Pavlac B.A. A Concise Survey of Western Civilization: Supremacies and Diversities throughout History
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CHAPTER 2
possess only as much property as he or she could carry. Most everyone, from chief
to child, did the same kind of work: hunting and gathering. In civilization, however,
any one person had as much property as could be accumulated, stored, and
defended with the support of others. Leadership soon became held by the few,
while followers were many. Through most of civilized history, in most places, only
a few powerful families have run entire human communities. In civilization, one’s
parents usually determined one’s status. Born to upper-class parents, one could
easily stay upper class. Born to poor parents, one could hardly ever rise in status.
Social mobility was rarely possible because of imposed law and custom. Some
customs, such as clothing fashions, made it obvious to any passersby on the street
to which class one belonged. Where one lived, in how elaborate a residence, also
reflected status. Most important, laws regulated this more complicated social order.
The earliest laws of Hammurabi and all laws until the eighteenth century
A.D.
recog-
nized different classes of people, divided at least into aristocrats and commoners.
Even crime and punishment usually depended on one’s social status. If an aristocrat
stole something, he paid compensation thirtyfold; a commoner paid only tenfold.
If a person had no money, however, he paid with his life.
The thought did sometimes cross poor people’s minds: ‘‘Why should we suffer
just because we were born to low-born parents?’’ Resentful of their imposed inferi-
ority, the lower classes every so often rebelled against their superiors. Mostly they
failed. Whether the upper classes opposed, granted concessions, or fell to their
social inferiors, class conflict affected the course of civilization. A noted tendency,
especially in societies of increasing prosperity, has been to open the upper ranks to
more people and add new classes or subdivide old ones. Social divisions could
become quite subtle and complex, requiring participants to constantly monitor the
proper usage of clothing, speech, and behavior.
With these divisions of labor and class arrived the first taxes. Two and a half
centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin famously quipped that death and taxes were the
only sure things in life. More accurate is the following basic principle:
The only certainty in civilization is death and taxes. The only
essential questions are these: who pays and how much?
Not everyone pays taxes. In some civilizations, the privileged are tax exempt. Uncivi-
lized barbarians do not pay taxes either: in their small, self-sufficient groups,
hunter-gatherer peoples do not divide up their labor and leadership. Yet civilized
society cannot exist without the taxes that pay for the rule keepers, warriors, and
infrastructure that have kept human interchanges functioning smoothly. Most of
the time, the poorer classes, hard-working peasants, have paid for the privileges of
the richer classes, land-owning aristocrats.
The worst class division was slavery, which denied any social status to certain
humans as people became mere property. Some persons became slaves to pay off
debt (for example, fathers could sell their daughters for such purposes). Others
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were enslaved as punishment for crime. Many people defeated in conquest became
slaves rather than suffer death. The harshness of the slave system—how well the
slaves were cared for or how hard they were worked—varied according to the cus-
toms of a civilization and either the beneficence or intelligence of the masters.
Whether inhumane or not, slavery has been a key component of almost every
civilization until modern times. Slavery among hunter-gatherers was much more
difficult to manage. If a hunter-gatherer was enslaved but managed to escape, he
could live off the land until he managed to find some friendly people of his own.
In contrast, a civilized slave who escaped did not know how to survive in the woods,
which plants to eat, or how to make shelter. Thus, the civilized form of slavery was
much more hopeless for those trapped in its system.
The slave economy was supported by a final negative consequence of the rise
of civilization: the perfection of war. Some romantics have suggested that human
conflict did not exist among noncivilized peoples, who reputedly lived in some
idyllic paradise. It seems, however, that humans have always organized to fight with
one another, over land, pride, or power. When hunter-gatherers came under attack,
though, they could run away—they knew how to live in the wilds and thus could
give up a hunting ground rather than be exterminated. Further, the world was
less crowded when more people were nomads. Hunter-gatherers also possessed
comparatively little of value to plunder.
Agriculture and cities, though, added a more lethal intensity to human conflict.
Once people settled down as farmers, the available space became much more
restricted: good farmland was limited to well-watered plains. Farmers would not
leave their land when threatened by invaders any more than when threatened by
flood or famine. Thus, people stayed and fought with more determination and
more destruction. The wealth of cities provided more temptation for invaders to
take quickly and easily (they hoped) what others had wrung from the soil by long,
hard labor. Agriculture also enabled the building of larger and more complex
armies, which in turn could more readily devastate a region.
