Pavlac B.A. A Concise Survey of Western Civilization: Supremacies and Diversities throughout History
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CHAPTER 2
harmful when men murder their friends, family, or neighbors. Much of our history
has been a harsh tale of coping with this male aggression.
From the beginning, humans have lived in both families and communities, men
and women, young and old, each mutually dependent and involved with the other.
Individuals without family and friends were sure to die. Nor could one family exist
by itself for long. Maybe a half-dozen to a dozen families made up the typical human
community for much of the millennia during which our ancestors evolved.
To deal with the inevitable squabbles within and quarrels among these commu-
nities, our ancestors formed the first political arrangements. Someone needed to
organize and lead, deciding where to camp, when to move, how to punish, and
even how to protect the young and to raise them with all the knowledge necessary
for survival. Hominids developed increasingly complicated rules of behavior, with-
out which communities would fall apart in anger and jealousy. Thus the choosing
of leaders, usually men proved in wisdom or strength who could resolve conflicts,
became the first political organization.
Hominids also formed a primitive economic system of hunting and gathering
that wrung the necessities of life from nature. Hunter-gatherers followed the game
and the ripening plants as nomads. Everyone in the community participated in
foraging for food and raw materials and in consuming them. Tribes traded and
exchanged with other tribes for food, tools, and breeding partners. Migrating out
of the original human homeland of Africa, people soon adapted to every climate,
from the frigid Arctic to the sweltering jungle.
Choices about sexual partners soon created superficial differences in appear-
ance and behavior among groups of humans in all these different living environ-
ments. These variations are described now as ethnicity. Inherited physical
attributes (skin color, eye shape, hair, height, etc.) and learned culture (language,
history, manners) separated groups of humans from one another. Human ethnic
communities did not remain separated, however, as different ethnic groups trav-
eled to where others lived. Sometimes the settlement of differing groups of people
provoked conflict; other times it created bonds of friendship. Despite this surface
multiformity, all human beings belong to the same biological species of Homo
sapiens.
In sum, the anatomy of human ancestors, their tools and weapons, their cre-
ative minds, their social and political bonds, and their economic practices gave
them advantages over most other animals. All these attributes allowed humans to
survive four great ice ages that lasted for tens of thousands of years. Scientists still
do not know why these ice ages happened. We ourselves may just be living in a
brief geologic pause between one ice age and another.
The global climate change was catastrophic for many species of plant and ani-
mal life. Vast ice sheets covered much of the land masses. Growing seasons short-
ened. Those living things that could not cope became extinct. The Neanderthals
were among those who failed to adapt. These close primate relatives and neighbors
to humans were named after the German valley where modern archaeologists
found the first skull attributed to the species. By about 25,000
B.C.
, Neanderthals
had become extinct, probably because they could not compete with Homo sapiens.
About ten thousand years ago, the climate warmed again, the summers lengthened,
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and the glaciers retreated. Humans survived in a precarious place within the world’s
ecosystem, poised for greater things.
Review: What important cultural survival techniques did our ancestors use?
Response:
BOUND TO THE SOIL
The end of the last ice age allowed what could be considered the most fundamental
and radical change in human history, the so-called Neolithic Agricultural Revolu-
tion. For historians, the term revolution represents a major transformation of
human politics, society, and culture. People lived different lives after revolutions
from those they lived before. This first important human revolution occurred dur-
ing the Neolithic Age (from the Greek for ‘‘New Stone Age’’), named after the new
kinds of tools used, different from those of earlier hunter-gatherers. Archaeological
evidence shows how ten thousand years ago the arrowheads and spear points suit-
able for hunting began to be replaced by hoes and sickles, the tools for planting
and harvesting. Humankind discovered farming, forever changing our way of life.
While hunter-gatherers adapted themselves to nature, civilized people began adapt-
ing nature to themselves.
The culture of farming, or agriculture, the growing of plants and raising of
animals, seems so natural to us today that we hardly think of it as a human inven-
tion. One can imagine how some person, after gathering grains or fruits, noticed
that the seeds dropped on the ground produced those same plants weeks later.
