A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Individuals who were the heads of large families or kin groups, or who had unusual leadership talents, had control over the labor of others. They were the “Big Men” who made decisions about how group resources should be used, which became more significant when these included material goods that could be stored for long periods of time. Material goods — plows, sheep, cattle, sheds, pots, carts — gave one the ability to amass still more material goods, and the gap between those who had them and those who did not widened. Storage also allowed goods to be handed down from one family member to another, so that over generations small differences in wealth grew larger.

  Human and animal power could be used for destruction as well as production, and war enhanced social and political hierarchies. It allowed some communities to conquer others, and the threat of war convinced people within a community to accept the authority of leaders in the hopes of avoiding being conquered themselves. Higher levels of armed struggle may have been a cause as well as a result of the spread of agriculture, as leaders advocated subsistence strategies that would increase the population (and thus provide more soldiers), and as the larger populations of agricultural communities allowed them to conquer their forager neighbors.

  Signs of greater wealth and power included prestige goods such as gold and copper jewelry, precious stones, carved jade, and feathers, which then marked their owners—in life and death—as different from most people, thus creating as well as reflecting prominence. Prestige goods were given away or exchanged locally and regionally, allowing their owners to gain supporters or build networks of mutual obligation. These ties might be expressed in egalitarian or even familial terms, so that exisiting ideologies of egalitarianism were not ignored or refuted, but instead put to new uses.

  Wealth could command labor directly, as individuals or families could buy the services of others to work for them or impose their wishes through force, hiring others to threaten or carry out violence. Eventually some individuals bought others outright. As with social hierarchies in general, slavery predates written records, but it developed in almost all agricultural societies. Like animals, slaves were a source of physical power for their owners, providing them an opportunity to amass still more wealth and influence. In the long era before the invention of fossil fuel technology, the ability to exploit animal and human labor was the most important mark of distinction between elites and the rest of the population. Land ownership was often what distinguished elites from others, but that land was valuable only if there were people living on it who were required to labor for the owner.

  Along with hierarchies based on wealth and power, the development of agriculture was intertwined with a hierarchy based on gender. In every society in the world that has left written records men have more power and access to resources than women and some men are dominant over other men. This patriarchal gender system came before writing, and searching for its origins involves interpreting many different types of sources. Some scholars see the origins of gender inequality in the hominid past, noting that male chimpanzees form alliances to gain status against other males and engage in cooperative attacks on females, which might have also happened among early hominids. Other scholars see the origins in the Paleolithic, with the higher status of men in kin groups.

  The development of plow agriculture and the resultant increase in the ability to amass food and other goods heightened patriarchy. Although farming with a hoe was often done by women, plow agriculture came to be a male task, perhaps because of men's upper-body strength, or because plow agriculture was more difficult to combine with care for infants and small children than was farming with a hoe or digging stick. Depictions of plowing on Mesopotamian cylinder seals invariably show men with the cattle and plows. At the same time that cattle began to be raised for pulling plows and carts rather than for meat, sheep began to be raised primarily for wool rather than meat or hides. Spinning thread and weaving cloth came to be seen primarily as women's work; the earliest Egyptian hieroglyph for weaving is, in fact, a seated woman with a shuttle, and a Confucian moral saying from ancient China asserts that “men plow and women weave.” Spinning and weaving were generally done indoors and involved smaller and cheaper tools than plowing; they could also be taken up and put down easily, and so could be done at the same time as other tasks. Though in some ways this arrangement seems complementary, with each sex doing some of the necessary labor, men's responsibility for plowing and other agricultural tasks took them outside the household more often than women's duties did, enlarging their opportunities for leadership.

  The earliest written records and later ethnographic evidence suggest that village structures of power were almost always gender and age related, and in most parts of the world adult male heads of household or heads of families had the most power. In some groups, men at (or near) the top of the social heap used their greater wealth to acquire more wives, which both increased their family's ability to produce and raised their status when compared with other men, as wives were a “prestige good.”

  1.6 In this clay and wood model from Middle Kingdom Egypt (c. 2000 BCE–1700 BCE), a man plows with a scratch plow pulled by two oxen. Egyptian depictions of plowing always show men at this task, though women are sometimes shown seeding.

  Warfare and other forms of organized violence also gave men power. Like slavery, armed conflict predates written records, but from its earliest occurrences it was profoundly gendered. Battle was perceived as the ultimate test of both individual and collective manhood, and justified in part because it was a defense of those who could not defend themselves, especially children and women. Victors were portrayed in images and oral traditions, and later in writing, as masculine and virile, and losers as unmanly, feminized, and weak. Conquests sometimes ended with the symbolic or actual rape of the defeated soldiers as well as women who were on the losing side. War sometimes created alterations in gender structures, as it broke down traditional norms of conduct, turning women into booty but also creating emergency situations in which women carried out tasks normally done by men. Because war was viewed as an extraordinary situation calling for great sacrifices and bravery from all, however, this did not lead to permanent change in gender roles.

