Peter Watson's Ideas - A History from Fire to Freud, may be one of the greatest history books ever written. Five years in the researching, compiling hundreds of books, it offers a 1000 page sweep over all of humanity's great ideas. This isn't a conventional political history (e.g. which king won which battle), but a history of how we think about ourselves, each other, and our relation to the earth and the cosmos.It provides the scaffolding in which other histories can slot into. How often have you read a biography or seen a documentary about an episode from the past, but can't connect it to the broader context?
Unlike most history books which are written by academics with a humanities education, Peter Watson does not avoid scientific developments. In fact, he emphasises them prominently as one of the main drivers of change. The book ends at the turn of the 20th century, the birth of modernism. Don't be fooled by Freud in the title; Watson is no admirer of Freud, claiming that he made up all his theories. For an equally insightful overview of the 20th century, Peter Watson has written A Terrible Beauty or the Modern Mind, published in 2000. Together, they took about a decade to write!
Peter Watson, is based in the United Kingdom and France, and keeps a low profile, out of the lecture/media circuit. In 2010 he released his third successive one-thousand page book, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century, an encyclopaedic overview of Germany's contribution to intellectual history beginning with Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.His next book, The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New explores what we can learn about human nature given the independent development of Eurasia and the Americas, separated for 14,000 years and and yet still converging on several important ideas and technologies.
For those that are interested, here's a 50-page summary of the introduction and Part 1 of Peter Watson's book. It was written over the winter of 2007/08 in Word, so the formatting may not be quite compatible with this blog. I tried to copy the entire 340 page summary but that exceeded Blogger's word/byte/size limit.
From Fire to Freud – A History of Ideas, by Peter Watson (2005)
Introduction:
Keynes’ purchase of Newton’s papers at Sotheby’s 1936 – discovered the great scientist was also a believer in Biblical eschatology, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, astrology, numerology, etc. The moral of story is that the gradual and inevitable enlightenment throughout history (Whig History) is false. Reality is always more complex. Furthermore, progress can regress. Increasing enlightenment is not guaranteed.
Tripartite classifications of history (‘triposis’ or ‘trinitarian’)
Three grand ideas, ages or principles
Organisational convenience
Forcing discrete simplified concepts onto a complex multivariable continuum
Any time one sees a historian, academic or self-help guru distil something from history, society, health into ‘x’ steps or units, it’s purely opinion.
Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202)
Epochs presided over by God the Father (Old Testament), Son (New Testament), Holy Spirit (eternal Gospel)
Jean Bodin (1530-1596)
Oriental, Mediterranean, Northern
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Printing, Gunpowder, Magnet – most influential inventions
Bacon was the first to conceive of the history of ideas
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Physics (natural objects), psychology (man), political (artificial groupings)
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) – borrowed from Herodotus & Varro
Age of Gods, Heroes (myth), and human age
Three instincts that shaped history: Belief in Providence (religion), recognition of Parenthood (family), burial of dead (sepulchre)
Three punishments that shaped civilisation: shame, curiosity, need to work
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781) (& Saint-Simon)
Civilisation product of geographical, biological and psychological factors
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat Condorcet (1743-1794)
Destruction of inequality between nations, within nations, & perfection of man
William Godwin (1756-1836)
Triumph of reason & truth: literature, education and political justice
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
Greatest elements of civilisation: Gunpowder, printing, Protestantism
Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
Three stages of history: Theological, Metaphysical, Scientific
James Frazer (1854-1941)
Three stages of history: Magic, Religion, Science
Lewis Morgan (1818-1881)
Three stages of history: Savagery, Barbarism, Civilisation
Growth of ideas about government, family and property
J H Denison (Emotions as the Basis of Civilisation)
Patriarchal, Fratriarchal, Democratic
Harry E Barnes (Intellectual & Cultural History of the Western World)
Ethical monotheism in the Axial ages
Individualism in the Renaissance: the World an end-in-itself
Darwinian Revolution
Karl Marx
No surplus or exploitation, surplus & exploitation, surplus & no exploitation
Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation)
Reciprocity, Redistribution, Market
R G Collingwood (Idea of History):
Three crises of histiography:
History as a science (5th century BC)
History as God’s purpose (Christianity)
Enlightenment: denial of intuition, revelation, etc.
Crane Briton (Ideas and Men):
Modern world: Humanism, Protestanism, Rationalism
Carlo Cipolla: (Guns and Sails...)
Modern world: Nationalism, Guns, Navigation
Ernest Gellner: (Plough, Sword & Book)
Hunting & gathering (production), agrarian production (coercion), industrial production (cognition)
Richard Tarnas (Passion of the Western Mind)
Autonomous Philosophy (classical times)
Philosophy subservient to Christianity
Philosophy subservient to science (since the Enlightenment)
Johan Gouldsblom (Fire and Civilisation)
Transformations of fire, agriculture, industrialisation
Isaiah Berlin
Three turnings points:
Death of Aristotle: philosophy ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life, ceased to discuss political and public life – concentrated only on private life.
