Overview.
Mesopotamian civilisation.
Agriculture.
Towns.
Scripts.
Science and technology.
In this module, we will discuss the fourth millennium.
This is the period between 4000 to 3000 BCE.
From 10000 BCE, we directly moved to 4000 BCE.
This may be surprising.
There are some reasons for this.
Early history in many ways is dependent on available tangible evidence.
This evidence typically comes from archaeological excavation sites, which reveal the remains of ancient civilisation.
The ravages of time, have erased much of the evidence.
If a community lived in thatched houses, they will not remain for thousands of years.
Even houses built with simple clay bricks, will not last this long.
Stone structures however, survives over many millennium.
We have relatively better evidence, of small towns, which existed in the fourth millennium.
These towns had some structures, specially temples, built in stone.
History did not evolve uniformly, for all civilisations.
When the Mesopotamian civilisation was thriving, Europe was still in the stone ages.
Early history typically tracks, the more advanced civilisation at that time.
For example, the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian civilisation, is more well known,
than the Indus valley civilisation in India, and the yellow river civilisation in China.
We had discussed that many factors interplay, influencing the evolution of civilisation.
Some times a civilisation, which sprang up, is wiped out, due to some unfavourable environment factors.
We hear less about them.
History normally tracks civilisations which had a significant continued existence.
There was no written scripts in early history.
Some of it was written, after scripts were invented.
These texts could have been written many centuries later.
Very often these texts tended to mix historical facts and myths.
This is specially true of early religious texts.
Given all these constraints historians, try to reconstruct history,
as a best possible approximation.
We need to be sensitive to this, when we discuss history.
When did we actually become civilised?
This raises a deeper philosophical question.
How do we define being "civilised"?
There are no clear answers to this.
We are only going to adopt a convenient interpretation, of being civilised.
The first civilisations, typically lived together as a dense community.
They had a common language.
They were involved in agriculture and lived in, what we now call as towns and cities.
They collaborated to achieve common goals.
Collaboration was a key differentiator, responsible for human beings to get civilised.
They specialised in specific skills, and traded their produce with each other.
Language was another important factor.
Language enabled the process of transferring knowledge, from one generation to another.
The next generation built upon the knowledge already known to their ancestors.
This way each generation became more knowledgeable, than the previous one.
This helped to differentiate civilised human beings, from other animals.
We think of a civilised society, only if they sustained themselves for a reasonable period of time.
Using these guidelines, and some common sense,
we can say that the dawn of civilisation, was in the late 4th millennium.
Our discussion is going to jump from 10000 BCE to 4000 BCE.
We might wonder what happened in the interim 6000 years?
The process of getting civilised was extremely slow.
We can imagine that from being more like animals,
we transform ourselves as a civilised society.
The profound nature of this transformation, justifies the amount of time taken.
After the homo sapiens became civilised, they went on to dominate the planet,
as we do today.
However slow, and painstaking the process was, it was obviously worth the time and effort.
The process of civilisation did not happen in a continuous smooth fashion through out the world.
By 10000 BCE humans had spread to most of the habitable places, in the planet.
Civilisation however, did not proceed at the same pace, in all geographical locations.
There were sparks of early civilised life in many locations.
We know a few of these, and possible do not know of many others.
But due to a combination of unfavourable factors, many of this sparks of civilisation got snuffed out.
One of the oldest known towns, is Jericho.
It existed around 8000 BCE, in Mesopotamia.
About 3000 people lived together, somewhat like a civilised society.
It had large water tanks, possibly for irrigation.
There was a massive stone tower, which may have been used for defence of the town.
The interesting factor about this, is that the residents believed that there was something to defend.
People were already developing a sense of ownership of property.
Around 6000 BCE there was a town in turkey, with brick houses.
We must recognise that the technology of making bricks, and building houses,
was significant at that time.
There is evidence that around 5000 BCE many villages in Asia, were producing surplus food.
Producing surplus food acted as a catalyst for civilisation.
These people had painted pottery, and took part in religious ceremonies.
The first significant and sustained civilisation came about in Mesopotamia.
This area is roughly around current Iraq and Syria.
Not surprisingly this civilisation sprang up, in the banks of two rivers,
the Tigris and Euphrates.
This area is known as the fertile crescent.
The Tigris and Euphrates flooded annually, and brought fertile silt to its banks.
This created a favourable land for farming.
It is possible that people from other areas moved to this place.
This probably created an opportunity of cross exchange of skills and ideas.
Exchange of Skills and ideas was an important catalyst for civilised life.
Most of the earliest known civilisations, developed in small villages and towns, in Mesopotamia.
The population of the whole world,
is estimated to be about 80 million in the 4th millennium BCE.
It is believed most of the more civilised human beings lived in Mesopotamia.
Many of the cereals that we consume today, originally grew in wild grass.
