Download History 1601: Global History

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Professor Paul Turnbull
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How did you last travel to the university campus? Did you walk an hour or so to get
there? Did you cycle? Or did you come by public transport or your own car? Whatever
way you got to the university, stop and think for a few moments about how you were able to
get there easily and safely.
If you walked, you most likely did so comfortably, wearing a pair of shoes that probably
were not made locally, but mass-produced another part of the world, before being bought
and resold by possibly several wholesale trading companies, then purchased by you, quite
likely from one of several retailers trading throughout Australia. You would have travelled
on footpaths and over bridges, crossing roads. These elements of urban infrastructure were
constructed and are maintained to ensure your easy and safe journeying by local or state
government agencies. These agencies directly employ, or hire on a short-term contractual
basis, a variously skilled workforce using a range of technologies. They do so with money
you provide through local, state and national systems of taxation.
When you stop to think for a few minutes about how you are able to travel easily and
safely to and from university by car, bus or train, it does not take long to appreciate how
more complex and interconnected the forms of social and economic organisation
underpinning these forms of moving about our urban environment are.
Considered in the light of what we have so far explored of human life-ways and forms of
social organization up until the emergence of agriculture around 12 thousand years ago, we
can easily see how the ways we then lived were simpler, both in terms of material wants and
life expectations, than life in today’s cities and other urban centres – in which approximately
half the world’s population now live.
You will recall that we recently considered Marshall Sahlins’ provocative argument that
Palaeolithic humanity generally lived in relative affluence compared to later agricultural
and industrial societies. 1 Reflecting on what Sahlins had to say about the material
conditions of life in the Palaeolithic, the possibilities in terms of inter-personal behaviour
and social organization it enabled, and what life since has been like for most humans living
in societies dependent on agriculture and industrially production, one might well ask: why
did we give up living by hunting and foraging?
Well, last week we explored this question, and came to see that many human
communities did so from around 12 thousand years ago gradually became less dependent on
hunting and foraging and came to live in more sedentary communities that relied on
agriculture for supplying the greater part of their foodstuffs and other necessary resources.
And we saw how much of the evidence we have illustrative of life in the upper late
Palaeolithic era points to this transition from hunting and foraging to agriculture having
occurred out of material necessity. Climatic change, and its effects on the differing
ecologies and food resources within the regions that humans had colonized by around 10
thousand years ago, left many communities with no option but to exploit a relatively small
1
Marshall David Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972).
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number of plants and animal species. Those that did so successfully grew in population, with
the result that the spread and density of population in habitable regions of the earth caused
our species to become even more reliant upon the plants and animals we could domesticate.
These agrarian societies of the early Neolithic era were generally small communities.
They were made up of anywhere between 20 and 100 households, which were largely selfsufficient in how they secured food and other necessary resources. Often these communities
were located in close proximity to each other, but generally exchanges between
communities were confined to items that they could not secure within the country they
controlled.
Figure 1: Neolithic hut reconstruction, Valjevo Museum. Image GFDL licensed,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neolithic_hut_reconstruction.jpg
While they may relied primarily on agriculture, Neolithic communities supplemented the
food they obtained from the plants they grew and animals they raised by exploiting available
wild food sources, notably birds, fish and other aquatic organisms and seasonally appearing
fruits and nuts. They also lived off insects far more often than we imagine.2
2
See, for example, The Human Use of Insects as a Food Resource: A Bibliographic Account in Progress by
Gene R. De Foliart, Professor Emeritus, Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
http://www.foodinsects.com/book7_31/The%20Human%20Use%20of%20Insects%20as%20a%20Food%20Resource.htm
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Starting around 5 thousand years ago, another turning point in world history occurred.
In parts of Africa, Europe, Asia and Central America, clusters of these largely self-contained
Neolithic societies developed into larger entities. They became agrarian city-states.
Why did this change occur? What caused the emergence of these city-states?