The logical next step was to push the seeds into the ground and wait for them to
grow instead of wandering around, looking for the plants. If people stored enough
to live on during the growing periods, they could simply stay put instead of wearing
out their feet walking. So instead of living in mobile tents or temporary huts, people
built sturdy houses from logs, mud, or baked clay bricks. Homes offered better
shelter against the elements.
Domestication of animals was equally as important as finding the right plants
to grow. Dogs had first begun bonding with humans during the ice ages. While a
few societies have dined on dog, most have viewed them as companions and useful
helpers in the hunt. Once people settled down to farm, they reasoned that if dogs
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could be bred to be tame, why not try it with the beasts that one hunted? Wild oxen
became beef and milk cattle; boars became pigs; wild fowl became poultry. With
taming of both plants and animals, human communities settled down and became
tied to plots of land to raise their food.
One cannot exaggerate the vast change these innovations meant for humans.
Before agriculture, everyone had been at the mercy of the environment, depending
on nature to provide sustenance. Nature was still, of course, important, and its
awesome force remained dangerous. An extended drought or a brief flood could
kill many people. Nevertheless, farming meant that humans began to dominate
nature, at least in small ways. Soon the people who managed food production even
learned to outproduce nature. They selected and bred stronger, hardier crops and
animals. They weeded out invasive plants that would steal water and nutrients.
They irrigated, digging trenches that led water from distant streams to feed the
roots of their seedlings. They chased away the wild creatures that would devour the
stalks. They diversified their crops and animals to provide more resources. From all
this hard work and innovation, people produced more food, allowing families to
grow as fast as hungry infant mouths could be filled. Since women did not have to
worry about long treks as nomads, they could more easily endure pregnancies
while looking after their other young children at the same time. Farmers soon grew
enough extra foodstuffs so that a few people no longer had to work in agricultural
production.
Nonfarmers could then devote their time to further improving people’s ability
to dominate nature. Farming thus led to a whole range of new occupations beyond
tilling the soil. Some people could devote their energy to making clothing. Weavers
wove the fibers of flax and hemp on a loom to produce cloth. Tailors cut cloth into
unusual styles and colored it with dyes in patterns never seen on plant or animal.
Some fashions promoted comfort, protection from weather, and ease of movement;
others emphasized social roles at the expense of proper fit. Cooks mixed, roasted,
baked, and boiled increasing varieties of plant and animal stuffs into cuisine. Potters
baked clay pots that better preserved food, free from spoilage and vermin. Cart-
wrights built wagons on wheels to transport large loads over long distances. Masons
stacked bricks and stone into secure buildings, beginning the art of architecture.
Especially where land could be turned over by the plow, economic success led
to growing communities where hundreds of families could reside. Several families
planted themselves into small villages. These might contain a few families or num-
bers up to two hundred people. Villages might grow into towns, which might hold
a few thousand people. Then great cities bloomed, ranging from many thousands
to today’s huge urban areas of millions of people. This complex life of intercon-
nected cities is called civilization. The civilized way of life differed from that of
the hunter-gatherers. Urban living provided a rich, creative, evolving dynamic that
expanded and intensified human domination of the planet.
The first civilized political organization, the city-state, was literally the smallest
viable unit of civilization. It included the city itself (made up of homes, businesses,
and public buildings) and the surrounding countryside of farmland from which the
people of the city fed and supplied themselves. These larger numbers of people
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confined in a small area required new leaders to organize the increasingly complex
human activities.
The first important leaders perhaps made use of religion as a key source of
convincing others to obey. Agriculture encouraged new, more complex religions.
Most were a form of polytheism, the belief in many gods and goddesses, divine
beings who were more actively connected to the new practices of farming (see table
2.1). Storm gods and earth goddesses tended to have more distinct personalities
and defined attributes than the vague spirits of animism. Priests (and, less often,
priestesses) conducted elaborate rituals and prayers intended to appease the gods.
People often shared in communal meals to celebrate the goodness of what the gods
had provided in nature. Ironically, priests and priestesses who managed the tem-
ples as centers of worship actually drew much of their power not from their com-
munication with supernatural beings, but from their practical, more systematic
knowledge of nature.
This brings up one of the most important basic principles:
Knowledge is power.
