Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit One BI. What is Civilization?

Transcription

1 Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit One BI What is Civilization?

2 Like ripples in a pond, the positive feedback loop of agrarian life continues as civilizations create technologies that only aid in expanding civilization. We are next going to take a look at a few of these technologies, that are important to us even today. The first of these is government, or organization through a hierarchical formulation All early governments and hierarchies were in large part denoted by a system of kinship as their basis. Here are a few of those systems developed by civilizations Moses' Hierarchy Meet Moses. Some of you may know him. Moses has a lot of responsibilities. He has to get about two million people from Egypt to the Promised Land. This is a daunting task. Moses must spend all day, sunup to sundown, telling people what to do - 'Set up your tents here, go look for water there, give him back his goat, no we're not there yet!' By trying to handle everything himself, Moses will quickly work himself into an early grave. Then who will lead the Israelites?

3 Moses' Hierarchy Rules of a Hierarchy Luckily for Moses, he has a clever father-in-law, Jethro. Jethro says, 'You're going to kill yourself this way, boy. These people need you alive. You need to delegate authority. Select capable men from all the people - men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain - and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.' Moses takes Jethro's advice. Now the leaders of tens can take care of little problems, the leaders of fifties can resolve larger problems, and so on and so forth. Now, no one bothers Moses for anything short of a disaster, and he can focus on getting his people from point A to point B. From Moses' story we can draw a pattern for hierarchies that holds true for most of human history: Step 1: A person does something awesome or terrible to the people. Step 2: Out of love for or fear of that person, the people decide to follow him.

4 Rules of a Hierarchy Step 3: The leader realizes he cannot possibly handle everything himself. Step 4: He divides his responsibilities and authority among subordinates. That is the basic goal of all hierarchies - to break up the countless responsibilities of leadership into manageable parts and to assign capable individuals to oversee those responsibilities. Yet, this raises some important questions. How should those responsibilities be divided? More importantly, what qualifies an individual for public office? Throughout history, human beings have come up with some very different answers to these questions. The results are different sorts of hierarchies. Aristocracy The most common form of hierarchy is an aristocracy. In this system, status is based on one's lineage. Important people have important children, important cousins and so on. Unimportant people have unimportant children.

5 Aristocracy This may seem disgusting to our modern sensibilities, but kinship is the basis of all other hierarchies in the animal kingdom. It should not surprise us to learn that kinship played an incredibly important role throughout most of our history. In fact, there is no record of a civilization without an aristocracy before America's Declaration of Independence. Theocracy This is not to say that other systems have not been tried. The system Jethro proposed was a theocracy, a hierarchy based on religion. He specifies that the leaders should be God-fearing and honest. Yet, when we get down to the details of exactly how the Israelites were divided and how their leaders were selected, we find that it has much more to do with kinship than with holiness.

6 Theocracy Every Israelite traces his lineage back to Abraham. Abraham had one son, Isaac. Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob, who was later called Israel, had 12 sons. These 12 sons are the patriarchs of the 12 tribes into which Moses divided the children of Israel. The tribes in turn are made up of clans, or extended families, each with a male established as the head of the household. It was from these heads of household that Moses selected his leaders of tens, fifties and so on. Thus, even in Moses' theocracy, the most basic social unit remained the family. Families were united into tribes based on kinship to a common patriarch. It is worth noting that one of those tribes, the tribe of Levi (which just happened to be Moses' tribe), just also happened to be the tribe that God selected to serve as the priestly class. They were excluded from military service and were given the first pick of everyone else's food. Sure sounds like an aristocracy to me.

7 Hierarchies Throughout History Regardless of a hierarchy's structure, kinship would remain at the core of all hierarchies for the majority of human history. Medieval lords claimed kinship to kings. Ancient kings claimed kinship to gods. Some emperors even claimed to be gods themselves. Even the Athenians (enlightened inventors of democracy) divided themselves into tribes descended from a mythical common ancestor. They also reserved high offices for members of the aristocracy. The Roman Emperor Claudius might have created an imperial bureaucracy of slaves to run his empire, but that does not change the fact that Claudius inherited the title Emperor from his cousin. Even in this age of equality, in a nation explicitly founded without an aristocracy, we still have aristocratic families - the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes. It's actually remarkable that we consider such dynasties as aberrations; most people throughout history would have considered them only natural.

