A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Because Sumerian cities are the oldest in the world, and because after 3000 BCE written records add to the evidence provided by archaeological sources, they have had a tremendous influence on ideas about what a city is and how ancient cities functioned. Many ancient cities in other parts of the world did resemble those of Sumer in important ways. The Olmec city of San Lorenzo, built around 1400 BCE in what is today southern Mexico—the first city in the western hemisphere—had large temples with plazas, gigantic statues, substantial residential structures for the city’s elite, a drainage system that brought in fresh water, and trading networks through which prestige materials such as jade, magnetite, and obsidian were imported and then fashioned by artisans into luxury goods and weapons. In 1200 BCE the largest city in the world was probably Anyang on the Huang He (Yellow) River in China, with perhaps 100,000 residents. It contained palaces and temples, along with elaborate underground tombs where rulers from the Shang dynasty that controlled this area and their wives were buried along with hundreds of exquisite bronze ceremonial vessels, ivory and jade ornaments, bronze weapons and armor, and a group of people who would serve them after death. In the first centuries CE the largest city in the world was undoubtedly Rome, with a population somewhere between half a million and a million. Here the emperors built beautiful temples, huge athletic arenas, triumphal arches celebrating their victories, stately palaces, and hundreds of miles of aqueducts to bring fresh water into the city, although most people lived in shoddily constructed houses and some depended on public distributions of bread and oil to survive. In the western hemisphere the largest city in the first centuries CE was Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, where over 100,000 residents under the rule of kings understood to be divine built hundreds of temples, including the magnificent Pyramid of the Sun, developed a writing system, and traded jade, obsidian, and other goods with distant Maya cities.

  Other urban centers looked and operated very differently from those in Sumer, however, sometimes so much so that they were not even recognized as cities until quite recently. One of these was Jenne-jeno, on the Middle Niger River floodplain in what is today Mali, initially built in the third century BCE, expanded over many centuries and then abandoned about 1400 CE. First excavated in the 1970s, Jenne-jeno was not a single city, but a clustered urban complex, with each node of the cluster specializing in the production of one particular item that was then traded with others. Thus the groups living in some locales produced pots, others iron tools, others fishing nets (as evidenced by the weights that would have been attached to the nets), and so on. People raised and herded sheep, goats, and cattle, and also hunted wild animals and fish. Plant foods included rice, millet, sorghum, and vegetables grown in fields along the Middle Niger in a system that most likely took advantage of the seasonal fluctuations of the river just as farmers living in Egypt at the same time did with the Nile. Jenne-jeno became a transshipment point where merchandise arriving by camel or donkey from across the Sahara was traded for metals and local goods, and then sent by boat along the Niger.

  Map 2.1 Ancient cities mentioned in the chapter

  No temples or palaces or other large buildings have been found at Jenne-jeno, leading Rod and Susan McIntosh and others who have studied this urban cluster to posit that decisions were made about the exchange of goods and services through a system of reciprocity among occupational groups rather than through a strong central authority. In this intertwined system of mutual dependence, rules and norms created expectations of the behavior needed to maximize reciprocal relationships, and were backed up by consequences—administered by the groups themselves—if the rules were not followed.

  Jenne-jeno was not the only ancient city in which alternative mechanisms of authority constrained hierarchical structures and prevented them from becoming the primary exercisers of power. In the Indus River Valley, Mohenjo-Daro was built as a planned city about 2500 BCE, with straight streets, bricks made to a standard proportion, large ventilated granaries, and a drainage system that connected an indoor toilet in each house with a sewer under the street. The elaborate and dense architecture and sophisticated hydraulic infrastructure would have required coordination in building and maintenance, but there are no large buildings that are unambiguously palaces and temples, no elaborate royal burials, and no other evidence of kingship or warfare. Thus in Mohenjo-Daro and perhaps in other cities within the Indus River Valley such as Harappa, power may have been distributed among competing and fluid social or economic groups rather than being highly centralized within a single ruling dynasty.

  Ancient cities were often divided into quarters, districts, or neighborhoods; these may reflect pre-existing social divisions such as kin groups, but they also grew out of new divisions fostered by the city itself, such as craft specialization or allegiance to a particular temple. In Teotihuacan, for example, some neighborhoods seem to have been reserved for merchants and traders. Even the practical necessities of urban life could generate new social groups and ideologies that underpinned these. The sewer system of Mohenjo-Daro, for example, required people to clean it so that it continued to function; they most likely took the human waste to the fields near the city to be used as fertilizer, along with animal wastes that had ended up in city streets. In other cities as well, trash collectors gathered refuse and knackers picked up dead animals, which they rendered into a variety of products, including leather, glue, and bone meal. Such activities were essential in densely populated urban spaces, but they came to be seen not only as smelly and unpleasant, but also as socially undesirable and ritually unclean. When social hierarchies later became more formalized, people who handled waste or dead animals were often the lowest group, unthinkable as marriage partners or even as neighbors by those who did other sorts of work. Cities provided opportunities for social and economic mobility, but this could be up or down.

