World History For Dummies. Peter Haugen

Drawing a connection between rivers and budding civilizations

      

Starting a written record

      

Going conquering with the Greeks and Alexander

      Human beings lived without cities — with none of what people today call civilization — much longer than people have lived with cities and civilization. Archaeologists can’t find much evidence that anything that could be called a city existed until at least 10,000 years ago, although there are older ruins that show the beginnings of cities. The people of 20,000 years ago may have thought about large permanent settlements as impractical — that is, if the idea ever occurred to them — because the way to get food reliably was to remain mobile. If you wanted to eat, you went where the plants were thriving, where the shellfish clung to the river rocks, and where herds and flocks migrated. You followed food sources season by season, and as you wandered, you took care not to merge your band of wanderers with other bands. It wasn’t a good idea to have too many mouths to feed.

      But even before they fully adopted agriculture, as early as 11,000 years back, humans got together in great numbers for impressive building projects. The ruins at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey give evidence. More than 200 T-shape stone pillars, each about 20 feet high, are arranged in 20 circles. There are no nearby ruins of dwellings, so researchers think the circles may have been a site of worship or ritual burial for a hunter-gatherer society. Ruins at Tel Qarmel, in northern Syria, also include stone towers that may be older than farming. That fact makes such finds more impressive — and more mysterious.

When the practice of farming did get people to settle down, communities followed, and grew — villages to towns, towns to cities. By 10,000 years ago, Jericho, a city on today’s Palestinian West Bank, was either welcoming travelers who happened by their oasis or chasing them away with rocks and spears thrown from the town’s protective walls and tower.

      Archaeologists know quite a bit about early civilizations, especially those that rose along major rivers in Iraq and Egypt. It helps that Iraq and Egypt are also where people invented writing. When the written record began, prehistory could grow into history.

      Cities developed not just in the Middle East, but also in Pakistan, India, and China, where great civilizations have risen and receded as they interacted with the rest of the world over 3,000 or 4,000 years. They also arose in the Americas, where Europeans and the diseases they carried wiped out advanced native societies in the 16th century AD.

      In this chapter, you can find out about early civilizations and how their ruins teach us about people gathering, collaborating, and trading in greater numbers as they recognized shared needs for safety, sustenance, order, and justice. Forms of law, religion, and philosophy developed and led, by a long, circuitous path, to modern ways of thinking and governing. They developed systems of writing, without which we couldn’t study history. The world that you and I know started to take shape in those first urban societies as cities grew into city-states, civilizations, and eventually empires.

Building Jericho’s Walls for Mutual Defense

      The Bible says that Joshua and the Israelites raised a ruckus that brought down the walls of Jericho, a city in Canaan (today’s Palestinian-administered West Bank). Jericho appears to be one of the world’s oldest cities; it predates even the early civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq. What the Bible doesn’t say is that Jericho’s walls of perhaps 3,200 years ago were built on top of walls that were built on top of walls. (Maybe that’s why those walls toppled so easily when Joshua and his posse arrived.) Scientists date the settlement’s earliest buildings to as early as 9000 BC, which is about 11,000 years ago. True, Jericho was abandoned and rebuilt maybe 20 times, but when you’re talking about thousands of years, what are 20 do-overs?

      Scientists say Jericho’s living quarters were first round and then in later levels the style changed to rectangular. Researchers can speculate about the residents’ lifestyle based on the stuff found lying around—pottery and animal bones stand up to time rather well. Human skulls fitted with realistic plaster faces, for example, may have been creepy reconstructions of dead loved ones or slain enemies.

Most significantly, the walls and tall stone tower of Jericho tell a story. They show researchers that residents worked together for a common goal: to build civic structures that provided community defense. Working together in such an organized way — whether voluntarily or under the orders of a hard-handed ruler — is a sign of civilization.

      Unfortunately, archaeologists don’t know the names and stories that passed from generation to generation by word of mouth in the earliest centuries of Jericho. You can assume that people gossiped about romances and affairs. Guys no doubt bragged about the size of the fish they almost caught in the Jordan River. They surely teased and trash talked, especially after a little too much wine. And they must have told stories. But civilization didn’t wait for a way to write things down so that later generations could read about its beginnings.

Planting Cities along Rivers

      Although Jericho grew at a desert oasis (a prehistoric pit stop, if you will), it wasn’t far from the River Jordan. Other early cities, those of the best-known early large-scale civilizations, formed along rivers in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), Egypt, India, and China.

      

River floods spread rich, silt-laden mud. Besides being fun to squish around in, this mud built up over eons and enriched the soil of the valleys where organized human society would first take hold on a large scale. Good soil and readily available water enabled primitive farmers to increase their annual yields and feed ever-larger populations. It follows that early cities, early legal codes, and systems of counting and writing — all elements of civilization — would also arise in these river valleys.

      Settling between the Tigris and Euphrates

      Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was an inviting place to stop and settle. The lower rivers, as they neared the Persian Gulf, formed a great marsh with plentiful fish, birds, and other wildlife. Late Stone Age people lived there in reed huts. As hunter-gatherers and herders who lived around the swamp and in the hills to the north turned increasingly toward the hot new farming lifestyle (a gradual change that probably took thousands of years), the fertile valley to the northwest of the marshland beckoned.

By about 5000 BC, barley and flax farmers dug networks of irrigation canals from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their tributaries and built villages along those canals. These communities fueled a hot real estate market, becoming fashionable neighborhoods that grew into about a dozen impressive cities of the Sumerian civilization, followed after 2000 BC by the great city-state of Babylon and its successive empires. (A city-state is a city that’s a nation in itself, like modern-day Singapore and Monaco.)

      From about 2700–2300 BC, the leading city-state in southern Mesopotamia was Ur, home to the Bible’s Abraham. Like other cities in the region, Ur was built of mud bricks. Besides fertilizing the fields and inspiring epic mud-wrestling battles, the mud of the river valley proved the best building material in an area with little stone or wood.

      Getting agricultural in Africa

      Northern Africa, where the great Sahara Desert is today, was once fertile grassland with generous rainfall. It was a good place for animals to graze and a great place for nomadic hunters, gatherers, and herders to wander, stop to try a little farming, and establish villages.