That is the question that we will largely focus on in our classes this week. We will
consider what factors were responsible connections for the transition from living in small
agrarian settlements to living in the city-states that appeared in the Fertile Crescent, China
and Central America between 5 to 3 thousand years ago. We will explore what conditions
of material life may have been influential not only in the formation of these city-states., but
in the more complex forms of social organization that developed within them. In doing s,
we will pay particular attention to the work of Andrew Sherratt (1946-2006), a British
archaeologist who argued that integral to the emergence of these city-states was what he
termed a “Secondary Products Revolution” which began around 5 thousand years ago in the
Fertile Crescent.3
Dating and Chronologies
Before we go any further, however, let me say a word or two about chronology, or rather
the conventions employed in referring to past times when events occurred, or longer-term
changes in the conditions inhabitants of the past experienced. From the time that
Christianity became widely established in Europe until very recently, European historians
generally referred to past events and trends in terms of the number of years or centuries they
occurred before the birth of Christ. By the end of the nineteenth century historians writing
in English did so using the abbreviations BC (before Christ) and AD (derived from the
Latin Anno Domini, meaning after Christ).
Many historians still use these terms for explanatory convenience. However, as our
chronological focus in coming weeks becomes progressively less expansive, and we explore
the experiences of peoples in the Middle East, Europe and parts of the world that came to
colonized or controlled by Europeans, I will generally use, starting this week, the convention
of referring to specific events and processes of changes as having occurred before or after
the common era (BCE or CE).
The reason we will adopt this convention is because historians of world history are
increasingly employing it. You will encounter it in many of the articles and book chapters
that will be asked to you read in coming weeks.
Why are many historians now using this convention? As far as one can ascertain they are
doing so as a courtesy to their non-Christian readers, or because they are concerned not to
imply the truth or otherwise of Christianity has any relevance in assessing the causes of past
3
Andrew Sherratt, Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe : Changing Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1997). ———, Reviving the Grand Narrative : Archaeology and Long-Term Change ([S.l.]:
[s.n.], 1995). A. Sherratt, "The Secondary Exploitation of Animals in the Old-World," World Archaeology 15,
no. 1 (1983).
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human behaviour (and these reasons seem sensible enough, especially given that only a third
of the world’s inhabitants in the early twenty-first century are Christian).
However, you may be wondering whether in view of the reservations many historians
have about dating events by religious calendars that it would make more sense to adopt a
dating system in which we spoke about the past using the term BP (before present). And
you would be right. But as you will encounter the terms BCE and CE (before and after
common era) in many of the readings set for this and the remaining weeks of the course, it is
best we use this chronological short-hand. In this course I am unconcerned whether you
chose to use the older convention of dating past phenomena by their proximity to the birth
of Christ, Allah or Buddha in your essays.
The Emergence of Agrarian City-States
Let us return, however, to the subject at hand: the emergence of the first city-states
between 3000 and 1000 BCE.
The emergence of city-states can be regarded as a turning point in world history because,
remarkably, between 3000 and 1000 BCE, these agrarian states appeared separately in parts
of the Fertile Crescent, India, China and present day Mexico and Guatemala. These states
took the form of cities tiny in comparison to the urban areas in which over half of the
world’s population now live. But they were like modern cities in that they were centres of
power, administration and management of agriculture that dominated surrounding regions,
wherein lay smaller agricultural settlements, some of which were large enough in terms of
population diversity of socio-economic activity to be considered towns or smaller cities.
How and why did these agrarian city-states emerge? Historians have offered different
explanations; but it seems fairly clear that one fundamentally important factor in their
emergence was population pressure. These city-states emerged in regions where the climate
and geographical conditions were initially such that living by agriculture enough food could
be produced to cause a gradually increase in population, which intensified reliance on
farming. In the case of the communities of the southern parts of the Fertile Crescent, India
and China, the need to grow more food led to experimentation and successful innovations
in technology that increased agrarian productivity. The first kinds of innovations what a
British archaeologist, Andrew Sherratt, has collectively termed the “Secondary Products
Revolution.”
The Secondary Products Revolution
Essentially, these innovations in technology occurred as communities in various regions
of northern Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent and Asia found that among the animals
they had domesticated, there were certain species - horses, oxen and camels - that could be
bred for more than just supplying meat, clothing and the basis of various tools and artefacts.
By around 3000 BCE agricultural communities in these regions had learnt how to create
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durable clothing and coverings for shelter from fashioning the hair of these animals into
matting or yarn. They were also using the milk produced by these animals to make more
storable high-energy foods such as butter and cheese. They also used horses, oxen and
camels to pull sledges and simple wheeled carts.
Importantly, communities with horses oxen and camels had learnt that the energy of
these animals could be harnessed to prepare soil for planting crops far more easily than men
and women could do using digging sticks or simple hand-drawn ploughs.
