This book was produced by Human Bridges.
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- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Prologue: What Are the Roots of Civilization?
- Chronology and Maps
- Spring: Establishing Society’s Structural Proportions
- 1. How the Archaic Kosmos Integrated Nature and Society
- 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
- 3. Measures, Rules, and Prices
- Summer: Balancing Self-Expression With Group Order
- 4. Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos
- 5. Music, Temperament, and Social Concord
- 6. The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets
- Autumn: The Division of Labor and Economic Justice
- 7. Social Division Into Calendrical Tribes and Ranks
- 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
- 9. The Archaic Cosmology of Cities: Building the Kosmos on Earth
- Winter: The Archaic Order in Motion and Its Collapse
- 10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis
- 11. Periodicities of Property and Debt
- 12. The Cosmology of War
- Epilogue: Modern Civilization as the Destruction of Archaic Order
- Backmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- Lecture: How Temples and Religion Played a Central Role in Creating the Ancient Economic Order That Has Become Secularized Today
- Help Us Edit and Join This Collaborative Research Project
- Navigate the Query Pages Throughout This Book
- Style Guide for This Book
Anyone setting out to re-create the modes of thought and social practices of Ice Age populations owes a paramount debt to Alexander Marshack for his pioneering work on paleolithic notations, calendar-making, and cognitive symbolism. My debt to him is personal as well as intellectual, for over the years he has been generous in sharing his ideas, files, and friends with me.
Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky showed me the need to contrast the Bronze Age Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Indus societies so as to trace our civilization’s unique time frame rather than searching for universals. He too has been generous in discussing Bronze Age social structures.
My understanding of the role of Sumer’s temples and palaces as public utilities rather than as a “state” follows that of Igor Diakonoff, to whom I am also grateful for drawing my attention to numerous problems concerning the public-sector setting of early Sumerian debt and land sales. Denise Schmandt-Besserat has provided basic help in the sphere of neolithic and Bronze Age notations and account-keeping. All the above scholars have been generous in reviewing early drafts of The Creation of Order.
I am grateful to Norman Yoffee, Piotr Steinkeller of Harvard, and Marc Van De Mieroop for helping to refine my discussion of Mesopotamian cuneiform archives and save me from numerous pitfalls and misinterpretations. Bob Stieglitz has been of great help in demonstrating the connections between Bronze Age astronomy, music, and mathematics and their respective notation systems. Bart Jordan also has given me many ideas over the years regarding the connections between archaic music and the calendar. For emphasizing the contribution that art history has been able to make in reflecting archaic social values, I am indebted above all to Günter Kopcke. I also have benefited from the work of Irene Winter, and from discussions with Joan Connelly about art history and classical studies generally. Jennifer Roberts and Larissa Bonfante have given valuable help over the years with regard to Greek and Roman antiquity and the translation of classical texts.
