Prologue: What Are the Roots of Civilization?

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Michael Hudson
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Introduction

How far back can we trace the key elements of civilization—urbanization, social structuring, and public law? The fact that the word “civilization” derives literally from “city” (Latin civitas) has led most archaeologists to pick up the thread in the neolithic Near East, where the first towns appeared in the sixth millennium BC, some eight thousand years ago. Yet all the important characteristics of towns can be found in pre-urban ritual sites dating back to the Ice Age caves of Europe c. 12,000 BC. These sanctified areas were set aside from the rest of the land long before they attained urban scale as year-round settlements.

A similar problem of pinpointing beginnings occurs in trying to write histories of the calendar and writing, which were in a state of flux for thousands of years before they settled into their familiar modern meanings. The earliest known notation is found on an engraved bone dating from c. 33,000 BC. The Ice Age archaeologist Alexander Marshack[1] (1972) interpreted its markings as depicting the lunar phases. To be sure, word-writing, syllable signs, and the alphabet would take tens of thousands of years more to develop. Beginning in the ninth millennium BC, three-dimensional commercial tokens were carried in clay pouches or “envelopes.”

In time these sealings were imprinted with the marks of these tokens, from whose shapes Sumerian cuneiform developed c. 3200 BC. Just this single phase in the development of written notation took over five thousand years, and it would take many more centuries for the phonetic symbols to be innovated. Archaeologists can pinpoint each breakthrough along this course; but where can writing as such be said to really begin? Rather than trying to decide whether civilization began at such and such a point, it may be more helpful to think of it as a long series of transformations, with a “big bang” occurring in the Uruk period, in the fourth millennium BC. The Uruk expansion radiated from southern Mesopotamia (Sumer), sending out colonies and trade ventures as far away as Asia Minor in the northwest, Egypt in the southwest, and the Indus Valley to the east. The reason for this reaching out is clear enough. Mesopotamia’s land was composed of rich, river-deposited soils, but lacked metals, stone, and even hardwood. To make use of the bronze-making technology that gave its name to the entire age, the Sumerians had to organize long-distance commerce.

In structuring their exchange of textiles and other skill-intensive exports for foreign raw materials, the Sumerians did not have in mind the ideology of modern commerce. There was no idea of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” guiding private self-interest to operate automatically to benefit society at large. The gains from trade were concentrated in the temples rather than left to merchants operating on their own. In setting up this public enterprise, Bronze Age planners (and theirs was indeed a planned and carefully structured society) looked to the past, to the traditional modes of social organization.

In setting up their handicraft enterprise the Sumerians had reasons not to leave industry in private hands. Individual families lacked the resources to establish large-scale industry and long-distance transport on the requisite scale. In any event, to have let a few families monopolize commerce would have violated traditional norms of social equity. Social values of the time were based on ideas of distributive justice. The Creation of Order describes how worldly economic structures were developed, how they originally were sanctified, and how they were transformed as they passed from one social context to the next.

In the process of tracing a number of economic practices back in time, I have found that the evolution of urban forms, written notation, and the technique of economic planning in terms of what I call cosmos-building—the art of making integrated social structures—extend back through the neolithic and deep into the Ice Age.

In the Ice Age the rhythms of nature provided the model for structuring time. The ripening of plant life and the migration, mating, and birthing of animals, birds, and fish were correlated with seasonal changes in the weather (the melting of snows, rising of the rivers, and the coming of rains) and with the periodicities of the heavens—the sun and the moon, the fixed stars, and the five visible planets rising over the eastern horizon in each season.

By 15,000–9000 BC, in what archaeologists call the Magdalenian period that closed the Ice Age, a number of inscribed bone batons, probably carried by chiefs (as proposed by Marshack 1985),Missing Bibliographic DetailsThe internal citation bibliographic details appear to be missing. Can you help us identify the text so that we can add a citation?OpenSee All Queries indicate that European Ice Age communities timed their annual round of activities to coincide with the rhythms of nature. Synchronizing these rhythms with the movements of the heavens created a parallelism between worldly and celestial periodicities. Indeed, to be at one with nature was to reflect these calendrical rhythms in the organization of everyday life. This was confirmed most notably in the ritual activities conducted at key calendrical points of the year.

Late Ice Age cave art reflects the convening of groups for periodic feasts and rituals of social cohesion. By the Bronze Age the communal feast especially the New Year Saturnalia became the occasion for communities to reform themselves while reinvigorating nature, that is, to subdivide themselves into tribal fractions to hold and (re)distribute land, serve in the army, and administer local policy.

Calendrical ratios were elaborated into an archaic Natural Law governing all dimensions of social organization. Calendar-keeping led to the development of counting systems, which in turn inspired the search for numerological parallels in all areas of life and behavior. Calendrical parallels were found with the musical scale, whose 12 tones corresponded to the 12 months of the year, and whose seven notes signified the sun, moon, and five visible planets. In time the mathematics of musical harmony were elaborated into a metaphor for social concord.

