- 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
Introduction
The upper paleolithic (50,000 BC–12,000 BC)General Note About Dates in This ChapterSome of the dates in this chapter and elsewhere have been updated to reflect more recent research than when this was originally written. But there may be internal discrepancies as a result. If you find any, please let us know. is synonymous with the Ice Age. It includes the evolution of modern mankind from the time the Cro-Magnons appeared in Europe c. 45,000 BC. Coming into contact with the Neanderthals, the Cro-Magnons learned their tools and coping methods. This toolkit, coupled with the need to cope economically with the cold latitude’s seasonal rhythms, contributed to the greater cognitive sophistication of European artifacts as compared to those found elsewhere in the Ice Age.
The following Ice Age periods are named after major areas in France where caves have preserved distinctive toolkits:
- Aurignacian (41,000 BC–20,000 BC). The first known notation system dates from c. 33,000 BC—lunar calendar-keeping engraved on a bone. Also dating from the Aurignacian are female figurines, and engraved bone, ivory, and stone artifacts, probably of a ritual character.
- Solutrean (20,000 BC–15,000 BC). Chipped flints and other stone tools have relatively sophisticated and finished (“polished”) surfaces. Needles were used to sew animal skins.
- Magdalenian (15,000 BC–10,000 BC). Named after the rock shelter and caves of La Madeleine on the Vézère River, near Les Eyzies, Magdalenian art and iconography have been found at more than 100 Franco-Spanish sites. These artifacts are much more complex than anything before, and use numerous symbol systems such as those found on the bone “batons” inscribed with representations of seasonal phenomena. Burials included gifts of food, ornaments, and tools identified with the deceased. Horses may have begun to be domesticated for ritual sacrifices. Bone whistles and trumpets were used, in addition to drums and other percussive sound-makers. Exchange extended over long distances, with Atlantic European shells worn as far east as the Russian Urals.
The neolithic (new stone age), broadly defined, began c. 10,000 BC. Global warming had begun c. 12,000 BC, causing the ice sheets to recede, drawing birds and animal migrations northward. This warming was accompanied by forestation in the northern latitudes, disrupting traditional hunting and gathering. Some nomadic hunter-gatherers followed the receding ice sheets; others adapted to the warmer and geographically changed environment by clearing the land and settling down to cultivate the soil and domesticate animals.
Growing numbers of people came together at seasonal festivals, timed by astronomical observation and hence by counting and measuring time. Most marriages and protoeconomic exchange probably occurred at these rituals, whose time and place became regularized by tradition and myth.
In the mesolithic (20,000 BC–10,000 BC in the Near East), the rudiments of social organization are evidenced by ritual architecture and artifacts. The town of Jericho, dating back to 9000 BC, is exceptional. (More formal town-building is not found until the neolithic some three thousand years later.) An amber and obsidian trade extended for thousands of miles, from the Baltic down along the Danube reaching as far south as Mesopotamia. From c. 8000 BC to 3000 BC, commercial tokens were found throughout the Near East—abstract shapes wrapped in clay envelopes, signifying the inventories consigned to traveling merchants.
The neolithic proper began c. 6000 BC. Towns such as Çatalhöyük in Asia Minor emerged as multiethnic “neutral zones,” enclaves where diverse groups came together to trade and to manufacture on-site. This town, like its successors throughout the Near East, was focused around a sacred area and was a commercial center. Exchange apparently was sanctified by temple sponsorship in a common overall religious context that was cosmopolitan and open, not ethnically closed.
Settled agriculture and its related neolithic technologies imply a social dimension headed by calendrical coordination, storage (at least of seed grains), and protection (including religious sanctions) against attack, theft, or misappropriation. A hierarchy of authority is implicit. Forums to coordinate group action were organized as festivals under the protective umbrella of celestial sanctions.
Urbanization required a body of common law to arbitrate conflicts and disputes, and to maintain or restore order generally. Religion provided a higher authority to administer laws and deter individual self-centeredness from infringing on the public welfare. Temples played a dominant role by sanctifying ritual centers and structuring economic life.
The chalcolithic (copper and stone age, 6000 BC–4000 BC) was centered in Mesopotamia. The south—Sumer—had rich alluvial soil, but lacked stone, metal ores, and hardwood. In the process of trading for these vital resources, Sumerians had to organize their economic life more thoroughly than was the case in more self-sufficient regions. They exchanged specialized handicrafts for foreign raw materials. Export goods were produced not in the households of chieftains, but in the public temples which appear from the very first settlements (such as Eridu in the sixth millennium BC).
Communalistic traditions remained strong. Land tenure was subject to redistribution. When resources were accumulated by individuals they typically were expended on burials. Economic surpluses generally were consumed rather than used by their holders as a wedge to commercially exploit or indebt the rest of society.
The Bronze Age (3300 BC–1200 BC) began in the Near East, and spread into Eurasia and Africa. It was characterized not only by a technology (mixing soft copper and brittle tin to make hard bronze), but by the complex and far-flung social organization needed to obtain tin from a few distant regions (especially Afghanistan), and to administer specialized metalworking and weaving workshops staffed by dependent labor.
The Early Bronze Age (3500 BC–2000 BC) began with the Uruk expansion sending out military and trading outposts c. 3500 BC, and planting colonies from the Iranian plain (Tepe Yahya) to Asia Minor. Contacts were made with predynastic Egypt by the late fourth millennium BC. Temples acted as umbrella institutions for damgar (merchants) to earn commercial gains, which were systematically reinvested rather than buried or otherwise consumed.
Cuneiform (“wedge-shaped” writing) developed as a byproduct of temple account-keeping. Catalyzed by the need to represent the names, places, and words of Sumer’s multiethnic population, it evolved into a phonetic syllabic script in the third millennium BC.
The Middle Bronze Age (2000 BC–1600 BC) began with an Intermediate Period of disruption from Mesopotamia to Egypt at the end of the third millennium BC. Temples were taken over by invading warlord chieftains, who turned hitherto communal hierarchies into organs of dynastic control and bequeathed shares of their temple revenues (prebends) to their children—legacies that were subdivided to represent civilization’s first corporate shares. Military seizure came to overshadow commercial wealth creation. Indo-European speakers such as the horse-breeding Hurrians and Hittites entered Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and Greek-speaking Mycenaeans occupied the Balkans. Hammurapi’s Amorite dynasty in Babylon conquered southern Mesopotamia and delegated authority to local chieftains in exchange for their military support. The result was a feudal sharing of power.
The Late Bronze Age (1600 BC–1200 BC) signaled the beginning of the Dark Age in Babylonia, which was occupied by Kassite invaders in 1596 BC. But Mesopotamian modes of organization diffused throughout the Near East and Aegean. Entrepreneurial dynamics permutated in the western periphery—along the Phoenician coast (Sidon, Tyre, and Ugarit), and across the sea to Cyprus, Crete, and Mycenaean Greece. These Late Bronze Age kingdoms became cosmopolitan as rulers established familiarity with one another, addressed each other as “brother,” exchanged skilled artisans, and encouraged marriage among members of elite society to forge interdynastic ties.
The Mycenaeans conquered Crete and adopted its linear syllabic writing to their own language. On the Syrian coast, multiethnic Ugarit developed a cuneiform alphabet, and another alphabetic system was developed out of calendrical or musical symbols that had indicated consecutive order within a gamut (a month, or perhaps a scale of notes). However, this phonetic alphabet did not diffuse widely until around 800 BC.
The Geography of Bronze Age Social Evolution
Each of the three major Bronze Age civilizations—Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley—organized industry and commerce in a different way, for there was no single “natural” way to do it. But it was primarily Mesopotamian structures that became embedded in our civilization’s everyday life—the 360-degree circle and zodiac, our 60-based minutes and hours, and much of the iconography for temples and other public buildings, as well as corporate business organization, commercial credit and interest, standardized money prices, and contractual forms. Sumerian myths and ideas of righteousness supplied the prototypes for much of the Old Testament and for secular literary motifs.
The Indus civilization was the geographically largest of the late third millennium BC. It exported raw materials to Mesopotamia via the territory of Dilmun at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and had contacts with Central Asia to the north, but few imported artifacts have been found. The Indus society seemed quite homogeneous in an austere and highly standardized way, run on different principles from those of its contemporary cultures. But just what these principles were is not entirely clear.
Egypt was the second-largest Bronze Age civilization, and the most autocratic. Its pyramid tombs and their cults to the dead pharaohs sterilized land and other resources for religious ends, which were connected with the afterlife of the pharaohs rather than with undertaking commercial enterprise. Egypt’s strong army withstood the attacks of the Sea Peoples in 1200 BC, but often was conquered by other North African kingdoms (especially the Ethiopians), which established military dynasties for many centuries at a time.
Egypt traded much of the gold from its Nubian south to the Levant and Crete, which its armies dominated for many centuries at a time. But for the most part Egypt remained isolated. It received but did not promulgate. This is apparent even in the realm of diplomatic marriage practices: There is no record of any pharaoh sending abroad his daughter or other relatives.
