Discussion 1

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his mother, the goddess of freshwater and human fertility. But in practice, it was the chief and his zemi who commanded obedi- ence. Theoretically, women could be chiefs, but few were. Taino society was matrilineal; even the chief inherited the position through his mother’s line. Nevertheless, at least by the end of the fifteenth century, male Taino chiefs and nobility seem to have garnered considerable power and privilege for their sex as well as their class. They commonly took a number of wives, and when a chief died, one or two of the wives might be buried with him. That was a hallmark of pa- triarchy that was to become more common in post-Neolithic kingdoms and imperial states.

Neolithic Continuity and Change

In comparison with foraging societies, ag- ricultural societies were larger, denser, and more complex. Neolithic life was settled life. Dozens of related families or clans lived in villages, and almost everyone tilled the soil or cared for animals. Neolithic villagers made and used far more tools, containers, clothing, and other objects than hunter- gatherers. They invented not only farming but also pottery, fermenting, and storage. Like their Paleolithic predecessors, Neolithic farmers were relatively equalitarian: no indi- vidual, group, or sex dominated. Women’s work, although different from men’s, was invaluable, and their deities were indispens- able. Fear of famine or disaster mitigated greed, arrogance, and self-indulgence. Secu- rity lay in numbers and mutual aid.

In these respects, most agricultural so- cieties were similar. But Neolithic societies also changed over the course of the past 10,000 years. From the time of ancient

Jericho, agricultural societies evolved from family-centered villages to larger chiefdoms, in the process eroding early traditions of equality, goddess worship, and matrilineal descent. This process was gradual in some places, swift in others. Signs of inequal- ity appeared in ancient Catal Huyuk, yet habits of mutual aid continued down to the present. But despite their many differences, Neolithic societies shared a lot of common ground. Unlike later cities and state societ- ies, virtually all villages managed without money, writing, occupational specialization, or social classes but relied on a common fund of tradition and experience.

Changes in a Mexican Valley. Archaeolo- gists have recently excavated the site of one of the earliest state societies in the Americas, the Zapotec state of Oaxaca in a valley of central Mexico.38 By digging beneath the elaborate remains of the state society, they have been able to reconstruct some of the changes that occurred in the Oaxaca valley since about 7000 BCE, when it was occupied by foragers. At the lowest excavated level, they found a ritual earthen field surrounded by stones, dating from 6500 BCE. Here they believe that hunters and gatherers gathered at special times of the year for initiations and courtship. Like foragers today, they probably joined together in ritual dances to celebrate these meetings.

Around 1500 BCE, the people of the Oaxaca valley domesticated corn and be- gan living in permanent settlements. The first villages were probably communities of equals like the equalitarian bands of hunters and gatherers. At a slightly later stage, there appeared men’s houses apart from commu- nity field of dance, suggesting the develop- ment of a special religious or political role for leading males.

Reilly, Kevin. The Human Journey : A Concise Introduction to World History, Prehistory to 1450, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nu/detail.action?docID=5328388. Created from nu on 2021-11-02 02:05:57.

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By 1150 BCE, the Neolithic villages show signs of social inequality and the emergence of elites who lived in large houses, wore jade, and stretched the skulls of their children as a mark of their status. The men’s houses were now large temples, destroyed and rebuilt every 52 years to conform to the calcula- tions of two calendar systems of 260 and 365 day-years, which came together every 52 years. A world in which the natural rhythms of gathering and planting could be marked by the entire community had become a hi- erarchical chiefdom with secret knowledge preserved by privileged specialists.

Around 500 BCE, the Zapotecs wielded the chiefdoms of the Oaxaca valley into a military state centered on the crown of Monte Alban. There they constructed large pyramids around a central ceremonial plaza, where priests lived apart from the people,

administering the rule of a king with reli- gious rituals sanctioned by celestial calen- dars and the force of arms.

The history of Oaxaca from foraging to Neolithic villages to chiefdoms to state sum- marizes the history of much of the world over the course of the past 10,000 years. In the following chapters, we survey that pat- tern, its varieties, and its exceptions.

Conclusion

The history of 99 percent of the past 14 bil- lion years is hard to summarize. From the vantage point of seconds before midnight, however, certain conclusions leap out at us. Two are as obvious as they are contradic- tory: humans have taken over the world, and human history is a flash in the pan.

Figure 1.11 The great Mexican ceremonial center of Monte Alban, capital of Zapotec state, built after 500 BCE. iStock/frentusha.

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36 Chapter 1

Each of these truths reflects a different time line. From the perspective of the past 10,000 years, even perhaps the past 300,000 years, the emergence, expansion, and increase of the human population is staggering. Its ca- pacity for invention and adaptation marks the human animal as far and away the most successful of its age. And yet that age is only seconds on the solar calendar. Further, the fossil remains on which we walk so proudly are reminders of numerous species that thrived far longer than our brief 300,000 years, only to evaporate in a cosmic accident or fall prey to a new carnivore.

Are human chances any better than the dinosaurs’? Certainly, our tool kit is infi- nitely more subtle and diverse. But the tools that might intercept and destroy a small to middling meteor or even provide food for a population under an ashen sky are not un- like the tools used to kill other humans or those that extract ever-greater leverage from the mantle of nature that gives us life. The exploitation of nature did not begin with agriculture. In some ways, farmers were more attentive to nature’s ways and needs than hunters and gatherers. But more than any other species, humans have sought and found ways of reaching nature’s limits and surmounting its obstacles. There is both enormous hope and vulnerability in that achievement.

Suggested Readings

Christian, David. Maps of Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. A “Big History” by the founder of the movement; full of charts and insights about the first 14 billion years.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Nor-

ton, 1997. Award-winning best-seller offers a long-view answer to the question of why some countries became rich and others poor.

Fagan, Brian. World Prehistory: A Brief Intro- duction. 8th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren- tice Hall, 2010. A well-written short text by a master of the subject.

McNeill, J. R., and William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World His- tory. New York: Norton, 2002. All of world history in a brief volume by two masters— the modern dean of the subject and his son.

Peregrine, Peter N. World Prehistory: Two Mil- lion Years of Human Life. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Well-written and well-illustrated college-level text.

Ristvet, Lauren. In the Beginning: World His- tory from Human Evolution to the First States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. The story of this and the next chapter told engag- ingly and authoritatively.

Notes

1. Robert F. Service, “Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum,” Science, Mar. 16, 2015. Also in http://www.sciencemag.org/ news/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved -origin-life-conundrum.

2. Kenneth Chang, “Meteor Seen as Caus- ing Extinctions on Earth,” New York Times, November 21, 2003, A28.

3. Peter Brannen, “When Life on Earth Nearly Vanished,” New York Times, July 30, 2017, SR2.

4. On North America here and later in this section, I am indebted to Tim Flannery’s The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), a fascinating and highly readable account of North American prehis- tory. Recently, some scientists have argued that such collisions may have occurred far more often than previously thought: possibly every few thousand years rather than 500,000 to a million years. See Sandra Blakeslee, “Ancient

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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved-origin-life-conundrum

The Long Prologue 37

Crash, Epic Wave,” New York Times, November 14, 2006, F1.

5. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Hentry Holt, 2014).

6. Science, May 29, 2014; and Christine Dell Amore, “Species Extinction Happening 1,000 Times Faster Because of Humans?” Na- tional Geographic, May 30, 2014. See http:// news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/ 05/140529-conser vation-science-animals -species-endangered-extinction/.

7. Peter Brannen, op. cit. 8. See Jamie Shreeve, “The Evolutionary

Road,” National Geographic, July 2010, 35–67. 9. Pallab Ghosh “‘First human’ discovered

in Ethiopia,” BBC News, March 4, 2015. http:// www.bbc.com/news/science-environment -31718336.

10. Nicholas Wade, “Signs of Neanderthals Mating with Humans,” New York Times, May 7, 2010, A10.

11. John Noble Wilford, “Bones in China Put New Light on Old Humans,” New York Times, November 16, 1995, A8.

12. New DNA evidence has established that the crossing could not have been made more than 18,000 years ago, not, as previously thought, 30,000 years ago. Nicholas Wade and John Noble Wilford, “New World Ancestors Lose 12,000 Years,” New York Times, July 25, 2003, A19.

13. The thesis of University of Arizona pale- ontologist Paul S. Martin—that it was mankind, not a change in climate, that caused the great extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene—might be modified slightly to emphasize the role of the post–13,000 BCE wave of “Clovis” or stone projectile point–wielding humans.

14. See Sally McBrearty and Allison Brooks, Human Evolution, November 2000. The entire issue of the journal is devoted to their thesis.

15. Hillary Mayell, “Oldest Jewelry? ‘Beads’ Discovered in African Cave,” National Geo- graphic News, April 15, 2004.

16. Mark Stoneking and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. See, for instance, John Travis, “The Naked Truth? Lice

Hint at a Recent Origin of Clothing,” Science News 164, August 23, 2003, 118.

17. Nicholas Wade, “Adventures in Recent Evolution,” New York Times, July 20, 2010, D1.

18. Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, Race and Human Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

19. Nicholas Wade, “DNA Study Yields Clues on First Migration of Early Humans,” New York Times, May 13, 2005, A8.

20. Nicholas Wade, “New DNA Test Is Yielding Clues to Neanderthals,” New York Times, November 16, 2006, F1.

21. Called the “Movius line” after the an- thropologist Hallam Movius, who suggested it in 1944.

22. Mary C. Stiner, Natalie D. Munro, Todd A. Surovell, Eitan Tchernov, and Ofer Bar- Yosef, “Paleolithic Population Growth Pulses Evidenced by Small Animal Exploitation,” Sci- ence, January 8, 1999, 190–94.

23. C. Schrire, ed., Past and Present in Hunter-Gatherer Studies (London: Academic Press, 1984).

24. Carl L. Hoffman, The Punan: Hunters and Gatherers of Borneo (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986).

25. Kathleen Gough, “The Origin of the Family,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 33 (November 1971): 760–71. Reprinted in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 69–70.

26. Larry Rohter, “Brazil Moves to Protect Jungle Plants from Foreign Biopiracy,” New York Times, December 23, 2001, A4.

27. Kyle Jarrard, “On the Origins of the Dentist (with a Stone-Age Drill),” New York Times, April 7, 2006, A15.

28. Scientists refer to this period as the Younger Dryas, or Big Freeze, and date it from 10,800 to 9,500 BCE.

29. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Nor- ton, 1997), 132.

30. Steve LeVine, “The Eden of Apples Is in Kazakhstan: It May Be a Godsend,” Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2003, 1.

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140529-conservation-science-animals-species-endangered-extinction/

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31718336

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31. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. 32. William Ryan and Walter Pittman, No-

ah’s Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

33. The excavations at Catal Huyuk can be followed on the website maintained by the Cambridge University team under the direc- tion of Ian Hodder. It can be accessed at http:// www.catalhoyuk.com.

34. Robert Briffault, The Mothers, abridged by C. R. Taylor (London: Allen & Unwin, 1927, 1959), 363.

35. Chief Solomon Amadiume, Ilu Ndi Igbo: A Study of Igbo Proverbs, vol. 1 (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishing, 1994), 3, #14.

36. Chief Solomon Amadiume, Ilu Ndi Igbo, 4, #27.

37. The English words “tobacco,” “hurri- cane,” “barbecue,” “canoe,” and “hammock” originate from the Taino words tobaco, hura- can, barbacoa, canoa, and hamac.

38. Nicholas Wade, “7,000 Years of Ritual Is Traced in Mexico,” New York Times, December 21, 2004, F4.

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The Urban Revolution The Epic of Gilgamesh The First Cities Origin of Cities in Plow and Irrigation The Brave New World: Squares and Crowds Tall Buildings and Monumental Architecture Social Classes and Inequality Officials and Scribes Slaves and Servants Farmers and Workers New Systems of Control Fathers and Kings Religion and Queens Law and the State Hammurabi’s Code New Urban Classes in City-States and Territorial States Merchants Priests Soldiers New Country People Change and “Civilization” The Bias of “Civilization” Achievements Writing Control and Change

Pasture and Empire Nomads Put the Horse before the Cart New Balance between City and Pasture Nomads Conquer and Create Empires States Regain Empires with Chariots Empires and Collapse Iron Age Eurasia Iron versus Bronze New Forms of Inclusiveness Iron as Metaphor The Invention of the Alphabet “T” Is for Trade Monotheism Gods at War The Rivers of Babylon Citizenship and Salvation The Cities of Babylon The Persian Paradise Imperial Size and Reach Ships and Satrapies Conclusion The Legacy of Gilgamesh’s Wall The Promise of Pharaoh’s Dream

The Brave New World of City, State, and Pasture

From 3000 BCE

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Figure 2.1 Time line.

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The Brave New World of City, State, and Pasture 41

The Urban Revolution: Causes and Consequences

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Come then, Enkidu, to ramparted Uruk, Where fellows are resplendent in holiday clothing, Where every day is set for celebration, Where harps and drums are played. And the harlots too, they are fairest of form, Rich in beauty, full of delights, Even the great gods are kept from sleeping at night.1

Map 2.1 The first urban civilizations arose in some of the areas of the first agricultural revolutions.

T HE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, the world’s earliest surviving written epic, tells the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, one of the world’s first cities, built along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers 5,000 years ago. According to the epic, King Gilgamesh, two-thirds god and one-third human, built the great ramparted wall of Uruk, enclosing three and a half square miles of the city and its gar- dens. But Gilgamesh was an overbearing and arrogant king, and so the people of Uruk called on the gods to bring them a strong man who might keep Gilgamesh in check. In answer

to their call, Aruru, the goddess who created the human race, created Enkidu, a wild man who roamed the pasture like a gazelle. Before Enkidu could tame Gilgamesh, he himself had to be tamed, a task carried out by Shamhat, the harlot, who seduced Enkidu and invited him to Uruk with the words quoted above.

