Big History

Historians have widely debated the possible meanings of civilization, and currently many avoid the term, especially since, during recent colonial times, historians in imperial countries used “uncivilized” to designate colonial people. In addition, attitudes toward civilization are changing. Once the rise of civilization was thought to demonstrate humanity’s success in overcoming its savage nature. Now, many are beginning to wonder if civilized life is as savage, if not more so, than the hunting-and-gathering life, particularly in its social inequality and frequent warfare.

Some historians replace civilization with the term “complex society.” I mostly use “cities” or “urban life” to indicate the early complex societies that arose across Eurasia at about the same time; whenever I use “civilization” or “complex society,” I am referring to the constellation of characteristics of urban life as listed earlier, without implying a value judgment either negative or positive. Also, I like the suggestion of David Christian that we call these first states “agrarian civilizations” to remind ourselves that they depended on their rural hinterlands for food and tribute.²

The first cities arose more or less simultaneously in about 3500 BCE in river valleys in four areas of Afro-Eurasia, the continents of the earliest human habitation. These earliest cities appeared in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in southern Iraq, in the Nile valley in Egypt, in the Indus valley in Pakistan/India, and, a bit later, in the Yellow (Huang) River valley in China. Urban areas appeared later in the Americas, beginning with the Olmecs in Mexico in about 1300 BCE and with groups in the Andes in about 900 BCE. The fact that cities arose later in the Americas than in Afro-Eurasia had significant consequences, to be discussed in chapter 10. In this chapter I will describe the first cities in the Tigris/Euphrates valley in some detail, then generalize about life in the other three Afro-Eurasian urban areas.³

The first of eight or so Sumerian cities to emerge was Uruk, called Erech in Biblical times and Warka today. It lies 150 miles (250 kilometers) south of Baghdad and 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the Euphrates. By 3400 BCE Uruk had become the largest permanent settlement up to that time. It contained two major temples, one to An, the god of the sky, and the other to Inanna, the goddess of love and procreation.

Sumerians believed in a universe controlled by invisible living beings, or gods. There were thought to be seven major gods and goddesses, who formed a council that decided what would happen to people. The four major gods were An (sky), Enlil (air), Enki (water and wisdom), and Utu (sun); the three major goddesses were Ki (Earth), Nannar (moon), and Inanna (love and procreation, also known as Lady of the Evening, Lady of the Morning, and Queen of Heaven). These beings were thought to have given people a set of immutable and universal laws and rules, called the me, which had to be carried out to satisfy the divine beings.

Each major city had one or more gods in residence in divine households, or temples. Temple statues were carved to embody the invisible divine spirit, and the temple staff worked to provide everything that its god or goddess could desire, so that it would choose to reside there and assist people. The temple staff controlled great acreage for food and tribute to keep their divine household well stocked. The main temple of each city stood on a high terrace, which gradually rose into a massive stage tower, or ziggurat, Sumer’s contribution to religious architecture.

Over time Sumer changed from temple-dominated, fragmented cities into a centralized state, in which one city and its ruler controlled the others, backed by a bureaucracy of scribes and priests. As warfare became common among the cities, temple households became subordinate to warrior households. Sargon of Akkad is Sumer’s best-remembered king (ruled ca. 2350 BCE and for about fifty years); his grandson, Naram Suen (ruled 2291-2255 BCE) was the first to proclaim himself divine. Sargon achieved a new stage in state formation—a state that controlled several others—which he did by conquering others, demolishing their walls, and appointing his sons as governors.

The food-producing land in Sumer was used in three distinct ways: as gardens within the cities, as irrigated fields lying parallel to the rivers, and as arid grazing land. The chief irrigated crops were dates, barley, wheat, and lentils, bean, and peas. Flax was grown for making linen cloth. Large herds of goats and sheep were kept, as were smaller ones of cattle for milk and meat, and donkeys and oxen for draught animals. Fish were a major supplement; poor people lived on a diet of barley, fish, and dates. Some hunting of rabbits and birds went on; dogs were ubiquitous.

