Chapter 1: Origins

Understanding Western History

Describing the West

• Ideas about the West and the distinction between West and East derived originally from the ancient Greeks.

• Greek civilization grew up in the shadow of earlier civilizations to the south and east of Greece, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia.

• Greeks defined themselves in relation to these more advanced cultures, which they saw as "Eastern".

• This conceptualization was passed on to the Romans, who saw themselves clearly as part of the West.

• Greco-Roman ideas about the West were passed on to people who lived in western and northern Europe, who saw themselves as the inheritors of this classical tradition and thus as the West.

• With colonization, Western came to mean those cultures that included significant numbers of people of European ancestry, no matter where on the globe they were located.

• The United States encouraged the establishment of college and university courses focusing on "Western civilization," the first of which was taught at Columbia University in 1919.

• This conceptualization and the course spread to other colleges and universities, developing into what became known as the introductory Western civilization course, a staple of historical instruction for generations of college students.

• After World War II divisions between the West and the East changed again.

• Islamist radicals often describe their aims as an end to Western cultural, economic, and political influence, though Islam itself is generally described, along with Judaism and Christianity, as a Western monotheistic religion.

• Thus, throughout its long history, the meaning of "the West" has shifted, but in every era it has meant more than a geographical location.

What is Civilization?

• In the ancient world, residents of cities saw themselves as more “civilized,” a word that comes from the Latin adjective civilis, which refers to a citizen, either of a town or of a larger political unit such as an empire.

• Beginning in the eighteenth century, European scholars described any society in which political, economic, and social organizations operated on a large scale, not primarily through families and kin groups, as a civilization.

• Civilizations had cities, laws, codes of manners and social conduct, and scientific, philosophical, and theological beliefs.

• Civilizations also had some form of political organization, what political scientists call “the state.”

• States established armies, bureaucracies, and taxation systems.

• Generally, only societies that used writing were judged to be civilizations.

• The idea that all human societies developed (or should develop) on a uniform process from a “cradle” to a “mature” civilization has now been largely discredited, and some historians choose not to use the term civilization at all because it could imply that some societies are superior to others.

• Western civilization has been shaped by interactions with other societies, cultures, and civilizations.

• The idea that there are basic distinctions between the West and the rest of the world in terms of cultural values has been very powerful for thousands of years, and it still shapes the way many people, including people in power, view the world.

The Earliest Human Societies

• During the nineteenth century, archaeologists coined labels for eras of the human past according to the primary material out of which surviving tools had been made.

• Thus the earliest human era became the Stone Age, the next era the Bronze Age, and the next the Iron Age.

• They further divided the Stone Age into the Paleolithic (Old Stone) era, during which people used stone, bone, and other natural products to make tools and gained food largely by foraging.

• This was followed by the Neolithic (New Stone) era, which saw the beginning of agricultural and animal domestication.

• The transition between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic is usually set at about 9000 b.c.e., the point at which agriculture was first developed.

From the First Hominids to the Paleolithic Era

• Sometime between 7 and 6 million years ago in southern and eastern Africa, groups of human ancestors (members of the biological "hominid" family) began to walk upright, which allowed them to carry things.

• About 3.4 million years ago some hominids began to use naturally occurring objects as tools, and around 2.5 million years ago, one group in East Africa began to make simple tools, a feat that was accompanied by, and may have spurred, brain development.

• About 200,000 years ago, again in East Africa, some of these early humans evolved into Homo sapiens ("thinking humans"), which had larger and more complex brains that allowed for symbolic language and better social skills.

• Homo sapiens invented highly specialized tools, made regular use of fire, and migrated.

• They migrated, first across Africa, and by 70,000 years ago out of Africa into Eurasia. Eventually they traveled farther still, reaching Australia using rafts about 50,000 years ago and the Americas by about 15,000 years ago, or perhaps earlier.

• In the Paleolithic period humans throughout the world lived in ways that were similar to one another.

• Archaeological evidence and studies of modern foragers suggest that people generally lived in small groups of related individuals and moved throughout the landscape in search of food.

• Burials, paintings, and objects also suggest that people may have developed ideas about supernatural forces that controlled some aspects of the natural world and the humans in it, what we now term spirituality or religion.

• Spiritually adept men and women communicated with that unseen world, and objects such as carvings or masks were probably thought to have special healing or protective powers.