Machiavelli – recognition that there is a division between natural and moral values. Political values may be incompatible with Christian values
Romanticism
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs & Steel)
Geographical determinism
Domestication of available animals/plants gave resistance
Jacob Bronowski (Western Intellectual Tradition) with Bruce Mazlich
Three realms of intellectual activity:
- Inquiry into truth: religion, science, philosophy. In an ideal world, agreement would be total, inevitable and involuntary
- Inquiry into what is right: law, ethics, politics. Agreement needs to be widespread in order to work.
- Inquiry into taste: arts. Disagreement may be desirable
Meta-analysis:
Selected by >1 author: guns, printing, agriculture, science, industrialisation
One can also stress the continuity of “big” thoughts e.g. individual, freedom
Peter Watson’s three ideas:
Individual/soul, Europe, science/experiment
Non-Tripartite classifications of history
Condorcet (10), Herder (5), Hegel (4), Kant (9)
Great modern historian of ideas
Arthur Lovejoy: History of Ideas Club (Johns Hopkins Uni)
William James lectures at Harvard 1933
The Great Chain of Being (1936)
Assumption that the universe is rational – begun about 2400BC
Hierarchy of cognition – from inanimate objects to plants to animals to humans (and beyond to angels & supreme being)
The ‘chain’ implied an otherworldliness – greater perfection at the top
God at top, perfect, Absolute, good, a Platonic ideal
Failed as it implied a static universe
Influential ideas weren’t necessarily right – Christianity, Freud, etc.
Lovejoy thought of ideas as discrete units, not fluid
Lovejoy founded the Journal of the History of Ideas (1940) contributed to by Bertrand Russel
Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973) – editing by Philip Wiener, contributed by Isaiah Berlin and Peter Medawar
Nine categories of ideas:
i. External order of Nature
ii. Human nature
iii. Literature & aesthetics
iv. History
v. Economic, Legal and Political ideas & institutions
vi. Religion & philosophy
vii. Formal mathematical logic
viii. Linguistic ideas
Failures:
Meaning of secularisation
Psychohistory
The Imagination’s production of ideas
Variations (German)
History of concepts, human spirit, words, anachronistic disposition to insert modern concepts into historical processes.
James Thrower (The Alternative Tradition)
Alternative to Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being
Naturalistic ideas that seek to explain the world without recourse to God(s)
Prologue – Discovery of Time
1835-1859, Abbeville France – bones and stones axes dug up by Boucher suggesting humans have been around a lot longer than the 4,000 – 6,000 years that Biblical scholars have derived. In England as early as 1797, stone axes were found together with bones from extinct animals (mammoth, rhinoceros, tiger). Proper scientific excavations begun around 1858. The sense of man’s antiquity changed dramatically with the discovery of the stone tools (which coincidentally is considered the first ‘idea’).
Stone axes found in classical times had fanciful explanations: petrified thunderbolts or fairy arrows or naturally formed in dark clouds. “Thunderstones’
Age of exploration: Europeans discovered hunter-gatherers using stone tools in Africa, America and the Pacific. Agricola and, later, Mercati (Vatican librarian) was one of the first to suggest European stone tools were of human origin.
Isaac La Peyrere (French Calvinist) – wrote a book in 1655 challenging the biblical account: ‘A Theological System upon that presupposition that Men were before Adam’. Thunderstones date from before the Hebrews. Adam & Eve were the first Jews, not first humans. He was seized and jailed by the Inquisition and forced to renounce.
Geologists more concerned with reconciling strata with the Bible (catastrophists (aka Diluvialists) v uniformitarians) than with the age of the Earth.
Floods thought to wipe out all life, and species replaced in improved form.
Noah’s Flood was the most recent of these catastrophes (five days of creation in Genesis were about 1,000 years each). The Biblical version was supported by archaeological discoveries at Ur and Nineveh where stone tablets described (and confirmed) kings written about in the old testament.
Uniformitarians:
Earth formed by continuous processes like what are happening today.
Slow – need a lot of time
Benoit de Maillet ‘Telliamed’ published 1748
Presented as fantastical account written by an Indian philosopher
Absence of a recent flood, long time before civilisation, life began in oceans
Humans existed before Adam
Comte de Buffon – calculated world was 75,000 years old in 1779 (later revised to 168,000 years old, but privately thought closer to 500,000 years). Seven epochs (Bible friendly).
Charles Lyell Principles of Geology 1830-1833 (3 volumes) – observations from Mt Etna.
Summarised the uniformitarian view.