Irrigation dominated the work of many people. In spring the river water had to be kept from flooding, then gradually released as the season wore on. This required constant repairs and adjustments to the dikes and canals. Since even fresh water has some salt content, salt crystals built up in the soil from the evaporating water, undermining the crops after several centuries.

At the fall equinox, after the harvest of crops but before the planting cycle began anew, Sumerians celebrated their new year with a temple ceremony at which the ruling king had sexual intercourse with the high priestess representing Inanna before the assembled public, to insure fertility for the coming year. The Sumerian word for water was a, which also signified sperm, or generative power. Sumerians clearly understood that life would not bloom without the masculine element.⁶

The earliest written language that has been found so far comes from the temple to Inanna at Uruk—on clay tablets incised in wedge-shaped patterns. This writing is believed to have developed from merchants pressing little tokens representing traded items into wet clay to record transactions. Later, officials drew pictures of the items in the clay with a stylus pointed on one end and ball-shaped on the other. Later, they let the pictures represent one-syllable names of the items. Someone decided to put a wedge shape on one end of the stylus, and the pictures began to be rendered by wedges. Thus emerged cuneiform writing (from Latin cunens for wedge), with about 3,000 characters representing syllables. This was used in Sumer and neighboring places for over 3,300 years.⁷

The Sumerian tablets that have been found so far, about 5,000 to 6,000, are scattered throughout museums the world over. An American team excavated at Nippur, Sumer’s spiritual center, between 1889 and 1900; their findings are divided between the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. The linguistic analysis of this material has been a triumph of scholarly cooperation, beginning in the late nineteenth century. New texts can now be translated with reasonable confidence, although many pieces of texts are still missing and could yet be found in Iraq when conditions permit. Most of the literary texts have been published, many in the last thirty years—among them twenty myths, nine epic tales including the Epic of Gilgamesh discussed in the last chapter, and several hundred hymns, laments, and dirges, including the hymn to Inanna at the end of this section. About 300 people today read cuneiform. Johns Hopkins University has established a project, called Digital Hammurabi, whose goal is creating an electronic archive of all known tablets in 3-D images so that scholars around the world can work on translating them.⁸

Since Sumerians had no timber, stone, or metal, they traded extensively by donkey caravan and possibly by boat with Turkey, Iran, Syria, the Indus Valley, and probably with Egypt. These connections formed a network of human communication in the core area of central Europe, Asia, and northern Africa.

At the beginning of city life in Sumer, copper was in use, when they could trade for it. Beginning in about 2500 BCE, people somewhere in western Asia learned to make bronze, a stronger metal made by combining one part tin to nine parts copper. Since tin was available only from Egypt’s eastern desert, from Cornwall, England, and from Afghanistan, not much bronze was used for a long time. But bronze was being used by 2000 BCE in eastern Asia and by 1500 BCE in northeastern Africa.

The first human experiment with city life produced a frenzy of creative adaptation, in which many aspects of urban life emerged that remain today. The Sumerians developed a code of law and order—the me mentioned earlier—which they wrote into prescriptions of how conflicts should be resolved. Whichever ruler could organize the most effective army, bureaucracy, and supporting structures conquered the rulers of the other city-states. Wealthy families developed individual ownership of property and traded abroad for luxury goods. About 90 percent of the people remained farmers, sending tribute, coerced when necessary, to the rulers in exchange for protection. Ranked hierarchies, or distinct social classes, emerged, including slavery of failed farmers, nomads, and war captives. Sumerians invented pictographic writing, literature, cylinder seals, canals and dikes, weighted levers for lifting water, accounting procedures, entrenched bureaucracy, and the use of silver as money. Other places may also have invented some of these items, but the Sumerians put them all together.

Eventually, in 2004 BCE, 4,000 years ago, the Sumerian ruling city of Ur was destroyed by Elamites from Iran, and its king was taken into exile, never to return. Sumer’s language died out, although cuneiform writing continued to be used as the language of international diplomacy until the first century of the Common Era.

