History Midterm

A broad definition of “technology”

• techne “system of obtaining, making, doing”

• Fire, domestication of plants and animals, agricultural systems

• Writing, religion as tech for mediating for peace

Neolithic

• Neo = new lithos = stone (10,000 BCE)

• Start of agriculture - settlements

• Farmers did the selecting - fertility, tame

• Domestication - reduced brain size and biodiversity loss

• hierarchy - agriculturalists, nomads/pastoralists, hunter-gatherers

• Southwest Asia, Fertile Crescent - Mesopotamia, deserts

Diversity at Origins Principle

• Humans emerged in Africa because Africa displays the highest level of genetic diversity (300,000 years ago)

Sedentism

• Settled down, reproduced more,

• Work the same plot of land for more than one growing cycle

• pastoralism(herding of domesticated animals) complemented

• Agriculture 9000 BCE in Fertile Crescent

Examples of early art

• Walls of Afro-Eurasian caves: animals, hunting scenes

• Chauvet Cave(southwestern France) - 35,000 years ago - herds of horses and lions portray perspective and movement

Benefits of fire

• Protection from predators, cooking, warmth, communication, light, warfare

• Hunting - moved prey

• Rejuvenation of soil

• Later advances: glassmaking, smithing, pottery

“Barbarian”

• People who were considered uncivilized

• Outside of settlements

• Didn’t transition into agriculture

• Steppe people

Dolní Věstonice

• Archaeological site in modern-day Czech Republic

• Pre-agriculture sedentary society of hunter-gatherers lived

• 27,000 BCE

• Settled on multiple large-mammal migration routes

• Utilized a lot of clay - prehistoric plastic

• Stayed until all mammoths were killed

Effects of domestication on animals

• Dogs were separated from wolves 30,000 years ago - used as transportation, co co-evolved with humans - earliest domestication

• Selected traits like fertility, tameness

• male/female differences reduced

• Increased fertility, less unpredictable - more dependent on humans

• Related to the domestication of plants - need to feed animals

• Reduced brain size

• Sacrifice of animals/holy animals

Effects of domestication on humans

• Skeletal records show the effects of the hard labor people were doing

• Plants get what they want and we do the work

• Have kids more often 1-2 years

• Allowed for sedentary lifestyle - emergence of city-states

• More important people got more resources - bureaucracy

• High protein diet delayed fertility to late in life, agricultural societies were fertile earlier - reduced protein

River-Valley Civilizations

• Mesopotamia, Nile valley, Indus valley, China(yellow and Yangtze rivers)

• Centered around the river - fertile land

• Abundance of fish, birds, wild game

• Egypt - Nile River- 3000 BCE

• Became socially complex, pharaoh (king) ensured forces of nature continued(flooding)- appeased the gods and tension between people of lower and upper Egypt

• Governance divided into old (2600 BCE), middle, and new kingdom

• Farmed papyrus, wheat, barley, flax seed(linen)

• Hieroglyphics

• Indus Valley - South Asia - 2600 BCE

• Melting snow in Himalayas watered valley, flourishing vegetation didn’t experience flooding

• Wheat and barley

• Rich variety of copper and copper mines

• Harrapa was a main settlement - used lots of brick

• Absence of written record (third millennium BCE)

• East Asia - Yellow and Yangzi River

• Settles around 4000-2000 BCE

• Tension between settled and nomads

• Farm millet and rice

• Differing housing shapes, burial practices - multiple cultures

• Developed more slowly - plants/animals may have been harder to domesticate

• Mesopotamia - between rivers - Tigris and Euphrates - 3500 BCE

• Fertile crescent

• Earliest attempts of irrigation

• Little rainfall

• Sumer (3500 BCE), Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria.

• Akkadian and Sumerian

• Rise of Ur and Uruk

• Cuneiform script

Bronze Age

• Copper + tin = bronze used for weapons

• 2300 - 700 BCE

• Sumer 3000-2340 BCE

• Increased urbanization

• Centralization of power in kings

• Warfare between city-states

• City-states into larger territories

Hunter-gatherers

• Food is acquired through hunting animals, fishing, and foraging for berries and nuts

• Healthier more diverse diet

• Slash and burn farming - burn everything made soil nutrient-rich use for a year or two then move on

• Ate everything

Idea of a “Dark Age”

• 1200 BCE - 900 BCE? Mediterranean - decrease of written materials

• Bad times in New Kingdom Egypt but survived, settlements abandoned/collapsed

• Famine, migration, warfare, climate change

• Revolution, economic collapse, earthquakes

• Sea people - pirates, attacked cities

• Decline of state and bureaucracy - didn’t get enough taxation

• Monopoly of violence

• Ugarit and Mycenean cultures collapsed

Themes in Gilgamesh

• Problem of death

• Eternal life = eternal fame

• substance of a good life

• Uruk was his legacy

• making humans human

• The wild(hunter-gatherers), the place of the sheep-pin(nomads/pastoralists), the city (agriculturalists)

• Enkidu becomes human by having sex and eating

• civilization - cities and kings (moving to agriculture)

• Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk and there was no city without him

• Struggle with the divine and nature

• Refusal of Ishtar’s advances

• slaying of the bull of heaven

• Can’t accept death

• The slaying of Humbaba - cutting the divine cedar forest

• Friendship

Uruk

• References to Gilgamesh

• Southern Mesopotamia - branch of Euphrates

• Inhabitants focused more on specialized professions

• Origin of writing (3500 BCE)

• The first true city in the world in Sumer

Steppe Nomads (Eurasia Steppe)