Hunter gatherers probably gathered some of this cereals to eat.
Typical cereals were millets, wheat, rice etc..
Settled agriculture to cultivate these crops, was a defining feature of civilised life.
It marked the transition from the hunter gatherer, to the town dweller.
The Tigris and Euphrates provided fertile land on its banks.
But formal agriculture needed more than fertile land.
The rivers used to flood periodically.
The rivers also changed over a period of time.
Agriculture required some kind of dams made of mud.
It was also required to build canals, to bring in the water, to the inland agricultural fields.
It is imaginable that such tasks, required collective work.
This was possibly one motivating factor for people to collect and live together,
to harness the potential of the fertile soil.
The agricultural village was probably populated by this collection of people,
who worked together to perform the tasks involved in formal agriculture.
These villages typically would produce more food than they require.
A group of villages would produce enough food to sustain a small town.
People in the town would be free to engage in other tasks,
which produced goods and services, in exchange for food.
Agriculture was the forerunner for town life.
The hunter gatherers, found enough food to feed themselves.
The advent of settled agriculture resulted in surplus production of food.
This was a essential condition to sustain town life.
The prosperity of agricultural society, was reflected in the springing up of towns.
The towns nurtured a number of other professions.
Trading was one of the significant professions.
Agricultural surplus could not only feed a town, it could also be traded in other towns.
Towns typically acted as a storehouse and a trading point of agricultural produce.
We know some of the towns that existed during this period.
They are:
Jericho, Babylon, Byblos, Uruk, Ur, Memphis, Nineveh, Ashur, Akkad, Tyre, etc..
It is possible that other towns, which existed, but did not survive the ravages of time.
This period witnessed the development of different cultures.
Culture is unique to human beings.
Humans living in a particular region, tended to have similar culture.
They had a common primitive language,.
They had common rituals.
Their social behaviour also tended to be relatively homogenous.
Society seem to exert some kind of pressure, on the individual to homogenise the culture.
Culture bonded people to each other.
It also created conflict with another culture.
Some of the significant cultural groups, during this period,
were the Sumerians , the Akkadian and Assyrian.
All these groups were nurtured by the fertile crescent, in Mesopotamia.
So far, communication with a common language, was limited to over communication.
This period saw a tentative beginning of the art of writing.
The Sumerians were the earliest to develop a primitive script.
They used a wedge to make simple short straight line markings in clay.
It was called as Cuneiform, which means wedge shaped.
By using a combination of these markings, they were able to put down a simple idea, as pictograms.
The power of a written script cannot be under estimated.
For the first time, a idea could be stored.
It could be communicated to one or many people.
It could travel long distances.
It could last for a long time, outliving the author of the writing.
Knowledge could be passed on from one generation to another, more easily.
During the next couple of millennium, a prodigious amount of written information,
and knowledge was generated.
Archaeologists have excavated about a million tablets, with cuneiform writing.
A few thousand of them have even been deciphered.
The Sumerian script was a primitive one.
It relied on pictographs, to represent and convey meaning.
This would have been sufficient to convey a limited amount of ideas.
The beginning of societies also created an explosion of ideas.
It would have been very cumbersome, to represent a larger number,
and more complex ideas with cuneiform script.
Cuneiform script eventually gave way to phonetic scripts, in the second and first millennium BCE.
Cuneiform script however, was instrumental in laying the foundations of written communication.
Much of the knowledge of early civilisation, was encoded in cuneiform script.
Discovery of agriculture, was possibly the greatest invention, of early societies.
Many technologies developed around agriculture.
Tools like ploughs were designed, to till the land.
Initially the ploughs was crafted from wood.
Later on metal was incorporated, with the plough.
Tools were also designed to dig canals, to irrigate the land.
Pottery was one of the earliest technology developed by humans.
Pots were useful to store and transport food grains.
Interestingly the wheel was invented, somewhere during this period.
The earliest wheels seems to have being used for making pots.
Even today we can see the potter's wheel, in use.
This invention is about six thousand years old.
Clay was an important raw material during this period.
Clay was also used to make bricks.
Initially the bricks were sun dried.
Later someone discovered that bricks could be baked with fire.
The baked bricks were stronger, and lasted longer.
Many ancient dwellings were built with clay bricks.
Later clay was used to make tablets, on which inscriptions were made with wedge shaped tools.
This was the beginning of written scripts.
The stone age refers to a period for over three million years.
It precedes the advent of homo sapiens.
Most tools made by humans were made of stone.
It was around this period we started to emerge out of the stone age.
This is the period that humans learnt about metals.
One of the first metals to come into use was copper.
Copper melts at relatively lower temperature.
It is a malleable, could be cast into different shapes.
Tools and ornaments could now be made with metal.
Use of copper preceded the use of bronze, which is much stronger and lasted longer.