• Total human population grew very slowly during the Paleolithic.

• The low population density meant that human impact on the environment was relatively small, although still significant.

Planting Crops

• Foragers began planting seeds in the ground along with gathering wild grains, roots, and other foodstuffs.

• Intentional crop planting first developed around 9000 b.c.e, in the area archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent, which runs from present-day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan north to Turkey and then south and east to the Iran-Iraq border.

• Over the next two millennia, intentional crop planting emerged for the most part independently in the Nile River Valley, western Africa, China, India, Papua New Guinea, Mesoamerica, and perhaps other places where the archaeological evidence has not survived.

• Crop raising may have resulted from population pressures in those parts of the world where the warming climate provided more food through foraging.

• A very recent archaeological find at Göbekli Tepe in present-day Turkey, at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent, suggests that cultural factors may have played a role in the development of agriculture.

• Archaeologists speculate that, at least in this case, the symbolic, cultural, or perhaps religious importance of the structure can help explain why the people building it changed from foraging to agriculture.

Implications of Agriculture

• People in the Fertile Crescent, parts of China, and the Nile Valley were relying primarily on domesticated food products.

• They built permanent houses, planted fields around the villages, and invented storage containers for food, such as pottery made from fired clay and woven baskets.

• Agriculture requires much more labor, and early farmers were less healthy than foragers.

• Still, farmers came to outnumber foragers, and slowly larger and larger parts of Europe, China, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa became home to farming villages, a dramatic human alteration of the environment.

• At roughly the same time that they domesticated certain plants, people also domesticated animals.

• In about 9000 b.c.e.,at the same time they began to raise crops, people in the Fertile Crescent domesticated wild goats and sheep, probably using them first for meat, and then for milk, skins, and eventually fleece.

• Sheep and goats allowed themselves to be herded, and people developed a new form of living, pastoralism, based on herding and raising livestock.

• Crop raising and pastoralism brought significant changes to human ways of life, but the domestication of certain large animals had an even bigger impact.

• The domestication of large animals dramatically increased the power available to humans to carry out their tasks.

• The division of labor allowed by plow agriculture contributed to the creation of social hierarchies, that is, the divisions between rich and poor, elites and common people, that have been a central feature of human society since the Neolithic era.

• Along with hierarchies based on wealth and power, the development of agriculture was intertwined with a hierarchy based on gender.

• The system in which men have more power and access to resources than women of the same social level, and in which some men are dominant over other men, is called patriarchy and is found in every society with written records, although the level of inequality varies.

Trade and Cross-Cultural Connections

• Çatal Hüyük, in what is now Turkey, shows evidence of trade as well as specialization of labor.

• Among the goods traded in some parts of the world was copper, which people hammered into shapes for jewelry and tools.

• People in the Balkans had learned that copper could be extracted from ore by heating it in a smelting process.

• Because it was stronger than copper, bronze had a far wider range of uses, so much so that later historians decided that its adoption marked a new period in human history: the Bronze Age.

• The end of the Bronze Age came with the adoption of iron technology, which also varied from 1200 b.c.e.

• All metals were expensive and hard to obtain, however, so stone, wood, and bone remained important materials for tools and weapons long into the Bronze Age.

• The rhythms of the agricultural cycle and patterns of exchange also shaped religious beliefs and practices.

• Thus in many places multiple gods came to be associated with patterns of birth, growth, death, and regeneration in a system known as polytheism.

Civilization in Mesopotamia

Environment and Mesopotamian Development

• The Sumerians and later civilizations built their cities along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and their branches.

• They used the rivers to carry agricultural and trade goods, and also to provide water for vast networks of irrigation channels.

• To prevent major floods, the Sumerians created massive hydraulic projects, including reservoirs, dams, and dikes as well as canals.

• The rivers supplied fish, a major element of the Sumerian diet, reeds, which were used for making baskets and writing implements, and clay.

• Clay was fired into pots, and inventive artisans developed the potter’s wheel so that they could make pots that were stronger and more uniform than those made by earlier methods of coiling ropes of clay.

• Cities and villages in Sumer and farther up the Tigris and Euphrates traded with one another.

• The city-states of Sumer continued to rely on irrigation systems that required cooperation and at least some level of social and political cohesion (runned by Sumerian priests).

• Encouraged and directed by their religious leaders, people built temples on tall platforms in the center of their cities.

