The Sumerian civilization was comprised of some twenty temple-centred city-states that arose during the 4th millennium BCE in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of present-day Baghdad. Although increasingly linked over the centuries by trade that took place along the canals and rivers of southern Mesopotamia, each city was independently ruled by a priest-king and council of elders. By the end of the 4th millennium, several had populations exceeding 10,000, and the city of Uruk became the first in the world to surpass 50,000 inhabitants. Together they gave birth to the wheel, written language, mathematics (including geometry and algebra), astronomy, kiln-fired pottery, large-scale irrigation, monumental architecture, urban planning, the first codified legal system, epic literature, and the first schools that flourished under the auspices of the city-state’s primary temple.
These city-states, which had evolved from earlier Neolithic villages, continued to evolve over the 2000 years of Sumerian history. Each was surrounded by a belt of agricultural land that contained many small hamlets connected by a network of roads, canals, and irrigation ditches. Typically situated on a major waterway, each city was linked by a main canal to its own harbour. Divided into commercial, civic, and residential spaces, the residential areas were further divided according to the occupants’ work specialties and social status. Houses – about 90 square metres or 950 square feet in size – were designed so that rooms opened only onto a private inner courtyard, thereby maintaining a clear separation of public and private spaces.
At the centre of each city was a high temple around which the city had grown, and which itself had grown from a small one-room structure in Neolithic times into a successively larger and more elaborate complex that might occupy several acres. As cathedrals today give architectural expression to key components of the Christian worldview, with their high altars, cross-shaped nave and transepts, and steeples pointing heavenward, so these ancient temples gave expression to the Sumerian cosmology. The world was seen as a disc of land surrounded by a salt-water ocean which in turn floated on a primeval sea of fresh water. Above was a giant dome-shaped firmament within which the fixed motions of the heavenly bodies regulated time. Uniting this three-layered cosmos was the Cosmic Mountain or axis mundi, represented by the temple which was home to the patron god of the city and the place of meeting between gods and men. Doors along the long axis of the rectangular temple were entry points for the gods; doors along the short axis provided entry points for men. At the intersection of the two axes, at the centre of the temple, was a table for receiving offerings. Here one could turn 90 degrees to face a statue of the city’s patron god at the far end of the central hall.
The temple was initially built on a raised terrace of rammed earth, later on a higher platform of adobe brick, and still later on a much higher stepped pyramid or ziggurat (which may have inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel). This raised platform represented the primordial land that, in creation, had emerged from the underlying sea. On it the temple was oriented such that its four corners pointed in the cardinal directions of the compass, from whence four rivers flowed from the Cosmic Mountain to water the earth. The roof of the temple served as the observatory from which priestly astronomers kept track of the time. And, as the temple grew ever larger during the Dynastic Period (2900 – 2270 BCE), it became as well a storage and distribution centre for surplus food and the primary residence of the priests.
Not far away, the priestly governor (ensi) or king (lugal), together with his council of elders, kept court at the palace. Like the temple, it had grown during the Dynastic Period from modest beginnings into what became known as “the Big House”. At the same time, and not coincidentally, the cities themselves became walled. During earlier centuries, there had been no military class, little or no armed conflict, and no reason for a city to be walled. But from the start of the 3rd millennium BCE, the growing power of the temple-palace alliance brought with it increasing violence. Cities became walled, undefended villages disappeared, rulers vied with one another for power, and cities began to engage in siege warfare with each other as they sought to expand their territories. The city of Lagash annexed almost all of Sumer and introduced the use of terror as a means of reducing other city-states to tribute. The first historically recorded war took place between the cities of Lagash and Umma c. 2525 BCE. Lagash was later conquered by the priest-king of Umma who went on to claim an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He in turn was overthrown by Sargon of Akkad who absorbed all of Sumer and proceeded to establish the far-flung Akkadian Empire. Violence was now institutionalised. What began as a cooperative constellation of city-states had, in just a few centuries, surrendered to the imperial ambitions of one dynasty after another.
Accompanying this escalating violence was a worldview that supported it. While the relatively benign presence of the Great Mother was still a focus of Sumerian worship, the nature spirits of the earlier Paleolithic and Neolithic eras had now become more godlike forces of nature. By the 4th millennium BCE, they had morphed into individual deities within a pantheon of gods and goddesses. Although still associated with the forces of nature and immensely powerful, they were now human in form, had human qualities and foibles, and among themselves were unequal in status. Some of them became patron deities of particular cities that they ruled through their earthly representative – the priest-king of that city. It followed that the increasingly frequent and violent power struggles between cities should be seen as a contest between their associated deities.
Nammu, goddess of the primeval sea, may have been the earliest deity. Sometimes described as the mother of all gods, she gave birth to heaven and earth – specifically to her first-born, An, the god of heaven, and then to Ki (later known as Ninhursag), the goddess of earth. From their union in turn came Enlil, god of the air, who separated heaven and earth. An carried off heaven, while Enlil carried off his mother, earth, and with her proceeded to create man and the entire world of plants and animals. An ,the first male sky-god to appear in human history, was seriously concerned with power and served as supreme ruler and alpha-male of the pantheon, as well as the patron god of the city of Uruk – at least until Uruk was defeated by the city of Nippur, whereupon its own patron god, Enlil, replaced him as the supreme object of worship.
Each of these main players had specific functions. An was the power that gave being to all nature. Ninhursag governed wildlife and gave birth to kings. Enlil was god of the winds and of crop-growing weather. Of lesser rank, but significant nonetheless, were the sun god (Utu), the moon goddess (Nanna), and a host of male sky-gods who belonged to a kind of heavenly club known as the Anuna. There were deities for almost everything – for the other celestial bodies, for geographical features such as mountains and steppes, for important tools such as brick-moulds and ploughs, and for each of the crafts, as well as very personal gods who were served by individuals and households.
