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!"#$%&'()*+),(-.%/0.(!"#$%&'( 123$4&2(5"62,($72(8"&#$(9"$"2#(06:(;$0$2#( Professor Paul Turnbull " ! 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). ! # 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 $ ! 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). ! % 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 & ! 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). ! ' 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 ! ( 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. ! ) 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). *+ ! 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 ! ** 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). *" ! 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. ! *# 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." *$ ! 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). ! *% 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 University Press, 2005. Cody, Martin L., and Jared M. Diamond. Ecology and Evolution of Communities. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975. Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997. Glassner, Jean-Jacques, Zainab Bahrani, and Marc Van de Mieroop. The Invention of Cuneiform : Writing in Sumer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Krader, Lawrence, 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. McLellan, David. The Thought of Karl Marx : An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1980. Roth, Martha Tobi, Harry A. Hoffner, Piotr Michalowski, and American Council of Learned Societies. "Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor." In Writings from the ancient world ; v. 6. Altanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997. Sahlins, Marshall David. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972. Sherratt, A. "The Secondary Exploitation of Animals in the Old-World." World Archaeology 15, no. 1 (1983): 90-104. Sherratt, Andrew. 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. Simmons, I. G. Changing the Face of the Earth : Culture, Environment, History. Oxford ; New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989.