History Explored: The Ancient World Civilization

 

The first humans evolved in Africa around two million years ago. By 9000 BG their descendants had spread to most parts of the globe and in some areas were beginning to practise agriculture. From around 4000 BG the first civilizations developed, initially in the Near East and India and subsequently in China, Mesoamerica and South America. In the centuries that followed, to AD 500, many states and empires rose and fell.

 

Introduction

Some five to eight million years ago, a species of small African primates began walking upright. While there are many theories about the advantages conferred by moving on two legs rather than four, there is general agreement that the success of the hominid line (humans and their ancestors) is due in part to the adoption of this new method of locomotion. Between five and one million years ago, hominid species proliferated in East Africa and southern Africa, giving rise by 1.8 million years ago to the new genus, orao, to which we ourselves belong (map J). The development by Homo of stone tools - and, we may presume, tools that have not survived, made of other materials such as bone and wood - was a major advance in human evolution, allowing our ancestors to engage in activities for which they lacked the physical capabilities. This ability to develop technology to overcome our physical limitations has enabled us to develop from a small and restricted population of African apes to a species that dominates every continent except Antarctica and has even reached the moon. Between 1.8 million and 300,000 years ago, members of our genus colonized much of temperate Europe and Asia as well as tropical areas, aided by their ability to use fire and create shelter. By 9000 BG the only parts of the globe which modern humans - Homo sapiens - had not reached were some remote islands and circumpolar regions.

 

FROM HUNTING TO FARMING

In 10,000 BG the world was inhabited solely by groups who lived by hunting and gathering wild foods. Within the succeeding 8,000 years, however, much of the world was transformed. People in many parts of the world began to produce their own food, domesticating and selectively breeding plants and animals. Farming supported larger and more settled communities, allowing the accumulation of stored food surpluses - albeit with the counterpoised risks involved in clearing areas of plants and animals that had formerly been a source of back-up food in lean years. Agricultural communities expanded in many regions, for example colonizing Europe and South Asia, and in doing so radically changed the landscape. High agricultural productivity supported high population densities, and towns and cities grew up, often with monumental public architecture. 

However, there were also limitations in these regions, such as an unreliable climate or river regime, or a scarcity of important raw materials (such as stone), and there was often conflict between neighbouring groups. Religious or secular leaders who could organize food storage and redistribution, craft production, trade, defence and social order became increasingly powerful. These factors led to the emergence of the first civilizations in many parts of the world between around 4000 and 200 BG (maps 3 and 4 overleaf).

 A surplus of agricultural produce was used in these civilizations to support a growing number of specialists who were not engaged in food production: craftsmen, traders, priests and rulers, as well as full-time warriors - although the majority of soldiers were normally farmers. Specialists in some societies included scribes. The development of writing proved a major advance, enabling vast quantities of human knowledge and experience to be recorded, shared and passed on. Nevertheless, in most societies literacy was confined to an elite - priests, rulers and the scribes they employed - who used it as a means of religious, political or economic control. In most parts of the world, the belief that there should be universal access to knowledge recorded in writing is a recent phenomenon.

 

FIRST CIVILIZATIONS

As the millennia passed there was continuing innovation in agricultural techniques and tools, with the domestication of more plants and animals and the improvement by selective breeding of those already being exploited. These developments increased productivity and allowed the colonization of new areas. Specialist pastoral groups moved into previously uninhabited, inhospitable desert regions. Swamps were drained in Mesoamerica and South America and highly productive raised fields were constructed in their place. Irrigation techniques allowed the cultivation of river valleys in otherwise arid regions, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt.

 

RITUAL AND RELIGION

Although without written records it is impossible to reconstruct details of the belief systems of past societies, evidence of religious beliefs and ritual activities abounds, particularly in works of art, monumental structures and grave offerings. Ritual and religion were a powerful spur to the creation of monumental architecture by literate urban societies such as the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, but also in smaller societies dependent on agriculture, such as the prehistoric inhabitants of Europe who built the megalithic tombs, or the Moundbuilders of North America. Monuments also reflected other factors, such as a desire for prestige or to affirm territorial rights. Although such building activity implied the ability to mobilize large numbers of people, this did not necessarily require hierarchical social control; it could be achieved within the framework of a community led by elders or priests.

 

Concern with the proper disposal of the dead was displayed from Neanderthal times, more than 50,000 years ago. In the burial or other treatment of the body regarded as appropriate (such as cremation or exposure), the dead were often accompanied by grave offerings. These could range from food or small items of personal dress, to large numbers of sacrificed relatives or retainers as in tombs dating from the 3rd millennium BC in Egypt and the 2nd millennium BC in Shang China. The offerings might be related to life after death, for which the deceased needed to be equipped, but also frequently reflected aspects of the dead person's social position in life.

Grave offerings often provide valuable clues about past social organization. They also point to the important part played by artisans in the development of civilized communities, in particular producing prestige items for use by the elite and manufactured goods to be traded in exchange for vital raw materials. In developed agricultural societies, craft production was unlikely to be a full[1]time pursuit for more than a handful of individuals, but this did not prevent high standards being reached in many communities. Unlike pottery, which was made by the majority of settled communities, and stone, used for tools worldwide from very early times, metalworking did not develop in all parts of the globe, due in part to the distribution of ores. Initially metal artefacts tended to be prestige objects, used to demonstrate individual or community status, but metal was soon used for producing tools as well. The development of techniques for working iron, in particular, was a major breakthrough, given the abundance and widespread distribution of iron ore.

 

 

STATES AND EMPIRES

By about 500 BG ironworking was well established in Europe, West and South Asia, and in parts of East Asia and Africa. States had developed in most of these regions at least a thousand years before, but for a variety of reasons the focal areas of these entities had changed over the course of time. The formerly fertile lower reaches of the Euphrates, cradle of the Mesopotamian civilization, had suffered salination, and so the focus had shifted north to the competing Assyrian and Babylonian empires. In India the primary civilization had emerged along the Indus River system; after its fall, the focus of power and prosperity shifted to the Ganges Valley, which by the 3rd century BG was the centre of the Mauryan Empire. 

Europe was also developing native states, and by the 1st century AD much of Europe and adjacent regions of Asia and Africa were united through military conquest by the Romans. The rise and expansion of the far-reaching Roman Empire was paralleled in the east by that of the equally vast Chinese Han Empire. Military conquest was not, however, the only means by which large areas were united. The Andean region, for example, was dominated in the 1st millennium BG by the Ghavin culture, seemingly related to a widely shared religious cult centred on a shrine at Ghavin de Huantar. A complex interplay of political, economic, religious and social factors determined the pattern of the rise and fall of states. On the fringes of the human world, pioneers continued to colonize new areas, developing ways of life to enable them to settle in the circumpolar regions and the deserts of Arabia and to venture huge distances across uncharted waters to settle on the most remote Pacific islands. By AD 500 the Antarctic was the only continent still unpeopled.