This pantheon of deities answered life’s most basic questions, How did we and the universe come into being? What is our place in the larger scheme of things? What drives the forces of nature, and what can we do to control them? It was the gods who brought all things into being and created humans from clay in order to serve them. “Worship your god every day,” reads the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom, “with prayer and sacrifice, accompanied by incense. Present your free-will offering to your god, for this is proper. Offer him prayer, supplication, and prostration daily, and you will get your reward. Then you will have full communion with your god. Reverence begets favour; sacrifice prolongs life; and prayer atones for guilt.” Beyond the demand that we serve them, however, the Sumerian gods seem not to have specified any code of behaviour such as we find later in the Jewish Torah. Nor was behaviour motivated by any promise of heavenly reward or eternal damnation. Men and women were on their own to decide issues of right and wrong, good and evil. And regardless of how they had lived, all were destined to descend after death into a gloomy Underworld where they could expect to spend eternity as a ghost.
The Underworld was ruled, at least from 2400 BCE, by Gilgamesh. Earlier in that millennium he had been king of the city of Uruk, around whom such legends had grown that he was later elevated to the status of a god and king of the Underworld. The myths and legends surrounding him are related in The Epic of Gilgamesh, told and retold by the Sumerians, and later by the Assyrians and Babylonians, over at least two thousand years. Although details of the story differ from one version to another, the main theme – coming to terms with the fact of our mortality – remains the same. Knowing that all men must die, a youthful and irrepressible Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu set out on a journey to accomplish a heroic deed (slay a mythical monster) and thereby achieve a kind of immortality. In the process, however, they insult the Great Mother who decrees Enkidu’s death and reduces Gilgamesh to resignation regarding his own mortality. Henceforth, because of his heroism in confronting death, he is made ruler of the Underworld and his blessing is invoked in Sumerian burial rites.
The same Gilgamesh narrative includes the story of the Flood and is almost certainly the source of the later Biblical account. According to the Sumerian version, the gods decided on a whim to destroy humankind with a flood. But Enki, patron god of the city of Eridu, was less than happy with the decision and told a man named Utnapishtim to build a very large boat in which to preserve himself, his family, and a host of animals. After six days and nights of riding out the flood, the boat grounded on Mount Nisir (in modern-day Iraq). After another seven days, three birds were released in succession. When the third one did not return, Utnapishtim knew the flood was over.
Alongside the growing pantheon of gods and goddesses, the Great Mother retained a central role in Sumerian mythology – worshipped as the goddess Inanna (“queen of heaven”) until the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, and thereafter as the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. An epic poem, The Exaltation of Inanna, described her as all-powerful and reigning in heaven. Associated with the life-giving powers of fertility and abundance, and hence not as war-mongering as many of her male counterparts, she was still far from domesticated. Sexual attraction is aroused in her presence, and she herself is described as sexually aggressive. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, her sexuality is excessive and downright dangerous when spurned.
In order to arouse sexual vigour and ensure the fertility of crops and animals within a city-state, the priest-king was ritually united with Inanna in a royal marriage ceremony. Over the course of two millennia, the marriage was celebrated at least once by the ruler of each major city. A vase found at Uruk illustrates the occasion there c. 3000 BCE. An inscription found at Lagash refers to the marriage being performed there c. 2250 BCE. And in ancient Babylon (c. 1700 BCE), the ritual was performed annually in association with a New Year festival. More than simply promoting fertility, it may have served as well to legitimise the king’s rule by placing him in a productive relationship with the Great Mother.
Gradually over the ensuing centuries, as Sumerian civilization disappeared under the onslaught of successive empires, the Great Mother was reinvented by the warring Father God worshippers. In some instances, the Mother Goddess became the wife or daughter of their chief god. Sometimes they got rid of the goddess altogether or demoted her to the status of a disobedient and trouble-making mortal woman. Pandora, whose name means “giver of all gifts,” was demoted into a mortal woman who brings only trouble into the world. And the Hebrews turned the Mother Goddess into Eve who, because of her disobedience and questioning of male authority, ended forever humanity’s place in Paradise. Needless to say, this masculinisation of the Mesopotamian worldview was the accompaniment not only of increasing violence and warfare, but of the subjugation of women over all ensuing millennia until the present time.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Age of Civilizations and Empires
Civilization began with the emergence of cities and city-states. The word itself comes from the Latin civis, which means one who lives in a city. So a civilization is a constellation of cities that occupy a given geographical area, share a common language and culture, engage cooperatively in the production and importation of food and other life necessities, and create organisational structures that ensure a continuity of government and social order.
Around the start of the 4th millennium BCE, the city-states of Mesopotamia, located in the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, began coming together to form the first of the great Bronze Age civilizations. Many of these cities, such as Eridu (perhaps the oldest city in the world) and Ur (just 12 kilometres northeast of Eridu), each of which housed as many as 10,000 residents, grew up almost in sight of one another. Populated by the same Sumerian people, sharing the same language and culture, and increasingly linked by trade, it was virtually inevitable that these cities should come together as the Sumerian civilization.
The same process soon followed in other regions of what was now becoming the civilised world. Cities in the Indus River Valley came together in the mid-4th millennium BCE to form the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization. It flourished until c. 1800 BCE in what is now Pakistan, north-western India, and south-eastern Afghanistan. At about the same time, from c. 3600 BCE, settlements along the Nile River began to grow and advance rapidly towards civilization. What had previously been autonomous towns and villages were united first into the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and then (c. 3150 BCE) unified under the great dynasties of the Egyptian civilization. Meanwhile, on the nearby Mediterranean island of Crete, migrants from Anatolia and/or the Levant had settled in agricultural villages from c. 7000 BCE. As elsewhere, some of these grew into palatial cities that later (from c. 2700 BCE) comprised the Minoan civilization. This in turn was eclipsed by yet another civilization, the Mycenaean, which had emerged from city-states on the mainland of Greece c. 1600 BCE.
These five – the Sumerian, Harappan, Egyptian, Minoan, and Mycenaean – were the great Bronze Age civilizations that marked the beginning of our collective adolescence. They were born in the 4th millennium and had all expired before the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. As is typical of early adolescence, it was a period marked by a new flowering of the human mind and the first purely mental productions of the human race (e.g. writing, the alphabet, the calendar, mathematics, astronomy, etc.). It was also a time of escalating adolescent hubris during which these civilizations and succeeding empires became intoxicated with their expansionist dreams and whatever mayhem was required to realise them. Indeed, it was precisely this escalating violence and mayhem that contributed to the demise of each of these civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, in what historians call the Bronze Age Collapse.