Lyell still believed man to be young, despite the old age of the Earth
Unwilling to “go the whole orang” – letter to Darwin
He finally came around in 1863 with “Geological Evidences for the Antiquity of Man” 1863
Georges Cuvier – comparative anatomy
Animals found deeper in the rocks were more primitive, no longer alive
Conclusions – A continuous series of creations and extinctions (biological uniformitarianism)
Robert Chambers Vestiges of Natural History of Creation (anonymous) 1844
Popularised the notion of evolution, old Earth, uniformitarian geological processes
Gradual advances in forms
Had no idea about the mechanism of evolution (natural selection)
Humans evolved and were the same as animals
Archaeology
Tripartite classification scheme in Middle East – Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age
Lucretius was the first to suggest it
Renaissance & Grand Tours renewed interested in the classical world
Denmark: protected antiquitaries, museum in Copenhagen
Navy destroyed by English in 1801 (Copenhagen)
Nationalism due to Napoleon, battles with Germany
Interest in the past – many, well-preserved, stone-age sites
Christian Jurgensen Thomsen
First curator of a national museum, opened in 1819
Coins, etc arranged in Stone, Bronze, Iron Age classifications
First practical arrangement of artefacts – showed the progression of styles
Cultural evolution
Thomsen wrote a book, Guide Book to Northern Antiquaries
Translated into English in 1848
Francois de Jouannet
Four-age classification – old stone age, new stone age, bronze, iron
1864: engraving on woolly mammoth tusk – proving man lived in ancient times
Paris Exhibition 1867: 4 age system of classifying ancient Europe
Ethiopia – stone tools now dated to about 2.7mya.
Darwin
On the Origin of Species, and Descent of Man suggested the great antiquity of man
Part One – Lucy to Gilgamesh. Evolution of Imagination
Chapter 1: Ideas before language
George Schaller – NYZS
Observed the uneaten carcasses lying around the Serengeti
Early humans could have been scavengers (first ‘idea’) – conjectural
Meat eating does not necessarily imply hunting (plenty of bones have been found with carnivore predator teeth marks AND tool marks).
Other candidates for first idea: bipedalism, fire, stone axe, scavenging, cooking
Bipedalism:
Ice ages made central Eurasian dry (5-6mya, the Antarctic ice cap sucked so much water out of the oceans that the Mediterranean was dry).
Dry climate meant savannah environment – easier locomotion to walk (or was it?)
Bipedalism could also have come about by the need to appear more threatening to Africa’s big game species.
Mutation rate of DNA: 0.71% per million years (common ancestor with chimp about 6.6mya). Chad’s Sahelanthropus could have been bipedal.
Lucy – most famous Australopithecus afarensis – definitely bipedal 3mya
Bipedalism frees hands to carry, make tools, lower larynx, higher calorie diet, etc
Hunting, scavenging leads to meat died – lots of calories for brain growth
Bipedalism also allows the descent of the larynx (sits low in humans)
Meat chewing allowed finer control jaw & tongue muscles to develop
Disadvantage of bipedalism – mothers give birth to smaller brained offspring
Longer period of weening – stimulated division of labour.
Specialisation drives social structures, politics, tribes, etc.
Predicting behaviour of others – mechanism by which consciousness evolves
Theory of mind – also acquire a sense of self.
Stone Tools:
Five major phases:
1.5 Mya – oldest artefacts from Ethiopia (Homo Habilis)
Volcanic peddles – difficult to distinguish from nature rocks
Trained eye to see the ‘swelling’ or ‘bulb of percussion’ from deliberately carved rocks to make chopping implements. Perhaps began by selective of the best rocks, then throwing one rock against another, then more nuanced manufacture needed to “see” the finished tool inside the unworked rock.
Change from vegetarian to meat-eating
Encephalised brain – large brains compared to body mass
Mammals have 4X brain/body ratio than reptiles
Brain is a large metabolic hog – 20% of resources, despite being 2% body weight
Tool making no longer essentially “human” – chimps observed by Jane Goodall and even crows make tools. Now it’s recursive language that’s the domain of humans.
1.7mya
Homo habilis (ape body, human face/teeth), Homo rudolfensis (human body, ape face/teeth) and Homo ergaster. Difficult to know which one was the ancestor. Larger brains (800cc)
Specialisation in tool design: heavy choppers, light flakes, etc.
Hominids could have been passive or confrontational scavengers
They had (1) technical intelligence, (2) natural history intelligence (3) social intelligence
No social separations of food & tools, no organised group activity
Home erectus started to appear on the scene (Asia, Java, etc)
First ape to leave Africa (important excavation sites in China) about 1mya
Erectus had brain sizes up to 1250cc.
Tools found a long way (10km) from their origin (quarry) – implying planning, intelligence beyond primates.
1.4mya
Earliest true hand axes (symmetrical, triangular) called “acheulian”
Abrupt change in design – homo erectus had radical shift
Now hunting, as opposed to scavenging. Possibly cooking too
Cooking: breaking down indigestible plant fibre into edible carbohydrates with fewer demands on teeth and alimentary canal.
Difficult to establish when fire use became established (approx 1.4mya)
700,000ya
Stone axe standardised – different sizes but same proportions (different types of stone throughout Eurasia)
Standard axes found all over Eurasia around this time
Brain size jumped up in size to 1,100cc – 1,400cc around 400,000ya.