8 The Walls of Jericho Welcome to Jericho. It is one of the oldest human settlements on earth. For thousands of years the natural spring and high rock formations of Jericho have drawn hunter gatherers seeking refuge. With the rise of agriculture, people began to settle in earnest near Jericho, but it was not its ready waters and fertile soil that attracted farmers, it was that great fortress of a rock. The whole point of settled agriculture is to store food. These stored resources attract raiders. This is what makes Jericho so appealing. When barbarians came on raids, the farmers could retreat to the rocks with their stores and fight off the invaders. It is no surprise that such a place was home to one of the first man made fortifications. These people of Jericho were already familiar with the idea of taking refuge behind stone. All it took was for some clever fellow to think 'if the rock protects us what if we could extend the protection of the rock around a larger area.'? Thus the wall was invented. And so the people of Jericho built a wall around their town. And we're not talking about teeny flimsy walls, these walls were over eleven feet tall and 7 feet wide! They even built a tower so they could attack anyone attacking them.

9 The Walls of Jericho Imagine the shock and outrage of a raiding barbarian warlord to see his target, the people, livestock and food of Jericho, tantalizingly out of reach, protected behind 7 feet of stone. He cannot simply storm the place. From their vantage atop the walls and tower, the people of Jericho can shoot arrows at the invaders, while the invader's projectiles cannot reach them. The only option remaining is a waiting game. For a few thousand years, that is a game that the people inside the walls will win. The people of Jericho have all their food stored safely inside the walls. They even have a fresh water spring. The barbarian raider has no food stored; that's why he went raiding. Like a siege in reverse, the people of Jericho must only wait for the barbarians to get hungry and leave to find an easier target to raid. Such walls would prove just as frustrating to armies of civilized invaders. The technology to break down such walls would take thousands of years to develop. So unless, like Joshua, you've got a lot of trumpets and a god on your side, you're going to leave cities like Jericho alone. For now.

10 The Walls of Jericho The main obstacle to besieging a walled city is keeping your own people fed in the process. Feeding an army on the move is hard enough; armies carry their own supplies, and can also forage and pillage along the way. Feeding an army for an extended siege requires massive amounts of resources. A sizeable army will soon consume anything edible nearby. To conduct a siege, you must be able to move troops quickly to preserve their stores, and be able to resupply them once they arrive. The Use of Waterways This is not a problem if your target is near a river or the sea. Humans have been traveling by sea for at least 130,000 years. All you have to do is put your soldiers on boats and send them supplies down river. This is one of the reasons why the earliest empires form along rivers. Several civilizations would conquer their way down the fertile crescent, using the Tigris and Euphrates to move and supply their armies.

11 The Use of Waterways Egypt held sway along the Nile Valley from its delta at the Mediterranean to deep into the Nubian deserts. Once the empires had been built, the rivers served as highways for defense as well as arteries for trade. But there are drawbacks to sea faring. Paddling across the Mediterranean in a dug out canoe is a chancy business at best. Rivers can be flooded one season and dried up the next. Still, this system works well enough if you don't mind your empire being limited to a few days march from the nearest body of water. But what if you want to expand further? To do that, you're going to need roads. The Construction of Roads The first roads were probably little more than game trails, followed by so many hunters over the years that they were pounded into rough pathways. Such dirt paths are unsuitable for moving goods, let alone an army. They make a poor surface for wheels and rains will turn them to mud. The first attempts to improve upon this surface seem to have been log highways.

12 The Construction of Roads We've found some in England that date back almost 6 thousand years ago (4,000 BCE). Around the same time, cities in the fertile crescent began to pave their streets with stone. Yet paving a road is a laborious process. Foundations must be dug. A substrate of sand or gravel must be laid. Stones must fit together tightly and be worked smooth on one surface. The whole road must be reinforced on both sides to keep the stones from spreading. Finally, some sort of drainage method must be included to keep the road from washing away. And all this must be done by hand, at best using soft copper saws, at worst using one rock to break another rock. With such primitive tools, just paving a half mile street through the city of Ur likely took years. And, actually building a road between two cities with such primitive tools would take generations. Then, around 3000 BC, a new metal came on the scene: bronze, a combination of tin and copper that is harder and stronger than either.

