Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

Episode 1: Uncovering Near Eastern Civilization

Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization

Dr Amanda H Podany

Film Review

With its amazing longevity of 3,000 years, Mesopotamia accounts accounts for two-thirds of the total history of human civilization. Western concepts of writing, criminal and contract law and diplomatic relations can all be traced back to Mesopotamia.

According to Podany, Mesopotamian civilization is much less studied than Roman, Greek or Egyptian civilization, largely because its written language, Akkadian,* was only deciphered 170 years ago. The deciphering of Akkadian hieroglyphics led to a burst of archeological investigation of ancient Mesopotamian sites (most in modern day Iraq). At present, 250,000 separate Akkadian tablets have been discovered, some of which have yet to be read.

Most of these tablets relate to everyday activities: court documents, business letters, rations, lists of animals and multiplication tables.

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*Written Akkadian originated in the Kingdom of Sumer (4500 – 1900 BC) in southern Mesopotamia.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/uncovering-near-eastern-civilization

 

 

 

Ancient History: The Innovations of Mesopotamia

The Sumerian Alphabet

Episode 6: The Innovations of Mesopotamia

The Big History of Civilizations (2016)

Dr Craig G Benjamin

Film Review

This lecture explores the major technological innovations produced by Sumer, the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), which flourished between 2750 and 2150 BC. Sumer consisted of roughly a dozen city states. Six (Eridu, Kish, Ur, Uruk, Nippur and Babylon) are mentioned in the Old Testament.

Benjamin traces how initially these city-states were ruled (as were most towns and villages) by assemblies of leading male citizens elected for their seniority and status. In each instance, these leaders gave up their power to absolute leaders during periods of crisis. Because Sumer’s city-states were almost constantly at war, they all appointed kings, who in most cases granted themselves absolute power owing to their special relationship with the gods.*

In 2334 BCE, Sargon the Great overthrew the king of Kish, built a massive army and established the world’s first empire, comprising nearly all of Sumer.** The Akkadian Empire collapsed in 2150, in part from a mass uprising of its people and in part from and hostile nomadic invasions. Maintaining a large army is extremely expensive, and Sumerians became very resentful of the massive tribute (taxes) they were charged.

Among the important technologies to come out of Sumer were

• writing – dating from 3200 BC, the first written language involved the use of pictograms depicting animals, weapons and other goods accepted in tribute. Over 200 years, a written alphabet evolved in which letters represented speech sounds rather than objects. The first example of written literature (The Epic of Gilgamesh) dates from 2700 BC.
• the wheel – Benjamin and others speculate the first wheels were potters wheels turned on their side.
• bronze – an alloy made from combining tin and copper, bronze first appeared in 3000 BC. It was used mainly for swords, spears, shields, and armor, as well as jewelry for the ruling elite. A few wealthy farmers used bronze plows.
• shipbuilding – by 3000 BC Sumerian ships were were sturdy enough to sail from the Tigris/Euphrates rivers into the Persian Gulf, and by 2500 they were crossing the Arabian Sea to trade with civilizations in the Indus Valley (modern day Pakistan). Sumer exported woolen textiles, leather and jewelry and imported ivory, pearls and spices.

The Sumerian city-states were the first to demonstrate clear class stratification, consisting of

• kings and the military
• priests**
• nobles owning large tracts of land
• subsistence farmers
• slaves (in some places 50% of the urban population) – in most cases these were either war captives or subjects who couldn’t pay their debts.

Women lost considerable status with the rise of city-states, with most consigned to child rearing and housekeeping. A few were allowed to participate in public life as scribes, priestesses, midwives, shopkeepers and textile workers.

The cities of Sumer saw the first emergence of a middle class engaged in specialized labor and crafts (bronze metallurgy, scribes, potters, textile workers, merchants and traders

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*Sumerians believed all forces of nature had a spiritual aspect and named their first gods after them. In addition, each city-state had its own local god.

**At the peak of Sumerian civilization, Mesopotamia hosted a population of 100,000, the largest on the planet to that point.