A critical change occurred when Bronze Age economies from Sumer (in modern Iraq, near the mouth of the Persian Gulf) to Ebla (to the northwest, in what is now Syria) found it necessary to replace lunar calendars with a more standardized solar one. The problem with lunar months was that they vary in length. Temple and palace administrators needed a standardized calendar to allocate regular amounts of rations each month to the labor force working in their workshops, and to coordinate forward-planning generally. Their solution was to change lunar calendars and their zodiacs of 28 days (reflecting the visibility of the moon as it passed through its monthly phases) into solar zodiacs, consisting of 12 monthly houses with 30 days each.

This shift to solar calendars cut the umbilical cord to the old lunar-order–goddesses, affecting virtually every dimension of archaic life. In the realm of mythology, sun-gods of justice replaced the old goddesses of distributive justice such as Inanna of the Uruk pantheon and Nanshe of Lagash, whose spirit survived in the Greek hubris-avenging Nemesis. Henceforth the “law-giving sky” bolstered the authority of rulers claiming the support of solar-justice–gods from Marduk to Zeus and Jupiter. To the new solar deities, the old lunar-goddesses were like chaos-dragons such as Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation epic, or tame agricultural-goddesses such as Virgo-Ceres. These goddesses ended up being co-opted as punishing deities of retribution such as Nemesis, defending the new solarized order.

The new natural order extended the periodicities found in calendrical nature throughout all dimensions of social life. For instance, Sumerian measures and weights were divisible by the number of days in the solarized 30-day months. It was from these basic measures of barley, silver, and other basic commodities that the first formal “prices” developed. Early prices and interest rates literally were set in stone along with other public laws and measures.

These prices at first were used mainly by the temples for their internal account-keeping and administration, and for exchanges with society at large. The gur (“bushel”) of barley was made the equivalent of a silver shekel-weight. This price tended to remain fixed under normal conditions; so did the 2:1 ratio between wheat and barley prices, for a millennium from Mesopotamia to Mycenaean Greece. Babylonian interest rates were fixed in the laws of Hammurapi c. 1750 BC, and in earlier Sumerian laws going back to about 2000 BC. The stability of interest rates for a thousand years, 2500 BC–1600 BC, does not reflect the market-responsive conditions with which modern economists are familiar.

If the roots of these debts and related economic phenomena were largely cosmological rather than market-oriented, it also is true that innovations as seemingly modern as corporations can be traced back to Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia. The first corporate commercial bodies were the Sumerian temples, replete with officers and annual meetings, sealed account-keeping, and auditing. These temples became the first industrial entrepreneurs and absentee landlords, housed the first workshops and dependent labor, and undertook the first bulk production and trade, account-keeping, and forward-planning, all by the middle of the third millennium BC. And it was to these temples that civilization’s first documented interest-bearing debts were owed. Wherever one chooses to pick up the thread of such practices, it is clear that to begin with classical Greece and Rome in the first millennium BC, or even the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek world of Linear B, is to enter the drama in the second act, or perhaps even the third or fourth act. To be sure, classical civilization in what hitherto had been the geographic periphery did not simply pick up where Bronze Age Near Eastern societies left off. A new social and political context was at work—self-sufficient communities with closed hereditary aristocracies, whose economic scale was smaller than that of their Bronze Age predecessors. So we are brought back to the original question: Where does the prologue end and civilization begin?

I think that the starting point should be the process of intellectual correlation at work between calendrical structures and other natural phenomena on the one hand, and social laws on the other. One finds the resulting structures reflected in myths, laws, and ritual artifacts. Enough is clear to establish the Bronze Age transition from informal “anthropological” exchange to impersonal bulk trade, written contracts, laws, and prices. Enterprise was formally set aside in public temples, impersonal in the sense that they were not controlled by any single family. The temple labor force and later that of the palace consisted largely of individuals taken out of the normal family context on the land.

To have left this archaic industry in private hands would have been to polarize society in ways that violated traditional norms of equity. The objective was to maintain self-dependency for the community’s families on the land. But things changed in the Iron Age. Following the destruction of most Bronze Age societies c. 1200 BC by a combination of natural disasters, folk wanderings, and warlordship, the palaces and temples were overthrown, looted, and taken over by military aristocracies.