As these ancient religious leaders studied the natural world, looking for evidence
of the gods, they found data about seasons, climate, and soil conditions. Priests
Table 2.1. Comparisons of Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Polytheisms
Attribute Mesopotamian Egyptian Greek Roman Norse
Ruler of gods Enlil, Marduk, Ra Zeus Jupiter Odin
Asshur
Sky/storm Anu Nut, Horus Zeus Jupiter Thor
Earth Ninhursag Geb Gaia Terra/Tellus Erda
Water/sea Apsu, Enki Tefnut Poseidon Neptune Aegir
Sun Shamash Ra Apollo Apollo Sunna
Moon Sin Thoth Artemis Diana Moon
Wisdom Ea, Nabu Thoth Athena Minerva Odin
War Ninurta/Ishtar Nit, Menhit Ares Mars Tyr
Magic Enki Isis Hermes Mercury Odin
Crop fertility Dumuzi Ernutet Demeter Ceres Freyr
Alcoholic drink Ninkasi, Osiris Dionysius Bacchus Byggvir
Geshtinanna
Technology Hephaestus Vulcan
Trickster Set Hermes Mercury Loki
Love Ishtar Hathor Aphrodite Venus Freya
Fire/hearth Gibil Bes Hestia Vesta Frigga
Marriage Innana Hathor Hera Hymen, Juno Frigga
Death Ereshkigal Osiris Hades Pluto Hel
Note: The deities of ancient religions performed similar functions for agricultural peoples in early
civilizations.
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observed the heavens and calculated the calendar; they measured, added, and
divided to plan and build their temples and irrigation canals; they quantified trade
and agricultural production; they told stories (usually in the form of epic poems
about heroes) that defined for their culture the connections of humans to gods;
they invented writing to keep track of it all. Thus, the fields of astronomy, mathe-
matics, and literature became basic to the civilized way of life.
The priests passed on their knowledge in schools, one of the essential institu-
tions of civilization. Instead of having education provided by parents and commu-
nity leaders, as in hunter-gatherer societies, children of different families more
efficiently learned from professional teachers. Usually, though, elites allowed only
boys from prosperous families access to a formal education. The knowledgeable
few excluded girls and the poor from higher knowledge, thus restricting education
to only a privileged few.
Priests had to share leadership of society with kings, who became the dominant
political figures. Monarchy, the rule of kings, has been the most frequent form of
government throughout civilized history. The essential political questions became
(first) how many decisions affecting other people’s lives the king could make and
(second) who might influence or share in making those decisions. Some kings pos-
sessed only minimal power, enjoying tightly limited roles as figureheads or mere
symbols of authority. Members of the royal family, favorites, and court officials or
the upper classes might actually run the kingdom behind the scenes. Kings typically
strove to rule according to absolutism, the practice that one person should domi-
nate as much as possible in authority and decision making.
1
The acceptance of
absolute monarchy allowed a ruler to exercise as much power as human limitations
allowed. Attempts by rulers to establish absolute monarchies and resistance to such
efforts have driven many political changes in history.
Whether weak or strong, kings held three essential roles. First, they represented
the unity of the people. Each was symbolically the father of his country, the head of
the most important family of families. The importance of family often eased the
creation of a dynasty, where political power passed from parent to child. Dynasts
justified their monopoly on power by claiming connection to the gods, through
ancestry, favor, or promise. Even today, powerful political leaders endowed with
charisma are often seen as superior to normal citizens. The people worshiped these
‘‘Oriental despots’’ almost as elaborately as the gods they represented. The gods,
however, failed to preserve the lines of descendants. Accident, disease, and infertil-
ity might end dynasties, provoking political crises. The preference for male, pater-
nal authority often meant that power went from father to son. While this limited
the ability of females to rule, women did sometimes come to hold formal power.
Otherwise, their power worked like those of many women through history, influ-
encing the family members of their dynasties.
A king’s second role was to preserve peace among his own people. In this role,
a king usually acted as supreme judge (which was also a divine attribute). People
1. Historians and political theorists most often apply the term absolutism to European mon-
archs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
A.D.
While queens and kings during those years
clearly argued for unlimited authority, the concept does apply to all ages.
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petitioned the ruler for redress of wrongs. He settled their disputes over pigs or
pottery and punished the wrongdoers. To manage the complex relationships of
cities, kings began to establish laws. The most famous early law code was that which
King Hammurabi of Babylon commanded to be carved onto a black stone pillar
around 1700
B.C.