This film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/innovations-mesopotamia

Prehistory: Power, Cities and States

Ancient Sumer

 

Episode 5: Power, Cities and States

The Big History of Civilizations (2016)

Dr Craig G Benjamin

Film Review

In this lecture, Benjamin traces the 5,000 years of prehistory between 10,000 BC (when humans first adopted agriculture) and 5,000 BC (when the first cities arose). For the first 5,000 years human beings could only produce limited food through agriculture and had to supplement their intake through hunting and fishing.

With slash and burn agriculture, practiced in many areas of the world, villagers moved to new territory when soil fertility was exhausted or when populations grew to large too feed from existing gardens.

During this period a typical village consisted of 24 to 100 dwellings. Some villages were much larger if they had special spiritual significance or an exceptional water source or they became a trading center.

According to archeologists, there is no evidence of hierarchy, power structures or warfare in villages dating from this period. Wealth and power seems to have been shared equally between residents, regardless of sex or social status.

The first cities emerged in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas around 5,000 BCE. Their archeological remains are characterized by massive palaces and monuments indicative of powerful leaders with control over substantial resources and many people. According to to Benjamin, these leaders were initially appointed from below to fulfill specific needs, most commonly to wage war against neighboring cities, to mediate with the gods, to organized irrigation projects or to settle disputes between residents. Eventually a leader accumulated sufficient resources to impose power by force.

Benjamin believes the first cities arose owing to a big increase in food production he credits to improved irrigation and the traction power and manure of domesticated animals.

The first agriculture-based cities appeared in Sumer in Mesopotamia adjacent to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Over time, Sumer acquired dozens of cities, with Ur, Uruk and Eredu the most prominent. Uruk, the largest, had a population of 55,000.

Once it was no longer necessary for all residents to produce food to survive, city residents could undertake more specialized work, as craftsmen, potters, scribes, silversmiths, priests, administrators and snake charmers. It’s also clear that large numbers of slaves were needed to build walls, large buildings, monuments, and irrigation systems and to clean streets and dispose of garbage. In addition, a regular system of taxation or tribute to finance, city administration, temples and armies, as well as leaders extravagant lifestyles.

Writing was also central to city life to keep tract of taxes, tribute and administrative decisions.

The film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/power-cities-and-states

Collapse: Revisiting the Adam and Eve Myth

A Short History of Progress

by Ronald Wright (2004 Caroll and Graf)

Book Review

The theme of A Short History of Progress is social collapse. In it, Canadian historical archeologist Ronald Wright summarizes humankind’s biological and cultural evolution, as well as tracing the role of ecological destruction in the collapse of the some of the most significant civilizations (Sumer, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Easter Island and the Mayan civilization). Exhaustively researched, the book advances the theory that many of colossal blunders made by modern leaders are very old mistakes made by earlier civilizations. Wright starts with the mystery of the agricultural revolution that occurred around 10,000 BC, when Homo sapiens ceased to rely on hunting and berry-picking and began growing their own food. Twelve thousand years ago, the global population was still small enough that there was more than ample wild food to feed them. Yet for some reason, a half dozen human settlements in widely separated regions simultaneously domesticated plants and animals. Why?

The Importance of Stable Climate

Citing extensive geological and archeological evidence, Wright suggests plant and animal domestication may have been triggered by unprecedented climate stability. Prior to 10,000 BC, the earth’s climate was wildly unstable, with ice ages developing and abating over periods as short as a decade or so. These sudden periodic changes in climate forced our hunter gatherer ancestors to continually migrate in search of food. The climate stabilization that occurred following the last ice age (around 10,000 BC) enabled them to settle in larger groups, save seeds to cultivate crops that took months to harvest, and engage in trade for other basic necessities.

Wright goes on to describe a number of diverse civilizations that arose and collapsed between 4,000 and 1,000 BC – and their unfortunate tendency towards mindless habitat destruction and runaway population growth, consumption, and technological development. In each case, an identical social transformation takes place as resources become increasingly scarce. As prehistoric peoples find it harder and harder to feed themselves, inevitably a privileged elite emerges to confiscate communal lands and enslave their inhabitants. They then install a despotic tyrant who hastens ecological collapse by wasting scare resources on a spree of militarization and temple or pyramid building. This process is almost always accompanied by wholesale murder, torture, and unproductive wars.