Homo Heidelbergensis – ancestor to Neanderthals and Homo sapiens
Another type of stone tool – Levallois technique (spear points, etc)
Hunting spears from about 420,000ya (oldest wooden artefacts from Essex)
Throwing javelins (not thrusting) from about 400,000ya (Germany)
Ochre used for first time around then (earliest ‘mine’ in South Africa)
Today ochre is used as insect repellent, sun protection, animal hide treatment
First dwellings from 350,000ya (Halle, Germany) made of stones & bones
Blade tools from about 250,000ya
First intentional burial from 100,000ya (Israel) – abstract idea
50,000ya
Coexistence of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens throughout Europe
Developed together: cooking, hunting, burial, inhabiting diverse areas
Controlled fire i.e. proper hearths (Portugal, etc) – defrosting and cooking
Consistent, undisputed symbolic behaviour
Long term planning, strategic behaviour
Language? Unclear when – but perhaps around this time
Different schools of anthropology interpret this period differently
Stages of thinking (Merlin Donald)
1. Episodic – short term responses to the environment. Lives lived entirely in the present. Isolated minds (no sharing of ideas) – solipsism. Great apes. Each new generation starts afresh.
2. Mimetic – cooperation and coordination, mime & imitation (no language). Intentionality, creativity, pedagogy. Minds no longer isolated. Slow progress- 500,000 – 750,000 years to domesticate fire and adapt to the cold.
3. Mythic thinking – language, escape from the nervous system.
Great leap forward (creative explosion) – 60,000 – 40,000ya
No longer just stone tools for anthropologists to interpret
Gradualists v those who favour a sudden transition
Gradualists claim intricate artefacts dating 200,000ya+ : daggers, harpoon tips, pendants, beads with ochre, etc. [Evidence is meagre]
Art
40,000ya – modern looking cave paintings & engravings, Venus figurines, beads
Abundant and sophisticated – Middle/Upper transition
Finally a truly modern brain? (Steven Mithen’s merging of natural history, technical, and social intelligences).
Mysterious time lag between anatomically modern skeletons (100-150kya) and the Great Leap Forward (40kya). Also a mystery why the art sprang up suddenly “fully formed” i.e. no simpler predecessors.
Famous sites: Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet
Explanations:
1. climate change (rapid ice ages, reduced game, higher selection pressure). Also, Mt Toba exploded 71kya plunging earth into a 10,000 year severe global winter. Harsh environmental conditions until about 12kya.
2. Some mutation in the brain (FoxP2) e.g. language? Richard Klein: 10-1,000 genes is all that might be necessary. FoxP2 only differs by 2 out of 715 molecules from chimps and is thought to have arisen 200kya and rapidly spread in about 1,000 generations
3. Rapid sexual selection
4. Diet – switch to deer (rapid breeders) and marine food.
Purpose of the “art” – unknown, subject to much (over)interpretation
1. Utilitarian “writing” of movements of game
2. Worship: caves as temples with shamans, etc. Resonant caves have more art than non-resonant caves (musical component?)
3. Releasing spirits trapped in the rock
Development of early art:
Cave paintings
Personal decoration: carved antlers, ivory, stone, etc.
Motifs: vulva engravings, hybrid human-animals
Venus: Galgenberg Venus (31kya)
Venus pebbles
Venus figures from France to Siberia: most around 25kya
Naked, pregnant, exaggerated voluptuousness, faceless, etc
Red ochre (original ‘iron age’) – menstrual blood?
Beads: from South Africa 75-80kya, common by 18kya
Labour intensive – distinguished people in burial
Some buried with thousands of them
Significance of goods buried with graves?
One needs language to pass on knowledge gained
Religion:
Core tenants: afterlife, communication with supernatural agents, rituals can affect change in the present world
Beginning: animal worship (totem), ancestor worship, deity worship
Separation of cosmology and moral code
Altered states of consciousness
Dreams, trance, drug-induced hallucinations
Some deep caves have high CO2.
All evidence of ‘spirit world’
Chapter 2: Emergence of language & Conquest of Cold
Language the most important difference between humans and other animals
Driving factors behind language
Meat eating (diet) – brain size increase, game gets more dangerous (as evidenced from bones at camp sites (scavenged herbivores & carnivores, hunted herbivores & carnivores).
Stone tools (manipulation, planning, etc) – mimetic intelligence, sudden jumps in technology (spears, throwers, harpoon barbs, etc).
Larger group sizes - social intelligence. Groups >6 require hierarchical decision- making rather than group decision-making.
Harsh climates (e.g. Siberia) – tailored clothing (necessitating needles). Body lice are thought to have evolved from hair lice around 75kya (genetic mutations).
Australia – rafting over ocean straits (ropes, sails?), etc
(counter example – Tasmanian Aborigines had language but not much of the above technology – equivalent to pre-100kya humans in Eurasia).
Out of Africa: several migrations
Homo erectus – about 1mya
Homo sapiens – 90kya – Sinai, Levant, petered out
Homo sapiens – 45kya – Ethiopia, Red Sea, Mesopotamia, coastal routes
(however Australia was reached 50kya+?)
Did Homo Erectus contribute genes to later H. sapien migrants?
No Erectus or Neanderthal ever found in Americas or >53º N.