Speculation about the reasons for Sumer’s abrupt collapse has focused recently on the hazards of irrigation; increasing salinization resulted in decreasing yields and a series of poor harvests. Recent climate studies show that a major volcanic eruption to the north occurred in 2200 BCE, one that spewed ash sufficient to veil the sun. A 278-year drought cycle also began at the same time. Life in the first cities proved vulnerable to environmental changes.⁹

Sumer is with us still, in small specific ways as well as the larger ones just described. People of Sumer used a counting system based on twelve rather than ten. We retain this in counting our sixty-second minute, sixty-minute hour, twenty-four-hour day, twelve-month year, and 360-degree circle. We also retain the Sumerian belief in thirteen as an unlucky number and their belief in invisible ruling spirits, though we have reduced them to one.¹⁰

Listen to the joy of Sumerians as they sing their hymn to the evening star, Venus, representing Inanna, the goddess of love:

At the end of the day, the Radiant Star, the Great Light that fills the sky,
The Lady of the Evening appears in the heavens.
The people in all the lands lift their eyes to her.
The men purify themselves; the women cleanse themselves.
The ox in his yoke lows to her.
The sheep stir up the dust in their fold.
All the living creatures of the steppe,
The four-footed creatures of the high steppe,
The lush gardens and orchards, the green reeds and trees,
The fish of the deep and the birds in the heavens—
My Lady makes them all hurry to their sleeping places.
The living creatures and the numerous people of Sumer kneel before her.
Those chosen by the old women prepare great platters of food and drink for her.
The Lady refreshes herself in the land.
There is great joy in Sumer.
The young man makes love with his beloved.
My Lady looks in sweet wonder from heaven.
The people of Sumer parade before the holy Inanna.
Inanna, the Lady of the Evening, is radiant.
I sing your praises, holy Inanna.
The Lady of the Evening is radiant on the horizon.¹¹

After the fall of Ur, plundering and raiding became consistent features of Mesopotamian life. Desert people moved in, and power shifted to Hammurabi (ca. 1792-1750 BCE) of Babylon. Babylonians fought back and forth with Assyrians to the north, alternating conquests. The rule of Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BCE) is remembered, for he captured Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and carried out a massive deportation of Judeans to Babylon, known as the Babylonian captivity.

Sumerians traded, by coastal shipping and by overland caravans, with two other early urban areas, the Nile Valley in Egypt and the Indus Valley in Pakistan, probably from early in their development. The fourth urban area, centered in China, remained separate from the core of Eurasia until later.

The basic food crops in the Nile Valley were wheat, barley, dates, figs, olives, and grapes. Egyptians domesticated small fowl—ducks, geese, quail, pigeons, and pelicans—and caught many fish. They learned to make olives edible by soaking them in salt and water. They made bread and beer and used salt to preserve fish, which by 2800 BCE they were trading to the Phoenicians in exchange for cedar, glass, and purple dye made from the murex shellfish. Egyptians also learned to preserve human bodies by covering them in salt for seventy days.¹³

The religious ideas of the Egyptians cannot be systematized for lack of sufficient evidence. But a few basic assertions are clear. Egyptians were proud and judged themselves superior to others, a common human trait. Their population was mixed, composed of many different groups from Semitic peoples to dark black Nubians, and their gods were a blend of many local ones. Their creator god, Atum, was bisexual (the he-she god) and came to be associated with Ra, the sun god. Egyptians considered the heart to be the seat of intelligent thought and formulated a belief in an afterlife that one earned by thoughtful and moral behavior in this world. Osiris, the god of the dead who himself had risen from the dead, presided over the judgment, at which the newly dead person’s heart was placed on a scale to measure whether the person would be snatched by the demons of death or proceed to an afterlife better than this one. Osiris’s wife, Isis, was widely worshipped even outside of Egypt, especially in the early years of the Roman Empire.