Wright relates this typical pattern of ecological destruction and collapse to a series of “progress traps,” in which specific human inventions turn out to have extremely negative unintended consequences. Instead of fixing the underlying problem they’re meant to solve, the inventions create an even worse environmental mess. It’s a pattern so common in prehistory that it’s become enshrined in the Adam and Eve and similar creation myths. All describe how the quest for knowledge ended humankind’s access to freely available and abundant food and forced them to produce their own.

Our Ancestors Wipe Out the Neanderthals and Mammoths

According to Wright, the first of these “progress traps” was the invention of weapons (for hunting) by early Homo sapiens. Wright blames this early invention of weapons for the first (archeologically) recorded instance of genocide – namely the wiping out of Homo Neanderthalis (Neanderthal man) by Cro-Magnon man between 40,000 and 30,000 BC. This was followed by other important mass extinctions as Homo sapiens spread out across the globe between 30,000 and 15,000 BC. The most recent archeological evidence suggests the mammoth, camel and horse became extinct in North America during this period because of perfected hunting techniques that allowed human beings to carry out mass slaughters (involving as many as 1,000 mammoths or 100,000 horses simultaneously).

Some archeologists attribute the end of hunting as a predominate food source (in numerous regions simultaneously) and the rise of plant-based diets to the decline in game animals stemming from this indiscriminate slaughter. The birth of agriculture, in turn leads to widespread deforestation and soil erosion in all the ancient civilizations, accompanied by soil salinization from over-irrigation. According to Wright, the entire cycle takes around a thousand years, which happens to be the average lifespan of most historic civilizations.

Turning Iraq Into a Desert

The first civilization to collapse in this way was Sumer (in southern Iraq), which flourished between 3,000 and 2,000 BC. The Sumerians invented irrigation, the city, the corporation (in the form of priestly bureaucracies), writing (for trade purposes), hereditary kings and slavery. By 2,500 BC, soil salinization (from irrigation) had caused a massive drop-off in crop yields. Instead of implementing environmental reforms, the ruling elite tried to intensify production by confiscating communal lands, introducing slavery and human sacrifice and engaging in chronic warfare.

From Sumer the cradle of civilization moved north to Mesopotamia (Babylon), in the region of northern Iraq and Syria, and humankind created one of the first man made deserts out of a region lush in date palms and other native vegetation.

Around 1,000 BC, similar civilizations also appeared in India, China, Mexico, Peru and parts of Europe. The Greeks (around 600 BC) were the first with any conscious awareness that they were destroying their own habitat. Plato writes a vivid description of the dangers of erosion and runoff from deforestation. The Athenian leader Solon tried to halt increasing ecological devastation by outlawing debt serfdom, food exports, and farming on steep slopes. Pisistratus offered grants to farmers to plant olive trees for soil reclamation.

Wright makes a good case for similar environmental destruction, rather than barbarian invasion, causing Rome to collapse. By the time of Augustus, Italian land had become so degraded that Rome was forced to import most of their food from North Africa, Gaul, and other colonies.

The Role of the New World

The most interesting section of the book concerns the role the New World played in rescuing the environmentally decimated European civilization. According to Wright, it was mainly New World gold and silver that capitalized the industrial revolution. However he also stresses the importance of the New World foods that were added to the European diet at a point where the population had outstripped their food supply. Maize (sweet corn) and potatoes are twice as productive (in terms of calories per acre) as wheat and barley, the traditional European staples. He also makes the point – ominously – that, despite all our apparent technological progress, humankind hasn’t introduced one new food since the Stone Age. In fact, Homo sapiens hasn’t evolved culturally or intellectually since our ancestors failed to confront resource scarcity in a way conducive to their survival.

If anything, given mass extinctions, potentially catastrophic climate change, and a growing scarcity of energy, water and fertile soil, we seem to be repeating the old maladaptive pattern. As examples, Wright cites the idiotic war on terrorism, which has ironic parallels with the chronic warfare the Sumerians launched 4,000 years ago. He also cites the rise of the New Right and the folly of trying to address resource scarcity by consolidating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite.