Lecture 1, History 101: From prehistory to the Sumerians
Question
to start: why is it that we divide the hour into 60 minutes, a minute into 60
second, a day into 24 hours, a circle
into 360 degrees?
(Sumerians; who, when, where)
Today
I’m going to talk about the beginnings of history – the stages humanity went
through to get from palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to the first literate,
urbanized society, who wrote down their stories, mathematics, and laws.
1.
When did man begin to exist?
The
current consensus (which could change very soon because of genetics research)
is that human-like animals existed as early as a million and a half years ago
(homo erectus who spread from Africa to Middle East, Asia, perhaps Europe).
Most
of these early forms of homo could use tools – but they had somewhat smaller
brains than modern man (ca. 70% the size) and did not engage in symbolic
expression – i.e. they didn’t leave behind any art or religious objects.
By
about 400,000 BC, modern man - homo sapiens - had evolved.
Scientists
used to think that man had very early split into different racial groups – who
then evolved somewhat differently in different climatic zones.
Recent
research in human genetics has proven this theory unlikely
DNA studies (on human
mitochondria) suggest that all of us had a
common female ancestor who lived about 150,000 - 100,000 years ago.
Mitochondria are organelles within
cells, separate from the nucleus.
passed only from mother to
offspring.
differences in mitochondrial DNA of
modern human populations have been compared.
The rate of mutation in the human
mtDNA used in calculating last common human ancestor: Eve's date
She
was probably African – where earliest fossils of modern homo sapiens are.
This
form of humanity – homo sapiens sapiens – appear to have migrated from Africa,
and replaced all the previous forms of man – including the Neanderthals – (who
were particularly populous in Europe).
What
this means is that humans are closer relations than we used to think
Migrations of homo sapiens sapiens
So
less than 100,000 years ago – very recently – modern homo sapiens began to move
from sub-Saharan Africa to the rest of the world. (at this time the Sahara was
not a desert)
By
50,000 years ago, he migrated to Asia, Europe, and somewhat later Australia and
the Americas (crossing on a landbridge between Siberia and Alaska)
Earlier
forms of man – like the neanderthals in Europe – were displaced
The
longest period of human existence – your textbook deals with in three pages -
the Palaeolithic period –
Palaeolithic
means – Old Stone Age
This
Palaeolithic period lasted longer than any other period of human existence –
from the beginnings of man to the invention of agriculture around 10,000 BC.
Palaeolithic lifestyle
What
were these humans, living between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago like?
hunter-gatherers;
living in small groups of about 30 to 50 peopleart):
they
had sophisticated stone tools to hunt with- sprear throwers, bow and arrows,
harpoon, fish spear of bone, finely shaped spears); and could sew clothing from
animal skins
Big
difference from more primitive types of man like homo erectus: symbolic
expression: they produced art
-
Venus figures PICTURE (what does it suggest about the society)
-
Chauvet Cave (cf. Lascaux Cave, France), between 34,000 and 12,000 BP - mainly
paintings of animals PICTURE
importance of food: wild animals for hunting; aesthetic value of
fatness)
Why
are these prehistoric hunter-gatherest important for our overall understanding
of western civilization?
Because,
almost everything of importance biologically developed before 30,000 B. C.
our
brains, our sexual and nurturing instincts, our aggression, our need of
exercise.
Everything
that these people didn’t do and we do – is cultural – learned behavior from our
ancestors
NEOLITHIC
PERIOD: AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION - THE INVENTION OF AGRICULTURE (10000-3000 BC)
The
New stone Age – or Neolithic period – is distinguished from the Palaeolithic
period because agriculture was invented.
The
necessary precondition for complex civilization was the domestication of
animals and plants, simply because hunters and gatherers need too much space to
develop large concentrations of population.
Why did people start to farm?
probably
not technological push, but necessity caused by population growth, or climate
change.
It
is a lot more work to farm than to hunt and gather food.
Climate
change by 12,000 BC: end of last ice age; animal herds decreasing; wild fauna /
swamps that replaced begin to dry up
Humans
in first used wild forms of sheep, goats, rice, wheat, barely, grapes.
But
starting around 10,000 BC, they started to raise them.