This great break was civilization’s first real Dark Age. It lasted from 1200 BC to 750 BC in the Mediterranean region, and dates back to 1600 BC in Mesopotamia. The hitherto temple- and palace-centered Bronze Age cosmos was decentralized. By shifting property ownership from public institutions to individual families, this disintegration marks the beginning of western civilization. Rejecting the traditions of economic renewal, classical antiquity entered the timeframe of irreversible secular progress, privatization, and secular devolution that has characterized our civilization ever since. Classical Greece and Rome took older elements of social order out of their earlier contexts and gave them a new one, more decentralized and locally self-sufficient. The focus of commercial enterprise shifted away from the temples and palaces to workshops operated by families on their own estates. Without the former need for account-keeping and public accountability, the Bronze Age syllabic scripts were forgotten. What emerged in their place was the much simpler alphabet, a set of 22 to 30 phonetic symbols arranged in a fixed order. While these letters find their origin in Canaanite/Ugaritic notations c. 1400 BC, they deal not with economic record-keeping but with calendar-keeping and possibly musical notation.

Looking backward, we can recognize many other archaic features surviving in decontextualized form. The quantum leap that occurred in Bronze Age Mesopotamia likewise retained many neolithic elements, which in turn can be traced back to the Ice Age.

Solving the Puzzles of Bronze Age Society

In addition to falling intellectually outside the usual academic boundaries, there are pragmatic reasons why so little research has been devoted to Bronze Age social structures.

The path is so untrodden that what promises at first to be a jaunt on which the casual observer may lean back and watch the archaic world displayed by helpful guides soon turns into a trek through a thick underbrush of artifacts and terse records that only indirectly reflect what was going on.

Most Bronze Age tablets come from bureaucratic archives that are relatively simple to translate literally, but require much more effort actually to interpret. Their contents are like shadows reflecting underlying institutions well understood to their scribes but largely opaque to modern translators. A generation of cuneiformists has debated the meaning of “contextual” words such as “freedom,” “straight justice,” and so forth.

The puzzle is beginning to be solved by prosopography, cataloging the names that appear in tablet archives to figure out who was who. This is tedious work. It takes years to study a single archive, understand its dating system, cross-reference its personal names and places, and add up the value of the commodities, property, and debts involved. This means that to get an idea of the social structure at work, it is necessary to reconstruct the calendar, the system of weights and measures being used, and the size and composition of the labor force being supported. Matters usually are complicated by the fact that Bronze Age public and private functions were mixed together in the same archive.[2]

We are somewhat in the position of an alien from another planet looking at superficial social phenomena without understanding their context. We would be missing something, for instance, if we looked at the Statue of Liberty without recognizing that the symbolism of a raised torch[3] goes back at least to Babylonia in the 18th century BC, when it signaled the ruler’s proclamation of economic freedom canceling personal debts, freeing the debt bondsmen and returning land to its traditional holders by clearing it of debt encumbrances. By the time the Statue of Liberty was designed, the symbol no longer existed in the same context. The idea of freedom has changed so radically over the four thousand intervening years that it would be anachronistic to postulate a direct symbolic continuity.

Some Pitfalls in Viewing the Past

Going back to the Bronze Age inception of urban civilization in three major regions—Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley—during 3500–1200 BC we find three quite different types of society, as different from each other as are, say, the United States, China, and Russia today. Like these modern superpowers, the major Bronze Age civilizations shared similar technologies and traded with each other, but they provided very different social contexts and economic structures for this shared technology and trade.

Trying to understand how these diverse archaic civilizations were organized may reveal as many novel ways of thinking, and even of organizing society, that we today can consider as examples or even possible models to produce better human well-being.

How Shall We Reimagine the Past?

Suppose we had a time machine; what could it add to our understanding of the past? We surely could use an instant translation device so good it might be found in science fiction. But I worry that trying to use one of these devices to talk to Bronze Age Sumerians might be as frustrating as going to watch a foreign film and hearing an actor speak a long piece, only to read the terse English subtitle saying simply, “Yes, that is true.” One suspects that something is being lost in translation. But what? Is it just a colorful local idiom, or might the loss involve a deeper plane of understanding?

The semantic gap increases exponentially in dealing with cultures dead for four or five thousand years. We will never discover any text explaining just why Mesopotamians, Egyptians, or Indus Valley occupants did things in the way they did. Even if we could get out of a time machine and ask them to explain things, their answer might be simply, “Because that is the natural order of things. It is implicit in how nature is ordered. It is part of our kosmos.”

What if we actually were to talk to a ruler and hear such seemingly familiar words as kosmos and “freedom”? A conscientious translator would pause to explain that when ancient speakers used the word kosmos or its equivalents, they did not mean the infinite reaches of outer space, but rather, an ordered world, enabling social life on earth to reflect the celestial symmetries of the heavens. This symmetry was reflected above all in calendrical regularities.