The Egyptians managed to sustain their irrigation system for 5,000 years, longer than either the Sumerians or the Harappan society in the Indus Valley. Today, however, Egypt is beset with soil and water problems, since the technology of the twentieth century, applied to fix the problems, has worsened them. (For example, the Aswan Dam does not permit the annual flooding that deposited fertile silt; the dammed water is leaking underground into ancient tombs.¹⁴

The Egyptians, who did not feature much warfare among themselves, eventually suffered an invasion from people known as the Hyksos, thought to be the Canaanites from Palestine. In 1678 BCE the Hyksos used horse-drawn chariots, newly perfected, to cross the Sinai Desert and drag the Egyptians into the maelstrom of warfare that occurred between 2350 and 331 BCE among the rulers of the Middle East. Rulers everywhere had become skilled at building empires and maintaining them with a bureaucracy; by about 1550 BCE Egyptians ruled the Nile as far south as upper Nubia and the coast of Palestine and Syria north to the Euphrates River. Eight hundred years later Assyrians ruled Mesopotamia, and 200 years later the Persian Empire included lower Egypt, all of Turkey, and Mesopotamia to the Black and Caspian seas, stretching east to the Indus Valley. These military triumphs were supported by improvements in fighting, specifically horse-drawn chariots and iron metallurgy for cheap armor, starting in Cyrus or eastern Turkey about 1200 BCE (Fig. 6.1).

Egyptian culture strongly influenced a “country cousin” culture, the Minoan, on the island of Crete, located off the coast of Greece. Minoan culture was the first complex society of Europe, developing from 3000 to 1450 BCE. It used an early form of writing and deployed ships to found colonies and create a trading empire. Since Crete lies in the Mediterranean between Greece and the coast of Africa, Egyptian influences on Minoan frescoes, and presumably on the rest of its culture, were strong. Through Minoans, Egyptians influenced the Greeks, perhaps even providing analogs to its gods and goddesses. Minoan culture came to an abrupt end for unknown reasons, probably including the horrendous volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Thera, now Santorini, in 1645 BCE, which cast sun-reducing ashes into the atmosphere for years to come.¹⁵

In China, in the far eastern part of Eurasia, a fourth agrarian civilization arose producing another distinctive style of human culture. Early Chinese cities developed on the agricultural surplus produced within a great river system, the Yellow River and its tributaries. In northern China, where rainfall is more meager than in the south, millet (native) and wheat (spread from the Middle East) were the staple crops. Later, in wetter southern China, rice became the staple crop.

In China, urban areas evolved from well-established villages on terraced land near the Yellow River, unlike in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where cities grew on agricultural frontier land. By 3000 BCE there were walled vil-lages in northern China with richly appointed tombs containing pottery with marks that appear to be ancestral to Chinese script. Elite families managed relations with the spirits, whom the Chinese believed could be reached through the spirits of their own ancestors interceding on behalf of their descendants. The ancestral spirits were contacted through offerings of alcoholic beverages in bronze vessels. The Chinese character for “ancestor” earlier meant “phallus” and even earlier meant “earth,” suggesting the transition to a culture in which only the sons could perform the ritual sacrifices that set a father’s soul free to join the ancestors.¹⁶

The same families who arranged contact with the spirits also organized defense, unlike the dichotomy between priests and soldiers in Mesopotamia. By 1523 BCE the Shang family had established military and political power by importing an expensive system of weapons from the Middle East—bows made of wood, bone, and sinew glued together, bronze armor, and horse-drawn chariots. The Shangs ruled for 500 years; their capital, Anyang, now in Honan province, has been excavated after inscribed bones kept turning up in farmers’ fields. These bones were inscribed to cast oracles; the inscriptions are so close to China’s historic script that scholars could read them at once.

During the years of Shang rule the Chinese elites used bronze with outstanding artistry, especially in ritual vessels and cooking pots. They also used bronze for the metal parts of wheeled vehicles but seldom for tools and implements. They made books of crossed bamboo sections and began using brushes for writing. They practiced human sacrifice and slavery and began using cowrie shells as currency, although no one knows from where the shells came.¹⁷

In an alphabetic system, each symbol represents a single letter rather than a whole syllable. All the sounds of most languages can be represented with only twenty-five to thirty symbols. The Phoenician alphabet, developed in about 1400 to 1000 BCE, represented only the consonants, with twenty-two symbols or letters borrowed from Egyptian hieroglyphs (Fig. 6.2). This worked because Semitic languages had a limited number of vowels. Phoenicians consistently read their letters from left to right, unlike in Aramaic and Hebrew, two alphabets that developed in the eastern Mediterranean slightly later, which read from right to left.