13 Bronze occurs naturally in a few places around the world, and was greatly prized as a tool by those who had access to it. Yet with experimentation, ancient metallurgists were able to find the perfect ratio of copper to tin, making a much stronger metal than its naturally occurring counterpart. With this new metal, man was finally equipped with a tool that was harder than stone. Massive projects like roads would still take years to complete, but at least they would not take generations. By 2600 BC, the Egyptians had paved roads connecting their cities and resources, and were starting work on pyramids. Warriors But bronze is good for more than stone work. The same strength that allows a bronze chisel to cut stone also lets a bronze breastplate stop an arrowhead.

14 Warriors Its sharp cutting edge made for splendid tools, allowing for greater precision in all crafts. That same edge also made for fine weapons. The combination of sharp, strong weapons with arrowproof bronze armor made a civilized bronze age warrior a truly dangerous foe, a tank of a man. However, all that bronze is heavy! To stop an arrow, a bronze breastplate alone must weigh at least 50 pounds; his whole kit might have exceeded 90 lbs. That's nothing, you think, our soldiers carry as much.. But remember, these people are little. A Bronze Age agriculturalist was so malnourished, 5'5' was the tallest he could ever hope to grow. At most, he weighs 160 lbs. Even with roads to ease his way, he's carrying more than half his body weight. He's not going to be able to travel very quickly so encumbered.

15 Warriors The Horse To take advantage of all the benefits bronze offers to soldiers, a way had to be found to move these human fortresses around. It was at this point that humanity made a new friend: the horse. Behold the horse - fast, agile, noble and beautiful. It's what every little girl wants for her tenth birthday. Yet, up until around 4,000 BC humans hadn't quite figured out what to do with horses (besides eat them). We'd been hunting horses for at least 100,000 years before anyone was crazy enough to try riding one. This may seem odd to those of you who have enjoyed a pleasant horse ride at some point in your life, but a few of you might know that before a horse can be ridden, it must first be broken.

16 The Horse Wild horses have some very firm ideas about things on their backs - they want them off their backs. They make this point abundantly clear. No one who leaps on the back of a horse for the first time would ever think that this creature could serve as a reliable form of transportation. Nevertheless, around 3500 BC, the steppe nomads of Eurasia seemed to have had the patience to break horses to ride them. Finding themselves blessed with super human speed, they began to make raids into civilization, as a matter of fact, incursions of steppe raiders may have inspired the Greek myth of the centaur. This unfamiliarity emphasizes the fact that, to much of the Bronze Age civilization, men on horseback were something strange and unheard of - the stuff of legend. Nevertheless, it seems the Assyrians, at least, embraced horseback riding. Still, the practice would not become widespread in the civilized world until the development of the stirrup some 2,000 years later.

17 The Horse There is a very simple reason for this. Remember that amazingly useful but prohibitively, heavy bronze armor? Anyone who could afford to own such armor could afford to have a horse. The problem is that you could not possibly ride a horse wearing heavy, bronze armor. First of all, an armored soldier is so top heavy, without stirrups, he'd fall off. Second of all, the horses are too little - the size of modern ponies - and not suitable to carry 250 pounds over long distances. Also, horses are actually quite delicate. Though they're fast, they're not particularly good at carrying things. Too heavy a load will break a horses' back. They're also not very good at pulling things. Unlike an ox, which can pull many times its own weight, an ancient horse could not pull more than a few hundred pounds without choking to death.

18 The Horse The Invention of the Chariot It would take humanity 3,000 years of selective breeding, and the invention of the horse collar, to finally make the horse capable of doing an honest day's work. The development of bronze offered a new option. So what if the horse could not pull much? It didn't have to, so long as it was fast. The horse was not meant for work. It was meant for war. The same metal that had made the warrior so heavy would provide a lightweight vehicle to harness the power and speed of the horse. With bronze, wheels went from heavy clunky wooden affairs to streamlined beauties. The bronze wheels were lighter, stronger and rounder than their predecessors. They also offered less friction on the axle than their wooden counterparts.