There is no neat dividing line between a civilization and am empire. The former, as we have noted, is a complex agricultural and urban culture comprised of a regionally-defined constellation of city-states that share a common language, governmental structure, and sense of identity. An empire, on the other hand, is a geographically extensive group of states, united and ruled by a king or emperor who exercises military and political dominion over populations that are culturally and ethnically distinct from that of the ruling state. In their later stages, each of the Bronze Age civilizations either morphed into a more expansive empire itself or was conquered by some other expanding empire.
The city-states that had flourished as the Sumerian civilization from the start of the 4th millennium BCE were conquered by Sargon of Akkad (now the city of Fallujah in Iraq), c. 2250 BCE, to form the combined empire of Akkad and Sumer – often regarded as the first-ever empire. Having whetted his imperial appetite, Sargon went on to extend his empire as far west as modern-day Syria, Israel, and Turkey, and as far south as Oman. Within 100 years, however, the Akkadian empire itself had collapsed, to be succeeded by a brief Sumerian renaissance before the city of Ur was finally sacked and Sumer came under Amorite rule. That was the end of Sumerian civilization. From the start of the 2nd millennium BCE, Mesopotamia was dominated by successive empires – Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian. The latter was the largest in ancient history and spanned three continents – Asia, Africa, and Europe – before it too fell to yet another Conquering Hero: Alexander the Great.
Meanwhile, the Indus Valley civilization was similarly coming unstuck. By 1700 BCE, most of its great cities – (more than 1000 have so far been excavated) – had been abandoned. The reasons are unclear. Climate change seems to have triggered a severe decades-long drought at about that time. A decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia may have been another factor. But invading hordes of barbarian horsemen from the north – Indo-European tribes from Central Asia known as Aryans – almost certainly put the final nail in this civilization’s coffin.
The heyday of Egyptian civilization was also succumbing to its own and others’ imperial ambitions. The stability that had characterised this great civilization since the middle of the 4th millennium BCE began to unravel when its own expansionist dreams brought it into conflict with the Hittite Empire for control of Syria and Palestine. The largest chariot battle ever fought reached an indecisive but costly conclusion when, in 1274 BCE, the Hittites caught the forces of Ramesses II at Kadesh in Syria in history’s first recorded military ambush. Some 50 years later, his successor, Ramesses III, managed to defeat an invading confederacy of sea raiders (known as the “Sea Peoples”) in two great land-and-sea battles. But the heavy cost of such battles exhausted Egypt’s treasury. The death of Ramesses III in 1155 BCE marked the beginning of the end for Egypt. Some unknown environmental disaster (perhaps the eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland) dimmed the sun’s light and seriously arrested the growth of global vegetation for almost two decades. Then a combination of droughts, famine, civil unrest, official corruption, and endless bickering among Ramesses III’s heirs precipitated a more total collapse. In subsequent centuries a now-humbled Egypt was intermittently harassed and controlled by Libyans, Assyrians, Greeks, and Persians, before its ultimate conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE and its annexation as a Roman colony in 30 BCE.
Unlike its sister civilizations, the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete never succumbed to imperial temptations. Primarily a mercantile people engaged in overseas trade, they seemed content to lead a peaceful life with no expansionist ambitions. There is no evidence for a Minoan army or for their domination of any peoples outside Crete. In sharp contrast to their warmongering contemporaries, warfare does not appear in their art – and when weapons are depicted, it is only in ritual contexts. Significantly, the Minoan cosmology was never invaded by the warring male sky-gods, and the Mother Goddess remained at the centre of their essentially matriarchal religion. Such a pacific way of life, however, was no guarantee against calamity and war. The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history took place c. 1600 BCE on the Mediterranean island of Thera (now Santorini), devastating Minoan coastal settlements and inspiring Plato’s story of the lost island of Atlantis. Still another natural catastrophe, perhaps an earthquake or another eruption of Thera, further weakened Minoa and made it ripe for invasion. In any case, c. 1400 BCE, the Mycenaean Greeks did just that. They destroyed much of the island, occupied the Minoan palaces, and effectively brought Minoan civilization to an end.
Of all the Bronze Age civilizations, the Mycenaean was by far the most militant and short-lived. Emerging c. 1600 BCE among the cities of mainland Greece, it quickly became more an empire than a civilization, extending its reach to Crete, Turkey, Cyprus and Italy. Its swords and other artefacts have been found as far away as Germany and the Caucasus. Unlike the Minoans, Mycenaean society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy who advanced their interests through conquest. It is the setting of much ancient Greek literature, including the epics of Homer who, in the Iliad, recounts the probably legendary tale of the Mycenaean defeat of Troy in the Trojan War. No single explanation fits the archaeological evidence for the collapse of this warring civilization. Climate change, environmental catastrophe, invasion by the Dorians or the Sea Peoples, or the more widespread availability of iron weapons – all these may have contributed to its demise. The fact is that, from 1200 BCE, its palace centres and outlying settlements were being abandoned or destroyed, and within a hundred years any recognisable features of Mycenaean culture had disappeared.
So ended the 3000-year Age of Civilizations! By the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, all of these great Bronze Age civilizations had fallen prey, either to natural calamities, invading barbarians, or conquest by expansionist empires. Their legacy, however, continues to the present day, as certain of their defining characteristics continue to shape the civilised world.
One of these is the necessity of trade. Civilizations depend on the export-import of food and other essentials between their cities and other more distant regions. This requires long-distance trade relationships and the development of transportation systems to service them. So ox-drawn, and later horse-drawn carts, are found from early in the 4th millennium BCE. The world’s oldest known roadway, the Sweet Track in England, dates from the same time, as does the construction of more sophisticated sailing vessels. Trade also required the invention of money to replace the previous barter system – (the Sumerians began using silver bars and the Egyptians gold bars as a medium of exchange almost from the beginning) – and the invention of writing (Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics) c. 3200 BCE in order to keep accounts. The accumulation of money soon became synonymous with power, and eventually necessitated the introduction of legal codes (e.g. the Sumerian Code of Ur in 2050 BCE and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi in 1760 BCE) to regulate business practices and the ownership of private property. All of which of course have been enormously elaborated over the centuries ever since.