Figure 2: depiction of ploughing in burial chamber of Sennedjem C. 1200 BCE. Yorck Project in public domain,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Plough
As David Christian notes in his chapter “Power over Nature / Power over People” in Maps of
Time (set as your core reading for this week of the course), the historian I.G. Simmons
estimated some twenty years ago that, measured in terms of power output, humans can at
best produce 75 watts of power in preparing land for the cultivation of cereal crops, whereas
the most powerful draft animals available to agricultural communities produce between
500-700 watts. 4
This is a remarkable difference in energy output. It explains why a relatively simple piece
of technology - the plough – radically increased the ability of our ancestors to put land
under cultivation. It allowed some communities to put greater areas of land under
cultivation; but more importantly it enabled farming on soils that up until this time
contained too much clay to be prepared by hand tools.
4
See I. G. Simmons, Changing the Face of the Earth : Culture, Environment, History (Oxford ; New York:
Basil Blackwell, 1989).
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Irrigation
Besides this Secondary Products Revolution, other innovations in technology occurred
enabling greater and more reliable watering of crops. Since the upper late Palaeolithic era,
communities adopting sedentary agricultural lives had dammed or diverted streams to
provide water for crops; but by around 3500 BCE communities in various parts of Africa,
Europe and Asia were employing much larger and more sophisticated ways of watering
crops.
Climatic change was undoubtedly a spur to innovation in the use of animal power and
the development of irrigation. By 3500 BCE, the climate in the southern parts of the Fertile
Crescent, India and the Yellow River region of China became drier. Agrarian communities in
these regions were now able to cultivate tracts of rich alluvial soils that had previously been
swamplands fed by major rivers. And the size of their populations rendered it crucial they
did so.
However, the exploitation of these soils required them much more than simply diverting
water onto their crops from river systems such as the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, and Yellow
Rivers. It required the construction of large, sophisticated irrigation systems beyond what
any small coalition of households in one or more settlements could build. Labour resources
had to mobilise on
hitherto unknown scales;
and
once
this
infrastructure had been
built, its key components
– dams, channels and ways
of drawing water onto
fields - had to be routinely
maintained and often
made more efficient.
The ability to
mobilize people in large
Figure 3: Eastern Han (China) pottery model of rice field circa 25-220 CE.
Photo by Prof. Gary Lee Todd, Creative Commons licensed,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_Han_pottery_paddy_field.J
PG
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numbers to create large-scale, mutually beneficial agricultural infrastructure was a key
characteristic of these early city-states. It was one key reason why they emerged. For what
these states had in common was that they appeared in regions situated in different parts of
the world where agriculture had proved sufficiently productive to support relatively large
populations, but could only continue to support them and cope with further population
increase by developing more complex forms of social organization, in which there was
greater diversity and specialisation in the socio-economic activities people routinely
pursued over the course of their lives.
Ants, Bees, Homo Sapiens
David Christian, in his chapter entitled “Power over Nature / Power over People” (set as this
week’s core reading), suggests that in understanding why agrarian city-states emerged, it’s
useful to compare the lives of their inhabitants with the lives of ants and bees.
Figure 4: worker bees and queen.
Ants and bees are insect species that have
evolved complex kinds of social
organization out of necessity.
By
reproduction over successive generations,
different tasks have come to be performed
by biologically and behavioural specialized
variants of the species’ common form.
They have developed complex social lives because their survival have come to depend on
a repertoire of individual and collective behaviours that strengthen the ability of the species
to live and reproduce successfully in densely populated communities within confined
protected spaces.
Of course, we cannot jump to reductive conclusions; and this is not what Christian wants
us to do. Rather, he asks us to consider the parallels between social insects and humans to
underscore an important point, which is easy to neglect when studying our past: human
thought and behaviour involve myriad kinds of interaction and feedback that make it
nonsensical to try to explain what inhabitants of the past thought or did in terms of simple
relations of cause and effect.
Even when observing the physical world, it is difficult to explain adequately many events
in simple terms of causality. The reactions of human to events they experience are much less
predictable or easily explicable. This is not least because events, - especially those that
significant affect the material well being of people - are invariably interpreted in the light of
the socially constructed expectations they have about what effects the events in question
will have.
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Even so, comparing the evolution of insect societies with emergence of larger, more
complexly organized human societies between 3000 and 1000 BCE highlights in the
comparison how clearly factors such as climatic change, geographical conditions,
population density and technological innovation, have disposed humans to act in various
ways to ensure their personal and collective survival.5
Given the material conditions and adaptive possibilities that people had in various parts
of the world between 3000 and 1000 BCE, survival for many communities meant gradual
coalescence into societies in which the necessities of life were best guaranteed by
developing complex forms of social and economic organisation.