Ironically, war promotes destruction but also cooperation. First, war is an
expensive proposition that requires the material support of many who are not war-
riors. Many noncombatants, mostly old men, women, and children, provided weap-
ons, equipment, food, and even emotional and ideological support. Warriors
defended ideals such as the protection of noncombatants, the companionship of
fighters, and the trust of allies. Second, any army must have a system of obedience
and command to coordinate many individual soldiers into a killing unit. Third, the
nature of battle encouraged people to limit participants to only two opposing sides.
The best way to defeat an army was to attack it on its flank (or in the rear) instead
of head on. Any more than two participants in a battle exposed the flanks too easily.
This battlefield reality led to alliances, where different political units either stood
together or would be defeated separately. Thus, kings and emperors started a pat-
tern that has endured throughout the history of civilization: conquest and subjuga-
tion.
While history is not merely the record of wars and battles, no history can ignore
these events, for they often determined the rise or fall of civilizations. The word
civilization in this sense describes how numbers of people can be united by com-
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CHAPTER 2
mon culture, social and economic interaction, or political power. A civilization
might be confined to the smallest city-state but could embrace kingdoms, an
empire, or several diverse politically organized states and peoples. Most successful
civilizations in history have won and defended their supremacy through warfare.
Many failed civilizations have dissolved by losing wars. Wars are not simply won
or lost by battlefield decisions. Effective cultural, social, economic, and political
developments at all levels can strengthen a state in victory or defeat.
Wars have melded or destroyed groups of peoples who become part of one
civilization or another. Imperialists, those who support building empires, bring
diverse peoples into one state. On the one hand, imperialists usually have confi-
dence in the rightness of their efforts. Imperialists have often believed that their
dominance in power proves their superior virtues. On the other hand, the fate and
attitudes of the conquered could vary quite a bit. While conquests might destroy a
people outright, usually conquerors preserve large numbers of the conquered, if
only to use them for labor. Maintaining a separate minority ethnic identity is often
difficult, as most rulers encourage uniformity. Once conquered, people have some-
times assimilated, or merged, into the ethnicity of their masters. Sometimes, if the
conquered people are numerous enough, they have blended with the conquerors,
both creating a new identity. A few times, the conquerors have even been absorbed
into the conquered. It has also happened that people might break free again, either
through their own power or through allies. Empires have frequently been so large
or lasted so briefly that diversity of peoples has survived. A civilization’s attributes,
in governance, economics, and knowledge can be more enduring than its limited
political existence. Our history is built on the success and failures of past civiliza-
tions, and civilization and war have been close companions throughout history.
Review: What often-ignored problems did civilization create?
Response:
THE RISE AND FALL OF PRACTICALLY
ALL MIDDLE EASTERN EMPIRES
Historians still argue about which civilization was the first. Evidence is too fragmen-
tary to fully determine which people get boasting rights for being number one.
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Between seven and six thousand years ago, the first contenders lay along great river
systems that provided enough water for agriculture. In South Asia the Indus River
nurtured Indian civilization; in East Asia the Hwang Ho (Yellow River) gave rise to
Chinese civilization; and in the Middle East the valleys of the Nile and the Tigris
and Euphrates fed Middle Eastern civilizations. China and India were too far away
to have much influence on the formative West, at least at first.
The Middle East, however, laid the foundations for the later rise of the West
(see map 2.1). Westerners coined the name Middle East about a hundred years ago
as they were defining this region as different from both the Far East of India and
China and their own West. Europeans often call it the Near East; some geographers
prefer labeling the regions North Africa and Southwest Asia. Whatever the name,
the Middle East today includes countries stretching from northwest Africa through
the Arabian Peninsula, northward through the Levant (the eastern coast of the Medi-
terranean), Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia and eastward to Iran. Today, Islam sub-
stantially defines the culture (see chapter 6). But long before Islam, the Middle East
was rich, cultured, and powerful.
Today we often think of the Middle East as desert. Indeed, thousands of years
of human overpopulation, soil exhaustion, deforestation, and water overuse, as
well as climatic change, have left much of the area arid today. In ancient times,
however, ten thousand years ago, the core of the region deserved the name Fertile
Map 2.1. Ancient Middle East
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Crescent. An arc of agriculturally productive land from the Nile River Valley up
through Palestine and down across the Tigris and Euphrates to the Persian Gulf
soon fed peoples far more advanced than their neighbors in Europe, Africa, and
Asia.
Helping these new agricultural civilizations succeed was their discovery of how
to make metal tools. Humans had been using wood, bone, and stone for millions
of years. Embedded in many stones were ores that, when heated or smelted, could
be purified into an elemental metal, such as copper or tin. Thus, the Neolithic or
New Stone Age of technology began to end around 4000
B.C.
as humans began to
mine copper for tools. They soon learned how to make an even better alloy, blend-
ing copper and tin into bronze, a stronger metal. Bronze Age technology prevailed
from about 3000 to 800
B.C.