Only H. Sapiens adapted to cold. Bone needles date back to 19kya
Tierra del Fuegans – didn’t need much clothing
Siberia settled around 35kya (facilitated by a change in climate?)
Bering Strait is about 19,000km from Olduvai Gorge via the coastal route (direct route barred by mountains and dense tundra forests i.e. taiga).
Due to massive ice sheets, Siberia-Alaska-NW Canada were one land mass
Known as Beringia
Land bridge over 12-20kya
Migration to the New World approx about 11-12kya
Tierra Del Fuego by 9kya
Evidence from zoology, biology, medicine, archaeology, linguistic
Five waves of immigration – some along coast
Did any sail across? Yes, if migrations occurred before 20kya
Nature v nurture experiment – separated for 14,500 years (until 1492)
Neanderthals v Homo Sapiens
Neanderthal technology called “Mousterian” after SE France.
Only 60 types of stone tools – couldn’t adapt to extreme cold
Homo sapien dwellings: from about 18kya (using mammoth bones)
Stationary villages required resolution of disputes, greater social intelligence
First villages supporting populations of 30-100
Language
Broca’s area – language output
Wernicke’s area – language input (e.g. comprehension)
Both areas in the left hemisphere (side, above ears)
Australopithecines didn’t have them (but hominids did)
100kya skulls/skeletons from Israel have intact laryngeal vocal tract
This implies they had language, but why Great Leap Forward 40kya?
Mystery: why the 60,000 year time lag between anatomically modern humans and human behaviour
Neanderthals found in Israel (from 60kya) had all the ‘hardware’ (e.g. hyoid bone) for language
Ear bones – attuned to the same frequencies for human speech
To what extent is language necessary for:
(a) Hunting co-ordination? Lions hunt in packs without language
(b) Stone tool standardisation? Mimetic copying?
(c) Complex group interactions
FoxP2 gene:
London family has a mutation of it – inhibits speech
Two critical mutations estimated about 200kya
Spread rapidly – conferring significant advantage?
Language family tree:
How far back can one go to find a universal common mother tongue? Proto-Nostratic, Sino, Caucasian, Indo, etc.
Hunter-gatherer societies: one language per 1,000-2,000 people
Linguistic palaeontology – very speculative
“Mano” – meaning man – common to many languages
Other ideas on the emergence of language
Steven Pinker – 2-4mya
Robin Dunbar – language allows grooming >1 person at a time
Consciousness:
Self/non-self
Present/future
Scenario building: humour, art, music, myth, religion, drama, literature
Speculation runs ahead of the evidence
Rife with just-so stories and imaginative narratives
Merlin Donald: Episodic, mimetic, mythic, theoretical thought
Consciousness necessary for conceptual models of the universe
Technological breakthroughs:
Fired ceramics: 25kya
Boomerangs: 15kya
Needles, bow&arrow, rope, bricks, lunar records: 12kya
Domestication of plants/animals: 10kya
Writing: an artificial aid to memory
115 major alphabets – each letter has a maximum of about 3 strokes
Upper limit to what the human mind can easily identify
Four or more strokes – one has to consciously count
Stages of writing:
1. Ideographic
2. Hieroglyphic
3. Alphabetic
These forms vary in their rhetorical, logistical and grammatical possibilities. How does this account for the various trajectories of disparate civilisations around the world?
Foundations of Civilisation:
1. Writing
2. Monumental architecture
3. Organised religion
4. Specialised occupations
Chapter 3: Birth of Gods, Evolution of House & Home
Agriculture:
Began between 14kya and 6kya
Before 12kya, climate was colder and more variable
Since 12kya, climate is warmer and more stable (agriculture finally possible)
Variability: was 7º per decade (now is 3º per century)
Epochs: Pleistocene into the Holocene (12kya)
Agriculture began independently in 2-7 areas
1. Middle East (fertile crescent)
2. Mesoamerica (Mexico, Panama)
Other places may have imported the ‘idea’ of agriculture (not sure)
New Guinea highlands, China, sub-Saharan Africa, Amazon, eastern USA
Andrew Sheratt: hot spots i.e. narrow isthmuses where there was a sharp juxtaposition of hills, desert and alluvium (deposits of sand and mud)
High populations in those areas meant hunting/gathering not able to sustain – urgent pressure for alternative means of subsistence.
Transforming from hunter/gathering to domestication took 3,000 years.
Stages:
Cultivation of wild species
Tending wild gardens
Selecting smaller animals
Nomadic
Sedentary
Joint agriculture with hunting/gathering
Agriculturally supplied food a steadily increasing percentage of diet
Fertile crescent:
First place – confirmed by the study of palynology (pollen)
Tell Abu Hureyra, Tell Aswad, Aswan in Syria
Karacadag in Turkey
Jericho and Gigad in Jordan
Time – 10 – 12 kya
Founder crops: emmer wheat, barley and einhorn wheat
Companion plants: peas, lentils, chickpea, vetch, flax
Domesticated wheat: mature ears are less brittle. Break only when threshed.
