To do this week:
B. Read your textbook, Chapter 1.
C. Read this lecture.
D. View Bones of Turkana- a video on the earliest humans.
E. Do the work on understanding dating systems and play the Radioactive Dating Game and visit the virtual archaeological site for the vessel Uluburun, and answer the discussion questions on each.
The Radioactive Dating Game is a game about how archaeologists use radioactive isotopes to date artifacts they find as they go about digging and understanding a site. Your assignment is to view the site, understand how radioactive dating (carbon-14 and Uranium-238) is used to find date ranges for objects. Then discuss what you found, and the process you went through to find it, on the class discussion site. (Chat Room, in the left hand tool bar)
The virtual archaeological site for the vessel Uluburun is based on an actual site in the Black Sea. In the "Discussions and Private Messages" tool, answer the challenges questions (yes, all ten of them). Then post your answers on the discussion board in Laulima (Chat Room, in the left-hand tool bar).
F. A total of two discussions is due for this first unit. Both must be finished by Sunday Jan 18, at 11:59 PM).
Perhaps the most important thing to realize about the development of human civilization is that it came from the need to eat. The questions with which we have to begin with are: how did humans survive before farming? Why did they choose to become farmers? We also have to ask ourselves why humans didn't adopt agriculture much earlier.
For most of the time in which we have lived on our planet, foraging appears to have provided all the food that humans needed for most of our existence. Humans did not adopt agriculture until it was absolutely necessary. Environmental problems like climate shifts, animal migrations, and water scarcity eventually made agriculture necessary. The great advantage of agriculture was that it provided more food per square acre than foraging. Another advantage was that the food grown could usually be stored easily. However, agriculture also caused major problems. It encouraged population growth. This changed patterns of work in human societies.Farmers also grew only a limited number of food crops. Societies became dependent upon agriculture, and over time it became harder to go back to foraging. Abandoning a farm after one generation of farming might have been possible, but after a few generations of population growth, the large numbers of people could not live by foraging. Agriculture also changed the hierarchy in social organization of most societies. Humans needed a certain kind of social organization in order to farm successfully. That kind of organization was usually not good for successful foraging. So humans probably knew how to farm much earlier than they started to actually farm. They did not become farmers until climate changes made foraging less productive.
One cause of farming was environmental crisis. Starting about 12,000 years ago, geological, archaeological, and botanical studies all show us that there was a major drying and cooling period that lasted for about 1000 years. As rainfall was reduced in many areas of the world, because much of Earth's water was locked up in growing ice caps, areas that had been productive for foraging societies, began to become deserts. One example of this was Iraq, which we know to have been covered by a large oak forest at that time. As vegetation, and the animals that lived within it, retreated, foraging groups had to go further and further from their established routes to find food. Eventually in an area of northern Iraq and Syria that we call the Fertile Crescent, people began to establish farms, and to live permanently near them in order to care for their plants. So it is pretty clear that the response to environmental crisis was to grow and store food. In villages like Catal Huyuk and Dra, we see the creation of the first successful storehouses for grain. Although they worked harder than they had as foragers, they were able, for the first time in history, to create a surplus of food. This is one of the keys to understanding developments that came after.
What were the effects of farming on human communities? These are so varied and complex that whole libraries continue to be written on the subject. Today, we call that subject "history." Those effects, though, provide the themes that we will be concentrating on in the first part of this course. They include a new system of organizing society in a hierarchical way, with leaders on the top, workers on the bottom and many levels of skill and professionalism in between. This system was unequal, and that led to a number of different effects, too. Those who would lead had to both justify and secure their power and right to rule. The need for various layers of production and social order led to the creation of systems of morality and law. The search for justification of the political status quo, and for ways to secure moral attitudes, as well as for ways to explain natural phenomena moved humans toward the organized religions we know today. Attempts to understand and use the resources around them steered human societies in the direction of philosophy, science, and technology. Religion, practical storage and habitation needs, and ceremonial beliefs caused the movement toward monumental architecture, art, and politics and theology. All of these things are present in civilizations, though only in rudimentary form, or not at all, in farming villages. For the first 5,000 years of setted human history, people lived in villages, and had not invented cities
In many senses, the change in sustenance patterns from foraging to agriculture can also be said to have been the cause of most of the major changes in patterns of life that we associate with civilization. Agriculture made possible the specialization of labor. Since there was more food produced per square acre, and because the grains farmed in the Middle East could be stored, some members of a group could do things other than farm. Some produced tools. Some produced clothing. Others became leaders, priests, and traders.