This
is the “agricultural revolution” - one of the most significant changes
in human history
First
domestication was of animals, not plants.
Around
10,000 BC - sheep and goats , for milk products, wool mainly
Crops
soon followed - rice in China ca. 8,000 BC,
(Lerner says 5000 BC)
wheat
and barley in Middle East - southern Turkey/ Northern Iraq, Israel, etc., what
is called the Fertile Crescent: 8000-3500 BC
DNA
studies of animals and plants show separate development, not diffusion of the
technology
cattle lineage split 22,000 to 26,000 years ago into groups that gave
rise to modern African and European cattle.
“Cattle in the Near East were not domesticated until about 9,000 years
ago, and cattle in India and Africa were genetically distinct before then. The
latter two could not possibly be descended from domesticated Near Eastern
cattle, as was thought, but must have been domesticated independently”: TABITHA
M. POWLEDGE AND MARK ROSE, The
Great DNA Hunt, Archaeology (1996)
Implications of agricultural revolution: Agriculture allowed people to live in settlements of
larger size than before and not have to move around all the time.
The
first permanent villages began to develop during the Neolithic Age.
At
first the people of these villages lived in simple round huts
small villages of several hundred
people, in circular huts, with querns for grinding
These
are certainly larger human groups than the bands of hunter-gatherers, but they
are not yet “civilization”
First town
First
settlements which resembled town: in southern Turkey, in the 7th
millenium BC.
Most
famous site in Turkey: Çatal Hüyük (Chatal Huooyook), occupied ca. 6500 B.C.
population
of about 4000-6000 people - HUGE
women
used cosmetics; obsidian tools (wideley exchanged in area)
they
ate on pottery,
the
people grew wheat and barley
Instead
of primitive huts, they lived in rectangular dwellings, plastered walls and
floors, one story high, inside raised platforms for sleeping.
Hearths
near to hole to the ceiling, where people would enter the house by means of a
ladder (probably for security). They walk along each others roofs.
PICTURE:
DWELLING; GROUP OF DWELLINGS; IMPORTED FLINT WEAPON
With
Çatal Hüyük, you can see that by the 7th millenium BC , societies
were becoming decidedly more complex in this part of the world.
But
the people of Çatal Hüyük didn’t learn how to write – so we don’t know who they
were, what language they spoke, or what became of them.
Without
writing, they couldn’t develop large political entities – states – states need
to be able to keep tax records, to send letters to far-away officials.
It
wouldn’t be until 3 thousand years after the Çatal Hüyük – after the first
cities – that writing would be invented.
III.
SUMERIANS AND INVENTION OF WRITING 3300 BC – 2000 BC
The
Sumerians, were the first people to have a history.
They
were the first people to learn how to write and rule states consisting of more
than a couple of towns.
Sumerians
would have a huge influence on the people who come after them – their legal
system, their technology, their stories, – would be borrowed by their
successors – as you will see on Friday.
Origins of Sumerian society: irrigation society
Who
can tell me what where the Sumerians lived – what modern state did they
inhabit?
southern
Mesopotamia
“Mesopotamia,”
same space as modern Iraq, is the land “in the middle of the rivers” - the rivers
in this case the Tigris and Euphrates
(MAP)
Sumer
was originally a swamp.
In
the course of the fourth millenium - climate of this river valley growing more
arid
There
was not enough rainfall to allow intensive farming without the use of
river-water for irrigation.
This
need to irrigate might be one reason that the people there developed complex
forms of social organization - they had to act in groups to build and maintain
canals, and to keep other groups from taking their water or raiding their food
stores
(As
we will see, irrigation also played a role in state-formation in Egypt).
3500-3000 period of innovation:
bronze smelting
wheeled transport (Lerner)
writing
Invention of writing: cuneiform
The
people of these city -states, around 3300 BC invented the first recognizable
writing - cuneiform.
They
didn’t have paper; they wrote on wet clay tablets, with a metal stylus.
These
clay tablets survive in Iraq in the thousands - tax records, letters, wills,
the occasional creation story, both for the Sumerians, and even more for their
successors - the Babylonians and Assyrians.
We
would perhaps like to think that the Sumerian invented writing for grand
purposes - for literature, poetry, religious histories, or even to write
letters to friends.