To the modern ear, there is much that is foreign in The Epic of Gilgamesh: goddesses and sacred harlots, wild men who cavort in the fields with the gazelles, and kings who are descended from gods. But there is also much that is familiar—cities, walls, kings, holidays,

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fine clothing, and nightlife (in the above pas- sage alone).

The First Cities

The Urban Revolution. We recognize elements of our own world here because The Epic of Gil- gamesh stands at the beginning of a revolution that has transformed us all. We call that trans- formation the urban revolution. Some histori- ans prefer to call it the beginning of complex societies, the formation of state societies, or the rise of the first civilizations. Whichever words we use, when we look at the Uruk of King Gilgamesh almost 5,000 years ago, we see

the beginning of these developments: cities, states (or organized territories with govern- ments), and the whole range of activities and institutions that are summarized as “complex societies” or “civilizations” because they en- tered the world together.

Archaeologists of the Middle East first called the age of cities and states the Bronze Age because people of the region had learned to smelt bronze (copper and tin), which as weapons and tools replaced those of the stone age, specifically the polished stone tools of the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age. The Epic of Gilgamesh mentions the bronze work on Uruk’s wall. Above all, the Epic speaks to us because it was written and we can read it. Some historians call the period before cities the preliterate or prehistoric age since there was no writing and therefore no written history before the creation of cities 5,000 years ago.

First-City Firsts. The first cities changed the world in countless ways. The number of firsts is staggering: defensive walls, writing, wheels, and wars; kings, priests, soldiers, of- ficials, and numerous specialized occupations, crafts, arts, services, and manufactures; laws, literature, philosophy, astronomy, calendars, and science; and money, markets, merchants, metalworking, and monumental architecture. The first cities were the first places where ev- eryone did not have to find or produce food. Cities introduced not only the division of labor but also social classes, the first world of rich and poor, private property, patriarchy, debts, taxes, treasures, treasuries, treaties, theater, temples, and (thank the city gods) textbooks.

Origin of Cities in Plow and Irrigation

How did cities come about? One answer is that agricultural societies were able to feed

Figure 2.2 This early bronze (copper and tin) statue from Iran or Mesopotamia of a hero or a demon—a man of the hills, where they wore upturned boots and hunted wild prey not too different from themselves—evokes Enkidu, as imagined by the skilled metal worker of the city. Or maybe the royal beard and triple belt suggested Gilgamesh himself. Ca. 3000 B.C.E. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2007.

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The Brave New World of City, State, and Pasture 43

larger populations, including increased num- bers of people who could spend their time in ways other than farming or raising animals. Furthermore, agriculture became more pro- ductive as the use of animal-drawn plows and irrigation took hold.

The first farmers used simple tools like digging sticks and hoes. They planted seeds or placed roots in the soil in garden plots without turning over the soil. Some prepared the soil with a technique called swidden, or slash and burn. They would slash away a band of bark from large trees, thus killing them; cut down the rest of the underbrush; and then burn it

all off, producing a rich ash that fertilized the soil. Whether or not the soil was prepared with fire, this garden agriculture, sometimes called horticulture, required little more than cursory attention, occasional weeding, and some in- tensive labor at harvest time. Consequently, plots and populations remained small. People produced only what they needed, and very few people worked as nonfarming specialists. Horticulture was normally the work of women in family units that numbered a few to a few hundred in villages. While women gardened, men were often involved in the domestication and care of animals.

Figure 2.3 The origin of cities in the Middle East was a result of the marriage of agriculture and animal domestication: of farm and pasture. Animals first domesticated for meat were increasingly used for secondary products and purposes after 4,000 B.C.E. These included milk, cheese, leather, wool, and pulling plows. Plowed fields provided food for city societies, which invented writing-- like Egyptian hieroglyphics of pictures and symbols at top. This example is from an Egyptian tomb about 2,000 B.C.E Wellcome Collection.

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Middle East. In the Middle East, or South- west Asia, the initial urban revolution was the marriage of village and pasture, the joining of women’s gardens and men’s animals, the bonding of Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Certainly, the use of animal-drawn plows to till large fields made agriculture much more produc- tive. Oxen-drawn plows dug furrows into the soil for deeper planting over extensive areas for the first time about 5,600 years ago in the Middle East. A thousand years later, European farmers used oxen and plows to dig into the hard soils of northern Europe. But cities ap- peared in the Americas without plow or draft animals and in other parts of the world, espe- cially in river valleys, where agriculture was intensified as much by irrigation.

Agriculture did not originate along rivers, but cities did. River agriculture in the Middle East, Egypt, China, and Southeast Asia was much more productive than the earlier oasis gardens of places like Jericho or the rain- watered hillsides and plains of places like Catal Huyuk. The farmers of the Euphrates could multiply the amount of food produced along the river banks with irrigation dikes chan- neling silt and flood waters precisely where it was needed. In addition, irrigation systems required constant attention, virtually demand- ing the concentrated labor, common purpose, and community decision making that distin- guished cities from other farming communi- ties. Irrigation systems did not just provide the greater numbers for city life—they were city life. This was especially true of the first cities along the Euphrates, cities like Ur and Uruk, each a state unto itself with its own gods, temples, laws, and identity.

East Asia. Great river irrigation systems also nourished the growth of cities in India, China, and Southeast Asia. The first cities of India grew from villages on the Indus River

that runs through modern Pakistan. Chinese cities first sprouted along the northern Yellow River, where farmers grew millet, and later along the Yangtze River, farther south, where farmers cultivated rice. The earliest cities of Southeast Asia were similarly made possible by the irrigated rice paddies of the great deltas and marshlands of the Red River in northern Vietnam, the Mekong River in southern Viet- nam and Cambodia, and the Chao Praya River of Thailand.

Americas. In the Americas, irrigated ag- riculture supported city populations on the large central plateau of Mexico, the Mayan areas of Mexico and Guatemala, on terraced mountainsides in the Andes, and along rivers on the Peruvian coast. The Mexica, or Aztecs, who settled on an island in the more-than- mile-high Lake Texcoco of central Mexico cre- ated a highly intensive agriculture by building stationery floating islands of fertile mud for planting. Modern tourists can still visit a few remaining cultivated chinampas at Xochimilco near modern Mexico City. Farmers tend their crops in canoes, paddling by raised strips of corn and other plants that seem to rise from the lake. In Aztec times, before the Spanish conquest in 1519, these strips of mud, con- stantly replenished and fertilized with human waste, supported four crops a year and a very high population density.