Increasing population meant that villages were constantly growing, and eventually the social structure of egalitarianism gave way to a structure that could accommodate the fact that everyone in a group was not known to everyone else. This growing anonymity meant a number of things. Morality and law became critical to prevent people from causing loss and pain to others with whom they had no social connection. Growing numbers of people had to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and controlled.
All of these complications led to the creation of important solutions, which led to new problems, and thus new solutions.
Another complication that was the result of agriculture came in the form of mortality. Humans who farmed faced the possibility that their crops would fail. Because foragers had access to a much greater variety of food sources, they rarely faced starvation on a large scale. However, farming societies needed access to the products of other societies in order to supplement their diets. They did this through trade.
Farmers also had domesticated animals. Medical research has shown that many of the most devastating diseases that plague humanity came from animal diseases that mutated to inhabit humans. These diseases include smallpox, diphtheria, rubella, anthrax, and many more.
A positive result of agriculture was that it could produce a surplus. Having more than necessary to survive also enabled trade. The surplus also encouraged social divisions between the wealthy and the poor. People who controlled the surplus also controlled others who needed food and would work for it. Since land was the basis for agriculture, land became the primary form of wealth. For example, in Egypt during the Old Kingdom Period (3100-2686 BCE) the Pharaoh (king) owned all the land. Everyone else had to rent it from him. He allowed people to farm his land in return for 50% of the crop they produced. This system of land tenure was the basis, on many levels, for the economic and power relationships that existed in Ancient societies. Thus, rather than the trade-based economics that we think of in our own societies, we can only understand ancient economies, and the power structures that accompanied them, by understanding the importance of agriculture, and the land tenure systems associated with it in any given society.
Farming did not immediately lead to cities. The first farming villages were little more than settled versions of the clan system used by the foraging societies which they came from. In many cases, half the group would settle down into an agricultural situation, and half the group would continue to forage, with both groups helping each other.
Places like Çatal Huyuk, in the Crescent of Anatolia (what we now call Turkey) continued to supplement their agricultural activities with nearby foraging for a very long time after their inception. Çatal Huyuk was on the slopes of a volcano. Because of this, its inhabitants were able to find obisdian, a volcanic glass that can be turned into a very sharp blade. They made knives from the obsidian which were valuable in trade. They appear to have traded these knives for salt from Jericho, as well as wild mushrooms, berries, and other items that they were unable to grow or find themselves.
Farmers in the period just after the beginnings of agriculture lived in what we call the Neolithic period. The Neolithic is the first period of the Holocene epoch, which began 40,000 years ago. We still live in the Holocene epoch today, though not in the Neolithic period any longer. Neolithic farmers usually lived in villages like Çatal Huyuk. The people of Çatal Huyuk built their houses so that they shared walls. This made the town easy to defend. Close quarters also mean easy access to storage rooms designed to preserve grains and other agricultural products. Their clan-based populations were all related to one another in some way as well. These were very small, very close communities.
During the Neolithic period, agriculture changed. As population grew, farmers needed more cropland. As they cleared more land, they experienced more and more environmental problems. Rainfall was plentiful in the Fertile Crescent, but it was not sufficient to water the crops needed to feed such large populations. The overuse of the land led to decreasing productivity. Eventually, much of the Fertile Crescent area was desertified.
To the south of the Fertile Crescent, in the deserts of Iraq and Egypt, the huge rivers flowed through wide flat plains capable of supporting large populations. When villages like Çatal Huyuk became uninhabitable, people began to move toward what we call southern Iraq. They built farms and villages in the delta region where the Tigris River meets the Euphrates Rivers. Here they found the Absu, a great lake of fresh water bordered by green marshland that was home not only to plants, but to birds, freshwater fish, and numerous other animals. This was before the dessication of Iraq; before the silt from the two great rivers filled in the Absu and made it a lake of sand, and before over-farming turned the soil into acidic, saline dirt.