• Hunter-gatherers on the periphery of cities

• Essential to city economics - trade routes

• Major reason for mass migration

Cities and disease

• Barley carries less disease than wheat

• Scott: zoonoses - disease spread from animals to humans, population density

• Early city-states were vulnerable

Grain and taxation

• Got taxes through the grain, used as currency - wheat and barley

• Easy to weight and divide, durable, accessible, storable, transportable

• Harvesting grain was easy because they were visible

• Officials forced above ground to catch tax evasion - easily monitored

• Emergence of slavery - debts - Roman taxing authorities didn’t care if you had the resources to pay debts

• If enemies are coming plant potatoes below ground

Scribes and bureaucracy

• Necessary for taxation

• Record and register everything

• Writing for control of people document who owes debts - slavery

• Barbarians did not write

• Hyper-literate, occupational literate, barely literate

Ancient deforestation

• Roman Empire

• Gilgamesh - forest of cedar

• Slash and burn agriculture

• Need wood to build ships and fuel fires

Origins of Alphabet

• Set of symbols that represent morphemes, smallest unit of sound in the language, economic and simplified way of writing language

• Phonecian alphabet came from Semitic language - greeks and Romans adopt as Phonecians are great explorers of the Mediterranean

• Writing in Egypt

• Middle of third millennium BCE (old kingdom)

• Hieroglyphs - holy carvings, largely represent sounds

• Hieratic - less famous but more useful

• Demotic - democracy, peoples script, made from red ink

• Write on papyrus - black ink from burnt carbon and lead (lamination)

• Rosetta stone: top hieroglyphs, middle demotic, bottom greek

Cuneiform

• Earliest writing - wedge-shaped writing

• Emerges from Sumeria

• Top to bottom, right to left

• Express words and ideas and at the same time syllables

• Akkadian is the oldest Semitic language

• Sumerian was used for ceremonies, Akkadian day to day both in cuneiform

Religion and its relationship to fields/fertility

• Sacrifice animals to appease the gods - ward off disease, crops grow

• Cycle of growth and sacrifice, give cattle to gods for grain need grain to feed cattle

Bronze Age Collapse

• 1200 BCE

• Dark ages

• Egypt didn’t collapse because of desert barrier from sea people

• Writing systems vanished

• Trade was severed

• Widespread death

• Causes: earthquakes, class wars, drough/famine, sea peoples, political instability

Sea Peoples

• Naval raiders that attacked city-states

• Some consider the primary cause of the Bronze age collapse

Ugarit

• Port city in Syria - 1900 BCE

• Major trade center between egypt and other major powers of mesopotamia and asia

Chariots

• Horse-drawn vehicles used in warfare - dominated for a while

• Second millenium BCE

• Through interaction of pastoralists and settled communities

• Steppe people were first to use

Ritual and religion

• Religion as a technology to gain power, communal protection (city-state), mediate dangerous interactions (local), personal power (individual, love, hate, moving up social hierarchies)

• State cult

• Piece for the gods

• Getting the attention of the gods - big temples (Zigarat)

• Make a deal

• Domesticating time - structure calendars - religious festivals related to agricultural seasons

• Local cults

• local shrines

• Fields and fertility

• Neighborhood

• Keep evil eye away

• Personal Power

• magic/sorcery

• curses`

• Religion as human discourse - bonding, power, ritual

• Disease from gathering many animals in one place for a sacrifice

Examples of climate change in the Ancient Near East

• Mediterranean

• tree rings can date volcanic eruption

• Mesopotamia

• Mass deforestation lead to increased flooding as trees helped maintain level water

• Loss of topsoil, soil erosion, siltation, salinization

• Topsoil in irrigation canals - have to dig them out, not enough water in irrigation

• Short term solution is to flush out the salt

2.)

Q. 2: The Neolithic (or Agricultural) Revolution marked the beginning of a great change in the history of homo sapiens. Explain what this revolution was, give some ideas for why humans made this change, and describe some of the effects of this change. Be sure to give clear examples from lectures and course materials.

The Neolithic Revolution occurred around 10,000 BCE and first started in the Fertile Crescent. It marked the beginning of agricultural-based settled societies from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This shift also divided up homo sapiens into 3 categories with the agriculturalists being at the top, then the pastoralists, and lastly the hunter-gatherers. There was also major population growth that came with this revolution, as people had kids every one to two years rather than four to five years because they didn’t have to move around and had more resources to feed more people.

One of the main reasons for this shift was better climate conditions at the end of the Ice Age causing gradual global warming which made it easier to cultivate plants and herd animals. This allowed for the domestication of plants and animals keeping the agricultural lifestyle sustainable. They selected traits based on fertility and docility, specifically for animals they made them more dependent on humans. They were interconnected as agriculturalists needed to grow crops to sustain the animals. These societies also were more efficient with humans being able to specialize in certain tasks they were skilled at. Another possible reason for the shift was that the hunter-gatherers were running out of large mammals to hunt and they didn’t have enough resources to keep searching along large distances.

While the Neolithic Revolution created larger and more complex societies it came with a whole new set of challenges. The close interaction between humans and animals led to the spread of zoonotic diseases like measles and influenza. James Scott in Against the Grain described it as “the perfect epidemiological storm”, he explains how the gathering of all these animals in one place specifically their waste caused an extreme spread as people were also in close contact with each other. However, agricultural societies eventually built up an immunity to these diseases while hunter-gatherers were wiped out if they got into contact with them. There was a major environmental impact when making space for livestock and fields that reduced biodiversity and air quality. Another effect was the surplus of food which created a hierarchy within these societies through the taxation of grains, like the code of Hummarabi, inevitably leading to debt slavery, but also strong trade networks like the Silk Road that created a strong economy. Despite all these challenges, many pivotal technologies were developed through this settlement that led to the Bronze Age and subsequent advancements.