What modern translators render somewhat abstractly as “freedom” had quite concrete implications. The basic idea is closer to that of liberty, with its implicit contrast between liber (freedman) and slave. It also had the broadly ethical dimension of promoting justice and order (kittum and misharum in Babylonian, ma’at in Egyptian). The Sumerians used the word amargiSumerian TerminologyShould this be ama-gi or amagi instead of amargi throughout this book? See: Ama-gi.OpenSee All Queries (and later nig.sisa); and the Akkadians andurārum. From the latter derived the Hebrew deror, an Old Testament term that appears on the American Liberty Bell’s inscription from Chapter 25 of Leviticus: “Go forth and proclaim freedom throughout the land.” But without an explanatory gloss we would not know what postwar scholars have discovered: that instead of being as abstract as our modern idea of freedom, the terms used, from Mesopotamia to Israel, meant something quite specific—a cancellation of personal debts as part of an overall proclamation freeing debt-slaves and “restoring order.” The idea was one of a Clean Slate, or what the Athenian lawgiver Solon called a “shaking off of burdens” (seisachtheia).

The common denominator for all these words was social equity, and the idea extended into a broad social kosmos imbued inexorably with the perceived structures of nature, above all astronomy. For ancient rulers learned the art of statecraft in a different way from their modern counterparts. Today’s political scientists would consider it an elitist way, perhaps even bordering on the occult in the sense that rulers structured social institutions in ways that reflected basic calendrical proportions in the systems of measures and weights, prices, interest rates, and even the division of communities into tribal fractions. The result achieved something that, at the broadest level, has been universally sought: It gave social structures the appearance of conforming to Natural Law.

At first glance the attempt to integrate social policy with Natural Law might seem akin to what Enlightenment philosophers called the Law of Nature and of Nations in the 18th century or social physics in the 19th century. However, Enlightenment Natural Law is individualistic. It holds that society can develop best by leaving property and wealth in private hands. Individuals pursuing their own economic self-interest are supposed to automatically serve society, thanks to what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand.” But antiquity considered the pursuit of personal gain to be socially corrosive and unbalancing, above all the gaining of wealth through commerce and moneylending. This disparaging of personal gain is critical to understanding how archaic life was structured to educate individuals to act in the group interest. The further we look back in time, the more we find personal wealth accumulation to be a temporary phenomenon, and one viewed with suspicion and anxiety by most people.

Periodic renewal was the guiding rule in social structuring. For Mesopotamian rulers the most important occasion was their New Year coronation. Babylonian rulers would raise a ceremonial torch.[3] We know this from an ancient trial record in which a mortgage debtor claims that he does not have to repay his creditor because the ruler recently “raised the sacred torch” (Finkelstein[4] 1965). This gesture seems to have been fraught with symbolic meaning, a signal to be relayed throughout the land to say that economic liberty had been proclaimed. Yet even the foremost scholars disagree on just what was meant. We cannot understand the text’s or ritual’s full meaning without knowing more.

The point I am making is that much reconstruction remains to be done on the prehistoric pathways to modern civilization. Looking back in time before 500 BC, one must resort to logical inference based on terse records and artifactual evidence such as burials that can only provide hints as to the social values and organization at work.

The basic theme of The Creation of Order is the parallelism between social values and kosmos-building, and the grounding of both the social and natural kosmos in ideas of regularity which found their counterpart in ideals of distributive justice and equity. I therefore start out by describing the general spirit of the archaic kosmos, and proceed to its structure based on the first instance of a calendar and its counting systems.

Bibliography

Jack J. Finkelstein, “Some New Misharum Material and Its Implications,” in Assyriological Studies, No. 16 (1965), pp. 233–246.

Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (New York: 1972).

Eva von Dassow, “Proclaim Debt Amnesty Throughout All the Land? A Biblical Solution to a Present-Day Problem,” The Conversation, July 26, 2022.

  1. ↑ Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (New York: 1972).
  2. ↑ The above description concentrates on Mesopotamia rather than Egypt or the Indus Valley because Mesopotamia was the dynamic outward-reaching culture of its epoch, especially in the Uruk expansion. Egypt and the Indus Valley absorbed rather than radiated. The Indus Valley was the geographically largest Bronze Age civilization, but seems to have been economically stagnant. Late in the fourth millennium BC, in its predynastic period, Egypt adopted Mesopotamian innovations in a distinct way, including the ideas of syllabic writing (adapted to local images and words, to be sure), pyramids (derivative of Mesopotamia’s multistaged ziggurats), royal cult architecture, and apparently its sed festival where pharaohs periodically restored social order by proclaiming legal Clean Slates. Unlike the case in Mesopotamia, Egypt’s temples functioned more as cults to the dead pharaohs than as commercial corporations acting in the outward-seeking way found in Mesopotamia. There are no Egyptian cities to excavate apart from these tomb complexes.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Observatory Editor’s Note: See “Proclaim Debt Amnesty Throughout All the Land? A Biblical Solution to a Present-Day Problem,” Eva von Dassow, The Conversation, July 26, 2022.
  4. ↑ Jack J. Finkelstein, “Some New Misharum Material and Its Implications,” in Assyriological Studies, No. 16 (1965), pp. 233–246.

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