A picture above the Law Code of Hammurabi shows a god him-
self handing the laws to the king. Here the king was not going through the priests
but mediated himself with the gods, becoming the lawgiver within the cosmic
order. Such divine connections inspired legal systems for many early peoples. They
believed that keeping the law pleased the gods.
The laws, of course, laid out right and wrong in practical ways, dealing with
actual problems. Culture is encoded in a society’s laws, which reflect what matters
and what does not. One of the most essential rights in societies throughout
recorded history has been protecting property. Real estate, or arable land as prop-
erty, supported an agricultural society. Laws guaranteed that land could not be
easily taken away from owners and ensured that after the owner’s death it went to
the correct heirs. Laws defined which property belonged to whom and ordained
punishments for those who damaged or destroyed it.
Another universal legal issue for rulers has been regulating violence among
people. While hunter-gatherers often punished crimes with isolation or exile, civi-
lized regimes punished by taking wealth or inflicting physical pain. A fundamental
question for all societies has been to categorize the killing of one human by
another. Was it the defense of the nation by a soldier or of his family by a parent?
Was it capital punishment inflicted by the state for justice? Was it a vicious crime by
a murderer? Was it manslaughter by accident? Or did it matter at all? Many ancient
laws, like Hammurabi’s, punished a wide variety of crimes with death, crimes that
today we might consider unworthy of such a high price. Laws also began to regulate
drunkenness, after ancient farmers discovered how to manage the fermentation
processes for turning grapes into wine and grains into beer. For example, a wine
seller not reporting bad characters in his establishment to the authorities might be
executed for that oversight. Many other punishments involved mutilation. A son
who hit his father, in Hammurabi’s Code, for example, deserved having his hand
cut off. Fines and banishment also were common, but not prison, because of the
high cost of keeping a person confined.
The third role of a king was as war leader against foreign foes. Blunt force and
the ability to kill is an obvious form of power. Yet no king could fight on his own,
except in legend, such as the superhuman hero Gilgamesh of Sumerian literature
(see below). A king needed warriors. One of the basic questions through history is,
‘‘Whom do the soldiers obey?’’ Whoever can convince others to kill for him has real
power.
By his nature, the king’s command over life and death in peace and war gave
him supreme authority within a society. The earliest kings ruled over city-states, the
smallest and most cohesive political units. Because city-states were vulnerable
owing to their small size and because wealth and power tempted kings, they soon
desired to dominate other societies. If a king gained power over similar people in
a number of cities, he would rule a kingdom. If a king came to govern other peo-
ples who may have differed in ethnicity, religion, language, history, or any number
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of other ways, he became an emperor ruling an empire. As kingdoms grew to
be larger and more powerful, kings often were tempted to conquer their foreign
neighbors. Thus arose the practice of imperialism, taking over other peoples in
order to build an empire. Empires became the largest political structures of all,
although they were inherently unstable because of the diversity of the emperor’s
subjects. Many successful empire builders united their imperial subjects through
acculturation. When voluntary cooperation failed, forced obedience often followed.
Whether organized in empire, kingdom, or city-state, the new culture of civiliza-
tion derived from farming became the way of life for the majority of human beings
in Africa, Asia, and Europe by about 3000
B.C.
At first, civilized agriculturalists and
their uncivilized neighbors lived side by side. Many peoples stopped just short of
civilization and did not live in a society with cities, even until a few centuries ago.
Some made their livings as nomadic pastoral herders of animals on the plains and
steppes of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. A few groups of hunter-gatherers also
continued to flourish. The economic and political expansion of people living in
civilizations, however, progressively destroyed nonagricultural societies. The civi-
lized often insulted the noncivilized as barbarian. They set up a dichotomy of
themselves as generous, refined citizens (what the word civilized also means to
many people) and the others as selfish, uneducated savages. Of course, virtue does
not live only in cities and wickedness among the nomads. Instead, civilizations
embraced their power, created by highly structured social hierarchies supported by
agriculture, and attacked hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists who lacked cities.
