian culture were the Sumerians, who were present at least as early as 5000 b.c.e. They created the framework of civilization in Mesopotamia during a long period of dominance in the third millennium b.c.e.
5. Other peoples lived in Mesopotamia as well. As early as 2900 b.c.e., personal names recorded in inscriptions from the more northerly cities reveal a non-Sumerian Semitic language. By 2000 b.c.e., the Sumerians were supplanted by Semitic-speaking peoples who dominated and intermarried with the Sumerians but preserved many elements of Sumerian culture.
B. Cities, Kings, and Trade
1. Early Mesopotamian society was a society of villages and cities linked together in a system of mutual interdependence. Cities depended on villages to produce surplus food to feed the nonproducing urban elite and craftspeople. In return, the cities provided the villages with military protection, markets, and specialist-produced goods.
2. Together, a city and its agricultural hinterland formed what we call a city-state. The Mesopotamian city-states sometimes fought with each other over resources like water and land; at other times, city-states cooperated with each other in sharing resources and allowing traders safe passage through their territories.
3. City-states could mobilize human resources to open new agricultural land and to build and maintain irrigation systems. Construction of irrigation systems required the organization of large numbers of people for labor.
4. Although we know little of the political institutions of Mesopotamian city-states, we do have written and archeological records of two centers of power: temples and palaces. One or more temples, centrally located, housed each city-state’s deity or deities and their associated cults (sets of religious rituals). Temples owned agricultural lands and stored the gifts that worshipers donated. Head priests, who controlled each shrine and managed its wealth, played prominent political and economic roles.
5. Secular leadership developed in the third millennium b.c.e. when “big men” (lugal), who may have originally been leaders of armies, emerged as secular leaders. Although the lugal’s position was not hereditary, it often passed from a father to a capable son.
6. The location of the temple in the city’s heart and the less prominent site of the king’s palace symbolize the later emergence of royalty. The king’s power grew at the expense of the priesthood, however, because the army backed him. The priests and temples retained influence because of their wealth and religious mystique, but they gradually became dependent on the palace. Some Mesopotamian kings claimed divinity, but this concept did not take root. Normally the king portrayed himself as the deity’s earthly representative.
7. By the late third millennium b.c.e., kings assumed responsibility for the upkeep and building of temples and the proper performance of ritual. Other royal responsibilities included maintaining city walls and defenses, extending and repairing irrigation channels, guarding property rights, warding off foreign attacks, and establishing justice.
8. Eventually some of the city-states became powerful enough to absorb others and thus create larger territorial states. Two examples of this development are the Akkadian state, founded by Sargon of Akkad around 2350 b.c.e., and the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112–2004 b.c.e.).
9. A third territorial state was established by Hammurabi and is known to historians as the Old Babylonian state. Hammurabi is also known for the law code associated with his name, which provides us with a source of information about Old Babylonian law, punishments, and society.
10. The states of Mesopotamia needed resources and obtained them not only by territorial expansion but also through a flourishing long-distance trade. Merchants were originally employed by temples or palaces; later, in the second millennium b.c.e., private merchants emerged. Trade was carried out through barter because coins did not reach Mesopotamia until several centuries after their first appearance during the sixth century b.c.e. Items that could not be bartered had their value calculated in relation to fixed weights of precious metal, primarily silver, or measures of grain.