Instead
the first readable texts are mundane record-keeping - lists of grain, animals,
slaves received by the temples - i.e. tax documents.
First,
the Sumerians used pictogaphs - where simple pictures represented objects
(fourth millenium BC).
Of
course the problem with this is that you would have many pictures as objects -
thousands - and some things just could not be represented.
The
real novelty was when Sumerians used signs to represent sounds.
The
example is the ideogram for Water” - which in Sumerian was pronounced “a”. “A”
also meant “in,” the preposition. Scribes began to use the ideogram for water
to mean both “water” and preposition “in”.
writing
started to represent phonetic sounds, instead of objects or ideas. They needed
much fewer of them to write their language than pictograms.
Sumerian
cuneiform was not yet an alphabet - syllables were represented, not individual
sounds - but the Sumerians were on their way.
500 symbols
Writing
Because of writing, the Sumerians were the first people to transmit their religious
stories to posterity.
Complex political structure
Writing
also allowed Sumerians to develop the first state.
At
first, they had city-state theocracies: about 13 of them
earliest
Sumerian city-states formed around temples
citizens
of these cities paid taxes to the temples; priests ruled the cities.
Between
3100 BC and 2300 BC - war leaders began to take over - the cities built walls,
slavery increases (remember slaves in antiquity usually acquired by war), metal
weapons were forged.
Gilgamesh
ruled a large Sumerian city-state (Uruk) around 2700 BC, as war leader. Uruk
was fortified at that time.
Rulers
of cities like Uruk began to rule other cities – forming states of hundreds of
thousands of people
SPREAD
OF SUMERIAN CULTURE
Sumerian
culture spread throughout the Near East (much like American culture has around
the word in this century).
Communities
in Syria, s. Asia Minor, Palestine adopted Sumerian script and myths.
New
people immigrated into Mesopotamia and eventually took it over: the Babylonians
under Hammurabi ca. 1800 BC).
Assyrians next week
They
also borrowed much from Sumerian culture.
This
borrowing is why western civilization is said to start with the Sumerians
(“ALCOHOL” for example has Sumerian root)
MESOPOTAMIAN
LEGACIES
Class
distinctions: aristocrats, clients, commoners, and slaves (most societies we
will be studying had slaves).
A
person’s class affected how much protection they got from the laws:
if
an aristocrat injured a slave, he just paid a fine to the owner
for
a commoner, a larger fine to the family.
Among
equals, “an eye for an eye” code applied - if you destroyed someone’s eye, you
lost your own eyes.
Women
in ancient Mesopotamia were not equal to those of men.
But
in early periods women were free to go out to the marketplaces, buy and sell,
attend to legal matters for their absent men, own their own property, borrow
and lend, and engage in business for themselves.
High
status women, such as priestesses and members of royal families, might learn to
read and write and be given considerable administrative authority.
They
could get a divorce (with dowry) if their husbands were brutal to them.
This
was important because women had very little choice in husbands - everything was
arranged between the groom and the bride’s father, without bride consulted.
Double-standard
in definition of adultery: (this will be true until the medieval period):
Hammurabi’s Code:
“If a married lady is caught lying
with another man, they shall bind them and cast them into the water. If her
husband wishes to let his wife live, then the king shall let his servant live.”
(#129)”
A
husband could have sex with slaves and prostitutes without any problem.
MESOPOTAMIAN
SCIENCE:
Mesopotamians
had an advanced number system.
The
base was 60 rather than the base 10 of our present system.
They
divided the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60
seconds. This form of counting has survived
One
major disadvantage of the system however was their lack of a zero.
This
meant that numbers did not have a unique representation but required the
context to make clear whether 1 meant 1, 61, 3601, etc
SUMMARY
By
3000 BC, we have moved out of the Neolithic Age, and into the first historic
societies
And
what was happening in Europe at this time? Very little.
The
beautiful cave art of the period between 20,000 and 10,000 BP had disappeared
There
was no ceramic industry, no settlements larger than small villages, less than
one hundred people.
It
would be thousands of years before “civilization” would develop in Greece - and
the Greeks would owe much to the peoples of the fertile crescent when