This "evolutionary" model is a useful starting point for exploring the questions how and
why agrarian city-states emerged from around 300 BCE. It’s a model that recognises that
changes in prevailing material conditions will greatly determine what people can possibly do
to continue to secure food and other essential resources; but this model takes into account
that what they will do depends on what they believe they can possibly do. And what they see
as possible will be greatly influenced by their existing social institutions, cultural practices
and how they understand their history.
Earlier models of state formation commonly employed by historians have similarly
acknowledged the fundamental importance of material conditions in determining social
possibilities. However, they have tended to be far more deterministic – that is to say they
have sought to explain every thought people have, and every action they take, as causally
determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.
In their most deterministic form, these models assume that throughout human history,
the mode of producing food and other resources essential to life has determined not only
the forms social institutions have taken, but also how inhabitants of the society have
understood themselves, their institutions and the wider world.
Now one can have no quarrel with the claim that throughout our history prevailing
conditions of material life have put boundaries on what was humanly possible in terms of
thought and action; but can we say that that people in similar material conditions have
thought and acted in pretty much identical ways?
Historians influenced by the work Karl Marx (1818-1883), the nineteenth century
philosopher and political economist, have tended to think that we can.
Following Marx, they have presumed that throughout human history, the
“superstructure” of every society – that is, its divisions of labour, social roles, technologies
and institutions - have all been determined by the economic basis of the society, or to be
more precise, the dominant mode in which food and other resources essential to life have
been produced.
5
For further fascinating discussion of the operation of these factors, see Martin L. Cody and Jared M.
Diamond, Ecology and Evolution of Communities (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1975). Also, Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).
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What is more, historians influenced by Marx have reasoned that each social
“superstructure” has inevitably become characterized by tension, between an elite seeking to
control the mode of production and consume an ever-greater share of what is produced, and
the bulk of the population, whose lives depend on
provide the labour to produce the resources the elite
seeks to control.
Historians influenced by Marx have reasoned that
the social superstructure of Neolithic city emerged
as a consequence of the growth of population and
the need for greater agricultural productivity.
Initially, those holding authority within large families
or clans accrued greater power by arbitrating
disputes that threatened to disrupt work on the land.
They were rewarded for performing this role by
tribute received after each harvest in the form of a
portion of the staple foods and other resources
households recognizing their authority produced.
Because of the tribute they gained, these chiefly
Figure 5: Karl Marx c. 1875. Public
families could retain men to enforce their authority
domain image,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/K in resolving disputes if required. Marx himself argued
arl Marx#Portraits
that not only was this how early city-states came to be
ruled by prominent members of one or more families, supported by warriors whose
functions in preserving order and defending the state became the inherited preserve of their
male offspring, but also how castes of men and women with exclusive rights to perform
religious ceremonies and rituals came into being. Priestly castes enjoyed richer conditions of
life through cultivating popular belief in the divinity or divinely sanctioned authority of the
city-state’s ruling dynasty.
Marx, and many of the eighteenth century historians and social theorists he drew upon,
found it hard to believe that the priestly castes of Neolithic states actually believed in the
religious beliefs and practices they observed. Marx was strongly inclined to think that they
regarded the rituals and ceremonies they performed as merely theatrics designed to instil
awe and obedience to authority in those whose lives were spent in agricultural toil.
However, what we know of religious beliefs and practices from written sources from the
centuries around the turn of the Common Era suggests that priests did not doubt the
essential truths of the religions they served, although in some states, priests regarded certain
beliefs and rituals as simplifications of religious truths that usefully strengthened popular
belief those who ruled did so by divine fiat.
For all Marx’s compassion for those who over the course of human history have been the
victims of exploitation and poverty, he believed that humans acted out self-interest in
limited, predictable ways. He saw rulers and elite castes throughout human history as having
sought not just to perpetuate, but strengthen their power and authority by coercively
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extracting an ever-increasing proportion of what the bulk of the populace produced in order
to live. He further held that this forced accumulation by a few of the resources produced by
the many would inevitably cause tension, and generate growing consciousness on the part of
those who toiled that they were victims of coercion and exploitation.