The Mayans, who lived in the tropical rain forests of southern Mexico and Gua- temala, also used chinampas and irrigated fields. Combined with Taino-like terracing and slash-and-burn farming in forest areas, Mayan agriculture was as productive as that of the Mexica; each supported more than double the population density of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In South America, the development of cit- ies in the Andes relied on both irrigation and

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terraces. Irrigation ditches trapped the sparse runoff of rainwater that cascaded down the desert-dry western cliffs of the Andes to the Pacific coast. The resulting irrigated coastal farms supplemented the dense fishing villages spawned by the rich anchovy fisheries of the Pacific coast south of the equator. In addition to subsistence crops, the irrigated fields of the lowland towns and cities grew the cotton used to fashion the fish nets used to catch anchovies.

High in the Andes, farmers built terraces to harvest the numerous varieties of potatoes that grew in the mountains. The Andes was the one area in the Americas that had domes- ticated large animals, but neither the llama nor the alpaca ever pulled a plow. Instead, Inca men pushed a foot plow along terraces while, behind them, their wives dropped seeds and potato cuttings into the ground.

Along the South American rivers that cas- caded into the Pacific Ocean, cities appeared as early as in South Asia—beginning about 3100 BCE, according to recent excavations.2 Without bronze or even pottery, dozens of cites of 25 to over 250 acres dotted the Peru- vian coast by 2600 BCE.

The Brave New World: Squares and Crowds

From a telescope on the moon, the effects of plow and irrigation agriculture would have seemed similar. Since oxen plowed long straight furrows, the dry and rain-watered agricultural lands would have appeared from a great distance as an expanding patchwork of rectangular fields, green or brown, depending on the season. Terraces would also appear as parallel lines running horizontally up the side of mountains. Irrigated fields, marshes, and deltas would look very much like plowed

fields that were more often blue than green. The overall impression would be of a world in which square shapes were increasingly re- placing circular ones. This was especially the case near the expanding red/brown patches that had grown near each checkerboard of greens and blues. In fact, a very sharp tele- scope would have shown that those urban patches were growing very quickly. By 2500 BCE, about 80 percent of the people along the southern Euphrates lived in cities of at least 100 acres. To take one example, the city of Shuruppak (modern Fara), which did not exist in 3000 BCE, covered 250 acres by 2500 BCE, and the city wall enclosed 15,000 to 30,000 inhabitants.

The view from inside these new urban checkerboards was uniformly different from that of earlier villages. Not only had rectangu- lar houses replaced round ones, but these new boxes, stacked side by side and soon on top of each other, marked off rectangular neigh- borhoods and straight streets instead of open fields and winding lanes.

China during the Shang dynasty (1766– 1050 BCE) reflected the new checkerboard world. Fields were divided into nine squares so that peasants would receive the proceeds of eight, and the ninth would go to the lord. Shang city houses were rectangular, laid out on grid plans with palace grounds in the center. Each of seven palace cities duplicated the lay- out of the capital city. The tastes of emperors ran from the uniform large to the uniform extra large.

The great rivers like the Euphrates and Indus might meander or change their courses, but the cities that relied on their bounty were constructed along the straight and narrow. Even the probably more peaceful Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro (2500–1500 BCE)3 follow the grid layout of military camps.

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Tall Buildings and Monumental Architecture

Even more noticeable to a visiting villager was the size and variety of buildings. Although or- dinary workers lived in rows of small buildings that were no larger or more comfortable than village huts, there were also large buildings, 4 to 10 times the size of workers’ homes, enclosed in high walls, barely accessible from the street, but open to large interior courtyards. And, more striking, there were palaces and temples: monu- mental buildings that no village could afford.

How could cities afford palaces, monu- ments, and large houses for some? By taxing the villages, the farmers, and the urban poor. Kings like Gilgamesh, noble friends like En- kidu, and the other “fellows . . . resplendent in holiday clothing” could afford to have “harps and drums played, and the harlots too” because of the new intensive agriculture. The king and the members of other wealthy and powerful families in the city taxed the farm and pasture a percentage of their produce so that they and those who supported them could eat without soiling their hands in the dirt.

Social Classes and Inequality

Everywhere cities first sprang up, they grew only a small portion of the food they con- sumed and used their power to fleece their country cousins. The first city societies were class societies, and nowhere were the class dif- ferences greater than inside the city itself. The city pyramid was topped by kings, often kings like Gilgamesh who claimed some share of divinity. In Egypt, the pharaohs were literally gods and their pyramids their eternal resting homes. Just beneath the king were noble fami- lies, people related to the king or members of families who had previously been headed by

kings. The early cities of Peru display similar signs of hierarchy: huge pyramids and broad ceremonial plazas.

Officials and Scribes. Beneath the rulers was history’s first middle class: a wide range of officials, priests, administrators, artists, and artisans who served the king, his court, and the nobility. To be a scribe, a writer, opened the world of officialdom, a middle-class paradise compared to the prospect of working with one’s hands. In ancient Egypt more than 4,000 years ago, students were advised,

Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labor of any kind and be a magistrate of high repute. The scribe is released from manual tasks; it is he who commands . . .

I have seen the metal-worker at his task at the mouth of his furnace, with fingers like a crocodile’s. He stank worse than fish-spawn. . . . The stonemason finds his work in every kind of hard stone. When he has finished his labors his arms are worn out, and he sleeps all doubled up until sunrise. His knees and spine are broken. . . . The barber shaves from morning till night, he never sits down except to meals. He hurries from house to house looking for business. He wears out his arms to fill his stomach, like bees eating their own honey. . . . The farmer wears the same clothes for all times. His voice is as raucous as a crow’s. His fingers are always busy; his arms are dried up by the wind. He takes his rest— when he gets any—in the mud. . . .

Apply your heart to learning. In truth there is nothing that can compare with it. If you have profited by a single day at school it is a gain for eternity.4

Slaves and Servants. At the bottom of the city class system were slaves. In the beginning,

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slavery was not as pervasive as it later became, but slavery existed in virtually all ancient city societies. In Egypt, as in many other ancient societies, most slaves were war captives who were employed as domestic servants. Some were owned by wealthy families and others by the state, such as the women who were loaned to working families at tomb-building sites, for example, to grind the workmen’s grain into flour.

Slaves were not the only underclass. Slightly above them in the social hierarchy was a wide range of servants. A pyramid-building site would require servants who were water car- riers, woodcutters, fishermen, gardeners, and washermen.

Farmers and Workers. Most of the heavy lifting on public projects like Egyptian pyra- mids was done not by slaves or servants but by peasant farmers who owed a certain number of labor days in the off season. But they were hardly alone. All the classes of Egyptian society were marshaled to build the great pyramids along the lower Nile by the pharaohs of 4,700 to 4,500 years ago (2700–2500 BCE). Such projects required architects, scribes, stonema- sons, carpenters, sculptors, and artists. Each new royal tomb involved the construction of an entire city of suppliers, bakers, physicians, ration providers, guards, and officials just for the period of construction.

New Systems of Control

Why did villagers who lived in general equal- ity accept the inequality of cities? The loss of equality was probably a gradual process. In the previous chapter, we noticed how villages turned into tribal societies and then chiefdoms as they became more complex. City societies were merely the next step in complexity and concentration of power. City societies created

new institutions that led people to accept in- equality as natural.

