A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Further reading

  Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) provides an excellent brief survey of both human evolution and the field of paleoanthropology. He emphasizes a quite sudden change to behavioral modernity, as do Richard Klein and B. Edgar, The Dawn of Human Culture (New York: Wiley, 2002) and Chris Stringer, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth (New York: Times Books, 2012), which was published in England with the less dramatic title The Origin of Our Species. For the more gradualist view, see Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn't: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution 39, no. 5 (2000): 453–563. For an even more gradualist view that sees symbolic thought emerging very early, see Clive Gamble, Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For Kanzi the bonobo, see Kathy Schick et al., “Continuing Investigations into the Stone Tool-making and Tool-using Capacities of a Bonobo (Pan paniscus),” Journal of Archaeological Science 26 (1999): 821–32. For some of the new thinking on Neanderthals, see Francesco d'Errico, “The Invisible Frontier: A Multiple Species Model for the Origins of Behavioural Modernity,” Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (2003): 188–202 and J. Zilhão, Anatomically Archaic, Behaviorally Modern: The Last Neanderthals and Their Destiny (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Museum voor Anthopologie en Praehistorie, 2001).

  On the importance of cooking to human evolution, see Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: Free Press, 2002), Martin Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Rachel Landau, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) all provide fascinating overviews of the significance of food preparation and consumption across time.

  Nicolas J. Allen et al., eds., Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) is a series of essays that examine the transformation of biological kinship into social kinship systems. Other recent work on kinship and the life course include Kristen Hawkes and Richard R. Paine, The Evolution of Human Life History (Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, 2006) and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd edn. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) argue that cultural and social evolution is rooted in the exchange of goods and services between families. For more on the role of culture, see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On migration as key to the formation and transmission of language, material culture, and other aspects of human society, see Peter Bellwood, First Migrants: Ancient Migrations in Global Perspective (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

  Ian Kuijt, ed., Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: Social Organization, Identity, and Differentiation (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2000) provides a series of essays that examine the development of sedentism, including the article by Michael Rosenberg and Richard W. Redding on Hallan Çemi discussed in the chapter. For more on Neolithic society, see Jane Peterson, Sexual Revolutions: Gender and Labor at the Dawn of Agriculture (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002) and Alasdair Whittle, The Archaeology of People: Dimensions of Neolithic Life (London: Routledge, 2003). W.K. Barnett and J.W. Hoopes, eds., The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) and Marcia-Anne Dobres, Technology and Social Agency (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) provide excellent analyses of the invention and transmission of technologies. On rituals, symbols, and spirituality, see Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Richard Bradley, Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe (London: Routledge, 2005), and David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005). Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) presents a fascinating theory of connections between humans and material objects from the Neolithic community of Çatalhöyük to today.

  On the development of hierarchies within and among societies, see Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Came to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (London: Vintage, 1998), and especially the magisterial Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

  Essays on many of the topics in this chapter may be found in David Christian, ed., Introducing World History, to 10,000 BCE and Graeme Barker and Candice Goucher, eds., A World with Agriculture, 12,000 BCE–500 CE, Volumes 1 and 2 of the Cambridge World History.

  2

  Cities and classical societies (3000 BCE–500 CE)

  In 113 CE, when she was nearly seventy years old, the historian, poet, and scholar Ban Zhao accompanied her son to his new position in a rural district away from Luoyang, the eastern capital of Han dynasty China. Recounting the trip in a poem, she tells of her uneasiness and sadness as they pass through small fields and rundown villages, and writes:

  Secretly I sigh for the Capital City I love, (but)

  To cling to one’s native place characterizes a small nature,

  As the histories have taught us.

  She pulls herself out of this mood by pouring a cup of wine and thinking about the philosopher Confucius, who had lived in a “decadent, chaotic age,” but had urged “truth and virtue, honor and merit,” and at the end of the poem writes stirringly that “Muscles stretched, head uplifted, we tread onward to the vision … and turn not back.”

