From Villages to Cities

From Villages to Cities

Lecture 29

The appearance of Agrarian civilizations, from about 5,000 years ago, marks an important subordinate threshold in this course.

With Agrarian civilizations we get, for the rst time, cities, states, and … writing! This means that for the rst time we have written evidence, precise dates, and even some names. In short, we enter the realm of what many historians might regard as “real history.” Suddenly, we have a mass of information and ideas. This creates new problems. Whereas in discussing biology or geology there was a broad consensus about the main ideas, historians debate endlessly about the main lines of historical development, so there is more room for controversy here than in any earlier part of this course. From now on, our main challenge will be to avoid getting too caught up in the details or the controversies of historians and try to keep our eye on the overall shape of human historical development.

Lectures Twenty-Nine through Thirty-Seven survey the 5,000 years or so during which “Agrarian civilizations” dominated the history of most people on Earth. This is the largest single group of lectures in this course. This lecture de nes Agrarian civilizations and offers a brief chronology of their initial appearance. Then we turn to Mesopotamia, located in modern Iraq, to describe how increasing productivity created the foundations for some of the earliest Agrarian civilizations.

The term “civilization” can be used in many different ways, so I need to explain that I use it neutrally, as a label for a particular type of human community. I do not use it to imply any value judgments about these communities. However, I will argue that Agrarian civilizations were more complex than all earlier human societies. Agrarian civilizations had distinctive characteristics.

They had large, networked communities of many millions of people.

These communities contained cities and tribute-taking states with bureaucracies and armies.

Most of their resources came from agriculture, and most of their inhabitants (often as many as 90%) were small-holding peasants living in villages.

Like agriculture, Agrarian civilizations evolved independently in different parts of the world. But because they depended so much on agriculture, they appeared in regions where agriculture was well established.

Just over 5,000 years ago, the rst Agrarian civilizations appeared in Mesopotamia and Northeast Africa/Egypt.

About 4,500 years ago, the rst Agrarian civilizations appeared in

North India/Pakistan.

Just over 4,000 years ago, the rst Agrarian civilizations appeared in northern China.

About 2,500 years ago, the rst Agrarian civilizations appeared in

Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, and also in a new world zone, the Americas.

During the last 1,500 years, states appeared by diffusion in one or two islands of the Paci c zone, but none were large enough to count as fully developed Agrarian civilizations.

The emergence of Agrarian civilizations was driven mainly by increasingly productive technologies that generated more resources and larger populations. Two clusters of innovation were particularly important in AfroEurasia: the “secondary products revolution” and irrigation. Archaeologist Andrew Sherratt (1946–2006) identi ed a cluster of innovations he called the “secondary products revolution.” When rst domesticated, animals were used mainly for their meat and hides, which meant you had to slaughter them to make use of them. From about 5,000 years ago, new methods of exploitation evolved over a wide area reaching from Northwest Africa to the

Eurasian steppes. These made it possible to exploit animals throughout their lifetime by using their “secondary products,” or resources they generated while alive. These techniques included the use of milk for food and wool for cloth-making. They also included exploitation of the draft power of large animals for riding and transportation or for pulling plows. Oxen or horses can deliver up to four times as much power as human beings, so this change counted as an energy revolution. Animal power allowed farmers to plow soils more deeply and to farm soils with tougher surfaces. It also revolutionized transportation in both commerce and warfare. In arid steppe regions, these innovations laid the foundations for pastoralist communities, which were largely nomadic, relying primarily on the exploitation of domestic animals that they As we have seen, grazed by traveling to different sites through the year. Pastoral nomadism would create new types of some of the communities, which because of their mobility and earliest farming military skills would play a vital role in the history communities of Afro-Eurasia.

appeared in the

Fertile Crescent, A second group of innovations was linked to irrigation. Irrigation means arti cially introducing around the edges water to regions with limited natural rainfall but of Mesopotamia. fertile soils and plenty of sunlight. Such regions can often be found in arid lands with alluvial plains (regions that are regularly ooded by large rivers). Mesopotamia, the land within the loop of the Fertile Crescent, was such a region. Literally, “Mesopotamia” means “land between the rivers,” the rivers being the Tigris and Euphrates. Most of it is within modern Iraq. Archaeologists have lavished much attention on Mesopotamia, so here better than anywhere else, we can see how increasingly productive technologies prepared the way for the rst Agrarian civilizations. As we have seen, some of the earliest farming communities appeared in the Fertile Crescent, around the edges of Mesopotamia. By 9,000 years ago, some farming communities were starting to settle the arid plains of Mesopotamia itself, but only in better-watered regions. As they pushed into the arid lowlands, they developed simple forms of irrigation.

By 8,000 years ago, there were many villages of irrigation farmers settled along the major rivers north of modern Baghdad. Some were beginning to build substantial canal systems.

By 7,000 years ago, villages were multiplying, particularly along the Euphrates to the south of modern Baghdad, in the lands of what would later be known as “Sumer.” Villages of the Ubaid culture often appear in small clusters near small towns with up to 4,000 people. They dug canals sometimes several kilometers long, grew barley and dates, and kept cattle and sheep. They also shed and caught water birds.

Rising productivity encouraged population growth and the emergence of larger towns that provided markets and other services to surrounding villages. Some, such as Eridu, contained large temples from perhaps as early as 6,000 years ago.

As populations increased, trading systems began to link entire regions into networks of trade. Catal Huyuk, in Turkey (see Lecture Twenty-Six), owed its wealth to the trade in obsidian, a volcanic glass that is extremely hard and can be used to make sharp and durable blades. Obsidian from Catal Huyuk and other sites was traded over many hundreds of miles. Other trade goods in early Agrarian Mesopotamia included shells, precious stones such as turquoise, and eventually pottery. By 8,000 years ago, the spread of distinctive forms of pottery such as Hala an ware and the presence of other goods such as obsidian, traded over hundreds of miles, shows that signi cant exchange networks were evolving between the multiplying villages of Mesopotamia.

The multiplication of villages, the appearance of an increasing number of larger towns, and the development of extensive trade networks had created the largest concentrations of people and resources and the most active systems of regional exchanges ever known. Now we’re ready to describe the appearance of the rst Agrarian civilizations in ancient Sumer.

Essential Reading

Supplementary Reading

Questions to Consider

Bentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters, chap. 2. Brown, Big History, chap. 6. Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 9.

Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East. Ristvet, In the Beginning, chap. 4. Trigger, Early Civilizations.

1. What features distinguish “Agrarian civilizations” from the communities of the early Agrarian era?

2. Why did the size of the largest human communities grow signi cantly in the early Agrarian era?