Another defining characteristic involves an increasingly complex division of labour, the accumulation of wealth, private property, and class stratification based on ownership and control of production. These, together with the centralising of government in the person and court of a priest-king, led quickly to the emergence of a privileged ruling class and a complementary religious or priestly class. Overlapping networks of political, religious, economic, and military power differentially benefited these privileged groups by exploiting the mass of peasant producers, via taxation and slavery, and funneling resources and power from the bottom to the top of the social hierarchy. The common thread is control. A small group of people, the ruling and priestly class, controls the mass of people through the institutions of civilization.
In this respect, not a great deal has changed over the centuries. A wealthy and powerful elite continues to control production, buy elections, manipulate governments, run the military-industrial complex, and manage the media. In this they are sanctioned by the religious establishment, supported by an educational system that selects who will and will not have access to high-status jobs, and protected against the threat of rebellion by contemporary versions of the ancient Coliseum that keep the masses entertained.
Two other defining characteristics are worth noting. One is institutionalized warfare and the magnification of military power. The other is the building of monumental tombs and ceremonial centres. The former, born in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE and growing in its killing power ever since, has, within the last 100 years, gone virtually out of control. Any restraints are gone. Wars are fought over ideas as much as over territory and resources, and the wholesale destruction of entire populations has become commonplace. The latter, whether the ziggurats of Mesopotamia or the pyramids of Egypt or the monumental palaces of Minoa, like the contemporary skyscrapers of New York or Dubai or Toronto, seem to express a kind of adolescent “I’m-the-biggest-I’m-the-best” defiance of death and a reaching for immortality.
The Age of Civilizations and Empires is scarcely over, and its legacy is evident everywhere around us. The great empires that dominated Europe until recently – the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian – finally collapsed only in the chaos of World War I. The Empire of Japan’s divine mission to rule the world ended only in the radioactive fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the last great empire – the British – was ultimately subdued only as recently as 1947 by the diminutive figure of Mohandas Ghandi.
Is it possible that we might finally be emerging from our collective adolescence? As we move towards a global community, could humanity be moving to a new level of maturity? If so, can we make that transition before some catastrophic clash of ideologies and worldviews brings the entire human experiment to an end? I think so. At least, that remains my hope and my contention.
Around the start of the 4th millennium BCE, the city-states of Mesopotamia, located in the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, began coming together to form the first of the great Bronze Age civilizations. Many of these cities, such as Eridu (perhaps the oldest city in the world) and Ur (just 12 kilometres northeast of Eridu), each of which housed as many as 10,000 residents, grew up almost in sight of one another. Populated by the same Sumerian people, sharing the same language and culture, and increasingly linked by trade, it was virtually inevitable that these cities should come together as the Sumerian civilization.
The same process soon followed in other regions of what was now becoming the civilised world. Cities in the Indus River Valley came together in the mid-4th millennium BCE to form the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization. It flourished until c. 1800 BCE in what is now Pakistan, north-western India, and south-eastern Afghanistan. At about the same time, from c. 3600 BCE, settlements along the Nile River began to grow and advance rapidly towards civilization. What had previously been autonomous towns and villages were united first into the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and then (c. 3150 BCE) unified under the great dynasties of the Egyptian civilization. Meanwhile, on the nearby Mediterranean island of Crete, migrants from Anatolia and/or the Levant had settled in agricultural villages from c. 7000 BCE. As elsewhere, some of these grew into palatial cities that later (from c. 2700 BCE) comprised the Minoan civilization. This in turn was eclipsed by yet another civilization, the Mycenaean, which had emerged from city-states on the mainland of Greece c. 1600 BCE.
These five – the Sumerian, Harappan, Egyptian, Minoan, and Mycenaean – were the great Bronze Age civilizations that marked the beginning of our collective adolescence. They were born in the 4th millennium and had all expired before the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. As is typical of early adolescence, it was a period marked by a new flowering of the human mind and the first purely mental productions of the human race (e.g. writing, the alphabet, the calendar, mathematics, astronomy, etc.). It was also a time of escalating adolescent hubris during which these civilizations and succeeding empires became intoxicated with their expansionist dreams and whatever mayhem was required to realise them. Indeed, it was precisely this escalating violence and mayhem that contributed to the demise of each of these civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, in what historians call the Bronze Age Collapse.
There is no neat dividing line between a civilization and am empire. The former, as we have noted, is a complex agricultural and urban culture comprised of a regionally-defined constellation of city-states that share a common language, governmental structure, and sense of identity. An empire, on the other hand, is a geographically extensive group of states, united and ruled by a king or emperor who exercises military and political dominion over populations that are culturally and ethnically distinct from that of the ruling state. In their later stages, each of the Bronze Age civilizations either morphed into a more expansive empire itself or was conquered by some other expanding empire.
The city-states that had flourished as the Sumerian civilization from the start of the 4th millennium BCE were conquered by Sargon of Akkad (now the city of Fallujah in Iraq), c. 2250 BCE, to form the combined empire of Akkad and Sumer – often regarded as the first-ever empire. Having whetted his imperial appetite, Sargon went on to extend his empire as far west as modern-day Syria, Israel, and Turkey, and as far south as Oman. Within 100 years, however, the Akkadian empire itself had collapsed, to be succeeded by a brief Sumerian renaissance before the city of Ur was finally sacked and Sumer came under Amorite rule. That was the end of Sumerian civilization. From the start of the 2nd millennium BCE, Mesopotamia was dominated by successive empires – Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian. The latter was the largest in ancient history and spanned three continents – Asia, Africa, and Europe – before it too fell to yet another Conquering Hero: Alexander the Great.
Meanwhile, the Indus Valley civilization was similarly coming unstuck. By 1700 BCE, most of its great cities – (more than 1000 have so far been excavated) – had been abandoned. The reasons are unclear. Climate change seems to have triggered a severe decades-long drought at about that time. A decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia may have been another factor. But invading hordes of barbarian horsemen from the north – Indo-European tribes from Central Asia known as Aryans – almost certainly put the final nail in this civilization’s coffin.