Fathers and Kings. One of these was an increased emphasis on the father’s command of the family. Having already seized control of the agricultural surplus through plow and irri- gation agriculture, men concentrated property in their own hands and sought to pass it on to their sons. In the cramped quarters of cit- ies, men were eager to ensure that sons were their own, so they restricted their wives to the interior of the houses or demanded that they cover themselves outdoors. In the cities of the Middle East, women wore veils and cov- ered their hair thousands of years before the Arabs brought Islam in the seventh century CE. Thus, the man’s control of wife, children, and family modeled the king’s control of city society. The words for father and king were

Figure 2.4 Nikare was an Egyptian granary official around 2400 B.C.E. His wife stands to his right; his daughter kneels to his left. What does this tell you about the ancient Egyptian family? The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Rogers Fund, 1952.

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interchangeable, and both meant power. Even religion changed to support men’s claim. In the age of cities, sky fathers and sun gods replaced Earth Mothers and fertility goddesses, even those who had presided over planting, harvest- ing, and giving birth. One Egyptian myth even imagined the god Atum creating the world from his own body through masturbation.

Religion and Queens. Goddesses did not disappear in the early cities, but they did become subordinate to gods. Not all women lost power and influence in patriarchal states. With kings came queens, women whose privi- leged lives were another sign of one man’s power. One of the earliest and most successful archaeological discoveries of ancient Mesopo- tamia was Leonard Woolley’s discovery of the royal tombs of Ur in the 1920s. In one of these tombs, Woolley found the tomb of Queen Puabi (ca. 2600 BCE), buried with a crown of

golden leaves, silver bracelets, and hundreds of strings of precious stone beads—deep blue lapis lazuli from central Asia and bright red carnelian from western India. In addition, the queen was buried with golden sculptured gifts for the gods and a harp-sized lyre, decorated in gold and precious stones.

In death, Queen Puabi exerted wide domin- ion. To accompany her on her voyage to the netherworld, Queen Puabi was joined by more than 70 guards and attendants, including 12 young women dressed like the queen in beaded cloaks and golden diadems. One can only won- der what these young women understood about their service to Puabi. Did they realize that they were to be buried alive with their queen’s corpse? If so, did their feelings about royal ser- vice or religious duty comfort them?

Human sacrifice became a city ruler’s pre- rogative, not only in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Figure 2.5 A reconstructed scene of the tomb of Queen Puabi at Ur before the slaughter of the animals and attendants. ©The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY

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In China, too, the graves of Shang dynasty emperors reveal hundreds of attendants sent to accompany the king on his journey to heaven. In this regard and many others, India stands out as an exception. Excavations of Harappa, Mohenjodaro, and other cities along the Indus show no sign of human sacrifice in elite burials.

Law and the State. Neither kings nor queens, neither fathers nor gods, could ensure inequality without the other major innova- tions of city society: the law and the state. Un- like tribal chiefs, the first kings did not justify their power in arbitrary or personal terms. That is one of the lessons the people of ancient Mesopotamia read into The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic begins with King Gilgamesh terror- izing the people of Uruk, leaving no son or daughter safe from his lust. The plea of the nobles asking the goddess Aruru to counter Gilgamesh symbolized the beginnings of a state—the formation of a government more permanent and less arbitrary than the whim of a tribal chieftain. States were administered by officials and ruled by law.

Law promised predictability, a limit to vengeance, and a certain standard of fair- ness. But that did not mean village equality. In a class society, the ministers and scribes of kings wrote laws that protected the wealthy and powerful while still claiming the loyalty of lower-class commoners.

Hammurabi’s Code. One of the earliest law codes, the Mesopotamian code of Hammurabi of Babylon, about 1750 BCE, balanced these two goals adroitly. The class bias of the code is obvious in the law on assault. The penalty for knocking out an eye of a noble was to have your own eye knocked out, no matter who you were. This, of course, was the origin of “an eye for an eye” as a legal principle, but it protected only the eyes of the upper class. If the eye of a common person was knocked out, the penalty

was a small fine. The same Hammurabi’s code, however, laid claim to protecting the common people with another set of laws on theft. A noble person who commits a theft must repay 30 times the cost of the stolen property; a com- mon thief need pay only 10 times the cost. The principle here may be that the upper classes had a greater stake in the rule of law and a greater responsibility to society. But before we make too much of this charitable finger on the scales of justice, we should add the last part of the law: “if the thief cannot pay, he shall be put to death.” Clearly, the state cared for some lower classes more than others.

In general, states achieved legitimacy with only the grudging support of the class of ordi- nary farmers by winning the more energetic approval of the nobility and middle class. The kind of middle class varied, however, depend- ing on the nature of the state.

New Urban Classes in City-States and Territorial States

The urban revolution actually created two kinds of states 5,000 years ago, and in many ways these two varieties have persisted down to the present day. One type, known as the city-state, consisted of the city, sometimes suburbs or a subordinate city, and the farm and pasture that were necessary to support the urban population. Uruk was one of these, as were the other first cities in the Tigris and Euphrates valley. City-states also sprung up along the Indus River in India and in Mexico though a bit later. The earliest city in central Mexico, Monte Alban, originated about 1000 BCE, but by about 300 BCE it reached the same population, 25,000 people, as Uruk had about 3000 BCE.

The other type of state, called the territo- rial state, was much larger in area and less

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urban. Cities mattered less, or there were fewer of them. Egypt was a territorial state. Its spine was the Nile River, dotted with vil- lages and urban settlements, but it stretched into the desert on either side as far as the eye could see. The capital city of Egypt was the location of the pharaoh’s court: Memphis near modern Cairo during the Old Kingdom in the third millennium BCE and Thebes, upriver near modern Luxor, during the New Kingdom after 1550 BCE. But the vast remains of the pharaoh Akhenaton’s city of the middle 1300s BCE on a previously undeveloped location midway between the two earlier capitals shows how easy it was for a determined king to pick up everything and move when it suited his purpose. The Gilgamesh poet’s pride in Uruk would have sounded strange to Egyptians, who felt no particular pride in any city. What mattered to each pharaoh was the design and construction of his final resting place, usually on the west bank, or sunset side, of the Nile. What mattered to the pharaoh’s court was the location of the pharaoh. And what mattered to the more than 80 percent of Egyptians who were peasant farmers were their meager fields and ancestral villages.

Merchants. Markets were also more im- portant in city-states than in territorial states. In large territorial states like Egypt, kings commanded and taxed all they needed. In the city-states of Mexico, farmers and merchants brought their products to market.

The Aztec city of the Mexica was a suc- cessor to many city-states that flourished in the valley of Mexico in the centuries before the Spanish conquest of 1519 CE. One of the Spanish conquistadors, Bernal Diaz, wrote of its great market:

We were astounded at the great number of people and the quantities of merchan- dise. . . .