  As with other social hierarchies, gender hierarchies and ideas about the proper roles of women and men may have shaped subsistence strategies as well as been shaped by them. Farming with a hoe is every bit as physically demanding—or perhaps even more so—than farming with a plow, so that men's association with large animals and plowing may have been rooted more in culture than in physiology. Visual and verbal depictions of men plowing and women weaving may initially have been prescriptive, not descriptive, designed to teach people what tasks they were supposed to do. The exchange of women by men for their procreative power and the prestige they conferred suggests that women (or at least some women) were understood to be property, perhaps preceding other forms of private property, such as land ownership or slavery.

  Whether women were the first form of private property has been debated since the nineteenth century, but there is no debate that the inheritance systems through which goods passed from generation to generation tended to favor men. This was particularly the case with land and the right to farm communally held land, which was most often passed down through the male line. In some places inheritance was traced through the female line, but in such systems women themselves did not necessarily inherit goods or property; instead a man inherited from his mother's brother rather than from his father. Accordingly, over generations, women's independent access to resources decreased, and it became increasingly difficult for women to survive without male support. Skeletal studies from Southwest Asia indicate that although farming brought a decrease in health and nutritional status for everyone, women's physical health deteriorated more, perhaps because they lost access to resources.

  As inherited wealth became more important, men wanted to make sure that their sons were theirs, so they restricted their wives’ movements and activit
ies. This was especially the case among elite families. Among foragers, women needed to be mobile for the group to survive; their labor outdoors was essential. Among agriculturalists, the labor of animals, slaves, and hired workers could substitute for that of women in families that could afford them. There is evidence that women spent more and more of their time within the household, either indoors or behind walls and barriers that separated the domestic realm from the wider world. Thus although the lines of causation are not clear, the development of agriculture was accompanied by the increasing subordination of women in many parts of the world.

  Social and gender hierarchies were enhanced over generations as wealth and power were passed down unequally, and they were also enhanced by rules and norms that shaped sexual relationships, particularly heterosexual ones. (Early rules and laws about sex did not pay much attention to same-sex relations because these did not produce children who could disrupt systems of inheritance.) However their power originated, elites began to think of themselves as a group apart from the rest with something that made them distinctive—such as connections with a deity, military prowess, and natural superiority. They increasingly understood this distinctive quality to be hereditary, and, like membership in an ethnic group, to be carried in the blood. High-status people were often thought to have superior blood; in parts of today's Indonesia, for example, nobles were referred to as “white-blooded” and married only those with similar blood, as did those who had “noble blood” elsewhere. Traditions—later codified as written laws—stipulated which heterosexual relationships would pass this quality on to children, along with passing on wealth. Relationships between men and women from elite families were formalized as marriage and generally passed down both status and wealth. Relationships between elite men and non-elite women generally did not do so, or did so to a lesser degree; the women were defined as concubines or mistresses, or simply as sexual outlets for powerful men. The 1780 BCE Code of Hammurabi, for example, one of the world's earliest law codes, sets out differences in inheritance for the sons a man had with his wife and those he had with a servant or slave, and did not mention inheritance by daughters at all. Again judging by later law codes, relations between an elite woman and a non-elite man could bring shame and dishonor to the woman's family and sometimes death to the man.

  Thus along with distinctions among the groups thought of as tribes, peoples, ethnicities, or nations that resulted from migration and endogamy, distinctions developed within groups that were reinforced by social endogamy, what we might think of as the selective breeding of people. Elite men tended to marry elite women, which in some cases resulted in actual physical differences over generations, as elites had more access to food or to more nutritious foods, so were able to become taller and stronger. No elite can be completely closed to newcomers, however, because the accidents of life and death, along with the genetic problems caused by repeated close intermarriage, make it difficult for any small group to survive over generations. Thus just as mechanisms were devised to incorporate people into ethnic groups, methods were also developed in many cultures to adopt boys into elite families, legitimate the children of concubines and slave women, or allow elite girls to marry men lower on the social hierarchy. All systems of inheritance also need some flexibility. The inheritance patterns in some cultures favored male heirs exclusively, but in others close relatives were favored over those more distant, even if this meant allowing daughters to inherit. The drive to keep wealth and property within a family or kin group often resulted in women inheriting, owning, and in some cases managing significant amounts of wealth, a pattern that continues today. Hierarchies of wealth and power thus intersected with hierarchies of gender in complex ways, and in many cultures age and marital status also played roles. In many later European and African groups, for example, widows were largely able to control their own property, while unmarried sons were often under their father's control even if they were adults, a pattern that may have begun with the first settled agriculture.