  Ban Zhao’s love for the city was shared by her brother Ban Gu, also a historian, poet, and scholar, who wrote an ode in praise of Luoyang that became a classic of Chinese literature. Poets and scholars living at the other end of Eurasia in the cities around the Mediterranean shared this preference for urban life, especially those in Rome, the largest city in the world at the time Ban Zhao was writing. Here as well, educated urban residents generally saw the city as a place of rational behavior and the good life, and viewed themselves as more advanced and sophisticated than rural folk. They were more “civilized,” a word that comes from the Latin adjective civilis, meaning of or pertaining to citizens, and the origin as well of the English words “civic” and “civil.” The opposite opinion could also be found, however. In much of the Old Testament—and in some Greek, Roman, and Christian works—cities are portrayed as dens of iniquity and materialism, autocratic hierarchies ruled by tyrannical despots. Only by escaping to the pastoral countryside or to the wilderness could a person escape oppression and live a moral and pious life. Ban Gu himself expresses this opinion in a poem about the Western Han capital Changan, which he criticizes for wastefulness and extravagance. Both value judgments can be found in written commentaries from other parts of the ancient world as well (and in discussions about cities today), but what their writers agree on is that cities were different from the countryside that surrounded them. They represented something new, a view that is widely shared by archaeologists and historians.

  The process of urbanization was not simply a matter of higher population densities and new political forms, but involved a restructuring of social institutions and cultural practices, which this chapter examines. Social and gender hierarchies became more formalized in cities and the larger-scale states and empires that developed from them. These were increasingly ruled by hereditary dynasties, that is, lineages of elites maintained by careful marriage stra
tegies whose authority was bolstered by ideologies connecting them to heroic figures or gods. Families and kin groups further down the social scale also arranged marriages strategically to maintain or enhance their status and wealth, which often included individuals owned as slaves. In some places, writing and other information technologies transformed the oral communication of ideas into written law codes, religious texts, and philosophical systems, creating distinctive and long-lasting cultural traditions that were later labeled “classical.” Although politically classical societies ranged from tiny city-states to giant empires, cities, writing, and formalized social hierarchies were important features of all of them. From the growth of the first cities about 3000 BCE to what is traditionally viewed as the end of the classical period about 500 CE, most people continued to live in small agricultural villages, or moved around the landscape as foragers or pastoralists. But for those who wanted change, cities were the place to be.

  Paths of urbanization

  Cities first appeared in Mesopotamia and Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, in South Asia in the middle of the third millennium BCE, and in China at the end of the third millennium BCE. In Africa outside the Nile Valley, cities were founded early in the first millennium BCE, and in Southeast Asia late in that millennium. In the New World, cities appeared early in the first millennium BCE in Mesoamerica, slightly later in South America, and in the first millennium CE in North America. In each of these regions, cities developed independently, and in many places urbanism spread, with cities multiplying and growing, but also shrinking and disappearing.

  Cities grew where they did for a variety of reasons, often intertwined. Some were established by people seeking safety and security from frequent armed conflicts or from natural disasters such as floods. Others were villages along rivers or land trade routes that gradually grew in size. Some cities were founded through a deliberate political choice. Around 2300 BCE, King Sargon conquered much of Mesopotamia with what was probably the world’s first permanent army, and according to sources written at the time built a new capital at Akkad. (Akkad has not yet been identified archaeologically.)

  Ideological and religious forces often played important roles in the establishment and expansion of cities, and they became ceremonial as well as economic centers. Cities often had special buildings or sacred precincts for regular public performances and rituals, to which people gained access through routes between buildings and monuments that enhanced their awe. Certain rituals were held in temples before a select few, but processions could involve vast numbers and were watched by even more. During the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BCE in Egypt, for example, kings and nobles built temples and tombs at the city of Thebes and linked them by grand ceremonial ways using rivers, canals, and roads on land. Buildings within a city might be constructed according to cosmic principles and alignments, and the city itself might be laid out along certain lines and patterns to form a cosmogram—a model of the heavens and earth. Maya cities built in the late first millennium BCE, for example, often had a building complex consisting of a carefully leveled elevated square with a pyramid on the west side and a low platform running north and south on the east, which oriented them toward the rising sun on the eastern horizon; these complexes were also designed to replicate sacred mountains and bring them within the community and thus under the control of its rulers. Such geometric forms are allowing archaeologists today to discover buildings and sometimes whole cities in deeply forested areas of Mesoamerica through the use of Lidar—a technology that analyzes reflected light from a laser carried in a small plane over the treetops. Lidar imagery can be used to create three-dimensional digital maps of the forest floor, with human-made structures evident from their straight lines, regular placements, and distinctive shapes.