Let us begin with the dealers in gold, silver, precious stones, feathers, cloaks, embroidered goods, and male and female slaves who were sold there. . . . Next there were those who sold coarser cloth, and cotton goods, and fabrics made of twisted thread, and there were chocolate mer- chants with their chocolate . . .

There were sellers of kidney beans and sage and other vegetables and herbs . . . and in another place they were sell- ing fowls, birds, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, dogs, and other creatures. Then there were the fruiterers and the woman who sold cooked food, flour, and honey cake, and tripe. Then came pottery of all kinds, large and small. . . . Elsewhere they sold timber too, boards, cradles, beams, blocks, and benches, all in a quarter of its own. But why waste so many words on the goods in their great market? If I describe every- thing in detail I shall never be done. Paper, which in Mexico they call amal, and some reeds that smell of liquid amber, and are full of tobacco, and yellow ointments, and much cochineal [insects for red dye]. . . . I am forgetting the sellers of salt and the makers of flint knives . . . and the fisher- woman, and the men who sell small cakes made from a sort of weed that they get out of the great lake, which curdles and forms a kind of bread which tastes rather like cheese. They sell axes too, made of bronze and copper and tin; and gourds; and brightly painted wooden jars.5

Mayan society was also made up of vari- ous independent city-states, linked by markets in which the long-distance trade of obsidian was particularly important. Nevertheless, the importance of markets in city-states did not translate into the importance of merchants, who were only one group among many.

Priests. In the city-states of both Mesopo- tamia and Middle America, religious temples

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presided over central squares, and priests were more influential than merchants. In both ar- eas, priests administered irrigation and the rhythms of agriculture. Priests were the inter- preters of the calendar, the celebrants of reli- gious rites. Even kings who claimed divinity relied on their priests. All Bronze Age states were theocracies: they did not distinguish be- tween religious and secular matters. Religions were local, and the deities were very much involved in life within the city walls. Recall Aruru. Local deities were able to control larger natural forces: the winds, rain, sky, sun, and underworld. The Epic of Gilgamesh contains an early version of the biblical flood story, but the great flood in the epic occurs because the people are too noisy and the gods cannot sleep.

The well-being of the people, nature, and the gods were intimately bound together. Kings were descended from the gods or be- came gods. Gods often acted like people, dis- played human emotions, or had relations with people. They had to be placated, appeased, or offered sacrifices. At times, the gods seemed to need the people as much as the people needed the gods. One ancient Mesopotamian poem has a slave advise his master to “teach the god to run after you like a dog” by withholding sacrifices.6

Numerous city societies offered human sacrifices to ensure the health and vitality of the god and natural forces. In Mexico, the Aztecs and the Mayans offered flesh to the sky and blood to the earth to ensure the continu- ance of the rains and fertility. Priests and rul- ers led their people in rituals of bloodletting from various parts of their bodies as offerings to the gods. The Aztec sun god, Huitzilopoctli, required regular human sacrifices just to en- sure that the sun rose each day. Consequently, the Aztecs conquered the cities of central Mex- ico, making some of them allies while turning

others into permanent enemies and suppliers of captive soldiers for sacrifice.

The sacrifice of palace attendants in the tombs of kings was a frequent practice in other city societies, especially territorial states where the power of the king was more like a god. The tombs of kings in Egypt, Inca Peru, and China contain such remains. In addition, defeated soldiers were sacrificed in ritual ceremonies in China and in other states.

Soldiers. After merchants and priests, the most important urban class was soldiers. Un- like in modern armies, they were normally conscripts rather than professionals, drawn from the farmers and urban working class and commanded by members of the nobil- ity. In periods of war or expansion, however, soldiers were granted special privileges. The Aztec state, for instance, promoted soldiers to the nobility and gave them land after they had captured four enemy combatants. And as the ancient states expanded, they developed professional armies. They also used mercenary armies, often recruited from pastoral societies on the borders of their expanding empires.

New Country People. What sorts of people inhabited the countryside? Farmers, of course, but we would be mistaken if we thought of farmers as a single class, all alike. The class di- visions of the city extended to the countryside. In fact, wealthy farmers often lived in the city, as in the following Egyptian account attributed to an official who contemplates a visit to his country estate, where the farming was done for him:

You go down to your ship manned from bow to stern. You reach your beautiful villa, the one you have built for yourself. Your mouth is full of wine and beer, of bread, meat and cakes. Oxen are slaugh- tered and wine is opened, and melodious singing is before you. Your chief anointer

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anoints you. Your manager of cultivated lands brings garlands. Your chief fowler brings ducks, your fisherman brings fish. Your ship has returned from Syria laden with every manner of good things. Your byre is full of calves, your weavers flourish.7

The countryside was full of people who were not farmers, as the city was full of people who owned or rented farmland. Neverthe- less, the majority of people in the countryside worked the land. Many were free peasants, but there was also a vast number of semifree farmers, bound to work the lands of the state or of religious temples. In Egypt, they were called “royal workers,” and in Mesopotamia they were officially “bringers of income.” In Egypt, where the status was hereditary, men worked in the fields, while the women of the household spun cloth and sewed in special workshops. All classes of workers, dependent and free, participated in mam- moth public work projects and the building of monuments.

Here is another clue to why social inequal- ity was widely accepted. Beneath the king or pharaoh, people of all classes worked on public projects, and they were not generally distinguishable by appearance. Slaves were foreigners, drawn from conquered armies of various racial or ethnic backgrounds. In addi- tion, foreign mercenary soldiers mirrored the diversity of slaves but were free.

Change and “Civilization”

To ask how things change is a difficult but important question for historians. But to ask if the change was good or bad is a question most historians would rather avoid. “Good for whom?” they might ask. “We should be

careful not to impose our values on the past.” Yet as citizens, we make judgments about how the world is changing all the time. In fact, we would be ill equipped to shape our future without an understanding of how things were changing and without an ability to evaluate those changes.

The Bias of “Civilization.” No change in human history is more loaded with value judg- ments than the development of cities and state societies. Traditionally, they are called “civili- zations,” a word related to “cities,” “civic,” and “civility,” which implies urban sophistication, high culture, and great achievement. In addi- tion, “civilized” has long had a special meaning of emotional control, maturity, and politeness.

The problem with all these associations is that they reflect the viewpoint of people in city-based societies. It is a self-congratulatory view that originated in the first cities them- selves. The Epic of Gilgamesh presents such a perspective:

. . . ramparted Uruk, Where fellows are resplendent in holiday

clothing, Where every day is set for celebration.

Moreover, it is the view that the upper class and literate class developed of itself. The ideas of civilization, progress, and perhaps even change were urban inventions, created to denigrate the people of farm and pasture as “uncivilized” or “barbaric.” Thus, to ask if city society was an improvement is to open a huge can of worms.

Clearly, we are well advised to ask “good for whom?” The Egyptian official described above lived far better than his chief fowler; he, in turn, lived far more comfortably than the rowers in the master’s ship. But did the rise of cities and state societies improve the lives of

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most people? Did it raise the level of living for future generations?