To survive, it needs to be reaped and sown. Under man’s control
Genetic analysis – domesticated wheat varies less than wild wheat. Domestication only occurred once.
Alternative speculative theory: slash ‘n burn
New shoots after burning attracted herbivores
Animal domestication:
Smaller mammals after the last ice age
Definition of domestication:
Change in species abundance
Change in size (wild species larger than domesticated species)
Change in population structure: gender, age, etc.
Began about 1,000 years after plant domestication: approx 9kya
Similar locations: fertile crescent, hilly regions where Iran, Iraq, Turkey intersect
Hilly locations: greater variations in wild populations
First species (in order): goats, sheep, pigs, cattle
Pigs: not suitable for nomadic lifestyle (need sedentary life)
Labour: (why agriculture?)
Hunter gatherer lifestyles are easier (less labour) with better, more varied diets
Stone age farmers: malnutrition, dental decay, infectious diseases
Agriculture: Monotonous diet
Theories:
Rituals, social, beer/alcohol
Climate: warmer earth, spreading forests, more distinct ecological niches
Seasons: more pronounced, predictable
Megafauna extinction: population crisis (Mark Cohen)
Rival theory: the Earth was full as the old world was inhabited (Groube)
Warming Earth allowed tropical parasites to spread e.g. malaria
Megafauna extinctions caused parasites to move to man
Health crisis – forced people to be sedentary and breed faster
Latest evidence: sedentism preceded agriculture
Housing & clothing
First ideas: tools, fire, clothing and shelter
Sedentism: allowed birth spacing to be reduced
Wheats cultivated
Defences needed: more possessions accumulated
First housing at Kharaneh in Jordan (15.5 – 12.5kya) – half buried
Bone art – animals (zoomorphic)
Followed by Natufian culture (first found in Israel and spread)
Harvested wild cereals around 12-13kya
Followed by Khiamian culture (also from Israel)
New weapons, houses on the ground, and female art motifs
Woman and the Bull – from about 11.5kya
Origin of religion (fertility prized when child mortality was high)
Religion began after cultivation & sedentism, but before agriculture
Theory advanced by Cauvin
Change from animal worship to super-human worship
Mureybetian culture (Euphrates / Syria)
More sophisticated housing e.g. heaths, sleeping areas
Communal cooking of meat
Change in architecture from 11kya: round to rectangular designs
Clay Venus figurines
Male bull fighting motifs from 10kya (virility celebrated)
Jericho
Excavated by Dorothy Garrod in the 1930s
70 buildings, 1,000 people, 8m tower
First use of clay (prior to this, all materials were stone, bone, etc)
Two types of ovens: baking and clay firing
First pottery in Japan (Jomon culture from 16.5kya)
Jomon also invented lacquer
Megaliths
Aka menhirs
Large stones, first started appearing 5.5 – 7kya
Best examples are on Malta (e.g. Gozo) and western Europe
Malta has some of the oldest colossal statues in the world
Circular arrangement – cromlech e.g. Stonehenge
Meaning? Worship of fertility goddess (concentric ‘c’ motif)
Astronomical instrument – solstice measurement?
Sun observatories from 6kya, lunar ones from 5kya
People who erected megaliths - more muscled, healthier, better diets
Religion (SE Europe)
Iconography from figurines, shrines and early pottery:
Great Goddess – capable of transformation
Bird/Snake Goddess
Vegetation Goddess – nude until 8kya, then clothed
Male God
Metallurgy
Five new substances ‘cultures of fire’
1. Pottery
2. Metals
3. Glass
4. Terra-cotta
5. Cement
Ages of man: Stone, Copper, Bronze, Iron
Red Ochre (from iron in haematite): used since 300kya
Green from malachite, blue-green replaced red as preferred colour
Flints – some rocks easier to work with when heated
Copper – easier to hammer when heated, found all over Fertile Crescent hills
Smelting – ‘miraculous’ transformations
Copper & Furnaces:
Campfires not hot enough – only 600-650ºC
Malachite copper ore – needs 700-800ºC
Metallic copper – needs 1083ºC
Furnaces also need to enclosed to ‘reduce’ the copper (electrons added)
Pottery also requires >1000ºC
2-chamber kilns found in Iran, Iraq about 7kya
First copper objects an Ninevah & Ur – about 4300BC
Widespread copper smelting around 3800BC
Sumeria – first civilization based on metals
Copper was the dominant metal for 2000 years until about 2000BC.
Bronze Age (alloy age)
Need tin (rare) to add to copper to make bronze
Tin not found in pure state – must have been smeltered
Only 1 piece of pure tin found older than 1500BC
Tin found in Europe, but not Africa, Asia
Mystery as to why and where it began
67-95% copper, 5 – 33% tin
Ideal strength is 9-10% tin – 70% harder than copper
Begun about 3000BC – spread rapidly to Cyprus, Crete, etc.