An example of how our alphabet carries the continuity of history can be seen in the letter M. The ancient Egyptians drew wavy lines to signify water. This symbol is retained in the Hebrew and Phoenician letter “Mem,” representing mayim or water, which became the Latin letter M.¹⁹

Creating an alphabet by making a phonetic analysis of the spoken language proved immensely difficult. Evidence suggests that it occurred only once in Afro-Eurasia and never in the Americas. Most alphabets borrowed from earlier ones or people got the idea of an alphabet from somewhere else and devised their own script.

By about 800 BCE the use of the Phoenician alphabet had spread to Greece, where people spoke a language with more vowels. Needing more letters for their vowel sounds, Greeks took letters for four extra consonants—A (alpha), E (epsilon), O (omicron), and Y (upsilon). I (iota) was a Greek innovation. Romans adopted the Greek alphabet, which is still used by Roman and Germanic languages.²⁰

Arabic script also derives from the Phoenician alphabet, but it diverged from the Phoenician by about the start of the Common Era and turned into Arabic by the mid-sixth century CE. The Quran was written in Arabic script in 650 CE, and the script was widely spread by the rapid expansion of Islam throughout the world.

Chinese writing never abandoned its pictograms and syllabic characters. The Chinese system was invented in about 2000 to 1500 BCE, was simplified from 200 BCE to 200 CE, and remains essentially unchanged today. It uses about 214 keys, which have to be combined into characters that represent whole words.

Alphabetic writing proved transformative because it simplified reading and writing and opened it to a larger segment of the population. In the process it rendered sacred scriptures accessible to laypeople. The content of religious thought, long attached to local gods, became moveable as people could carry scriptures with them when they migrated or were captured. Local gods could morph into a universal god, no longer tied to a specific place.

The Israelites, or Jews, of Judea provided the dominant example of this process. Originally from Ur in Mesopotamia, Abraham led his family southwest into current Israel in about the twentieth century BCE. In 586 BCE the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, captured Jerusalem and destroyed the temple and its priests. The captured Israelites were carried off to Babylon, where they used their collection of sacred texts to construct a new kind of religion, one centered on weekly gatherings to hear the text explicated by teachers known as rabbis. By meditating on the texts, they constructed a code of conduct for the exiles and affirmed that God was universal—present wherever his people were and not residing in a particular place. Judaism has continued for 2,500 years to guide its believers wherever they live, under whatever hardship.

Alphabetic writing also made possible the elaboration of the bureaucratic structures necessary to maintain the empires that constant warfare in southwest Asia produced. Bureaucracy arose before the development of alphabets; it was firmly in place by the time of Hammurabi, who ruled Babylon in about 1792 to 1750 BCE. Bureaucracy meant that individuals, appointed by the ruler, had the authority to collect tribute and enforce laws, which people had to accept (most of the time) in return for military protection. Alphabetic writing greatly extended the effectiveness of the ruler’s appointees. It also facilitated trade, as private people were able to record their own business contracts and transactions.

The rise of cities coincided with the establishment of the patriarchy, or the political and social subordination of women—another aspect of the development of hierarchies in human society. This cannot be explained by a single causal factor—as usual in complicated historical situations—but by a complex network of contributing factors all interacting to produce an outcome that characterized early urban societies.