There are many reasons to say “no”: in- creased inequality, suppression of women, slavery, organized warfare, conscription, heavy taxation, and forced labor, to name some of the most obvious. A list like this is enough to make one wonder if anything good came out of the first state societies. But we do not have to wonder long.

Achievements of Ancient Civilizations. Our museums are full of the art and artifacts of the ancient civilizations. The monuments of the ancient world, the pyramids of Egypt and of Mexico, and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia are among the wonders of the world. Does it mat- ter that the great pyramids of Egypt were built from the forced labor of thousands to provide a resting place for a single person (and those who were entombed alive in order to serve him)? We can view them today as a remark- able achievement of engineering and organi- zation while still condemning their manner of execution. We can admire the art in the tombs, thrill to the revealing detail of ancient Egyptian life, and marvel at the persistence of vivid colors mixed almost 5,000 years ago and still detest their purpose.

We can do this because these monuments have become something different for us than what they were for the ancients. They have become testaments to human achievement, regardless of the cost. These ancient city-based societies were the first in which humans pro- duced abundant works of art and architecture that still astound us in their range, scope, and design.

The significance of the urban revolution is that it produced things that lasted beyond their utility or meaning—thanks to new techniques in stonecutting and hauling; baking brick, tile, and glass; and smelting tin, copper, and

bronze—as a legacy for future generations. Even 3,000 years ago, Egyptian engineers stud- ied the ancient pyramids to understand a very distant past, 1,500 years before, and to learn, adapt, revive, or revise ancient techniques. In short, the achievement of the urban revolution is that it made knowledge cumulative so that each generation could stand on the shoulders of its predecessors.

Writing. The invention of writing was the single most important step in the urban revo- lution. Almost all the ancient city societies cre- ated some form of writing. The techniques and symbols differed widely. The earliest system in Mesopotamia, called cuneiform, began with wedge markings in clay, sun-dried or oven- baked to form a permanent record. Egyptians and Mesoamericans developed hieroglyphic systems of pictures and symbols painted on a sort of paper that the Egyptians made from papyrus leaves and the Mexicans made from bark. The Inca of Peru devised one of the most unusual systems for recording informa- tion; they tied knots at particular intervals on strings of different colors and weaves and hung dozens of these strings from a horizontal belt called a khipu. The combination of knot placement and color and weave of string gave an Inca khipu maker 1,500 separate units of information, like digital bits according to a recent study,8 a number equal to the approxi- mately 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs.

Remarkably, writing was invented for dif- ferent purposes in different societies, and cre- ating literature was not one of them. The first writing in Mesopotamia registered economic information about temple workers, such as work schedules and ration payments. In Egypt, writing designated kinship relations and prop- erty ownership. Mayan writing related the ancestors and achievements of Mayan kings. The earliest examples of Chinese writing that

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we have are the inscriptions written on animal bones that were used in the Shang dynasty about 4,000 years ago. Priests would inscribe their questions on the bones and then put them in a fire until they cracked. The lines of the cracks were interpreted as answers to their questions.

Control and Change. In these and other ancient state societies, writing was invented as a means of social control and administration by the wealthy and powerful. In its origins, writing had nothing to do with self-expression or literature, and it served only the interests of a tiny portion of the population. But writing was too powerful an invention to be contained within a narrow class. Despite frequent ef- forts by priests and scribes to preserve their monopoly, they could not control the spread or use of reading and writing. By 1700 BCE, at the latest, the story of Gilgamesh had been written down, and Egyptian scribes were copy- ing sample letters and descriptions of society to learn to write.

Writing was one of the most important forces for change in the Bronze Age. Even if it had been limited to the scribes, it would have inevitably led to innovation. Writing enabled a range of other crucial breakthroughs. Cal- endars were written representations of the changes in evening light (lunar) and the sea- sons (solar). At first an aid to determine the time of planting, especially in Egypt, where the river rose predictably, solar calendars became complex records of the movement of the stars and in Mayan society remarkably accurate measures of time. In conjunction with writ- ten observations about the movement of the stars and the natural rhythms of the earth, the beginnings of astronomy and earth science evolved.

There were other important forces of change in state societies. All technological

innovation takes on a certain momentum of its own as improvements are made and problems lead to new breakthroughs. In ancient societ- ies, however, such improvements were by no means as rapid as they have become in modern times. The class divisions of the ancient world generally divided manual labor and technical knowledge on the one hand from science and the power to innovate on the other. Markets were a richer source of change in the Bronze Age, as was the meeting of traders in market areas, especially in city-states, where markets played a greater role than they did in territorial states. Before the invention of coinage in the seventh century BCE in Lydia (modern Tur- key), however, the range of trade and markets was limited.

Not all forces of change in ancient society came from inside the society. Traders often came from distant lands, for example, and their very presence would encourage thoughts about different ways of doing things. In addi- tion, there was a very powerful force of change restlessly looking on from the frontiers of ancient states. Perhaps the most important of these frontier societies consisted of the people of the pasture.

Pasture and Empire

The urban revolution began with the trans- formation of some highly productive or well- placed agricultural villages into cities 5,000 years ago. While some prospered as city-states, others turned outward and created larger terri- torial states. Warfare punctuated the relations of them all.

Across Eurasia, an additional threat to the stability of city societies came from the grasslands, where people specialized in animal husbandry and traveled with their animals from one grazing land to another. In most of

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Eurasia, a revolution that began with cities ended with empires that were made possible by changes outside the city walls in the pasture.

People domesticated animals almost ev- erywhere they domesticated plants, beginning 10,000 years ago. Early communities like Catal Huyuk lived on both food sources. Village and later city settlements continued to keep chickens, goats, sheep, ducks, turkeys, and other domesticates within the city walls. The rooster’s announcement of sunrise can still be heard in most cities of the world. But at some point, the raising of animals became a special- ized activity, and the growth of herds required a continual search for grasslands instead of settlement. This was especially the case over the huge grasslands that run across Eurasia, from eastern Europe across Turkey, Russia, Mongolia, and China.

Agriculture and the settled life flourished especially in well-watered places and times. Pasture expanded across the dry, treeless grasslands of central Asia—and farther during times of drought. Most of the period between

3000 and 2200 BCE provided ample moisture to feed the agricultural settlements of the Mid- dle East. From 2200 to 1900 BCE, however, low rainfall reduced the number and size of northern Mesopotamian settlements by about a third, turning many of the farmers who did not flee to the south into pastoral nomads. Similar conditions may have aided the spread of pastoral lands elsewhere.

Nomads Put the Horse before the Cart. A catalyst for this change to a migratory life in the central Asian steppe was the horse. Before the domestication of the horse about 3500 BCE in southern Russia, people in the grasslands of Eurasia lived along rivers, where they farmed and raised sheep, goats, and cattle. Near these settlements, archaeologists have even found the remains of domesticated pigs, which are never kept by nomads.