Relentlessly, powerful, organized agricultural societies grabbed whatever good land
could be found for farming, mining, or building. The dwindling pastoralists and
hunter-gatherers retreated to isolated jungles or deserts where farming remained
impossible or unprofitable. This trend continues even today, where modern
encroaching civilizations may require the last barbarians either to convert to civiliza-
tion or be killed off.
Review: What did agriculture cultivate as the key components of civilization?
Response:
THE PRICE OF CIVILIZATION
While the vast wealth of civilization produced numerous comforts, life in cities
clearly had some serious drawbacks. We live with these problems as long as we lead
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civilized lives. Our lifestyle complicates our relation to the environment and to one
another.
First, serious health problems arose with life in cities. Famine could easily strike
since, despite the best planning, a drought or flood could destroy all the food
available in a particular region. The limited abilities for transportation often meant
that little food could be imported. In contrast, hunter-gatherers faced with natural
disaster could move on to other hunting grounds. Agricultural people, though, felt
compelled to stay, for two main reasons. First, they believed that one day the land
would be productive again, and so they stayed to prevent anyone else from taking
it over. Second, most other nearby land suitable for farming was already taken.
Good farmland is a precious and limited commodity. To find new land, farmers
might have had to journey a long distance. Lacking the skills to hunt and gather
along the way, many would have perished on the move. Farming peoples stuck out
the hard times and, consequently, many died where they stood.
Ironically, another health problem was poor nutrition. The hunter-gatherer
almost naturally ate a balanced diet out of what nature provides. In contrast, civi-
lized people chose what they wanted to eat rather than have nature choose for
them. They often started to go heavier on the meats, avoided certain roots and
vegetables, and devoured sweets. Our ‘‘sweet tooth’’ derives from our body’s
requirements for carbohydrates and fats. For hunter-gatherers, concentrated sugars
are limited and rare in the wild. Agricultural people, however, could reproduce and
consume sugars in large qualities, unaware of how obesity risked health and rotted
teeth.
Contagious diseases also threatened civilized society. Hunter-gatherers lived in
small groups that wandered regularly. Their contact with other groups of people
was brief. In contrast, cities opened themselves up for illness, encouraging close
and regular contact with travelers and traders from other communities. Widespread
outbreaks of disease, called epidemics or plagues, regularly devastated human
populations. Some epidemics spread by water (dysentery, cholera, typhoid), some
by human contact (measles, smallpox), some through fleas and lice (typhus, bubo-
nic plague), and some through the air (influenza, pneumonia). We know now that
the causes of all these (as explained in chapter 11) are microscopic bacteria and
viruses, which live all around and on us. Harmful germs flourished as civilized
people lived in increasingly large groups that dumped their waste all around them.
Up until a few hundred years ago, few people knew this or cared much about
cleanliness. For instance, until recently, more soldiers died of infections than
enemy attacks during wars. Ignorant of the real causes of disease, civilized people
could often do little more than suffer through them.
Another negative consequence of civilization, for half the human species, is an
increase of sexism. Sexism is the belief that one sex (usually the male) is better
than the other (usually the female). From birth, we separate humans into these two
groups, male and female, with that common first question, ‘‘Is it a boy or a girl?’’
Sometimes, physical or genetic irregularities complicate the answer to that ques-
tion. Regardless, all societies set expectations about gender behaviors. They use
both custom and law to define how individuals should express masculinity or femi-
ninity. Studies by modern social scientists and historians suggest that differences
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are much more complicated than we usually like to think, especially when dealing
with issues of sexual attraction and gender identity.
In hunter-gatherer families and tribes, sex roles were much more undifferenti-
ated and fluid than in civilized societies. In a community on the move, where every-
one bore his or her own share, men and women tended to be more equal in status.
Also, in such small communities everyone knew one another. In civilization, how-
ever, sexism began to grant more advantages to males. The acquisition of property
changed everything. Ownership of farmland led to yet another, and simple, basic
principle:
Land is wealth; wealth is power.
Of course, land is not the only means to wealth—later commerce, industry, and
finance would provide much more efficient ways to become wealthy. Nor is wealth
the only route to power—charisma, military force, ruthless violence, and other
methods all can be useful in seizing dominion. When agriculture has dominated
the economy, though, land has meant power.