19 The Invention of the Chariot The result was the chariot - a lightweight, maneuverable, horse-drawn vehicle with a wheel on each side of an armored platform. It had room for a driver and an armored fighter. The flat platform offered a good footing from which to fire a bow or hurl a javelin. But most importantly, chariots could carry armored soldiers for miles without killing the horses or even tiring their passengers. This allowed an empire to bring fresh troops wherever they were needed. Indeed chariots are synonymous with empire. The very first empire, the Sumerians, made heavy use of the chariot. And, the Hittites seem to have built their entire empire upon their prowess as charioteers. Chariots would define warfare for the next millennium. Anyone who was anyone had themselves depicted in stone riding around in a chariot, hunting lions and slaying enemies.

20 The Roads of the Ancient World The only limit to chariots is that wheels require a level surface to work effectively. This may have been one reason that empires began taking the building of roads seriously. Another might have been the need to establish lines of communication throughout an expanding empire. The obvious benefit of trade must have encouraged them as well. Sumerians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians all exploited the roads of their predecessors during their conquests. They knew that roads would make them vulnerable. Yet, while in power, each expanded the networks of roads further. They knew that they would gain access to wealth and resources, facilitate communication and project their empire's power wherever they built roads. Road building in the Near East reached its apex around 500 BC with the ambitious highway system of Darius I of the Persian Empire, who unified the roads of past empires into a network stretching 1,677 miles.

21 The Roads of the Ancient World Yet, by then, the true masters of road building, the Romans, had begun paving a path of conquest that soon would encompass the known world. The Fall of Jericho Let us return to Jericho. The city has done quite well for itself. It has withstood many assaults. Word comes of a new invasion. 'Primitive barbarians!' say the people of Jericho. 'We'll take them like we always have. Hide behind the walls and shoot arrows at the invaders until they get hungry and go away!' But these aren't barbarians, and they're not primitive. In fact, they're quite the opposite. Before the people of Jericho have time to gather their livestock and take shelter behind the walls, the invaders are upon them. About half of the population doesn't make it inside. Thanks to the speed of the horse, things already have not gone according to plan for the people of Jericho. Many people have died. Now the invaders have livestock to live off of, and the citizens must survive on what was already stored in the city.

22 The Fall of Jericho Still, those stores are pretty full, and those walls are pretty high. Surely, the people of Jericho still have a chance. They just need to wait it out. The invaders surround the city and begin to loot the countryside. Surely, they're going to storm the city at any minute. But no. They're going to wait. This is a new phenomenon to the people of Jericho. Another thing has not gone according to plan. Jericho usually wins waiting games. Even with what they left outside, they can still outlast an invading army. What the people of Jericho do not know, is that the charioteers were just storm troopers - a first assault. The rest of the army is traveling by the same network of roads that brought these charioteers within striking distance of Jericho. That network connects the army to the wagon-loads of supplies they will need for a sustained siege.

23 The Fall of Jericho When it finally comes time to storm the city, the people of Jericho are dead or dying of starvation. Still they put up a fight. They fire arrows and throw stones at the advancing force. Again, things do not go according to plan for the people of Jericho. Their missiles bounce harmlessly from the invaders' armor. The enemy scales the walls, heedless of the barrage. Just like that, a city that had withstood countless assaults had fallen without even much of a struggle. This does not mean the walls of Jericho were useless. If the people of Jericho had an empire of their own, their walls would have bought them time for reinforcements to arrive. Indeed, the invaders would fortify those walls for just such a purpose. This story would be repeated in town after town throughout the Near East.

24 The Fall of Jericho Wherever chariots could travel freely, cities conquered their neighbors to build kingdoms. And, kingdoms conquered their neighbors to build empires. That would continue to be the story of Western Civilization until the Persian emperor, Xerxes, decided to expand his empire into the mountainous lands of the Greeks. Unfortunately, for Xerxes, chariots are ill-suited for mountains. Though the Greeks fought bravely, it was not the Greeks, but Greece itself that cut short the ambitions of the last great chariot empire.