The mass of the people would eventually see their interests lay in overthrowing those
who ruled and the castes that represented their rule. They would come to see their lives of
toil as not divinely ordained, but forced labour. As their shared consciousness of being an
exploited caste or class of people grew, so too would their consciousness that they needed to
take radical action to end their exploitation.6
When Marx studied the emergence of the first city-states, what he saw was a regularity
determining the course of human history so predictably as to warrant it being treated as a
scientific law.
Marx held that from the time of the earliest agricultural civilizations, the ambitions of
elites and those social classes dependant on their authority had invariably generated
irreconcilable conflict with the bulk of the population who actually produced the material
necessities of life - irreconcilable conflict over control of the means of life’s essential
resources that in time had inevitably caused revolutionary change in how those necessities
had been produced, distributed and consumed.
What is more, Marx believed that all new modes of production arising out of
revolutionary change, and the new social institutions and relations to the means of
production they determined, would eventually also generate tensions and conflict inevitably
resulting in the revolutionary transformation of society and the emergence of a new mode
of production.
Amongst historians influenced by Marx, there has been a similar tendency to see these
early city-states as societies characterized by the exploitation of the bulk of the population
by a small elite and others who benefitted from their rule.
There is much evidence to suggest that elites securing and inter-generationally
perpetuating their rule was an important factor in the development of city-states from
around 3000 BCE. However, what is not so clear is whether the ruling families of these
city-states coerced and exploited those who laboured to produce food at the risk of causing
social tensions that threatened to weaken their power and authority.
Certainly, this happened at various times in the history of many of these early city-states,
most commonly when elites sought to procure the same proportion of harvest yields in years
when drought or rains severely reduced agricultural productivity that they were accustomed
to gaining in good years. However, these elites had a strong interest in securing their own
future and that of the agrarian populace they ruled.
6
See David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx : An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1980). Also
Lawrence Krader and Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii, The Asiatic Mode of Production : Sources,
Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx, Dialectic and Society ; 1. (Assen: Van Gorcum,
1975).
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We find, for example, among the earliest laws we have evidence of were those written on
clay tablets found in the early twentieth century in the remains of Ur, a city-state that arose
out of agrarian settlements near the mouth of the Euphrates River in ancient Sumer,
between 3000 and 2500 BCE.
Inscribed on these tablets are 32 laws, known as the Code of Ur-Nammu. They show that
Ur’s ruling dynasty was concerned to safeguard the city-states’ inhabitants from violence
and theft, but was also determined to ensure disputes over marriage agreements and
obligations in respect of land and its cultivation would not cause conflict families that could
have serious consequences for agricultural productivity. For example, if the head of a family
allowed another household to cultivate land, and that land was not cultivated, then that
household would be punished by a severe fine to be paid in barley seed. Similarly, if a family
accidentally or deliberately failed to control the flow of water onto their land so that they
damaged the land or crops of their neighbours, they faced a steep fine. 7
What the code further indicates is that by around 2500 BCE, the city-state of Ur was
not only governed by one powerful family and had castes of warriors and priests, but was
also a society in which there were men and women who were born, lived and died as slaves.
It is impossible to say how large this slave class was; but what we know of Ur’s laws relating
to slavery suggest that the institution was a significant source of agricultural labour.
While from our perspective the life of the bulk of the inhabitants of these early citystates appears to have one of coercion and exploitation, the power over the lives of others
that the elites of these city-states enjoyed had beneficial effects, even for those who were
slaves.
As David Christian rightly observes, thinking about the evolutionary development of
social insects and the emergence of city-states between 3000 and 1000 BCE throws into
sharp relief that as we began living in larger, denser communities, the challenges and
opportunities encountered required people to develop ways of living together in greater
numbers within confined areas of land.8
People came to sustain themselves by activities not directly connected with producing
food crops. The first ways of living other than directly by agriculture grew out of individuals
becoming adept in the making of essential artefacts, such earthenware vessels used for the
storage of grain and other foodstuffs. But very soon in formation of these city-states one or
more families acquired authority over the bulk of the population and over successive
generations strengthened their power and ability to enforce it through extracting tribute in
the form of foodstuffs and other essential resources produced by other households.
By securing control of surplus food production in good years, elites were able to build up
supplies of food that could be distributed in an orderly fashion in times of famine. As the
Code of Ur-Nammu illustrates, the ruling dynasties of these city-states had the power to
7
See Martha Tobi Roth et al., "Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor," In Writings from the
ancient world ; v. 6. (Altanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997).
8
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: California University Press, 2005),
pp. 251-2.