Based on these technologies, two civilizations arose in
the Middle East, in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Each was relatively isolated from the
other at first, but both were soon joined in commerce and conquest.
Mesopotamian civilization began around 3500
B.C.
, when the Sumerians moved
into the land of the two rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates (mostly in modern-day
Iraq). They founded the earliest significant political units in the form of city-states.
The Sumerians were the first of many Mesopotamian peoples who shared a similar
culture. As the most important public buildings they built ziggurats: huge step pyra-
mids of baked brick that served as temples for worship of the gods and storehouses
for grain. Priests and priestesses celebrated fertility rituals. In doing so, they imi-
tated the imagined sexual couplings of the gods, believing such activity sustained
the annual cycle of seasons (in other words, sex made the world go round). By
studying and learning about the skies, the priests divided the stars into the twelve
constellations of the zodiac (creating twelve months), set twenty-four hours to the
day, and set seven days to the week. They wrote such knowledge in cuneiform,
block symbols formed by a wedge-shaped stylus pressed into clay at different angles
(see figure 2.1). On such tablets they composed epic poetry, the most enduring
form of literature, popular for thousands of years. Epics are long poems (using
verse, rhythm, and often rhyme) composed to tell stories of heroes and gods. The
first great epic poem told of the king Gilgamesh, transformed from a human ruler
into a two-thirds divine hero six hundred years later. After the death of his friend,
Enkidu, with whom he had shared many adventures and hardships, the sorrowful
Gilgamesh sought the meaning of life. He learned that although the gods failed at
wiping out all humankind by a great flood, they still doomed men to death, by wild
animals, famine, and plague. Such a gloomy view of existence seemed common in
Mesopotamia, despite the riches of the civilization.
The second great Middle Eastern civilization, Egypt, arose in the Nile River Val-
ley of northeastern Africa. Powerful kings called pharaohs united Egypt by around
3100
B.C.
These men, and a few women, such as the now-famous Hatshepsut, not
only held the power of kings, but were also believed to be actual gods incarnate on
earth.
2
They often intensified their bloodline connection to the gods by marrying
2. History forgot about Hatshepsut (r. ca. 1479–1458
B.C.
) for millennia because her son and
heir tried to erase every single mention of her after he came to power. Historians rediscovered
her impressive and peaceful reign only about a hundred years ago. To reinforce her status as
ruler, she often wore the same artificial long, thin beards that male pharaohs wore. Perhaps to
compensate for his ‘‘mommy issues,’’ her son started a number of wars.
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Figure 2.1. The wedge-shaped lines of cuneiform, the writing of ancient
Mesopotamia, scrawl over the sculpture of an Assyrian.
their royal brothers or sisters. As divine beings, pharaohs were exempt from the
usual social prohibition against incest. The pharaohs, their officials, and priests
wielded power through their abilities to write (in pictographs called hieroglyphics)
and calculate (see figure 2.2). With these skills, they controlled agriculture: they
accurately predicted the regular annual rise and fall of the Nile floods that nour-
ished the fields. The Egyptian kingdom offered comparative stability and prosperity.
Hence, Egyptians seemed more optimistic about the afterlife than their Mesopo-
tamian neighbors. The Egyptians hoped that, after death, their souls would be
judged worthy by the gods, and thus they could spend a luxurious afterlife full of
pleasure. According to The Book of the Dead, a dead person appeared before the
court of Osiris, where a person’s spirit was weighed on scales against a feather. The
deceased recited a long list of sins not committed and good deeds done. Based on
the truth of the declaration and the weight, souls lighter than a feather went to
heaven; souls heavier suffered from the Devouress; those equally balanced were
servants in the afterlife.
Their belief in some sort of bodily resurrection after death led the ancient Egyp-
tians to mummify their loved ones’ dead bodies. So many hundreds of thousands
of mummified people (and cats) survived to the nineteenth century that they were
ground up for fertilizer or medicine (although Mark Twain joked that mummies
were also used to stoke fires for locomotives). For the ancient Egyptians, the most
wealth and effort was spent on the bodies of the pharaohs. Several pharaohs com-
manded tens of thousands of people over decades to build giant pyramids as fune-
real monuments to house their own mummies and treasure. Sadly for them and for
our ability to appreciate the past, most tombs were looted over the centuries, even
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CHAPTER 2
Figure 2.2. The hieroglyphics (pictogram writing) of the ancient
Egyptians decorates the wall of a temple.
when they were buried in the isolated Valley of the Kings. At the height of the
Egyptian civilization, though, the regular pattern of life and death, the flood and
fall of the Nile, the rising and setting of the sun offered Egyptians a comforting cycle
of expectation in this world, while they also hoped for a better life in the next.