Reached its peak around 1400BC
Harder than pure iron, and resistant to corrosion
Also in bronze was iron, lead, arsenic
Different geographical areas had different mixes of bronze alloys
Hardness of bronze meant that the edges of daggers became as important as the points – beginnings of swords
Iron Age
From about 1400BC (Hittites in northern Turkey)
Iron technology and smelting techniques spread from 1200BC
Egyptian iron tools from 700BC
Smelted iron v meteoric iron
Tin was rare, success of bronze inspired experimentation
Iron needs 1100-1150ºC smelting temperature
Simple single-tier furnace required
Steel (Iron & Carbon) - from about 1000BC in E. Mediterranean
Iron heated for long times in close contact with charcoal
Quenching for extra hardness mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey
Other metallurgy
Welding, nails, rivets – from 5kya
Gold plating – from 4kya
Mirrors – used by Chinese, Romans, 23-28% tin, 5% lead, copper
Sword-making
Coins - money
Money –
First money was commodity trading: salt, tobacco, coconuts, etc
Oldest traded material is obsidian (black volcanic glass)
‘salary’ derives from salt
First Roman coins – ‘as’ – 1/100th the value of a cow
First coins – Sardis, Lydia, Turkey about 640BC
Made of electrum (Au/Ag alloy)
Used to pay elected Greeks
Wealth & labor separated from objects
Thinkers can get paid for knowledge/intellect e.g. teachers
Encourages specialization
Facilitated international trade & indirectly, exchange of ideas
Chapter 4: Cities of Wisdom
Ur & Sumeria:
First excavated about 1854. Leonard Woolley did major excavations from 1927.
Sumerians invented the wheel (3400BC) – warfare chariots
Soldiers and ladies buried with king/queen
Invented in Sumeria: wheel, writing, schools, clocks, arch, legal code, epic literature
Cities:
Experimental, competitive, birthplace of ideas
Foundation of civilisations: cities, writing, specialization, capital, monuments
Cities force co-operating with strangers: legal codes, larger in-group
Law, bureaucracy, administration, weights & measures, etc.
First cities in northern Mesopotamia: 6kya (4000BC)
Eridu – first city (inland of Persian Gulf)
Uruk – population of 30,000 – 50,000
By 2000BC, 90% of Mesopotamia was urbanised
Weren’t initially for defence – walls were built AFTER the first cities
Babylon: music, medicine, maths, libraries, maps, natural history, writing
First cities built around the Temple, and inner wall with the important people lived
Commercial centre / market place
New occupations: barber, jeweller, metal-worker, costumier, cloth merchant, laundrymen, brick makers, ornamental gardener, ferryman, sellers of songs, artist
Writing:
Cuneiform script of Mesopotamia
Denise Schandt-Besserat: inscriptions on pottery: counted tokens
These tokens were eventually redundant.
6kya – 10kya (Iraq, Iran)
They became steadily more complex
“Prosthetic technology” i.e. outsourcing memory
Origins of cuneiform – accounting
Cuneiform known since late 1600s – attempted decipher in 1800s
Austrin Henry Layard – Nimrud, 3000-3500BC
Not deciphered until 20th century
Other proto-writing candidates:
Pictograms – symbols: SE Europe from 9kya – 6kya
Minoans at Knossos – unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans
Linear A (never deciphered) & B (Ventris)
Linear A – Old European language (not Indo-European)
India:
Indus civilisation – Harappa tablet from 7.5kya deciphered
Only a few examples – still not accepted as the “cradle”
Mesopotamia:
Cylinders used as seals – rolled over clay for embossing
Pictographical cylinders
Development of writing:
Uruk, Mesopotamia
Scribes used a short-land – less pictorially representative - speedier
Difficult to draw pictures on wet clay – easier to do lines (strokes & wedges)
Turned 90° on its side
Repertoire of signs reduced and homogenised by 2500BC
Script wasn’t ‘read’ in the modern sense – just an artificial memory aid
Before writing, humans had to memorise a lot
For proper writing, one needs: alphabet, grammar, personal names
Need abstract symbols for abstract concepts
Early thought worked by analogy, rather than inductive/deductive
Later development: same sounds can means different things in other contexts e.g. be, bee
Personal names: signed with name and rank of father
Modern writing developed in Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia
Sumerian
One sound per syllable that could be used in different contexts
Order of words became important: 2500BC
Writing became a reflection of language
First alphabet: urgarit (Syria)
Proto-Canaanite languge – boustrophedon (like a plough) – lines of writing go from right to left, then left to right, etc.