The heyday of Egyptian civilization was also succumbing to its own and others’ imperial ambitions. The stability that had characterised this great civilization since the middle of the 4th millennium BCE began to unravel when its own expansionist dreams brought it into conflict with the Hittite Empire for control of Syria and Palestine. The largest chariot battle ever fought reached an indecisive but costly conclusion when, in 1274 BCE, the Hittites caught the forces of Ramesses II at Kadesh in Syria in history’s first recorded military ambush. Some 50 years later, his successor, Ramesses III, managed to defeat an invading confederacy of sea raiders (known as the “Sea Peoples”) in two great land-and-sea battles. But the heavy cost of such battles exhausted Egypt’s treasury. The death of Ramesses III in 1155 BCE marked the beginning of the end for Egypt. Some unknown environmental disaster (perhaps the eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland) dimmed the sun’s light and seriously arrested the growth of global vegetation for almost two decades. Then a combination of droughts, famine, civil unrest, official corruption, and endless bickering among Ramesses III’s heirs precipitated a more total collapse. In subsequent centuries a now-humbled Egypt was intermittently harassed and controlled by Libyans, Assyrians, Greeks, and Persians, before its ultimate conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE and its annexation as a Roman colony in 30 BCE.
Unlike its sister civilizations, the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete never succumbed to imperial temptations. Primarily a mercantile people engaged in overseas trade, they seemed content to lead a peaceful life with no expansionist ambitions. There is no evidence for a Minoan army or for their domination of any peoples outside Crete. In sharp contrast to their warmongering contemporaries, warfare does not appear in their art – and when weapons are depicted, it is only in ritual contexts. Significantly, the Minoan cosmology was never invaded by the warring male sky-gods, and the Mother Goddess remained at the centre of their essentially matriarchal religion. Such a pacific way of life, however, was no guarantee against calamity and war. The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history took place c. 1600 BCE on the Mediterranean island of Thera (now Santorini), devastating Minoan coastal settlements and inspiring Plato’s story of the lost island of Atlantis. Still another natural catastrophe, perhaps an earthquake or another eruption of Thera, further weakened Minoa and made it ripe for invasion. In any case, c. 1400 BCE, the Mycenaean Greeks did just that. They destroyed much of the island, occupied the Minoan palaces, and effectively brought Minoan civilization to an end.
Of all the Bronze Age civilizations, the Mycenaean was by far the most militant and short-lived. Emerging c. 1600 BCE among the cities of mainland Greece, it quickly became more an empire than a civilization, extending its reach to Crete, Turkey, Cyprus and Italy. Its swords and other artefacts have been found as far away as Germany and the Caucasus. Unlike the Minoans, Mycenaean society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy who advanced their interests through conquest. It is the setting of much ancient Greek literature, including the epics of Homer who, in the Iliad, recounts the probably legendary tale of the Mycenaean defeat of Troy in the Trojan War. No single explanation fits the archaeological evidence for the collapse of this warring civilization. Climate change, environmental catastrophe, invasion by the Dorians or the Sea Peoples, or the more widespread availability of iron weapons – all these may have contributed to its demise. The fact is that, from 1200 BCE, its palace centres and outlying settlements were being abandoned or destroyed, and within a hundred years any recognisable features of Mycenaean culture had disappeared.
So ended the 3000-year Age of Civilizations! By the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, all of these great Bronze Age civilizations had fallen prey, either to natural calamities, invading barbarians, or conquest by expansionist empires. Their legacy, however, continues to the present day, as certain of their defining characteristics continue to shape the civilised world.
One of these is the necessity of trade. Civilizations depend on the export-import of food and other essentials between their cities and other more distant regions. This requires long-distance trade relationships and the development of transportation systems to service them. So ox-drawn, and later horse-drawn carts, are found from early in the 4th millennium BCE. The world’s oldest known roadway, the Sweet Track in England, dates from the same time, as does the construction of more sophisticated sailing vessels. Trade also required the invention of money to replace the previous barter system – (the Sumerians began using silver bars and the Egyptians gold bars as a medium of exchange almost from the beginning) – and the invention of writing (Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics) c. 3200 BCE in order to keep accounts. The accumulation of money soon became synonymous with power, and eventually necessitated the introduction of legal codes (e.g. the Sumerian Code of Ur in 2050 BCE and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi in 1760 BCE) to regulate business practices and the ownership of private property. All of which of course have been enormously elaborated over the centuries ever since.
Another defining characteristic involves an increasingly complex division of labour, the accumulation of wealth, private property, and class stratification based on ownership and control of production. These, together with the centralising of government in the person and court of a priest-king, led quickly to the emergence of a privileged ruling class and a complementary religious or priestly class. Overlapping networks of political, religious, economic, and military power differentially benefited these privileged groups by exploiting the mass of peasant producers, via taxation and slavery, and funneling resources and power from the bottom to the top of the social hierarchy. The common thread is control. A small group of people, the ruling and priestly class, controls the mass of people through the institutions of civilization.
In this respect, not a great deal has changed over the centuries. A wealthy and powerful elite continues to control production, buy elections, manipulate governments, run the military-industrial complex, and manage the media. In this they are sanctioned by the religious establishment, supported by an educational system that selects who will and will not have access to high-status jobs, and protected against the threat of rebellion by contemporary versions of the ancient Coliseum that keep the masses entertained.
Two other defining characteristics are worth noting. One is institutionalized warfare and the magnification of military power. The other is the building of monumental tombs and ceremonial centres. The former, born in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE and growing in its killing power ever since, has, within the last 100 years, gone virtually out of control. Any restraints are gone. Wars are fought over ideas as much as over territory and resources, and the wholesale destruction of entire populations has become commonplace. The latter, whether the ziggurats of Mesopotamia or the pyramids of Egypt or the monumental palaces of Minoa, like the contemporary skyscrapers of New York or Dubai or Toronto, seem to express a kind of adolescent “I’m-the-biggest-I’m-the-best” defiance of death and a reaching for immortality.
The Age of Civilizations and Empires is scarcely over, and its legacy is evident everywhere around us. The great empires that dominated Europe until recently – the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian – finally collapsed only in the chaos of World War I. The Empire of Japan’s divine mission to rule the world ended only in the radioactive fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the last great empire – the British – was ultimately subdued only as recently as 1947 by the diminutive figure of Mohandas Ghandi.