One brief exception in Egypt’s cyclical history was the Amarna period, created
by the rule of Pharaoh Ahkenaton (r. ca. 1352–1335
B.C.
). He came to power with
the traditional name Amenhotep IV but was inspired to transform Egyptian religion
and, thus, his status as pharaoh. Instead of the many gods of traditional Egyptian
polytheism, he encouraged worship of one god, Aton, the sun, with whom Ahkena-
ton had a special, divine connection, of course. Some historians think this focus on
Aton established the first monotheism, or belief in only one god. Ahkenaton’s
ideas, though, did not long outlive him. Whether the priests saw him as a creative
individualistic innovator or an ugly slothful fanatic, they and most Egyptians soon
went back to worshipping according to the traditional patterns. Later pharaohs
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erased Ahkenaton’s very name from their dynastic records. A brief artistic revolu-
tion, though, created lively and fascinating art of the Amarna Period that differed
from the static, unchanging forms of most Egyptian painting and sculpture. This art
has come down to us in the famous bust of Ahkenaton’s wife Nefertiti (see figure
2.3) and in the treasures from the tomb of his successor, the boy pharaoh Tutankha-
men (r. ca. 1335–1325
B.C.
), or King Tut. Archaeologists discovered Tut’s tomb in
A.D.
1922. Stories of a mummy’s curse that afflicted the tomb’s excavators exaggerate
the very normal circumstances surrounding the deaths of a few of them.
The curse of warfare, though, nearly killed off both of these early Middle East-
ern civilizations. Mesopotamia was particularly vulnerable to attack. Again and
again, warriors from the surrounding hills stormed into the fertile valleys to plun-
der and conquer. Similarly, neighboring kings fought to dominate one another.
Mesopotamia, never united for long, offered a dismal and depressing chronicle of
slaughter.
After 2500
B.C.
, various peoples, called Semites by modern scholars, en tere d
Mesopotami a from the Arabian Peni nsul a. Their name is based u pon the similar
languages t hey spoke, suppose dly linked to a bibl ical cha rac ter. Modern Semiti c
languages include Aramai c, He bre w, and Arabic. Soon, the Semitic speakers began
Figure 2.3. This head of Nefertiti, the wife of
Ahkenaton, rests on a swanlike neck in this
sculpture.
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CHAPTER 2
to dominate the region’s polit ics even as th ey adopted Sumeri an culture. By 2300
B.C.
,SargonofAkkadhadformedoneofthefirstgreatempiresbyconquering
Sumer and many of his M esop otam ian neighbors and then install ing h is re lati ves
as subrulers. Hi s descend ants los t thei r grip on powe r, and severa l city-st ates
restored their i ndep ende nce or built n ew, fragi le kingdoms a nd em pire s.
Throughout , Akk adia n rem ained a commo n Sem itic language to many. In the
chaos, the Sumer ian civilizat ion died out. King Hammurab i of Baby lon (r. ca .
1790–1 750
B.C.
) expan ded t he power of his Sem itic p eople, the A mori tes, almost
to the e quivalen t of S argo n’s. Wit hin a century after Hammurabi’s reign, various
peoples suc h as Kassi tes a nd Hitti tes h ad in turn destroyed hi s Bab ylonian
empire.
Meanwhile, the Egyptians managed a little more stability, unified by their pha-
raoh and protected by the desert. Even they, however, eventually suffered invasion.
Their impressive Old Kingdom (a long line of dynastic stability) endured for nearly
a thousand years, from 3100 to 2200
B.C.
, until it collapsed in civil disorder. By 2050
B.C.
, a new dynasty consolidated the Middle Kingdom, which lasted a mere 250
years until foreign invaders brought it down. Finally, the New Kingdom flourished
from 1600 to about 1200
B.C.
At that time, all over the Middle East, warfare and
invasions destroyed civilized states.
Two innovations a bout this time mad e war even more destr uct ive . First, the
Hittites we re th e first to figure out ho w to smelt iron ore and fo rge iron tools
around 1500
B.C.
Iron, exce pt f or th e problem of ru st, was st ron ger a nd co uld
hold an edge far better tha n bro nze . Iron swords, spear poi nts , a nd arrowheads
became more lethally efficient in killin g. Heavy iron h elme ts, breastpl ates , and
shields likewise offered better p rotectio n, although only to those who cou ld
afford them or be ar th eir h eavy weight. As ot her p eople adopted this metal as
their key material, the Iron Age (1200
B.C.