The original location of Sumeria, the first "civilized" place, was on the northern edge of the Absu, where the two rivers meet. The people there called it Sumeria. Here is where humans built the first cities using trees brought from the Mediterranean coast of what is now Lebanon, and mud bricks formed in molds with reeds to strengthen them, then baked in the sun to harden. Many of those bricks still exist in the remains of the structures of the ancient Sumerians.
The rivers themselves were not what we imagine today – two wide bodies of water snaking from North to South, from the great Zagros Mountains to the Absu. Instead, by the time they reached the soft silt-deposited soil north of what we call the Persian Gulf, the water in them found its way to the Absu and the sea in small channels, eddies, and streams which criss-crossed and irrigated the fertile silt deposited in seasons past. Such soil was well-watered, ready to grow the crops that had been developed in the fertile crescent farming villages.
As far as archaeologists can tell, cities developed in Sumeria only slowly. The first city was Eridu, whose archaeological remains have yielded a wonderful story. The temple of Eridu, a great ziggurat, was built upon the ruins of other temples – each time a fire, flood, or earthquake destroyed the city, they were rebuilt using the ruins and rubble of the previous construction as the foundation for the new one. Today this allows archaeologists to dig through identifiable layers of the city and reconstruct its physical history. The Great Ziggurat in Eridu, it turns out, was built on the exact same spot as a much earlier, tiny shrine, and the layers in between show a village, then a city, in various stages of growth.
Cities did not grow up overnight. As agriculture improved, population increased. The populations of the earliest Sumerian cities were ethnically diverse. This suggests that much of their population came from migration rather than from birth. Mesopotamia must have been, for many, a good place to be.
Migration puts pressure on the resources of the land,though. It was probably population pressure which led eventually to the other parts of the puzzle of civilization. The Sumerians needed to farm more and more land in order to feed growing populations. So they began to build canals for irrigation. Such large construction projects required planning, management of workers, and knowledge of engineering and geography. This probably led to a division of labor, with diggers who provided the hard labor, and supervisors who directed, planned, and organized the work.
Southern Mesopotamia was the first place, where civilization began. This was possible because of agriculture. Mesopotamia means "the land between the rivers," in Greek. Those who lived there called it Sumer. Here, for the first time, people gathered together in groups larger than the extended clan that had been the basis for Neolithic farming villages. They created organized systems of planting, harvesting, and food distribution. This led to a food surplus. That surplus made it possible for the society to support some of its members in pursuits other than agriculture. They developed extensive public works, carefully organized government and religious systems, law, entertainment, markets and trade, and education. Cities also meant large populations living closely together. Sumerians had to deal with poverty, crime, slavery, waste, social classes, and warfare. People had to devise methods and ideas they could maintain the social order and successfully distribute the surplus. Because cities were not composed of the extended families that tended to make up farming villages, achieving social order was more complex than it had been for villages such as Catal Huyuk.
Cities became possible because new methods of agricultural production - particularly the development of the plow - meant that farmers were able to feed more than just themselves and their families. The agricultural production of cities like Ur, Lagash, Uruk, and Eridu was sometimes so great that one farmer could feed one hundred people. This is a significant survival success story. It also meant that, since everyone in the society was not needed to produce food, many people were now free to do other things. This is known as occupational specialization, and is one of the hallmarks of civilization wherever it occurs. Those not farming did such critical things as plan irrigation and land conservation systems. Others took account of all the crops grown, and their distribution; still others tried to understand the world and influence events through science and religion. A few learned the art of fighting, and took control of defense. Another group learned how to exchange Sumerian produce for the commodities not found there - copper, wood, glass, salt, among others. Traders, tool makers, administrators, and priests were some of the new specialized occupations that made up cities.
As the cities of Sumeria increased their wealth and populations through agriculture, they also improved their prosperity through trade. Though 85% of the population were agricultural workers, a part of the remaining 15% were traders whose work was significant in a number of ways. They helped the people of Sumer - Uruk, Lagash, Eridu, Ur - get what they needed. Food was only a part of the equation. Also necessary was timber for building and boats, metal for ceremonial objects and plows and weapons, salt for people and livestock, and many other tools and objects that helped improve the efficiency of Sumerian civilization.