During the transition to farming, women’s role became more centered in the home. As men decreased their hunting, they used heavier plows than women could manage to increase their acreage. (But the patriarchy developed in the Americas in the absence of plows.) Increased food allowed more frequent babies, which kept women busier at home. Individual ownership of property led men to control women more, to ensure that their property went only to their heirs. Raids from outside groups made defense imperative; men had to organize the defense of their property and their families. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that men could be spared more easily than women from the most fundamental unit of society, the household, to specialize in other tasks.²¹

As cities developed and urban populations were no longer farming the land, the great mother goddess of early farming times began to lose meaning. The story of her overthrow can be seen in many mythologies. For example, the Babylonians told of their god-king Marduk, who waged war on Tiamat, the mother of all things. He hacked her body to pieces and fashioned the world anew from the pieces. The Israelites rejected the goddess image entirely. Their enemies, the Canaanites, a farming people, worshipped a fertility goddess known as Astarte, whom the Old Testament refers to as “the Abomination.” ²²

In Greek and Roman cultures, the message of the power of men was made clear. Zeus gave birth to Athene from his head, a classic reversal of the great mother myth. Much of early Greek literature tells the same story of reducing the power of women. In Eumenides, Aeschylus has the sun god Apollo announce: “ The mother is not the parent of that which is called her child, but only the nurse of the new planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts.” ²³ Boundary markers, called herms after the god Hermes, consisted of a man’s head carved in the round at the top of a wooden or marble stake, on the front of which was added a set of male genitals, usually erect. These have been found in Greek culture from at least the sixth century BCE. In Roman culture the male sex organ was believed to have the power to avert and overcome evil influences. Phalluses were worn as protective amulets. Patriarchy was fully in place.²⁴

In the approximate period covered by this chapter, 3000 to 1000 BCE, the world’s population increased from about 50 million to about 120 million. Each century ’s rate of growth stood at about 4.3 to 4.5 percent, a gentle but not explosive acceleration. The long-term trend masks the cycles of expansion and decline that historians believe underlay the general upward trend.²⁵

Some trading took place among the early cities, as documented by artifacts found far from their sites of origin. By 1100 to 800 BCE Phoenicians dominated trade in the Mediterranean, venturing down the west coast of Africa and to England for tin. By about 1500 BCE unknown metallurgists, perhaps in the Caucasus, learned to smelt iron ore by raising the temperature of the furnace 400 degrees Celsius higher than required for smelting copper. By 900 BCE iron tools were frequent in the eastern Mediterranean, and during the first millennium BCE they spread through many regions of Afro-Eurasia.²⁶

From 3500 to about 800 BCE peoples in the core Afro-Eurasia network began to develop the social systems and structures that would enable them to sustain stable cities and large-scale empires. For all the local differences, the solutions to dense living found in four areas of Afro-Eurasia turned out to be remarkably similar to each other—and to those of agrarian civilizations that developed independently in the Americas (see chapter 10). Some observers notice that these solutions are also remarkably similar to those of termites and other social insects. Dense living may have its own characteristics whether among humans or insects.

In the next chapter we will see how, from about 800 BCE to 200 CE, the systems and structures of early agrarian civilizations gave rise to what we know as world religions and cultures. During those years the creation of urban-based empire-civilizations reached its apex across the core of Afro-Eurasia.

2. How much did Egypt trade with other Mediterranean settlements and how much did Egyptian practices influence other cultures?

These questions have been much discussed in recent years as African peoples have been eager to reclaim their contributions to world history, particularly around the 1987 publication of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.²⁸

Bernal says that his central thesis in this book is that Egyptian and Phoenician influences on the formation of Greek society were strong and that these influences have been downplayed by European scholars for racist and anti-Semitic reasons. Many historians concede that Bernal exposed many examples of how the influence of Egypt and Phoenicia has been downplayed in the last 200 years, but most do not conclude that Greek culture was a construct of black African and Phoenician origin.

Aside from the question of how much influence Egypt had on Greek and Roman culture, there is the question of how black the Egyptians were. Were most of them black or Semitic or mixed? Since Egyptians used colors symbolically in their paintings, black-painted people may not actually have black skin color. There must have been a variety of skin colors from many different areas, but no one really knows.

The Sumerians

Other Urban Cultures—India, Egypt, and China

Urban Turning Points

Unanswered Questions