  Monuments and mentalities

  Objects were not the only things traded over increasingly long distances during the Neolithic period, for people also carried and circulated ideas, symbols, and symbolic behavior with them as they traveled on foot, boats, or animals, and in wagons or carts. Knowledge about the seasons and the weather, for example, was vitally important for those who depended on crop-raising, and agricultural peoples in many parts of the world began to calculate recurring patterns in the world around them, slowly developing calendars. People built circular structures of mounded earth or huge upright stones called megaliths to help them predict the movements of the sun and stars, including Nabta Playa, erected about 4500 bce in the desert west of the Nile Valley in Egypt, and Stonehenge, erected about 2500 bce in southern England. Megalithic arrangements are particularly common in some regions, such as Brittany, suggesting ideas about how and why to make them were transmitted across regions.

  The sites of these mounds and megaliths, and graves and trash heaps as well, often yield carved objects or pottery with motifs from the agricultural and pastoral world: shepherds’ crooks, sheep, cattle and cattle horns, plowing with yoked cattle, plowed fields, buildings that may be houses or sheds or granaries. Small model houses made from pottery have been found in Neolithic settlements in many parts of eastern Europe and western Asia. Such decorated objects suggest that now, instead of hunting, the growing and storing of food was ritualized; animals are still there, but they are the domesticated animals that are now human property.

  Along with megaliths that may have been calendars, agriculturalists in some areas also built other large structures that were likely monuments, shrines, and sanctuaries, giving new meaning to already significant natural places. Thus the landscape was altered not only by farming, but also by the construction of many more human-made objects in it. These structures sometimes included tombs built above ground, in the walls of houses, with tombstones over graves, or with many skulls decorated and gathered together, constant visual reminders of a group's lineage and collective ancestors. Symbolic archaeologists such as Jacques Cauvin have argued that these large buildings and new funerary customs are evidence of a different way of thinking—a new mentality—in which spirits became more clearly divinities distinct from humans to be prayed to and worshipped, and humans became more clearly separate from the environment. He proposes, in fact, that mental transformations and changes in symbolic uses of material culture preceded any change in subsistence strategy, and are a better explanation for the development of farming than population pressures or resource depletion. Others have also noted that domestication involves a new attitude toward linear time as well as cyclical, and greater separation from nature. Those who raise crops and animals must look beyond an annual cycle and plan for the longer term, keeping seed corn for the next year and deciding which animals to keep and which to kill. The separation between humans and animals, and between wild and tame, was not absolute, however; humans continued to live in intimate relations with animals, and archaeological evidence provides examples of attitudes of trust and respect, as well as domination, of animals and the natural world.

  The rhythms of the agricultural cycle and new patterns of material and cultural exchange also shaped other ritualized aspects of life. Among foragers, human fertility is a mixed blessing, as too many children can overtax food supplies, but among crop-raisers and pastoralists, fertility—of the land, animals, and people—is essential. Figurines, carvings, and paintings from the Neolithic include clearly pregnant women, women giving birth, and men (or individuals gendered male) with erect penises. Shamans and priests developed ever more elaborate rituals designed to assure fertility, in which spirits were often given something from a community's goods in exchange for their favor, such as food offerings, fermented beverages, animal sacrifices, or sacred objects.

  In many places spirits also became more obviously deities: gods and goddesses who took human form that came to be associated with patterns of birth, g
rowth, death, and regeneration. Gods and goddesses could bring death and destruction, but they also created life. Like humans, the gods came to have a division of labor and a social hierarchy. There were rain gods and sun gods, sky goddesses and moon goddesses, gods that assured the health of cattle or the growth of corn, goddesses of the hearth and home. Thus as human society was becoming more complex and hierarchical, so was the unseen world.

  Prehistoric patterns

  By 3000 BCE, humans were the only surviving hominins, and had migrated to all of the large land masses of the world (except Antarctica), and many of its islands. Whether foragers, farmers, or a combination of these, they brought with them symbolic language, kinship structures, technological inventions, food preferences, aesthetic and moral values, rituals, and divisions of labor, creating distinct cultures reinforced by endogamy. Everywhere humans migrated, from Argentinian caves to sub-Arctic tundra, they left their tools, trash, and marks on the world.

  All the aspects of human society that people carried with them played a role in the domestication of people, plants, and animals that marked the Neolithic, and were themselves affected by that domestication. Agriculture and animal domestication allowed the populations of farming communities to grow much faster than those of foragers, and resulted in a widespread common social pattern in which a small elite of landowners, religious specialists, and military leaders lived from the labor of the vast majority, who spent their lives raising crops. Like boundaries between cultures, social and gender hierarchies within cultures were reinforced by endogamy and other marital and inheritance patterns, and also by force, religion, and oral traditions. Soon other human creations, including writing and states, would further enhance the possibilities for differentiation among and within cultures, but the basic social patterns set in the Neolithic would not change dramatically for thousands of years.