Topic: The Rise and Collapse of the Bronze Age: 3000-1000 BCE
Early Civilizations: 3500-1000 BC
Although many of the characteristics of civilization had existed by 6000 or 5000 BC in this Middle Eastern region, the origins of civilization, strictly speaking, approximately date due to only 3500 BC. From this point on to roughly 1000 BC , the emergence of several civilization centers defined key developments in world history more generally.
The first civilization arose in the Mesopotamia along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Another center of civilization started soon thereafter in Egypt, and a third by around 2500 BC along the banks of the Indus River in northwestern India. These three early centers of civilization had some interaction . The fourth early civilization center arose in China along the Yellow River, although a bit later and more separately. A fifth center would emerge in Central America, though it was not river-based.
CIVILIZATION
After the rise of agriculture, the introduction of civilization as a form of human organization was a crucial step for many people. Civilization first developed in Mesopotamia, after about 3500 BC, on the heels of several changes in technology and communication.
Hunting and gathering and nomadic societies lacked the economic surplus necessary to develop civilization and often actively disliked the constraints they saw in civilization as well.
Civilizations normally demonstrated four distinctive features, operating powerfully in combination. First, they developed greater amounts of economic surplus, beyond subsistence needs, and they distributed this surplus unequally. This provided funds for new kinds of monuments. It also heightened social inequalities, compared to other, “non-civilized” kinds of societies. Second, civilizations developed formal governments, with at least small bureaucracies. Leadership thus became more specialized than in simpler agricultural or nomadic societies. Third, almost all civilizations, including all the early ones, had writing. This facilitated trade over long distances by facilitating standardized communication; it enhanced record keeping, which aided both commerce and bureaucracy. And fourth, they developed larger and more important urban centers as cities emerged as concentrations of populations.
In agricultural civilizations, most people lived in the countryside, and most people remained illiterate. But cities and writing were nonetheless influential in shaping societies with different characteristics from those of the earliest agricultural settlements.
The areas where early civilization developed covered only a tiny portion of the inhabited parts of the world, although they were the most densely populated. Such early civilizations, all clustered in key river valleys, were in a way pilot tests of the new form of social organization. Only after about 1000 BC did a more consistent process of development and spread of civilization begin--and with it came the main threads of world history. However, the great civilizations unquestionably built on the achievements of the river valley pioneers, so some understanding of this contribution to the list of early human accomplishments is essential.
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Mesopotamia: TIGRIS-EUPHRATES CIVILIZATION
The most noteworthy achievements of the earliest civilizations were early versions of organizational and cultural forms that most of us now take for granted--writing; formal codes of law; city planning and architecture; and institutions for trade, including the use of money (coinage was not used until 600 BC). Once developed, most of these building blocks of human organization did not have to be reinvented, although in some cases they spread only slowly to other parts of the world.
It is not surprising then, then given its lead in agriculture, metalworking, and village structure, that the Middle East generated the first example of human civilization. Indeed, the first civilization, founded in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in a part of the Middle East called Mesopotamia, forms one of only a few cases of a civilization developed absolutely from scratch--and with no examples from any place else to imitate (Chinese civilization and civilization in Central America also developed independently).
Challenges and Responses: Mesopotamia 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. Mesopotamia does have a warm climate and good soil.
By 4000 BC, the farmers of Mesopotamia were familiar with bronze and copper working and had already invented the wheel for transportation. They had a well-established pottery industry and interesting artistic forms. Farming in this area, because of the need for irrigation, required considerable coordination among communities, and this in turn served as the basis for complex political structures!
By 3500 BC, the Sumerians developed a cuneiform system, the first known case of human writing. Their system at first used different pictures to present various objects but soon shifted to use of geometric shapes to symbolize spoken sounds. Early Sumerian writing may have had as many as 2000 such symbols, but this number was later reduced to about 300, as later people adapted the system for their own languages. Even so, writing and reading remained complex skills, which only a few had time to master. Scribes wrote on clay tablets, using styluses.
City and Countryside: 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 craftsmen. In return, the cities provided the villages with military protection, markets, and specialist-produced goods. Together, a city and its agricultural hinterland formed what we call a city-state.