–
A. D.
1870) began and endured until
just over a centu ry ag o. Se cond , commanders domestic ated horses f rom t he
steppes of A sia, either as mili tar y tra nspo rtat ion for indiv idua l riders or har ness ed
to chariots. Both these ne w warfare techniq ues enabled ambitious kings to domi-
nate others and build ‘‘univer sal ’’ empire s that politic all y unified Mesopotamia ,
Egypt, and their neig hbors.
The Assyrian Empire (ca. 750–600
B.C.
) was th e first universal empire, a term
that means it united most of the peoples of the early Middle Eas t, ranging fro m
thePersianGulftotheNile.TheAssyrians,withtheirswiftcavalry,ironswords,
and utt er ruthlessness, were p rob ably the first wholehearted believers in milita-
rism: the idea th at virtue s such as disc ipli ne, obedi ence , co urage, and willing ness
to kill for the state are the highest values a civilized soc iety can hold . Assyrians
loved the hu nt and the exer cise of their power. Their brutality, however, inspired
little affe ctio n among the dozens of co nque red peoples. If any people dared to
resist conquest, the Assy rian s punish ed the defeated pop ula tions by burni ng alive
many men, women, and c hild ren, mutilat ing other s by h acki ng off hands, arms,
noses, ears, or g enit als, and then scattering survivors as slaves. These pr acti ces
swiftly destroyed ma ny ethnic groups. Many othe rs su rren der ed ra ther than resist.
Those survivors, though, organized against their Assyrian conquerors. The
Assyrian empire lasted only about 150 years. Two allied peoples destroyed the
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Assyrians in 600
B.C.
: the Chaldeans (or Neo-Babylonians since they had occupied
Babylon) and the Medes from the hills north of Persia (as it was called by the
Greeks, but they named their own country Iran, as it is called today). The Neo-
Babylonian-Persian alliance completely wiped out the Assyrians, as they themselves
had done to so many others. Of the Assyrian civilization only the ruins of their
grand monuments to hunting and war survived.
After ridding themselves of the Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians and Medes lived
in an uneasy relationship. Both competed for dominion over weaker societies. Dur-
ing one of the wars, there occurred the first scientifically ascertainable date in his-
tory: 28 May 585
B.C.
—when a battle between the Medes and the Lydians in Asia
Minor was broken off because of a solar eclipse (whose exact date modern astrono-
mers can confirm). After a few decades of intermittent warfare, both Neo-Babylo-
nians and Medes were surprised by the sudden rise of Cyrus ‘‘the Great’’ of Persia.
In 550
B.C.
, Cyrus defeated the Medes and eleven years later took Babylon.
Cyrus established the Persian Empire (550–330
B.C.
), the second, even larger
universal empire: Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Medes’ lands, and his own Persia.
As the shah, the ‘‘king of kings,’’ Cyrus ruled over all, venerated like a god on earth.
Yet his rule was benevolent compared with that of the Assyrians. He set up satraps
(provincial governors) to be his eyes and ears throughout the empire. With broad
authority, they kept his various subjects in order. He allowed many of his subject
peoples to keep their unique customs and religions. Instead of imposing their own
speech on everyone, the Persians encouraged the foreign (to them) Semitic lan-
guage of Aramaic as a common means for most people to communicate with one
another. (A few people today in Lebanon still speak it.) Most of the diverse peoples
found the Persian shah’s rule to be beneficial.
The Persians encouraged trade, helped by the invention of money in their
recently conquered province of Lydi a in As ia Mi nor. Money appeared surprisingly
late as a means of economic exchange, or at least it might seem so to us who take
it for granted. For thousands of years of civilization, though, no one could trust it.
Before money, peo ple barte red for goods and s ervices , trading their labor or
goods such as pots, cows, or women. Using money meant that specially made
lumps of precious metals (u sually copper, silver, or gold) could be used instead,
creating a more stable and consistent pricing system. One problem, though, with
any precious metal was determining h ow to trust its purity. Money w ill circulate
only when people trust its value. Copper, silver, a nd gold could be easily degraded
with baser metals such as tin or nickel into alloys and thus be worth less than the
expected value. Gold could be te sted somewhat because of its softness—and thus
the custom arose of people biting gold coins to see whether they dented. Silver
was a much more common and useful metal for making money, especially after
the Lydians figured out how to use a touchstone (a rock on which metals left a
specific color s treak) to prove the purity of silver coins. The power of government
also contributed to the use of money. Rulers put their own faces on the coins and
ensured t heir value by setting purity standards and punishing forgers who
debased coins. Hence, out of the Persian Empire came th e long- standing practice
that the government is responsible for money and therefore always intimately
involved in the economy.
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