2. The Possibility of Civilization
•Humanity at the dawn of the Neolithic
revolution, was on the verge of
unpresented change, due in large part to:
1. The domestication of plants
2. The domestication of animals
-The achievement of food production let
humans develop new, settled forms of
communities—and then civilization itself.
3. • While it is impossible to say exactly what defines a
“civilization,” or when civilization actually began, perhaps
the key element of civilization is its complexity.
• The growth of civilization depends on:
A. constant interaction among communities that lived far
apart.
B. Social specialization
C. Surplus food production
D. Various social/political institutions
4. Civilization:
• civilization becomes one of the great accelerators of change.
• -Archaeologists/historians define civilization as an urban
culture with differentiated levels of wealth, occupation, and
power.
• The “complete checklist of civilization” contains “cities,
warfare, writing, social hierarchies, [and] advanced arts and
crafts.”
• -With cities, human populations achieved the critical mass
necessary to develop specialized occupations and a level of
economic production high enough to sustain complex
religious and cultural practices—and to wage war.
5. •Thus, in early civilizations four kinds of
power:
1. military,
2. economic,
3. political,
4. religious
6. Culture:
• -the term culture is used to describe all the different ways that
humans collectively adjust to their environment, organize their
experiences, and transmit their knowledge to future
generations.
• Culture, to use the words of the English anthropologist E.B.
Tylor, "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief,
art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society.“
• Perhaps most importantly, culture serves as the means by
which knowledge is transmitted from one generation to
another.
7. Mesopotamia:
• Mesopotamia (from the Greek, meaning 'between two rivers’)
was an ancient region in the eastern Mediterranean bounded
in the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and in the southeast
by the Arabian Plateau, corresponding to today’s Iraq, mostly,
but also parts of modern-day Iran, Syria and Turkey.
• The 'two rivers' of the name referred to the Tigris and the
Euphrates rivers and the land was known as 'Al-Jazirah' (the
island) by the Arabs referencing what Egyptologist J.H.
Breasted would later call the Fertile Crescent.
8.
9. • Unlike the more unified civilizations of Egypt or Greece, Mesopotamia
was a collection of varied cultures whose only real bonds were their
script, their gods, and their attitude toward women.
• As a result of this, Mesopotamia should be more properly understood as
a region that produced multiple empires and civilizations rather than any
single civilization.
• Even so, Mesopotamia is known as the “cradle of civilization” primarily
because of two developments that occurred there, in the region of Sumer,
in the 4th millenium BCE:
1. the rise of the city as we recognize that entity today,
2. and the invention of writing (although writing is also known to
have developed in Egypt, in the Indus Valley, in China, and to have
taken form independently in Mesoamerica).
10. The Sumerian Kingdoms
• About 5300 B.C.E. the villages in Sumer in southern
Mesopotamia began a dynamic civilization that would
flourish for thousands of years.
• The key to Sumerian civilization was water.
• Villages merged into cities that became the foundation of
Sumerian civilization, as centralized administrations
developed to manage the dams, levees, and irrigation canals;
to direct the labor needed to maintain and expand the water
works; and to distribute the resources that the system
produced.
11.
12. • By 2500 B.C.E., about 13 major city-states— perhaps
as many as 35 in all—managed the Mesopotamian
floodplain in an organized fashion.
• Sumer’s cities served as economic centers where craft
specialists such as potters, toolmakers, and weavers
gathered to swap information and trade goods.
• Long-distance trade, made easier by the introduction
of wheeled carts.
• Sumerians believed that their city belonged to a god
or goddess.
13. Rise of Kings
• As Sumer’s city-states expanded, a
new form of authority emerged.
The ruins of monumental palaces as
well as temples testify to the
appearance of powerful royal
households that joined the temple
priesthood in managing the
resources of the city-state.
14. • Historians theorize that as city-states
expanded, competition for land increased.
Such competition led to warfare, and
during warfare, military leaders amassed
power and eventually, became kings.
• The king’s power rested on his military
might.
• Yet to retain the people’s loyalty and
obedience, a king also needed religious
legitimacy.