  Among the social divisions and new identities fostered by cities was that of the “citizen,” understood to be the permanent resident of a specific area who had certain duties and privileges. (In time this understanding of “citizen” would also apply in larger political units such as empires and nations.) The idea that residence in a specific urban area gave one a distinct identity appears very early in the development of cities. In Mesopotamia of the third millennium BCE, for example, both members of the elite and workers named in temple ration lists were known by their city of origin.

  In the cities of first-millennium BCE Greece, the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, combined with a commitment to male egalitarianism among citizens, created forms of governance that were unusual in the ancient world. Although Athens and Sparta are often contrasted, both were places where free adult male citizens shared in determining diplomatic and military policies, and where leadership appointments circulated. Women were citizens for religious and reproductive purposes, but their citizenship did not give them the right to participate in government. Citizenship was not completely distinct from kin structures, however, as almost all Greek cities defined a citizen as an adult man with at least one citizen parent, or at some times and places two. In classical Athens, resident foreigners and their sons and grandsons—termed “metics,” and numbering perhaps half of the free population of the city—had to perform military service and pay taxes, but had no political voice. They could be enslaved for certain offenses—which citizens could not—and only very occasionally were granted citizenship. Thus citizens shared ancestry as well as a place of residence. As with other changes brought by cities, new civic identities overlay but did not eliminate what had existed before.

  Writing and other information technologies

  Rock art in many parts of the world includes spectacular pictures of humans and animals, and it also sometimes includes tally marks, which may record days, or distance, or people, or some other thing the maker wanted to count. Tallies also show up on sticks, shells, and other objects that could be carried around, and it is these tallies that are the origins of the world’s earliest writing sys
tem, which developed in Sumerian cities. Writing began not as a way to record speech, but to record data: it was an information technology that later became a communications technology. Writing was invented independently in at least three places—Sumer, China, and Mesoamerica—and perhaps in many more, and it spread from the places it was invented just like any other technology, through conquest, trade, and imitation.

  Writing systems—and other forms of information technology—were invented or adopted as a way to organize and run cities that had become too large to administer by word of mouth, and to store, sort, and retrieve information across space and time. Tangible records did not depend on human memory, but were external to the individual; they transcended particular contexts and could be inspected and verified. As cities grew and their populations became more diverse and interdependent, creating and maintaining common and consistent means of measurement, and assigning collective meaning to events and structures, became more important. Conversely, writing also depended on cities, on the high degree of uniformity and control that cities made available, and on the specialization of labor in cities that allowed some individuals to spend time learning to write. As with the domestication of dogs, urbanization and the development of record-keeping was a process of co-evolution.

  2.1 Sumerian clay tablet with cuneiform characters from the ancient city of Girsu (now Tello), in modern Iraq, shows a tally of sheep and goats. Tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets have been taken, legally and illegally, from this site.

  In Sumer, writing began sometime in the fourth millennium bce as pictures drawn with a sharpened stylus on small clay tablets about the size of a cell phone, which then hardened in the sun. To the pictures people gradually added symbols, which linguists call ideograms or logograms, to represent other words and ideas. The system became so complicated that scribal schools were established, which by 2500 bce flourished throughout Sumer. Students at the schools were all male, and most came from families in the middle range of urban society. Scribal schools were primarily intended to produce individuals who could keep records of the property and goods of temple officials and nobles. Thus writing concentrated knowledge and power in the hands of urban elites—and primarily the men among them. Hundreds of thousands of Sumerian clay tablets have survived, the oldest dating to about 3200 bce. In them historians can see the evolution of writing from its earliest beginnings, and also learn about many aspects of everyday life, including taxes, wages, trade, and employment. A clay tablet from the city of Uruk in about 3000 bce, for example, records the rations of beer that workers on temple agricultural lands were paid, and others record payments of bread, fish, and oil, along with outputs of wool spun into yarn, and grain harvested from fields.

  In China, the oldest surviving writing is on ox shoulder-bones and turtle shells from about 1200 bce, many of which come from the tombs of Shang rulers. Diviners at the royal court carved hollows in bones and shells, and applied heat to them with a bronze rod until cracks formed. The cracks were then interpreted by diviners—including the king himself—as an omen sent from the gods answering a question about the future. They sometimes carved the question and interpretations of the omen onto the shell, with characters that are an archaic form of modern Chinese writing; this gave the writing a ritual purpose and sacred power. Oracle bone inscriptions sometimes record actual events such as battles, floods, harvests, and royal births, so they provide information about these as well as about what rulers hoped and feared.