• Temples owned large estates, including fields and orchards.

• Temple officials employed individuals to work the temple’s land, paying the workers in rations of grain, oil, and wool.

• By 2500 b.c.e. there were more than a dozen city-states in Sumer.

The Invention of Writing and the First Schools

• Pictographs were the forerunners of the Sumerian form of writing known as cuneiform (from the Latin term for “wedge shaped,”) used to describe the indentations made by a sharpened stylus in clay.

• Scribes could combine pictographs to express meaning.

• Pictographs were initially limited in that they could not represent abstract ideas, but the development of ideograms — signs that represented ideas — made writing more versatile.

• Scribes started using signs to represent sounds.

• The development of the Sumerian system of writing was piecemeal, with scribes making changes and additions as they were needed.

• Scribal schools were established, with students being all males.

• Scribal schools were primarily intended to produce individuals who could keep records of the property of temple officials, kings, and nobles.

• Sumerians wrote numbers as well as words on clay tablets, and some surviving tablets show multiplication and division problems.

• Mathematics was not just a theoretical matter to the people living in Mesopotamia, because the building of cities, palaces, temples, and canals demanded practical knowledge of geometry and trigonometry.

Religion in Mesopotamia

• Each city generally had a chief god or goddess, or sometimes several, with a large temple built in his or her honor.

• The gods judged good and evil and would punish humans who lied or cheated.

• The best way to honor the gods was to make the temple as grand and impressive as possible.

• The peoples of Mesopotamia had many myths to account for the creation of the universe.

• Stories about the gods traveled with people when they moved up and down the rivers, so that gods often acquired new names and new characteristics over the centuries.

• The Sumerians also told stories about heroes and kings, many of which were eventually reworked into the world’s first epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

• Historians can use epic poems to learn about various aspects of a society, and to that extent epics can be used as historical sources.

Sumerian Politics and Society

• Exactly how kings emerged in Sumerian society is not clear.

• Temporary power gradually became permanent kingship, and sometime before 2450 b.c.e. kings in some Sumerian city-states began transferring their kingship to their sons, establishing patriarchal hereditary dynasties in which power was handed down through the male line.

• Kings made alliances with other powerful individuals, often through marriage.

• Royal children, both sons and daughters, were sometimes priests and priestesses in major temples.

• The king and his officials held extensive tracts of land, as did the temple.

• Some individuals and families owned land outright and paid their taxes in the form of agricultural products or items they made.

• Slaves were a source of physical power for their owners, providing them an opportunity to amass more wealth and influence.

• Slaves were not widely used in Sumer, where most agricultural work was done by dependent clients.

• Slaves were prisoners of war, criminals, and debters, but they could engage in trade, make profits, borrow money, and even buy their own freedom.

• Each of the social categories included both men and women, but their experiences were not the same, for Sumerian society made distinctions based on gender.

Empires in Mesopotamia

The Akkadians and The Babylonians

• In 2331 b.c.e. Sargon, the king of a city to the north of Sumer, conquered a number of Sumerian cities with what was probably the world’s first permanent army and created a large state.

• The symbol of his triumph was a new capital, the city of Akkad (AH-kahd).

• He encouraged trading networks that brought in goods from as far away as the Indus River and what is now Turkey.

• Akkadians adapted cuneiform writing to their own language, and Akkadian became the diplomatic language used over a wide area.

• Sargon tore down the defensive walls of Sumerian cities and appointed his own sons as their rulers to help him cement his power.

• He also appointed his daughter, Enheduana (2285–2250 b.c.e.), as high priestess in the city of Ur.

• His empire collapsed, in part because of a period of extended drought, and the various city-states became independent again.

• One significant city-state that arose in the wake of the Akkadian empire was settled by the Amorites, who migrated in from the west, probably starting during the time of Sargon’s empire.

• Babylon grew great because of its commercial importance and the sound leadership of a dynasty of Amorite rulers.

• It included smaller kingdoms whose rulers recognized the king of Babylon as their overlord.

Life Under Hammurabi

• Hammurabi of Babylon (r. 1792–1750 b.c.e.) was initially a typical king of his era.

• As ruler of Babylon, he fought some of his neighbors, created treaties with others, taxed his people, expanded the city walls, and built temples.

• As had earlier rulers, Hammurabi linked his success with the will of the gods.