Is it possible that we might finally be emerging from our collective adolescence? As we move towards a global community, could humanity be moving to a new level of maturity? If so, can we make that transition before some catastrophic clash of ideologies and worldviews brings the entire human experiment to an end? I think so. At least, that remains my hope and my contention.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The rise of cities, kings, and warfare
For more than 6000 years, from the dawn of the Neolithic Era when the first horticultural villages appeared in what is now Syria and the West Bank of Palestine, until the start of the Bronze Age (3500 BCE) when the first great civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, humanity enjoyed a relatively settled, peaceful, and egalitarian existence. Like the latency period of our individual development (age 6–11), it was a time of calm before the storm of our collective adolescence engulfed us in the ensuing Age of Civilizations and Empires
During the later stages of the Neolithic Era, a number of developments took place that led inevitably to the emergence of the great Bronze Age civilizations:
• the growth of simple villages into large and complex city-states
• the invention of kingship
• the rise of militarism and large-scale warfare in an increasingly male-dominated world.
The growth of city-states
During much of the Neolithic period, our ancestors lived in pastoral-horticultural villages of anywhere from 150 to 2000 people. As their technology improved, and they discovered ways of farming more intensively (e.g. the polished stone axe for clearing forests, irrigation ditches, crop rotation, and the ox-drawn plough), they began to produce more food than was needed to meet the immediate needs of the community. A food surplus that could be stored, or possibly traded for other necessities, provided a measure of security hitherto unknown and attracted more and more people from the nomadic life of the hunter-gatherer to the settled life of the Neolithic village. As early as 7500 BCE, some villages were already approaching city size. By 5000 BCE, we see in some of them the first evidence of intensive year-round agriculture. And by 4500 BCE, some had grown in size to as many as 10,000 people.
People who lived in these early towns and cities now had time to concentrate on things other than growing food. Some became skilled in producing tools, others in weaving clothes, and others in building mud-brick houses. As early as 6000 BCE there is evidence of specialist classes – artisans, priests, traders, and administrators. And with such specialisation came social stratification and economic disparity – certainly in comparison with the egalitarian structure of earlier hunter-gatherer bands. The domestication of animals itself contributed to such disparity. Possession of livestock encouraged competition between families and led to inherited inequalities of wealth. But, for all that, such inequalities were still not pronounced. In the Anatolian settlement of Catal Hoyuk (6300-5500 BCE), for example, although some homes appear slightly larger or more elaborately decorated than others, there is on the whole a striking lack of difference in the size of homes and burial sites.
By the start of the Bronze Age, many of these burgeoning Neolithic towns had so grown in size and complexity as to become the first city-states. These were self-governing territories focused on a major urban centre with sovereignty over a surrounding region ranging from a few square miles to a vast hinterland that might itself contain other cities or towns. The earliest included the Mesopotamian cities of Babylon and Ur, the Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and the Egyptian cities of Hierakonpolis and Abydos. As the centre of economic, religious, cultural, and administrative life, the core city provided a variety of livelihoods while the surrounding area supplied food and other resources. Now there are marked disparities in wealth, power, and social class. The privileged classes included the professional religious persons, the ruling authorities, the wealthy traders, and the landowners. Those who worked the land were the peasants.
City-states reached their peak in Greece. By the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the Greeks were organised into hundreds of city-states, including Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. In Italy, what began as a 9th century BCE village became the city-state of Rome and thence the centre of a vast empire. The Middle Ages saw a revival of Italian city-states such as Florence, Genoa, Siena, and Venice. What became known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice controlled a vast land-and-sea empire throughout the eastern Mediterranean until it was finally conquered by Napoleon in 1797 CE. And some German city-states such as Bremen and Hamburg managed to survive into the 19th century. For the most part, however, unable to defend themselves against aggressive territorial empires, independent city-states went into serious decline after 1500 CE. Today, with the exception of Monaco, Singapore, and Vatican City, they are all consigned to history.
The invention of kingship
Large population centres, characterised by increasing social stratification and economic disparity, need some form of governmental control. Certainly this was true of the first city-states. By the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE, some had reached such size and complexity as to require an organised system of government. And so they invented kingship.
Precisely when or how the first kings came to power remains shrouded in pre-historic mist. Some early Sumerian texts (made possible only after cuneiform writing had been invented c. 3500 BCE) point to an earlier time, before kings existed, when the people wandered in a state of leaderless confusion – to which the gods responded by delivering to them the concept of kingship. “Kingship,” it was said, “descended from heaven.” The office, in other words, was of divine origin.
At about the same time, the priestly watchers of the Mesopotamian night skies discovered that the seven celestial lights – the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – move at mathematically determined rates through fixed constellations. Following the principle of “as above, so below,” they concluded that this celestial order should be reflected in the social order and that human affairs should be governed by a king and members of his court who played out a ritual pantomime of identification with the heavenly bodies. So the first Priest-Kings arose – rulers through whom each city-state was governed in accordance with the will of its patron deity.
From the start, religion and politics were in cahoots. Religion legitimised the power structure while priests enjoyed the fruits of their royal patronage. Soon the surpluses accumulated by the great city-states were being funnelled to the king and his court. More and more the labour of the many filled the treasure chests of the few. Why would men and women willingly submit to such a regime? Because they wanted a visible god or representative of the deity – a kind of father figure – always present to receive their offerings, provide necessary leadership, and ensure their protection and prosperity. And for this they were willing to pay the price of their own subjugation.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of these early priest-kings as ruling their cities with anything resembling the tyranny of later Roman emperors or European monarchs. On the contrary, with little individual autonomy, they were locked into playing their prescribed role. Moreover, though the job had undeniable perks, the term of office was time-limited and ended after a certain span of years with the king, together with dignitaries of his court, being slain in the ancient custom of ritual regicide. An extension of the longstanding Neolithic tradition of human and animal sacrifice intended to ensure continuing fertility and prosperity for the community, regicide was part of the job description to which the king willingly submitted. However his reign began – typically chosen in some manner by the local deity to take on the mantle of kingship and become the consort of the Great Mother – it ended with his being ritually sacrificed.