  Oracle bones sometimes specify the source of authorization for certain actions— “The king orders so-and-so to carry out such-and-such a task”—allowing a brief glimpse at the way power was (at least in theory) disbursed. Such commands and proclamations from political leaders became a common type of written record wherever writing was introduced, allowing the dictates of the ruler to transcend the immediacy of face-to-face interaction and become, literally, the law of the land. Law codes themselves were also among the earliest form of written records, often prefaced by a statement about their being the will of the king, or the gods, or both. The Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, for example, issued a law code governing many aspects of life in 1790 BCE, and ordered it inscribed on huge stone pillars set up in public throughout his realm; at the top was often a sculpture of Hammurabi receiving the scepter of authority from the sun-god Shamash, the god of law and justice.

  In Mesoamerica the development of writing also appears to have been associated with rulers and with secret knowledge. The earliest surviving example of writing comes from the Olmecs in around 900 BCE, and by about 200 BCE fully developed writing systems were in use in a number of different cities. In the Classic Period, 200–900 CE, the Maya developed the most complex writing system in the Americas, a script with nearly a thousand characters (termed “glyphs”) that represent concepts and sounds, which over the last fifty years has been largely deciphered. Classic Maya writing was painted or inscribed with large glyphs in public places where it could be easily seen, on books made of treated tree bark, and on smaller objects made of valuable materials designed to be worn or diplayed, such as carved shells, ceramic vessels, hairpins, and jade ornaments, whose value was further enhanced by the artistic quality of the writing. As in Mesopotamia, students learned to write in schools, where they probably began by copying models onto perishable bark and palm leaves.

  Many of the surviving large-scale inscriptions are historical documents recording the births, accessions, marriages, wars, and deaths of Maya kings and nobles counted in a linear fashion forward from a specific date. Others relate to the two cyclical calendars used by the Maya to determine the proper times for religious rituals, one of which they had perhaps inherited from the Olmecs and the other devised through their own careful observation of the earth’s movements around the sun. Such public writing communicated the links between a city’s rulers and the gods even to those who did not read (or who did not read very well), so it served as a form of propaganda for public consumption, assuring the city’s residents that the rulers had fulfilled their obligations to the gods.

  Mesopotamian, Chinese, Maya, and other early forms of writing combined symbols that stood for words and ideas with a few that stood for sounds, and sometime around 1800 bce workers in the Sinai peninsula, which was under Egyptian control, began to use only phonetic signs to write their language, with each sign designating one sound. This system vastly simplified writing and reading and spread among common people as a practical way to record things and communicate. Phoenicians—sea-going traders from the cities of the Mediterranean coast of modern Lebanon—adopted the simpler system for their own language and spread it around the Mediterranean. The Greeks modified this alphabet, especially by adding vowels, and beginning in the eighth century bce used it to write their own language. The Romans later based their alphabet—the script we use to write English today—on Greek, which was also the basis for the Cyrillic script of eastern Europe and the runic script of northern Europe. Alphabets based on the Phoenician alphabet were also created in the Persian Empire and formed the basis of Hebrew, Arabic, and various alphabetic scripts of South and Central Asia. The system invented by ordinary people and spread by Phoenician merchants is the origin of most of the world’s alphabetic scripts in use today.

  2.2 A page from the Maya book known as the Madrid Codex, painted in the thirteenth century on paper made from fig tree bark, which presents almanacs, horoscopes, and astronomical tables related to the 260-day ritual calendar used throughout Mesoamerica for divination and prophecy. The images include rituals and ordinary activities, and are bordered by glyphs.

  Even after alphabetic systems became more common, however, learning to read and write took a number of years, which meant that until quite recently this was generally limited to three sorts of people: members of the elite who did not have to engage in productive labor to support themselves; clergy and other religious personnel for whom reading and writing were spiritually meritorious tasks; and those who could hope to support themselves by
writing or for whom writing was required as part of their work. The first two groups comprised both women and men, for some elite women have been literate in all of the world’s cultures that have writing, as have some nuns in certain religious traditions. The third group was predominantly male: professional scribes, copiers, record-keepers, artisans in certain trades, officials, and administrators whose parents had been willing and able to pay for schooling, or who had found a patron to support them in this.

  The functions to which writing was put in early cities, and in the larger states that developed out of them, were multiple and varied: economic administration, the performance of power, the recording and commemoration of ritual, the transmission of divine instructions. Was the invention of writing a revolution? For scholars in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, the answer to that question was a resounding yes: Writing marked the beginning of history, with the human past before writing regarded as prehistory, and groups that did not have writing were dismissed as uncivilized “people without history.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the British anthropologist Jack Goody and the North American cultural theorists Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan developed more nuanced versions of this, rejecting the sharp civilized versus uncivilized dichotomy, but arguing that changes in modes of communication brought dramatic changes in every other realm of life, external and internal. For Goody, writing (especially the alphabetic writing of the Greeks) encouraged abstract thought, formal logic, and a distinction between myth and history. For Ong and McLuhan, when writing moved language from the world of sound to the world of sight, it restructured human cognition and consciousness.