After 2000 BCE, horses gave the people of the Eurasian grasslands easy movement and a much greater range, allowing them to increase vastly the size of their herds. Evidence of bit marks on horses’ teeth suggests the early use

Map 2.2 The Chariot Revolution

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of bridles and of horseback riding, but it was the invention of spoked wheels, carts, and chariots (see Map 2.2) that transformed the economy of the grasslands from mixed farm- ing and grazing to nomadic animal raising. With horse-drawn carts, people could com- fortably take themselves and their belongings over an almost endless supply of pasture. Sheep and goats remained the staples of their herds, supplying most of the peoples’ needs for food, hides, wool, and even dung for fuel, but horses put their previously settled world in motion. The change was somewhat akin to fishermen who were used to casting their lines from the shore suddenly getting ships to fish the open seas.

Everyone took up the new nomadic life, from forest dwellers in Siberia to settled farm- ers along the southern border of the grasslands. A world of different isolated cultures became a single culture of nomadic pastoralism. The similar transformation of the North American plains when the Spanish introduced the horse after 1500 shows how rapid such a change could be. Within a century, widely differing tribal cultures all seized on the advantage of horseback riding for hunting bison, creating a “Plains Indian” culture that was entirely new.

New Balance between City and Pasture. The new nomads of Eurasia brought change to city societies in a number of important ways. Their mobility brought them physically

Figure 2.6 Early chariots like this Hittite chariot were barely platforms, carrying driver, shield holder, and archer and often drawn by multiple horses. Erich Lessing/Art Resource NY.

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The Brave New World of City, State, and Pasture 57

closer to new cities. They entered a closer re- lationship of reciprocal wants and needs. The herdsmen desired the fine clothes, jewels, and precious products of the cities as well as wheat for bread. City rulers recognized the value of horses and horse-drawn vehicles. But the rela- tionship between farm and pasture could verge from fraternal to fratricidal. Gilgamesh both battles and befriends the wild man Enkidu from the grasslands, and in the Bible, Cain the farmer slays his brother Abel the herdsmen.

As city societies built walls and trained armies to raid others, the nomadic peoples forged military formations of their own with horse-drawn chariots. In clashes with settled societies, charioteers with bows and arrows enjoyed the advantage of speed and surprise. Their forces transformed the balance of power from southern Europe to China. The settled communities closest to the Eurasian grass- lands were the first to recognize the value of the new technology and make it their own.

Nomads Conquer and Create Empires. Tribal leaders and kings of border states in what is today Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and central Asia were instrumental in creating the new technology that melded horses and wheels into a powerful force for change. In some cases, as in India, the new technology gave an edge to Indo-Aryan–speaking nomadic peoples who already lived in the subcontinent. In other cases, the combination of horses and wheels created a devastating war machine of trained archers and chariot drivers that over- came the cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Indo-Aryan nomads probably lived among the Indus cities long before they were aban- doned around 1500 BCE. These people in- troduced camels before 1500 BCE, but horses and chariots did not come until later when the center of urban life had shifted east toward the area of the Ganges River.

Since the writing of Harappa, Mohenjo- daro, and the other Indus cities has not been translated, we do not know how similar or dif- ferent their culture was from the Indo-Aryan Sanskrit culture that emerged after 1500 BCE. Nevertheless, the great Indian epic Mahab- harata tells stories of battles between archers on chariots. In one famous passage, the god Krishna, incarnated as a charioteer, explains that members of the military caste must not shirk their obligation to wage war. Similarly, the oldest extant Sanskrit document of Hindu- ism, the Rig Veda, laid out the prayers and sac- rifices of tribes skilled in horsemanship whose leaders were charioteers. In fact, the spoked wheel of the chariot became an enduring symbol of India, transformed into a symbol of eternal return in Hindu and Buddhist imagery and displayed on the modern flag of India after independence in 1947.

The conquest of Mesopotamia by the charioteers of the Kassite kingdom of Iran was more of a military affair. While the Kas- sites were still able to defeat the cities of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, they could not or chose not to impose their culture on the more sophisticated one they conquered. Instead, they learned Akkadian (the educated language of Mesopotamia), copied the stories of gods like Marduk and heroes like Gilgamesh, and revived the law codes of Hammurabi. As the Kassites became like Babylonians, new king- doms arose to take advantage of the chariot military technology, like the Hittites and the Assyrians.

The Egyptians were conquered by a chariot- based military kingdom called the Hyksos, who came from the area of Syria and Palestine. The Hyksos imposed a regime that was partly foreign and partly respectful of Egyptian tradi- tions. They moved the capital from Thebes to Avaris and partnered with the Nubian kingdom

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58 Chapter 2

of Kush, south of Egypt. In response, a prince of Thebes led a successful Egyptian rebellion against the Hyksos and established an Egyptian New Kingdom that reconquered Nubia and used Nubian gold to pay for the best horses, chariots, and charioteers that money could buy. Horses do not breed easily close to the equa- tor because their estrous cycle is triggered by changing hours of sunlight, so the Egyptians got their horses from the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia (present-day Turkey). A letter from the period reveals that, for Nubian gold, the Hittites supplied not only the horses but the equivalent number of chariots as well. It was today’s equivalent of getting a fleet of jet planes, complete with trained pilots and spare parts.

States Regain Empires with Chariots. In Egypt and then in Mesopotamia, native char- iot-based states created empires larger than any that had ever existed before. Earlier an- cient Egypt had looked inward, protected by miles of desert. By contrast, the Egyptian New Kingdom after 1600 BCE created an empire that extended from Nubia to Syria. Similarly, the Kassites, Hittites, and Assyrians controlled all of Turkey and the northern Middle East. Horse-drawn chariots vastly increased the range of military conquest and administration. It was an international age. Akkadian became the first transnational language, used in diplo- matic correspondence from Egypt to Iran.

Chariots gave the Bronze Age states of Eurasia a new lease on life. By increasing the size of states and turning them into empires, chariots vastly expanded the number and size of dependent villages, cities, and kingdoms that the great states could tax and exploit. The Egyptian New Kingdom (1570–1085 BCE) was marked by some of the greatest cultural achievements (though the period of the pyra- mids was long past): Queen Hatshepsut estab- lished trade relations with Punt in East Africa

in 1493, Akhetaton initiated the monotheistic worship of Aten around 1362, and Ramesis II carried Egyptian armies to their widest bound- aries by 1283.

The success of these empires was tempo- rary, however. The imbalances that character- ized Bronze Age states remained. In fact, in some important ways, they increased. Kings became richer and more remote from their subjects. Farming communities were exploited more and more. Military occupations became more brutal and slavery more pervasive. The greatest of the new empires, the Assyrian, prided itself on the brutality of its armies. At some point, the farmers and other producing classes of Bronze Age society were squeezed

Figure 2.7 The face of the sphinx shows the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut with the beard that testified to her kingship, fifteenth century BCE. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

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