The occasion seems linked to the orbit of the planets – most often to the 8-year cycle of Venus or the 12-year cycle of Jupiter. Stargazing priests would set the date, and members of the king’s council or family would carry it out. Nor were they dispatched alone. Burial sites excavated in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur contain bodies from sixteen different royal courts, including not only those of the priest-kings themselves but of assorted members of their entourages.
Though later kings, more concerned with their own well-being than that of the polis, conspired to have substitutes sacrificed in their stead, the sacrifice of divine or divinely-chosen figures has continued to be an important theme throughout history. Sacred regicide, evident in the early stages of every literate culture, was still being practiced in India in the 16th century CE. In Zimbabwe, as recently as 1810, priests were still ordering the strangulation of the king every four years. And the voluntary sacrifice of a divine saviour to effect our salvation continues to be the central motif in the dominant religion of the Western world.
The rise of warfare
Throughout the Neolithic Era, the Mother Goddess was the ruling principle of the universe. Her presence and power was dispersed throughout the natural world. With the rise of city-states and a system of government modeled on our solar system, however, the cosmological order came more and more to be seen in its hierarchical dimension. Rather than power being dispersed throughout nature, it came more and more to reside above nature – in a celestial realm from whence a deity communicated his will and exercised his power through a human ruler. And significantly, that power became more his than hers. The realm of nature spirits was becoming a pantheon of gods and goddesses, with increasingly aggressive male deities coming to the fore.
Other factors doubtless contributed to this shift towards male dominance. Much of the work on which the city-state depended and which therefore had economic value (e.g. clearing forests, ploughing fields, and digging irrigation ditches) required male muscle-power in a way that earlier tasks such as planting seeds with a pointed stick did not. It may also be that the very nature of a city-state requires a more aggressive and expansive energy. The increasing concentration of power and wealth at the top means progressively less for those at the bottom. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, unless the state expands its resource base. Economic growth is essential to avoid social unrest and potential revolt. Eventually the city-state’s consumption will outstrip its own resources and drive it to consume the resources of its neighbours.
As early as the 8th millennium BCE, the village of Jericho, now a proto-city, found it necessary to fortify itself with a surrounding wall. Uruk in Mesopotamia is one of the world’s oldest known walled cities. By the 5th millennium BCE, many hitherto peaceful settlements, not only in the Middle East but in the Indus Valley as well, were fortified with a palisade and outer ditch as neighbouring communities quarrelled more and more over control of prime agricultural land. Nor was the threat only from neighbouring city-states. Bands of desert-dwelling nomads, with an eye on the rich fertile land, invaded many of these towns and villages and brought with them their warring male sky-gods. Clearly the level of testosterone was on the rise.
And it was only the beginning. By the dawn of the Bronze Age civilizations in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, virtually all of the city-states that comprised them were fortified with walls and defended by armies. Until then, armed conflict had been largely limited to local quarrels as one city-state bumped into another, or as may have been necessary to fend off invading nomads. But in 2350 BCE, King Sargon of Akkad changed all that. He invaded Sumer in massive style – the first outright war of conquest and total subjugation – and the world since then has never looked back. Ironically it was at this same time that city-states, in at least this part of the world, ended their practice of ritual regicide. End one form of ritual murder and institute a far more lethal one! Homo sapiens had discovered another mark of its specie’s uniqueness: a seeming delight in massacring huge numbers of its own kind. Now we could shed blood on a massive scale.
So began the Age of Civilizations and Empires. The rise of city-states, the emergence of kings, and the institution of large-scale warfare in an expansionist, male-dominated world marked a massive upheaval in human society. And it initiated an empire-building era that has lasted until the present.
During the later stages of the Neolithic Era, a number of developments took place that led inevitably to the emergence of the great Bronze Age civilizations:
• the growth of simple villages into large and complex city-states
• the invention of kingship
• the rise of militarism and large-scale warfare in an increasingly male-dominated world.
The growth of city-states
During much of the Neolithic period, our ancestors lived in pastoral-horticultural villages of anywhere from 150 to 2000 people. As their technology improved, and they discovered ways of farming more intensively (e.g. the polished stone axe for clearing forests, irrigation ditches, crop rotation, and the ox-drawn plough), they began to produce more food than was needed to meet the immediate needs of the community. A food surplus that could be stored, or possibly traded for other necessities, provided a measure of security hitherto unknown and attracted more and more people from the nomadic life of the hunter-gatherer to the settled life of the Neolithic village. As early as 7500 BCE, some villages were already approaching city size. By 5000 BCE, we see in some of them the first evidence of intensive year-round agriculture. And by 4500 BCE, some had grown in size to as many as 10,000 people.
People who lived in these early towns and cities now had time to concentrate on things other than growing food. Some became skilled in producing tools, others in weaving clothes, and others in building mud-brick houses. As early as 6000 BCE there is evidence of specialist classes – artisans, priests, traders, and administrators. And with such specialisation came social stratification and economic disparity – certainly in comparison with the egalitarian structure of earlier hunter-gatherer bands. The domestication of animals itself contributed to such disparity. Possession of livestock encouraged competition between families and led to inherited inequalities of wealth. But, for all that, such inequalities were still not pronounced. In the Anatolian settlement of Catal Hoyuk (6300-5500 BCE), for example, although some homes appear slightly larger or more elaborately decorated than others, there is on the whole a striking lack of difference in the size of homes and burial sites.
By the start of the Bronze Age, many of these burgeoning Neolithic towns had so grown in size and complexity as to become the first city-states. These were self-governing territories focused on a major urban centre with sovereignty over a surrounding region ranging from a few square miles to a vast hinterland that might itself contain other cities or towns. The earliest included the Mesopotamian cities of Babylon and Ur, the Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and the Egyptian cities of Hierakonpolis and Abydos. As the centre of economic, religious, cultural, and administrative life, the core city provided a variety of livelihoods while the surrounding area supplied food and other resources. Now there are marked disparities in wealth, power, and social class. The privileged classes included the professional religious persons, the ruling authorities, the wealthy traders, and the landowners. Those who worked the land were the peasants.