What made Sumer the most commercially dynamic Bronze Age society was its need for vital resources. Attempts at overt military seizure in the Uruk period simply did not work. They cost more than peaceful exchange, and distant fortresses were abandoned c. 3500–3300 BC. The Sumerians then organized industrial guilds to produce textiles and other prestige exports in exchange for foreign raw materials. Craftsmen and scribes were organized as what today would be called public professions (Greek dēmiourgoi), centralized in temples serving essentially as public utilities. It was these commercially outreaching temples that shaped the region’s unique urbanization and its social cosmos.
On the other hand, Mesopotamia alone among the major Bronze Age regions experienced ongoing internecine warfare, and increasingly struggled against external enemies—the Semitic Amorites from the western desert, Indo-European speakers from the north, and the Zagros mountain tribes and Elamites on the Iranian mountain plateau to the east. (See Map 1.)Missing Illustration: MapCan you help us figure out what map should go here?
During the Bronze Age’s remarkable two thousand–plus years, 3300 BC to 1200 BC, Mesopotamia’s economic innovations diffused up the Euphrates from Sumer via Babylonia, Ashur, and Nuzi to Ebla in northern Syria. (See Map 2.)Missing Illustration: MapCan you help us figure out what map should go here? Secondary states came into being along the Phoenician shore and across the Mediterranean, on Cyprus (whose name is synonymous with the copper it supplied to Bronze Age users), Crete (of the Minoan labyrinth), and Mycenaean Greece. Here, at the western end of the diffusion, the palace’s Linear B clay records still retain much the same accounting formats found on Sumerian documents dating from over a thousand years earlier. This continuity reflects how successful Sumerian public enterprise was. Apparently there was little need to modify its contributions as long as central administration survived, until c. 1200 BC.
The World-Historical Significance of Sumer’s Temples
From their economic functions of storing seeds, tools, and other communal capital, the Sumerian temples built up a commercial infrastructure and grounded it in sacred and civic rituals. Their herds provided wool and draft animals and provisioned the public feasts that were the only source of meat for much of the population. Wool was woven into prestige textiles by a dependent labor force composed mainly of female and child labor, especially widows and orphans whose husbands and fathers, respectively, had been lost in battle or otherwise had left their families without means of support on the land. In addition to their domestic cult uses, woolens and other temple products were consigned to merchants to exchange for raw materials. Temple workshops thus served as a “welfare/workfare” employer of last resort for the blind, infirm, and other individuals who could not function well in the communal agricultural sector. (In northern Mesopotamia these functions were centralized in the palaces.)
Administering these industries required account-keeping and writing, measures and weights, prices, and contracts. Also requiring administration were relations between the temples, palaces, and the landholding families at large for such things as sharecropping arrangements on temple and palace lands. All these efforts had to be organized on a sufficiently noncoercive basis that they would not spur revolt. They were made acceptable largely by myth and ritual representing public authority and its status quo as celestially sanctioned.
In sum, Mesopotamia’s temples provided the catalyst for profit-generating trade, in a socially acceptable way that could not have been achieved through private self-seeking in the first instance. Their commercial surpluses, sanctified by being used for public ends, were reinvested in public infrastructure and hence were immune to the traditional social pressures to give them away in feasts or as gifts, to bury them with their ancestors (glorifying their families and hence themselves in the process), or simply to destroy them.
The Mediterranean Privatization of Near Eastern Institutions
The Bronze Age ends with a Dark Age (1200–750 BC). Except for Egypt and Assyria, all the Bronze Age kingdoms were overturned c. 1200 BC by a combination of natural disaster and folk-wanderings. Demographic instability was aggravated in most areas by local revolts against what had become oppressive palace regimes. The Greek population was reduced to just a 10th of its former size in some areas, and economic life reverted to local subsistence production as palaces and temples were looted, their workshops destroyed and their lands and herds taken. Mycenae’s Linear B script was lost, along with its administrative bureaucracies. Locally delegated basileus administrators kept control of many public properties to become overlord-chieftains.
This Dark Age was the crucible for a new kind of world. Phoenicians and Syrians transmitted many elements of Bronze Age social structures and cosmologies to Greece and Italy (e.g., interest-bearing debt), but what was lost were the checks and balances that had governed relations between the Bronze Age palaces, temples, and their communities at large. When public organs revived in classical antiquity (from about 600 BC to the inception of the Christian era), they no longer were as centralized, entrepreneurial, and self-financing, but had to rely on taxing private wealth.
Antiquity’s economic focus was more military than commercial. What was needed for survival were troops. Money or exportable products were needed above all to hire mercenaries. Military devastation forced much of the population into debt. This led to forfeiture of lands to creditors who assembled great estates, which they stocked with war-captives (especially in Sicily and southern Italy).