City-states sometimes fought with each other over resources like water and land; at other times, they cooperated with each other in sharing resources and trade with one other.
Temples and Palaces were two center power of power.
ART AND SCIENCE
Sumerian art developed steadily as statues and painted frescoes were used to adorn the temples of the gods. Statues of gods also decorated individual homes.
Sumerian science aided a complex agricultural society, as people sought to learn more about the movement of the sun and stars--thus founding the science of astronomy--and improved their mathematical knowledge. (Astronomy defined the calendar and provided the astrological forecasts widely used in politics and religion).
The Sumerians employed a system of numbers based on units of 10, 20, and 360 that we still in calculating circles and hours (“out cultural DNA”) In other words, Sumerians and their successors in Mesopotamia created patterns of observation and abstract thought about nature that a number of civilizations, including our own, still rely on, and they also introduced specific systems, such as charts of major constellations, that have been in use, at least among educated people, for 5000 years not only in the Middle East but, by later imitation, in India and Europe as well.
RELIGION
Sumerians developed complex religious rituals. Each city had a patron god and erected impressive shrines to please and honor this and other deities. Massive towers, called ziggurats, formed the first monumental architecture in this civilization. Professional priests operated these temples and conducted the rituals within. Sumerians believed in many powerful gods, for the nature on which their agriculture depended often seemed swift and unpredictable.
Prayers and offerings to prevent floods as well as to protect good health were a vital part of Sumerian life. Sumerian ideas about the divine force in natural objects--in rivers, trees, and mountains--were common among early agricultural peoples; a religion of this sort, which sees gods in many aspects of nature, is known as polytheism. More specifically, Sumerian religious notions, notably their ideas about the god’s creation of the earth from water and about the divine punishment of humans through floods, later influenced the writers of the Old Testament and thus continue to play a role in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures. Sumerian religious ideas also included a belief in an afterlife of punishment--an original version of the concept of hell.
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
Sumerian political structures stressed tightly organized city-states, ruled by a king who claimed divine authority. The Sumerian state had carefully defined boundaries, unlike the less formal territories of pre-civilized villages in the region. Here is a key early example of how civilization and a more formal political structure came together. The government helped regulate religion and enforce its duties; it also provided a court system in the interests of justice.
Kings were originally military leaders during times of war and the function of defense and war, including leadership of a trained army, remained vital in Sumerian politics. Kings and the noble class, along with the priesthood, controlled a considerable land.
Mesopotamian civilization developed a strong patriarchal family structure. By 3000 BC, only men were shown as wielding a plow in Middle-Eastern Art. By 2000 BC, veiling of respectable women became common, in order to shield them from the eyes of men outside their family.
The Sumerians added to their region’s agricultural prosperity not only by using wheeled carts but also by learning about fertilizers and by adopted silver as a means of exchange for buying and selling--an early form of money. However, the region was also hard to defend and proved a constant temptation to outside invaders.
AKKADIANS
The Sumerians fell to a people called the Akkadians, around 2400 BC. The Akkadians continued much of Sumerian culture. It was an Akkadian king, Sargon, who came to be the first identifiable figure in world history, in terms of surviving records. He unified the empire (Mesopotamia) and added to Sumerian art the theme of royal victory. Sargon maintained 5400 troops, a larger professional army than had existed before. Akkadians sent troops far as Egypt.
After about 300 years, another period of decline was followed by conquest by the Babylonians, who extended their own empire and thus helping bring civilizations to other parts of the Middle East. It was under Babylonian rule that the King Hammurabi introduced the most famous early code of law. Hammurabi’s code established rules of procedure for courts of law and regulated property rights and the duties of family members, setting harsh punishments for crimes.
For many centuries during and after the heyday of Babylon, peace and civilization in the Middle East were troubled by the invasions of hunting and herding groups. Indo-European peoples pressed in from the north, starting about 2100 BC. In the Middle East itself, invasions by Semitic peoples (Akkadians and Babylonians) from the south were more important, and Semitic people and languages increasingly dominated the region. The new arrival adopted the culture of the conquered peoples as their own, so the key features of the civilization persisted.