Early letters could be back-to-front – took a while to be standardised
Technology:
Limestone added to clay tablets to make writing more legible
Wax
Reed brushes on pottery, slabs of sycamore coated with gypsum plaster
Papyrus – only given to the most gifted scribes
Scribal education took many years
Use of writing:
Business/commercial/accounting
Religious literature, hymns
Instructions from father to son
Accounts of battles & conquests
Cosmologies, magic, omens (most prestigious)
Early Sumerian stories:
Many pre-dated the Bible, and were later used in the Bible
Very long lived prior kings, flood literature
Flood as punishment from the Gods (common theme)
Gilgamesh epic – hero was Utnapishtim
‘He who saw Everything to the Ends of the World’
Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk 2900BC (2/3rd God, 1/3rd Man)
Semblences of Hercules & Bible stories
Built city walls with 900 semi-circular towers
Citizens appeal to Gods to allow them freedom from Gilgamesh
Enkidu – ‘wild hairy man’ as a counter to Gilgamesh
They become friends and go on adventures before returning
Gilgamesh spurns advanced by Inanna (goddess)
Inanna sends ‘bull of heaven’ in retaliation – killed by G & E
Enkidu is killed by Enlil (God of air/earth)
Gilgamesh sets out to find everlasting life – Utnapishtim (ancestor)
Discovers the history of the Great Flood – Noah story
Utnapishtim rewarded with eternal life for saving life on Earth
Flood stories:
Mesopotamia: means between the two rivers Tigris & Euphrates
They often flooded together – Noah’s Flood?
Or... Earthquake in Indus valley?
Formation of the Black Sea - 8kya
Libraries:
Began as archives of practical, everyday activities
Examples: Nippur, Ebla (2,000 clay tablets found dating from 2250BC)
Catalogues: religious texts and stories kept separately (e.g. Ur)
Table of contents – back surface, end of text (called a colophon)
Ordering was haphazard – no alphabetisation for a long time
By 1000BC, many religious texts, omens, prediction of heavens, hymns, etc
Also: translation dictionaries
Ashurbanipal (last great ruler of Assyria) – about 650BC
Literate, had a great library of about 1500 titles
Curse against stealing them
Egypt
Probably also had great ancient libraries, but none survive due to papyrus
Ramses II (1250BC) – great library called ‘clinic of the soul’
Authority in the cities:
High Priest ‘en’ – interceding with the Gods to guarantee fertility and administer redistribution. Perhaps the way they covered themselves if the ‘Gods’ brought upon a drought or flood was by blaming the people and their wicked ways’.
‘en’ consort: ‘nin’ – pontifical couple
‘Lugal’ – fortress commander, overseer, military matters, foreign affairs, etc.
Over time, the lugal became king and got nin as queen. The en became ceremonial
Greater emphasis on temporal power, masculinity
Lugals could control conquered territories, whereas the en had different Gods to contend with
As prosperity increased, the temptation for plunder of other cities increased
Gods slowly spread from city to city as conquests grew
The idea of the ‘state’ was realised
Lugals/Kings needed to record their conquests
Akkadian in Sargon – first King in modern sense (about 2300BC)
Vehicles:
First vehicles were sledges in arctic regions (from 9kya) – pulled by dogs
Wheel – began as disc wheels north of the Black Sea
1-3 pieces of solid wood
Pulled by oxen/donkeys
First 4-wheel wagons – very slow
2-wheel chariots – faster than walking. (pulled by 2 horses)
Sign of power & prestige
Spoked-wheel – under tension – lighter and faster
Chariot warfare – flourished between 1700 – 1200BC (end of Bronze age)
Horses:
Dereivka, 300km north of the Black Sea (now Ukraine)?
Can date domestication of wild horses due to lesions on their vertebrae
No reliable evidence of horse-use earlier than about 2000BC
Eurasian steppe, Near East, Greece
Weapons:
New weapons appeared in the proto-Neolithic period
1. Bow
2. Sling
3. Dagger
4. Mace
Egyptian pharaohs: could field armies of 20,000
Standing armies (professionals, conscripts (1/100), mercenaries)
Assyria: chariot, cavalry, steel (sword blades rather than dagger points)
Concerted effort to import horses
Cavalry was the elite army form until WWI (tank, machine gun)
Poles still had them in WWII against Panzers.
Cavalry more mobile than chariots
Legislation:
One of the oldest legal code s from Babylon (Susa, SW Iran) – in cuneiform
8’ high black obelisk (now in the Louvre) - excavated in 1901
Hammurabi King (depicted praying to Marduk or Shamash) – 1750BC
Offences against property
Trade & Commercial transactions
Family (adultery, concubinage, desertion, divorce, incest, adoption)
Wages & rates of hire
Slave ownership
Two types of laws: absolute prohibitions v prescriptions
To be displayed in public, and widely applicable
Three classes of people:
Privileged (mushkenum), free men (awelu), slaves (wardu)
Judges administered the law, but the King was the ‘Court of Appeal’
Cruel – adulterers bound together and thrown in the river
Principle of lex talionis – an eye for an eye
e.g. steal a beehive, get a bee sting
Ordeal – rival witnesses (conflicting testimony) forced to jump in river
Sumerian legal code
Lipit-Ishtar (King) in Isin (city) in 1930BC (written in Sumerian)
Found in the 1940s
Ur-Nammu (2100BC)
Taxation, weights & measures
Prohibition of the exploitation of the weak by the strong
Law based on actual cases
No lex talionis
Uruinimgina of Lagash (oldest laws)
Not a legal code in the modern sense
Demonstration of the power of the King (propaganda)
Ad hoc
Abstract concepts:
“Three” as opposed to “three sheep” or “three cows”
LU – human being
Private property
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