The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2
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11. 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.
12. Nicholas Wade, “Adventures in Recent Evolution,” New York Times, July 20, 2010, D1.
13. Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, Race and Human Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
14. Nicholas Wade, “DNA Study Yields Clues on First Migration of Early Humans,” New York Times, May 13, 2005, A8.
15. Nicholas Wade, “New DNA Test Is Yielding Clues to Neanderthals,” New York Times, November 16, 2006, F1.
16. Called the “Movius line” after the anthropologist Hallam Movius, who suggested it in 1944.
17. Mary C. Stiner, Natalie D. Munro, Todd A. Surovell, Eitan Tchernov, and Ofer Bar-Yosef, “Paleolithic Population Growth Pulses Evidenced by Small Animal Exploitation,” Science, January 8, 1999, 190—94.
18. C. Schrire, ed., Past and Present in Hunter-Gatherer Studies (London: Academic Press, 1984).
19. Carl L. Hoffman, The Punan: Hunters and Gatherers of Borneo (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986).
20. 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.
21. Larry Rohter, “Brazil Moves to Protect Jungle Plants from Foreign Biopiracy,” New York Times, December 23, 2001, A4.
22. Kyle Jarrard, “On the Origins of the Dentist (with a Stone-Age Drill),” New York Times, April 7, 2006, A15.
23. Scientists refer to this period as the Younger Dryas, or Big Freeze, and date it from 10,800 to 9,500 BCE.
24. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997), 132.
25. Steve LeVine, “The Eden of Apples Is in Kazakhstan: It May Be a Godsend,” Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2003, 1.
26. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
27. William Ryan and Walter Pittman, Noah’s Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).
28. The excavations at Catal Huyuk can be followed on the website maintained by the Cambridge University team under the direction of Ian Hodder. It can be accessed at http://www.catalhoyuk.com.
29. Robert Briffault, The Mothers, abridged by C. R. Taylor (London: Allen & Unwin, 1927, 1959), 363.
30. Chief Solomon Amadiume, Ilu Ndi Igbo: A Study of Igbo Proverbs, vol. 1 (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishing, 1994), 3, #14.
31. Chief Solomon Amadiume, Ilu Ndi Igbo,4, #27.
32. The English words “tobacco,” “hurricane,” “barbecue,” “canoe,” and “hammock” originate from the Taino words tobaco, huracan, barbacoa, canoa, and hamac.
33. Nicholas Wade, “7,000 Years of Ritual Is Traced in Mexico,” New York Times, December 21, 2004, F4.
The Brave New World
of City, State, and Pasture
FROM 3000 BCE
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 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
THE 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 gardens. 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, fine clothing, and nightlife (in the above passage alone).
The First Cities
The Urban Revolution . We recognize elements of our own world here because The Epic of Gilgamesh stands at the beginning of a revolution that has transformed us all. We call that transformation the urban revolution. Some historians 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 governments), and the whole range of activities and institutions that are summarized as “complex societies” or “civilizations” because they entered 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, officials, and numerous specialized occupations, crafts, arts, services, and manufactures; laws, literature, phi
losophy, astronomy, calendars, and science; and money, markets, merchants, metalworking, and monumental architecture. The first cities were the first places where everyone 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 larger populations, including increased numbers of people who could spend their time in ways other than farming or raising animals. Furthermore, agriculture became more productive 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 intensive 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.
Middle East . In the Middle East, or Southwest 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 productive. 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 appeared in the Americas without plow or draft animals and in other parts of the world, especially 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 channeling silt and flood waters precisely where it was needed. In addition, irrigation systems required constant attention, virtually demanding the concentrated labor, common purpose, and community decision making that distinguished cities from other farming communities. 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 Vietnam and Cambodia, and the Chao Praya River of Thailand.
Americas . In the Americas, irrigated agriculture 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 created 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, constantly 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 Guatemala, 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 cities in the Andes relied on both irrigation and 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 domesticated 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 cascaded 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 Peruvian 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 replacing 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 telescope 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 rectangular houses replaced round ones, but these new boxes, stacked side by side and soon on top of each other, marked off rectangular neighborhoods 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 layout 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 th
at 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.
Tall Buildings and
Monumental Architecture
Even more noticeable to a visiting villager was the size and variety of buildings. Although ordinary 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: monumental buildings that no village could afford.
How could cities afford palaces, monuments, and large houses for some? By taxing the villages, the farmers, and the urban poor. Kings like Gilgamesh, noble friends like Enkidu, 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 consumed and used their power to fleece their country cousins. The first city societies were class societies, and nowhere were the class differences 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 families, 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.