3.3 How Civilization Began and Spread: Antiquity Version 1.2 March 2012

How did different civilisations develop?

Who invented writing and mathematics, money and the wheel?

Why did some civilisations develop differently or more slowly?

When did religion and philosophy begin?

3.3 Conclusions from Antiquity (Statement 16)

History currently explains:

● City states and empires grew. As food production rose, more children lived, and larger populations needed more land. Surrounding areas were conquered and colonized, the indigenous peoples killed, enslaved or pushed further out. Other surrounding areas learned the new technology – farming – by copying their neighbors.

● “Frontier” groups often faced a different environment to the core civilizations, so innovation often began in the periphery and succeeded so well the periphery became part of the core or dominated the core. In stages, over a long period, people learned more about irrigation for farming, tamed horses, developed the wheel, used beasts of burden, developed sailing and rowing ships; built canals, and so on;

● Early peoples found gold and silver, which look beautiful but are too soft for tools. They learned to smelt copper and tin in fires and mix these into bronze, which was harder and made better tools and weapons. Eurasians discovered wrought iron, made by heating the ore and hammering it into shape, was even better. East Eurasians (the Chinese) learned early how to cast iron, which was better still - heating the ore so it melts and can be poured into a mold to make more shapes more easily – which West Eurasians learned about many centuries later. Americans in both the North and South had just begun using bronze when the Europeans invaded, aborting their development.

● Nations and empires varied from low end states of loose federations of local warlords perhaps paying tribute or supplying soldiers to an overall leader, to high end states with centralized bureaucracies taxing the people to maintain the elite and/or the military, which required early writing, arithmetic, laws and money.

● Settled societies always had to deal with the nomadic hunter gatherers on the edges of civilization, who could easily mount raids to steal herd animals, goods or slaves, but were difficult to conquer. Often they were bribed to leave civilization alone.

● Infectious diseases, such as small pox and influenza spread from farm animals to the farmers then spread from person to person through settled civilizations. Sometimes these killed a third or a half of the population: the survivors were lucky or had some immunity. Infections spread across Eurasia in loops coming back again years or decades later. Gradually the infections mutated and the survivors gained enough immunity so that they were less fatal or less serious.

● Major institutions of modern society began, as different peoples organized hierarchical societies (villages to cities, city states to nations and empires), using new warfare techniques, taxation, bureaucracies, law, money, writing, counting and arithmetic;

● Early thinkers such as Lao Tsu, the Buddha, Mahavira, Confucius, Moses, Socrates, Jesus (and later Mohammed) mixed philosophy science, history and religion to explain the world, devise social rules of behaviour, and discover the meaning and purpose of life.

● About 2000 years ago, the Roman Empire dominated Western Eurasia (Europe) and the Han empire, dominated Eastern Eurasia (China). There were smaller, less advanced, Persian and Indian empires in between.

● In Central America, the Mayan empire rose about 2000 BCE and declined after about 1000 CE. The Aztecs in central (Mexico) and the Incas in South America (Peru) were large civilizations with cities of 100,000s but less advanced technology than Eurasia.

…more

This brief summary will be updated after more work and review against the experts, and over the longer term it can be updated as we learn more, but it will only be replaced by a better story.

Farming began to produce a surplus – more food than required by the farmers themselves. This could be traded for other goods the farmers desired and taken (“taxed”) by community leaders, for wars and joint community projects. Counting, arithmetic and writing developed to facilitate local government and trade. From about 5000 to 2000 years ago villages and towns evolved into city states and early empires, such as those in ancient Iraq (Mesopotamia), Egypt, Persia, Greece, India and China.

Empires developed in the Americas from about 2000 BCE to 1500 CE (Mayan, Incan and Aztec) , later than in Europe because of geographical differences, but indigenous technical development was terminated when they were invaded by Western Europeans.

In sub-Saharan Africa and Australia the climate, plants and animals impeded the development of settled farming and no major cities or states arose until Europeans invaded.

As circumstances changed and new problems arose, intelligent people in each society developed solutions. These included technological advances such as irrigation, the wheel, beasts of burden, levers, mills, rowing boats and sailing ships, metals, and so on. The major institutions of modern society grew as different peoples organized hierarchical societies: trading goods, recording transactions, developing currencies, devising law, bureaucracies.

Around 1,000 BCE in India the Hindu poems of the Rig Veda began to be composed. Around 500 BCE thinkers such as the authors of the (Hindu) Upanishads, Socrates (in Greece), Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha, in India), Mahavira (the founder of Jainism, in India), Kung-Fu-Tzu (Confucius, in China), Moses (the founder of Judaism, in Palestine), and perhaps a little later Lao Tzu (the founder of Daoism, in China), mixed what they knew of philosophy, science, history and religion in their attempts to explain the world, devise social rules, and discover the meaning of life. Others later did the same: Jesus (the founder of Christianity, in Palestine), Mohammed (the founder of Islam, in Arabia) and Guru Nanak (the founder of Sikhism, in India).

Scientific knowledge, technology and culture spread across the inhabited continents and islands, especially east-west across Eurasia, but less so north-south between or within the Americas, less so into sub-Saharan Africa and hardly at all into Australia.