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enforce the resolution of disputes between families or communities working the land so as
to prevent violence and disruption to the agrarian cycle that could gravely diminish the sum
of available food. 9 By their ability to use agricultural surpluses to support castes of men
skilled in fighting they could protect the city-state and its outlying farming communities
from both inter-communal and threats by external enemies, such as nomadic herding
communities, or neighbouring city-states. In short, elites emerged as much because of the
benefits they gave people whose ancestors may have lived in small and relatively selfsustaining agrarian villages communities in which what differences there were in rank and
status were largely based on deference to age, accumulated knowledge and specialized
abilities within family or clan groups.
The benefits that social diversity and stratification gave the inhabitants of agrarian citystates of the period 3000-1000 BCE alerts us to the shortcomings of more deterministic
models of social transformation that have seen exploitation and resulting caste or class
conflict as prime drivers of historical change. Rather, looking at what biologists have learnt
from studying the nature and evolution of complex forms of social organisation in other
species of organisms helps us to see that while material conditions have determined what
possibilities there were in past societies, what people in those societies saw as possible was
not rigidly determined by structural tensions and conflict over the means of production.
Rather, these societies experienced more complex patterns of social and cultural evolution.
Even so, the agrarian economic basis of these city-states was largely responsible for new
forms of economic specialisation and social institutions emerging. As previously
mentioned, the first ways of living other than directly by agriculture in these city-states were
by making items essential for growing and preserving foodstuffs, such as pottery storage jars.
But as city-states became larger and more socially complex, economic niches emerged for
people with specialized skills, such as those involved in the construction and furnishing of
elite residences, temples and buildings serving other communal purposes. Elites also
stimulated the production of various kinds of decorative items and clothing signifying their
wealth, power and authority. Warrior classes required weaponry. The range of needs and
desires within these city-states also enabled men and women to live by trading in a range of
raw materials and commodities obtained from places beyond the territory it controlled. But
it was not just elites that generated opportunities to live by means other than agrarian
labour. In years of good harvests, a large proportion of the populace of many of these citystates appear to have been able to use surplus foodstuffs they produced to acquire basic
domestic items and even some luxury goods.
As these city-states became more complex in terms of social and economic activity, more
sophisticated forms of administration developed. One innovation of crucial value in the
administration of the state occurred, remarkably, not only in city-states of the Fertile
Crescent, but also in those that developed in India, China and Central America between
9
Roth et al., "Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor."
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3000 and 600 BCE. This innovation was writing, or to be more precise, systems of writing
for recording information essential for managing the ruling elites of these city-states’ prime
source of power: the portion of foodstuffs, and often also other natural resources, it
routinely laid claim to as tribute from farming households. The most ancient documents we
have are clay tablets on which officials within city-states of the southern part of the Fertile
Crescent grain tallied tributes of grain which the rulers of these states managed for their
own and communal ends.
Writing
Systems of writing were initially used to manage the acquisition and use of tribute; but
they gradually came to be employed in the recording and transmission of other forms of
information. As they did so, these early writing systems became more sophisticated. Initially,
they were little more than pictograms, that is, depictions of concrete things reduced to a
simple, stylized form that could easily be inscribed into a wet clay tablet. For example, a
simple pictogram of an ear of barley was used to represent the cereal.
Figure 6: Schøyen Collection MS 3029. Sumerian
inscription on a creamy stone plaque. The text is a list
of "gifts from the High and Mighty of Adab to the
High Priestess, on the occasion of her election to the
temple". Public domain image,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sumerian_26
th_c_Adab.jpg
Another remarkable thing happened
separately in city-states throughout the
world: these writing systems were
modified so that the sign for one thing
came to be employed to signify other
concrete things, actions and ideas.
Initially, this was done by capitalizing on
phonetic similarities - between, for
example, a pictogram’s literal meaning
and other words.10 Hence in ancient
Sumerian, a stylized reed on a clay tablet
or seal literally meant “gi” or “reed,” but
the word could also be use to signify the
Sumerian word “gi” meaning to repay or
reimburse somebody.
In time, the process was further adapted so that a several pictograms placed together
could be used to represent a word of several syllables.
10
Jean-Jacques Glassner, Zainab Bahrani, and Marc Van de Mieroop, The Invention of Cuneiform : Writing in
Sumer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
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The symbols below, example, together form the Sumerian word 'namdubsa' - meaning
friendship.
Figure 7: image placed in public domain by Stephen G. Brown,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sumerian-namdubsa.PNG
Bibliography
Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: California
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