Traders served their cities in ways other than business, too. They had to find markets for Sumerian products. This meant making contact with other groups of people outside of Sumer. Jericho, for example, on the edge of the Dead Sea, traded salt, one of the most precious commodities in the ancient world. Catal Huyuk, a Neolithic village on the slopes of a volcano in what is now Turkey, which dealt in obsidian (volcanic glass) which was prized for its qualities as a cutting edge for tools, became a trading partner of Sumerian city-states. In this way, traders opened communications between different cultural groups with different languages, and they shared ideas as well as goods.
The other great benefit of trade was the fact that the purchasing of goods to bring back to market necessitated the creation of transportation systems between cities. Traders from Sumeria built or caused the building of roads, canals, and bridges. They eventually traded as far West as Egypt (and perhaps Central Africa), as far south as what is now called Yemen, north into the Caucasus regions, and East as far as the Indus Valley. The role they played reached far beyond simple economics. They brought greater material wealth, but they also blazed trails and made the people of Sumer aware of a greater world with ideas and goods beyond what they had imagined. They made possible ever-increasing communication and trade with their explorations and their roads and canals.
Of course, traders were only a small part of the 15% of Sumerians who were not farming for a living. Another, group organized the agricultural work of the civilization. These people designed irrigation systems and land layouts, managed the building of canals, walls, and structures. They took stock of how much seed there was, and distributed it - even planning which fields would be planted with what crop - then distributed and accounted for the crop produced. They had to learn weather patterns, agricultural techniques, how to motivate people, and how to control people. They had to create ways by which large numbers of people could live together in peace even when they weren't related to each other. They had to find ways to defend the city against those who wanted what it had, and how to take more from those who had what it wanted. This group of people became the upper class. They included engineers and managers in their lower ranks. Upper ranks included wealthy landholders, city administrators and priests.
Early in Sumerian history, the priests came to be the most important members of the society. They were the linchpin of Sumerian culture, and thus the creators and maintainers of order. The Sumerian religion was animistic - they ascribed to a large pantheon of gods responsibility for nearly every event that could happen in nature. For this reason Sumerians required a group of people who understood the gods in order to understand, and influence nature. Those who trained in religious rites and special religious knowledge were the ones who had the most developed knowledge about how the world worked. Their knowledge and influence with the gods led to their elevation to the top rung in society. The temples that these priests managed were the center of every Sumerian city, and each owned most of the land surrounding the city. So each temple (Ziggurat in Sumerian) was also the biggest employer in town. In addition, those who owned or worked land separately from the temple, or who had favors to ask of the gods, would make donations in order to receive their blessings. These donations added to the wealth of the temple, and that made the priests even more powerful.
Priests also held power because of their monopoly on writing. Writing was one of the most important developments in the course of human history. Next to language, writing is one of the most flexible and useful tools we have ever developed. With it, we can record information about nearly anything, and thus be able to refer back to accurate information at any time in the future. But writing did not spring into action full-fledged in Sumer. Instead, it appears that the Sumerians borrowed the idea of record-keeping from Neolithic farmers and traders. They wrote by poking the cut end of a reed into a wet clay tablet once for each object that was counted.
Eventually, this system of record keeping needed improvement. The Sumerians began to draw pictures in their clay tablets to resemble objects. This is known as pictographic writing, and has been used in many places in the world. The primary problem with this is that pictures can easily depict objects and some simple actions, but do not do well when complex ideas come into play. In order to discuss complex ideas, the Sumerians began to combine different pictograms, or use one pictogram that represented an object whose sound was the same as the word being used. Thus the writing system became very complex. Compounding that difficulty, drawing pictures on wet clay with a reed is very difficult. They devised a system of making approximations of the pictures with patterns made in the clay with the point of the reed. Since the reed left triangular impressions, archaeologists call this writing cuneiform - Latin for "triangular in shape".
By 3500 BCE, the city-states of Sumer had become civilizations. The Sumerians maintained a complex society with differentiated social classes and specialized occupations. They had a centralized political system that managed the economy, defense, law, and labor. Their language was well-developed, and their business dealings and cultural ideals could be transmitted to posterity through a flexible writing system. These are the things that made the Sumerians "civilized" according to historians. If we define civilization in this way, we can see that we have much to learn from the Sumerians.