Economic status was determined by one’s rank in the armed forces (headed by the cavalry), for soldier-citizens had to outfit themselves. Most of the military aristocracies that replaced kingship in Greece, Italy, and other Mediterranean regions became oligarchic, although often they were democratic within their own hereditary ranks. In Sparta, with its dual kingship based on two separate royal families, the senate (gerousia) of elders bolstered oligarchic control. But in Persia, Egypt, and the Hellenistic period following Alexander the Great (who died in 323 BC), kingship became more absolute and even divine, culminating in the Roman emperors. These neo-kingships emerged out of the aristocratic families, not from public sectors set aside from the clans as in Sumer. In none of these cases did there survive the Mesopotamian ruler’s ritual show of subordination to the high priest on New Year’s day by pledging to serve his city-deity. Temple priesthoods had come under the thumb of civil rulers or the oligarchies they came to represent.
Among the casualties of antiquity’s evolution were the periodic renewals of freedom from debt. Although the great popular demand throughout antiquity was to cancel the debts and redistribute the land, people had no recollection that such reorderings had been part and parcel of Bronze Age cosmologies. Instead of social order periodically being re-created in classical times, lands that had been forfeited or sold by indebted peasant families were rarely recovered. Except in the biblical lands with their Jubilee Year (Leviticus, Chapter 25) and the pro-debtor laws of Deuteronomy, personal freedom was not restored.
In the seventh century BC, popular leaders or “tyrants” seized power in some Greek cities, canceling the debts and parceling out the estates of the ruling families. In the Athenian crisis of 594 BC, Solon was appointed archon (“premier”) and abolished debt bondage, but democracies generally lacked the power to proclaim economic justice edicts of the far-reaching Near Eastern type. Once established, debts were permitted to polarize society irreversibly. After Rome conquered Greece, Asia Minor, and the rest of the Mediterranean in the second century BC, self-serving oligarchies ruled unchecked. Social polarization increased, and the ideal of a well-proportioned economic cosmos became irrelevant.
How Antiquity’s Mode of Collapse Shaped the Modern World
A new kind of Dark Age descended after about AD 400, nearly two thousand years after the collapse of Babylonia and other Late Bronze Age societies in 1600 BC and 1200 BC initiated the classical privatization process. A European epoch of feudalism descended as economic life once again fragmented into locally self-sufficient estates ruled by local big-men calling themselves lords. By the fifth century AD trade and local money exchange dried up. The ensuing poverty and depopulation undercut the region’s ability to defend itself. To stem the military and economic decay, the institutions of slavery and interest-bearing debt were banned outright—not merely temporarily as in the Bronze Age justice proclamations, but permanently in the greatest and most far-reaching Clean Slate ever witnessed. (No such convulsion occurred outside of the Roman Empire.)
Every epoch is shaped by the way the preceding society collapses. Although Western Europe remained in a long Dark Age of feudalism, the unique embryonic shape of modern economic development was formed. All that was needed to give birth was money, which came when the Crusades seized bullion in the Levant in the 12th and 13th centuries AD, and in the New World after 1492.
Having been freed from debt-slavery and other forms of slavery, the new capitalism developed along radically new lines. For the first time in history, economies came to be based on a new source of labor—neither that of slaves, public dependents, nor debtors working off their obligations to creditors and patrons, but free (albeit dependent) wage labor. Also new were interest-bearing public debts owed to private banking families, debt-based paper money (after 1694 AD, when the Bank of England was founded to monetize the nation’s war debt), and entrepreneurial borrowing. Lending was mobilized to finance development rather than stifling it as was the case in antiquity’s usury-oriented society.
As personal self-seeking was seen as enhancing rather than threatening social welfare, economic individualism came to replace public enterprise. The new doctrine was just the opposite of Stoic altruism. Materialism was held to uplift society, riding on the wave of technological progress and rising living standards in the European core and its most advanced colonies.
The ensuing individualistic ideology has had little interest in cosmos-building. This is especially the case as theories of secular progress have replaced periodic re-creations of order. It would seem grandiose to try to integrate our knowledge of astronomy, musical tuning, and related aspects of physical nature into a single system linked to the periodic renewal of economic order by canceling debts, releasing prisoners, and so forth. Instead of a general field theory linking the workings of nature and society in this kind of way, each field of knowledge has become dissociated from the other, with no common denominators to provide a grand synthesis. Progress has come to be viewed as something automatic, if only governments refrain from interfering. This view is just the opposite of the archaic[1] awareness that economies tend inherently to polarize when not counteracted by political activism.
- ↑ By archaic I mean society prior to classical Greek and Italian antiquity c. 600 BC.