• Hammurabi’s most memorable accomplishment was the proclamation of an extensive law code, introduced about 1755 b.c.e.

• Like the codes of the earlier lawgivers, Hammurabi’s law code proclaimed that he issued his laws on divine authority “to establish law and justice in the language of the land, thereby promoting the welfare of the people.”

• Hammurabi’s code set a variety of punishments for breaking the law, including fines and physical punishment such as mutilation, whipping, and burning.

• Hammurabi’s code provides a wealth of information about daily life in Mesopotamia.

• Hammurabi gave careful attention to marriage and the family.

• The penalty for adultery, defined as sex between a married woman and a man not her husband, was death.

• A father could not disinherit a son without just cause, and the code ordered the courts to forgive a son for his first offense.

• The Code of Hammurabi demanded that the punishment fit the crime, calling for “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” at least among equals.

• Hammurabi’s code gives historians a valuable view into the lives of the Mesopotamians, and it influenced other law codes of the Near East, including those later written down in Hebrew scripture.

Cultural Exchange in the Fertile Crescent

• Countless wills and testaments show that husbands habitually left their estates to their wives, who in turn willed the property to their children.

• Financial documents prove that many women engaged in business without hindrance.

• Mesopotamians found their lives lightened by holidays and religious festivals.

• Mesopotamian writing and merchandise, along with other aspects of the culture, spread far beyond the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys.

• Southern and central Anatolia presented a similar picture of extensive contact between cultures.

• Thousands of cuneiform tablets testify to centuries of commercial and cultural exchanges with Mesopotamia, and eventually with Egypt, which rose to power in the Nile Valley.

The Egyptians

The Nile and the God-King

• The Greek historian and traveler Herodotus in the fifth century b.c.e. called Egypt the “gift of the Nile.”

• The Nile flooded once a year for a period of several months, bringing fertile soil and moisture for farming, and agricultural villages developed along its banks by at least 6000 b.c.e.

• The Egyptians based their calendar on the Nile, dividing the year into three four-month periods: akhet (flooding), peret (growth), and shemu (harvest).

• Through the fertility of the Nile and their own hard work, Egyptians produced an annual agricultural surplus, which in turn sustained a growing and prosperous population.

• Egypt was fortunate in that it was nearly self- sufficient — it had most of the materials required to address its basic needs.

• The political power structures that developed in Egypt came to be linked with the Nile.

• Political unification most likely proceeded slowly, but stories told about early kings highlighted Narmer or Menes, who had united Upper Egypt—the upstream valley in the south—and Lower Egypt—the delta area of the Nile that empties into the Mediterranean Sea— into a single kingdom around 3100 b.c.e.

• The political unification of Egypt in the Archaic Period (3100– 2660 b.c.e.) ushered in the period known as the Old Kingdom (2660–2180 b.c.e.), an era remarkable for prosperity and artistic flowering.

• The king’s surroundings had to be worthy of a god, and only a magnificent palace was suitable for his home; in fact, the word pharaoh, which during the New Kingdom came to be used for the king, originally meant “great house.”

• To ancient Egyptians, the king embodied the concept of ma’at, a cosmic harmony that embraced truth, justice, and moral integrity.

• During the First Intermediate Period (2180–2080 b.c.e.), rulers of various provinces asserted their independence from the king, and Upper and Lower Egypt were ruled by rival dynasties.

Egyptian Religion

• Like the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians were polytheistic, worshipping many gods of all types, some mightier than others.

• Egyptians considered the sun-god Ra the creator of life. He commanded the sky, earth, and underworld.

• Much later, during the New Kingdom, the pharaohs of a new dynasty favored the worship of a different sun-god, Amon, whom they described as creating the entire cosmos by his thoughts.

• The Egyptians likewise developed views of an afterlife that reflected the world around them and that changed over time.

• During the New Kingdom, a time when Egypt came into greater contact with the cultures of the Fertile Crescent, Egyptians developed more complex ideas about the afterlife, recording these in funerary manuscripts that have come to be known as the Book of the Dead, written to help guide the dead through the difficulties of the underworld.

• New Kingdom pharaohs came to associate themselves with both Horus and Osiris, and they were regarded as avatars of Horus in life and Osiris in death.

• The pharaoh’s wife was associated with Isis, for both the queen and the goddess were regarded as protectors.

