Historians take the data of past events and construct narratives. History is narrative.
Anthropologists study culture. A culture has six common practices: food, clothing, sports, tools, social customs, and work. A culture has six shared understandings: language, symbols, religious beliefs, values, art, and political beliefs. A culture has six ways to organize society: family, class structures, government, economic systems, view of authority, and the relationships between the individual and the community. Culture is learned in two ways: direct teaching, and observation and imitation. Culture is learned in seven settings: media, family, friends, government, religion, school, and workplace.
History begins in the paleolithic age; ‘paleolithic age’ means ‘old stone age’ – in this era, people made tools, jewelry, arrowheads, and other objects from chopped stone. Written records from this era are rare. The Dispilio tablet was found by archaeologists in Greece and dates to approximately 5260 B.C.; the Tartaria tablets date to approximately 5300 B.C. and were found in Romania; the Jiahu writings date to approximately 6600 B.C. in China. The people during the paleolithic age were nomadic hunter-gatherers, who made tools not only from stone, but also from wood and bone. They also began painting pictures.
The transition from paleolithic to neolithic included the emergence of professional record keepers or ‘scribes’ as a defined class: people who could read and write, spent most of their time recording data about their societies.
During the new stone age – the ‘neolithic age’ – people developed techniques for polishing stone, making pottery, and domesticating crops and animals. ‘Domesticating’ means making something not wild. Neolithic people ceased being nomadic, and began to farm. In regions with many trees, agriculture required that the land first be cleared. Trees were cut down for their useful wood, and grass and smaller plants burned off to empty the fields for planting – hence the name ‘slash and burn farming.’
As people stopped being nomadic, civilization developed with five elements: cities, specialized workers, complex institutions, record keeping, and advanced technology. Around 3500 B.C., in the city of Ur, for example, skilled craftsmen called ‘artisans’ invented both the mixture of copper and tin called ‘bronze’ and the potter’s wheel. Around 3000 B.C., the ‘bronze age’ began as this alloy became widely used.
Ur is located near where the Euphrates river flows into the Persian Gulf in the region called Sumer. The Tigris river flows parallel to the Euphrates, and the area around and between them is called ‘Mesopotamia’ – which means ‘the land between the rivers.’ Like all early civilizations, Ur conducted human sacrifices. Young men and women were killed as an offering to the city’s idols, in hopes of gaining good weather for farming or military victories. Mesopotamian rivers flooded unpredictably, and starvation could easily result from bad weather.
Mesopotamia is part of a larger geographical region. The eastern end of the Mediterranean forms, together with Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent.
Ur, and other Mesopotamian cities, had pyramid-like structures called ‘ziggurats’ for ceremonies and sacrifices. They did not yet have religions, instead having beliefs which were polytheistic and magical. Most buildings were constructed out of mud-clay bricks. Buying and selling in the city was done with barter, exchanging one item for another – coins had not yet been invented. Most of the population lived in the surrounding countryside and did farming. Reading and writing progressed as the ‘cuneiform’ alphabet was invented, used first for business records, and then for recording events in the city.
These cities are called ‘city-states’ because they functioned as independent countries. They were not part of larger countries. As the rulers handed power to their children, generation after generation, ‘dynasties’ or royal families emerged.
Early Mesopotamian societies faced several challenges: the cuneiform system of writing was cumbersome, keeping literacy rates low; the river flooded unpredictably and rain was unreliable, keeping famines and starvation as constant threats; some social classes engaged in polygamy, keeping social structures less stable; beliefs in magic and polytheism focused on manipulating nature, preventing religion from arising until later.
Many early civilizations focused their magical and polytheistic beliefs on fertility – the ability of farmland to yield plentiful crops and animals; these belief systems are often called ‘fertility religions’ although they are not religions – they are superstitions. Such belief systems are magic, because they are an attempt to manipulate nature – to determine the outcome of a course of events. Along with agriculture, they also attempted to manipulate military victories. Civilizations will move from ‘magic’ to ‘religion’ as the belief system is less about manipulating events and more about forming a relationship with the deity.
This pre-religious phase included mythology. A ‘myth’ is a story designed to explain.
In these earliest phases of history, individual political liberty, in the forms of property rights and in the forms of freedom of speech and thought, had not yet appeared, and was not even clearly articulated as a goal. Liberty was, however, a driving force, if a subconscious one, in historical development and is an innate feature of human beings.
The obstacles which humanity had to overcome at this stage were polytheism, polygamy, the lack of an alphabet, and the ubiquitous practice of human sacrifice.
As these obstacles were removed, societies embraced monotheism, monogamy, alphabetic writing systems, and a respect for human life which replaced human sacrifice.