  However they originated, cities began to assert control over the surrounding hinterland, forcing residents to supply some of their agricultural surplus to the city. Villages in the hinterlands often became economically dependent on the cities they surrounded, so that urbanization was accompanied by “ruralization,” and village societies were different than they had been before. Cities were crowded with people and animals, and they became breeding grounds for diseases. Mortality levels were higher than fertility levels, and cities required in-migration to maintain their population. Most migrants were young adults, who came seeking opportunities or as conscripted laborers or slaves. Thus as cities pulled in agricultural surpluses from neighboring villages, they also pulled in young adults in the prime of life, and village populations skewed older. (The same demographic pattern can be found when comparing urban to non-urban populations today.) Cities and villages were not completely separate, however; there was often much back and forth between the city and the countryside as residents left the city to work in fields during the day or during certain seasons.

  Cities all faced the same central challenge: reliably feeding a large population in a sustainable fashion. To do this, they developed structures of power and authority that ranged from highly centralized to less hierarchical, with most having multiple nodes of decision-making. A closer examination of two very different patterns of urbanization—Sumer and Jenne-jeno—can reveal ways in which these political arrangements were intertwined with social and occupational hierarchies, and with cultural practices.

  The earliest cities in the world were in Sumer, the southern part of Mesopotamia, where the soil was fertile but the rainfall inadequate for regular crop-raising. In this arid climate farmers developed irrigation on a large scale, which demanded organized group effort, but allowed the population to grow. Beginning about 4000 bce, several agricultural villages, beginning with Uruk, expanded into cities housing tens of thousands of people, with massive hydraulic projects including reservoirs, dams, and dikes to prevent major floods and to enable trading with one another, defensive walls, marketplaces, and large public buildings. Each one came to dominate the surrounding countryside, becoming city-states independent from one another, though not very far apart.

  The city-states of Sumer relied on irrigation systems that required cooperation and at least some level of social and political cohesion. The authority to run this system initially seems to have been an assembly of elders, and priests also began to have greater power. Temples grew into elaborate complexes of buildings with storage space for grain and other products, staffed by priests and priestesses who carried out rituals to honor the city’s primary god or goddess, who often represented cosmic forces such as the sun, moon, water, and storms. People believed that humans had been created to serve the gods and generally anticipated being well treated by the gods if they served them well. Surrounding the temple and other large buildings were the houses of ordinary citizens, each constructed around a central courtyard.

  Exactly how kings emerged in Sumerian city-states is not clear. Scholars have suggested that during times of emergency, a chief priest or sometimes a military leader assumed what was supposed to be temporary authority over a city. He established an army, trained it, and led it into battle, making increasing use of bronze weaponry. Temporary power gradually became permanent kingship, and sometime around 2500 bce kings in some Sumerian city-states began to hand down the kingship to their sons, establishing patriarchal hereditary dynasties in which power descended through the male line. They built palaces, which came to rival the temples in their size and magnificence. This is the point at which written records of kingship begin to appear, which, unsurprisingly, highlight the importance of kings and their connections with the gods. Priests and kings in Sumerian cities used force, persuasion, and threats of higher taxes to maintain order, keep the irrigation systems working, and keep food and other goods flowing. Urban residents inevitably found ways to subvert or resist their orders, however, such as exchanging surplus food directly with a neighbor for cloth or pots, or worshipping family or household gods rather than at state temples.

  The king and other members of the elite held extensive tracts of land, as did the temple;
these lands were worked by the palace’s or the temple’s clients, free men and women who were dependent on the palace or the temple. They received crops and other goods in return for their labor. Although this arrangement assured the clients of a livelihood, the land they worked remained the possession of the palace or the temple. Some individuals and families owned land outright and paid their taxes in the form of agricultural products or items they had made. At the bottom rung of society were slaves; the law code of the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu from 2100 to 2050 BCE—the world’s oldest surviving law code—distinguishes between free persons and slaves in laws regarding marriage, rape, and injuries, and orders owners of fugitive slaves to reward those who return them.

  Each of these social categories included both men and women, but their experiences were not the same, for Sumerian society made distinctions based on gender. Most elite landowners were male, but women who held positions as priestesses or as queens ran their own estates, independently of their husbands and fathers. Some women owned businesses and took care of their own accounts. Sons and daughters inherited from their parents, although a daughter received her inheritance in the form of a dowry, which technically remained hers but was managed by her husband or husband’s family after marriage. The Sumerians established the basic social, economic, and intellectual patterns of Mesopotamia, and influenced their neighbors to the north and east.