Once civilized through owning land, men effectively excluded women from
power by their exclusive control of property. This control by men had nothing to
do with our Western, traditional idea that the men are out sweating at work while
the women are keeping house. Indeed, in many farming societies women work in
the fields as much as or more than men, especially during planting and harvest.
One reason for women’s exclusion from public roles may be that once people set-
tled down, women had more young children to care for (since only women bear
children). With increased food production, more children could be fed. In turn,
more children provided cheap labor for farmwork.
Women undoubtedly worked behind the scenes, in the kitchens and bedrooms,
at mealtimes and in the fields, influencing the decisions of fathers and brothers,
husbands and sons. Nevertheless, men largely monopolized the formal and
accepted social roles of status and power that developed in civilization. Women’s
domestic work freed the men from chores so that they could take the lead in public
life. Since mothers usually do most of the child rearing, they may have crucially
formed the character of their children (leading to the later cliche
´
, ‘‘The hand that
rocks the cradle rules the world’’). Mothers’ influence on grown children and wives’
on their husbands certainly affected decisions made by men that changed history.
It remains difficult, though, to illuminate their role within families, since so few
sources survive. Therefore, women’s roles in driving decisive changes in history
have only rarely been noticed. Only in the twentieth century did numbers of West-
ern women gain rights comparable with or the same as those that men have long
had (see chapter 13). The dominance of men over subservient women became
traditional in civilizations.
In most societies, social divisions have gone unquestioned, whether applied
to gender or labor. Most civilizations produced social classes, groups of people
structured around a common cultural and economic status. These first developed
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out of a division of labor or specialization in economic production typical of urban
civilizations. Dividing work made farming life more efficient. While all hunter-gath-
erers hunted and gathered, civilized people might focus on those tasks for which
they were most suited or found most enjoyable. Weavers, tailors, potters, cart-
wrights, smiths, bakers, or masons carried out their crafts with greater efficiency
than if everyone wove and sewed cloth, molded pots, built carts, or laid bricks.
The kind of occupations different people adopted easily became hereditary and
connected to the power structures.
Social classes separated people into groups that reflected rulership, wealth, and
influence. Upper classes lorded their status over the lower classes. A tiny minority
of people took charge, controlling the knowledge, possessing most of the land, and
taking the best goods that society had to offer. They became aristocrats at the top
with the nobles just below, who declared themselves destined to pass on domi-
nance from generation to generation. These upper classes organized society. The
vast majority of others, the lower classes or commoners, did the actual work. A
tiny middle class formed around artisans (who made pots, shoes, and furniture)
and merchants (who bought and sold goods). The overwhelming majority of peo-
ple, through most of civilized history, were simple farmers called peasants. They
worked the land and produced the food so that the aristocrats and artisans did not
have to. The hard work of peasants raising food from the land was at first, and often
still is, the foundation of civilization. Although they created much wealth, peasants
often saw few of its benefits. In even worse condition, at the bottom of the social
hierarchy, were the poor, those who lost most social connections and the ability to
work.
Seeing society as divided between elites and the masses reflects the social divi-
sions of the past. A few people rose to the top of society and controlled economic,
political, and religious decisions. The large numbers of people without power usu-
ally went along with these decisions and reinforced the authority of the elites in the
marketplace, on the battlefield, and within sacred spaces. The masses had little
choice. Throughout most of civilized history, most people remained in the class
they had been born into. Social mobility, or the possibility that individuals could
rise into a better class, remained rare until modern times. More frequently, attempts
by the masses to achieve power alongside the elites drove historical change, often
manifesting as class conflict.
At the beginning of civilization, though, the aristocrats took charge. Two
changes explain the elevation of a few people to aristocratic supremacy over the
peasants. One was the aristocratic role in warfare at the beginning of civilization. In
hunter-gatherer groups, most adult males fought. Hunting even provided training
in tactics similar to battle, with its organization of killing. Farming techniques, how-
ever, did not resemble warfare. Civilized warfare thus became the work of special-
ists: warriors were freed from the daily grind of farming so that they could dedicate
themselves to training for combat. The king as war leader shared with a few associ-
ated warriors some of his aura of power. The best weapons became more expen-
sive.
Another change to explain the rise of the aristocracy was stability. In a hunter-
gatherer group, the nomadic wandering imposed equality. Any one person could
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