Egyptian Society and Work

• At the top stood the king, who relied on a sizable circle of nobles, officials, and priests to administer his kingdom.

• Egyptian scribes actually created two writing systems: one called hieroglyphic for engraving important religious or political texts on stone or writing them on papyrus made from reeds growing in the Nile Delta, and a much simpler system called hieratic that allowed scribes to write more quickly.

• In addition to scribes, the cities of the Nile Valley were home to artisans of all types, along with merchants and other tradespeople.

• As in Mesopotamia, common people paid their obligations to their superiors in products and in labor, and many faced penalties if they did not meet their quota.

• Peoples’ labor obligations in the Old Kingdom may have included forced work on the pyramids and canals, although recent research suggests that most people who built the pyramids were paid for their work.

Egyptian Family Life

• The lives of all Egyptians centered around the family.

• Marriage was a business arrangement, just as in Mesopotamia, arranged by the couples’ parents, and seems to have taken place at a young age.

• Wealthy Egyptians lived in spacious homes with attractive gardens and walls for privacy, while the very poor lived in hovels with their animals.

• The Egyptians bathed several times a day be­cause of the heat and used soda ash for soap.

• Marriage was apparently not celebrated by any rit­ual or religious act; it seems to have been purely a legal contract in which a woman brought one third of her family’s property to the marriage.

• Most Egyptian men had only one wife, but among the wealthy some had several wives or concubines.

• Ordinary women were expected to obey their fathers, husbands, and other men, but they possessed considerable economic and legal rights.

The Hyksos and New Kingdom Revival

• A group of Egyptians called Hyksos, which means “rulers of the uplands,” settled in the Nile Delta.

• Although they were later portrayed as a conquering horde, the Hyksos were actually migrants looking for good land, and their entry into the delta, which began around 1800 b.c.e., was probably gradual and generally peaceful.

• The Hyksos brought with them the method of making bronze and casting it into tools and weapons that became standard in Egypt.

• They also brought inventions that revolutionized Egyptian warfare, including bronze armor and weapons as well as horse-drawn chariots and the composite bow, made of laminated wood and horn, which was far more powerful than the simple wooden bow.

• In about 1570 b.c.e. a new dynasty of pharaohs arose, pushing the Hyksos out of the delta, subduing Nubia in the south, and conquering parts of Canaan in the northeast.

• Hatshepsut (r. ca. 1479–ca. 1458 b.c.e.), one of the few female pharaohs in Egypt’s long history, seized the throne for herself and used her reign to promote building and trade.

• Amenhotep III was succeeded by his son, who took the name Akhenaten(r. 1351– 1334 b.c.e.).

• He renamed himself as a mark of his changing religious ideas.

• Akhenaten’s new religion, imposed from above, failed to find a place among the people, however.

• After his death, traditional religious practices returned and the capital was moved back to Thebes.

• The wealth of “King Tut’s tomb,” assembled for a boy-king who died unexpectedly at nineteen, can only suggest what must have originally been in the tomb of a truly powerful pharaoh.

• The objects in the tomb have been studied intensively since it was first discovered in 1922 and have yielded much information about New Kingdom Egypt.

• Tutankhamon’s short reign was also marked by international problems, including warfare on several of the borders of the Egyptian empire.

• His successors were court officials, and in 1298 b.c.e. one of them established a new dynasty whose members would reassert Egypt’s imperial power and respond to new challenges.

Conflict and Cooperation with the Hittites

• One of the key challenges facing the pharaohs after Tutankhamon was the expansion of the kingdom of the Hittites.

• Information about the Hittites comes from archaeological sources, and also from written cuneiform tablets that provide details about politics and economic life.

• These records indicate that in the sixteenth century b.c.e., the Hittite king Hattusili I led his forces against neighboring kingdoms.

• As the Hittites expanded southward, they came into conflict with the Egyptians, who were re-establishing their empire.

• The pharaoh Ramesses II engaged in numerous campaigns to retake Egyptian territory in Syria.

• He assembled a large well-equipped army with thousands of chariots and expected to defeat the Hittites easily, but was ambushed by them at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 b.c.e.

• In 1258 Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III concluded a peace treaty, which was recorded in both Egyptian hieroglyphics and Hittite cuneiform.

• Each promised peace and brotherhood, and the treaty ended with a long oath to the gods, who would curse the one who broke the treaty and bless the one who kept it.