*Divine Right
15. Sargon the Great
• Sargon of Akkad (also known as Sargon the Great, "True King" or
"Legitimate King") reigned in Mesopotamia from 2334 to 2279
BCE.
• With the reign of Sargon, the history of Mesopotamia took a
sharp turn. Sargon created the first empire in history.
• the empire Sargon built embraced a string of territories running
far west up the Euphrates River toward the Mediterranean.
• Sargon was probably the first ruler in history to create a
standing army, one that was larger than any yet seen in the
Near East.
16. • My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not,
• The brother of my father loved the hills,
• My home was in the highlands, where the herbs grow.
• My mother conceived me in secret, she gave birth to me in
concealment.
• She set me in a basket of rushes,
• She sealed the lid with tar.
• She cast me into the river, but it did not rise over me,
• The water carried me to Akki, the drawer of water.
• He lifted me out as he dipped his jar into the river,
• He took me as his son, he raised me,
• He made me his gardener (Bauer, 95).
17. • -The cities of Mesopotamia
prospered under Akkadian
rule. Even so, Akkadian rulers
could not hold their empire
together for reasons that
historians do not completely
understand.
• -Regardless of the cause,
Akkadian kings lost control of
their lands, and a period of
anarchy began about 2250.
18. Babylon
• By 1780 B.C.E., the kingdom of
Babylon had become a mighty
empire under Hammurabi.
• -Hammurabi never entirely
conquered Assyria but he
dominated Mesopotamian affairs.
• -Like Ur-Nammu and Sargon,
Hammurabi developed a centralized
administration to direct irrigation
and building projects and to foster
commerce throughout his realm.
19. HAMMURABI’S CODE
• Although Hammurabi spent a considerable amount of time on
campaign, he made sure to provide for the people whose lands
he ruled over.
• A popular title applied to Hammurabi in his lifetime was bani
matim, 'builder of the land', because of the many building
projects and canals he ordered constructed throughout the
region.
• Hammurabi’s laws reflect the shock of an unprecedented
social environment: the multi-ethnic, multi-tribal Babylonian
world.
20. • Hammurabi’s code was written in a
later time when one tribe’s or city’s
understanding of the will of the gods
might be different from another’s.
• In order to simplify matters,
Hammurabi’s code sought to prevent
vendetta and blood feuds by stating
clearly the crime - and the punishment
which would administered by the state
for committing such crime – without
assuming a communal understanding
of the god’s will in these matters.
21. • If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put
out.
• If he break another man’s bone, his bone shall be broken.
• If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be
knocked out.
• If a builder build a house for someone, and does not
construct it properly,
• And the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then
that builder shall be put to death.
• If it kill the son of the owner of the house, the son of that
builder shall be put to death.
22. • Hammurabi’s code epitomized the
principle known as Lex Talionis,
the law of retributive justice, in
which punishment corresponds
directly to the crime, better known
as the concept of 'an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth'.
• Hammurabi’s law code thus set the
standard for future codes in dealing
strictly with the evidence of the
crime and setting a specific
punishment for that crime.
23. Religion:
• Although the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires
punctuated the political history of Mesopotamia between the
emergence of Sumerian civilization in 5300 B.C.E. and the
collapse of Babylon in 1500 B.C.E., Mesopotamian culture
exhibited remarkable continuity.
• The Sumerians did not tend to think of their gods as loving or
forgiving. Sumerian
• Sumer’s religion was polytheistic. Sumerians believed that
many gods controlled their destinies
24. “The sin I have committed I know not;
The forbidden thing I have done I do not know.
Some god has turned his rage against me;
Some goddess has aimed her ire.
I cry for help but no one takes my hand.”
25. • In the Sumerian pantheon, the all-powerful king Anu, the father of
the gods, ruled the sky. Enlil was master of the wind and guided
humans in the proper use of force. Enki governed the Earth and rivers
and guided human creativity and inventions. Inanna was the goddess
of love, sex, fertility, and warfare.
• Because the priests conducted the sacrifices that appeased the often-
angry gods, the priesthood dominated Mesopotamian culture as did
the temples in which they served and the gods to whom they
sacrificed.