City-states reached their peak in Greece. By the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the Greeks were organised into hundreds of city-states, including Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. In Italy, what began as a 9th century BCE village became the city-state of Rome and thence the centre of a vast empire. The Middle Ages saw a revival of Italian city-states such as Florence, Genoa, Siena, and Venice. What became known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice controlled a vast land-and-sea empire throughout the eastern Mediterranean until it was finally conquered by Napoleon in 1797 CE. And some German city-states such as Bremen and Hamburg managed to survive into the 19th century. For the most part, however, unable to defend themselves against aggressive territorial empires, independent city-states went into serious decline after 1500 CE. Today, with the exception of Monaco, Singapore, and Vatican City, they are all consigned to history.
The invention of kingship
Large population centres, characterised by increasing social stratification and economic disparity, need some form of governmental control. Certainly this was true of the first city-states. By the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE, some had reached such size and complexity as to require an organised system of government. And so they invented kingship.
Precisely when or how the first kings came to power remains shrouded in pre-historic mist. Some early Sumerian texts (made possible only after cuneiform writing had been invented c. 3500 BCE) point to an earlier time, before kings existed, when the people wandered in a state of leaderless confusion – to which the gods responded by delivering to them the concept of kingship. “Kingship,” it was said, “descended from heaven.” The office, in other words, was of divine origin.
At about the same time, the priestly watchers of the Mesopotamian night skies discovered that the seven celestial lights – the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – move at mathematically determined rates through fixed constellations. Following the principle of “as above, so below,” they concluded that this celestial order should be reflected in the social order and that human affairs should be governed by a king and members of his court who played out a ritual pantomime of identification with the heavenly bodies. So the first Priest-Kings arose – rulers through whom each city-state was governed in accordance with the will of its patron deity.
From the start, religion and politics were in cahoots. Religion legitimised the power structure while priests enjoyed the fruits of their royal patronage. Soon the surpluses accumulated by the great city-states were being funnelled to the king and his court. More and more the labour of the many filled the treasure chests of the few. Why would men and women willingly submit to such a regime? Because they wanted a visible god or representative of the deity – a kind of father figure – always present to receive their offerings, provide necessary leadership, and ensure their protection and prosperity. And for this they were willing to pay the price of their own subjugation.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of these early priest-kings as ruling their cities with anything resembling the tyranny of later Roman emperors or European monarchs. On the contrary, with little individual autonomy, they were locked into playing their prescribed role. Moreover, though the job had undeniable perks, the term of office was time-limited and ended after a certain span of years with the king, together with dignitaries of his court, being slain in the ancient custom of ritual regicide. An extension of the longstanding Neolithic tradition of human and animal sacrifice intended to ensure continuing fertility and prosperity for the community, regicide was part of the job description to which the king willingly submitted. However his reign began – typically chosen in some manner by the local deity to take on the mantle of kingship and become the consort of the Great Mother – it ended with his being ritually sacrificed.
The occasion seems linked to the orbit of the planets – most often to the 8-year cycle of Venus or the 12-year cycle of Jupiter. Stargazing priests would set the date, and members of the king’s council or family would carry it out. Nor were they dispatched alone. Burial sites excavated in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur contain bodies from sixteen different royal courts, including not only those of the priest-kings themselves but of assorted members of their entourages.
Though later kings, more concerned with their own well-being than that of the polis, conspired to have substitutes sacrificed in their stead, the sacrifice of divine or divinely-chosen figures has continued to be an important theme throughout history. Sacred regicide, evident in the early stages of every literate culture, was still being practiced in India in the 16th century CE. In Zimbabwe, as recently as 1810, priests were still ordering the strangulation of the king every four years. And the voluntary sacrifice of a divine saviour to effect our salvation continues to be the central motif in the dominant religion of the Western world.
The rise of warfare
Throughout the Neolithic Era, the Mother Goddess was the ruling principle of the universe. Her presence and power was dispersed throughout the natural world. With the rise of city-states and a system of government modeled on our solar system, however, the cosmological order came more and more to be seen in its hierarchical dimension. Rather than power being dispersed throughout nature, it came more and more to reside above nature – in a celestial realm from whence a deity communicated his will and exercised his power through a human ruler. And significantly, that power became more his than hers. The realm of nature spirits was becoming a pantheon of gods and goddesses, with increasingly aggressive male deities coming to the fore.
Other factors doubtless contributed to this shift towards male dominance. Much of the work on which the city-state depended and which therefore had economic value (e.g. clearing forests, ploughing fields, and digging irrigation ditches) required male muscle-power in a way that earlier tasks such as planting seeds with a pointed stick did not. It may also be that the very nature of a city-state requires a more aggressive and expansive energy. The increasing concentration of power and wealth at the top means progressively less for those at the bottom. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, unless the state expands its resource base. Economic growth is essential to avoid social unrest and potential revolt. Eventually the city-state’s consumption will outstrip its own resources and drive it to consume the resources of its neighbours.
As early as the 8th millennium BCE, the village of Jericho, now a proto-city, found it necessary to fortify itself with a surrounding wall. Uruk in Mesopotamia is one of the world’s oldest known walled cities. By the 5th millennium BCE, many hitherto peaceful settlements, not only in the Middle East but in the Indus Valley as well, were fortified with a palisade and outer ditch as neighbouring communities quarrelled more and more over control of prime agricultural land. Nor was the threat only from neighbouring city-states. Bands of desert-dwelling nomads, with an eye on the rich fertile land, invaded many of these towns and villages and brought with them their warring male sky-gods. Clearly the level of testosterone was on the rise.
And it was only the beginning. By the dawn of the Bronze Age civilizations in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, virtually all of the city-states that comprised them were fortified with walls and defended by armies. Until then, armed conflict had been largely limited to local quarrels as one city-state bumped into another, or as may have been necessary to fend off invading nomads. But in 2350 BCE, King Sargon of Akkad changed all that. He invaded Sumer in massive style – the first outright war of conquest and total subjugation – and the world since then has never looked back. Ironically it was at this same time that city-states, in at least this part of the world, ended their practice of ritual regicide. End one form of ritual murder and institute a far more lethal one! Homo sapiens had discovered another mark of its specie’s uniqueness: a seeming delight in massacring huge numbers of its own kind. Now we could shed blood on a massive scale.
So began the Age of Civilizations and Empires. The rise of city-states, the emergence of kings, and the institution of large-scale warfare in an expansionist, male-dominated world marked a massive upheaval in human society. And it initiated an empire-building era that has lasted until the present.
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