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
As Mesopotamia’s temples were elaborated into large public utilities, their merchants and other officials were made accountable. As early as the eighth millennium BC a neolithic system of checks was based on tokens enclosed in clay envelopes and sent along with merchants delivering goods. Each token represented a product-unit. In time the envelopes containing these tokens were embossed with signs indicating their contents—the first media on which cuneiform signs were written. Out of this system emerged a repertory of signs that Sumerian temples elaborated into a full-fledged accounting system around 3200 BC. This accountability by sacred and public administrators evolved into the writing of narrative texts and annals, public laws, and in time a general literature including astronomy, medicine, and omen-reading.
Instead of the intermixing of populations creating a Tower of Babel, it became the major impulse to use phonetic writing. For as peoples speaking diverse languages came into increasingly regular contact with one another, a phonetic system of symbols had to be developed to represent proper names, place names, and other relevant ethnic sounds and vocabulary. Writing also was used for calendrical and musical notations. Indeed, it seems to be these highly structured quasinumeric notations that evolved into the earliest alphabetic symbols c. 1400 in the Levant.
Music formed an important ligament of archaic communities. A musical line aided the memorization of oral knowledge. The earliest laws, and also the Homeric epics and no doubt earlier literary forms as well (if we can call them “literary” before there were alphabetic letters), apparently were written to a rhythmic meter that could be sung, or at least recited in a singsong.
Not only the mode of creative self-expression but also its substance often was based on cosmological proportionalities. From the Sumerian King List to the biblical Patriarch List, for instance, the lengths of reigns, lives, and childbearing ages were not actually historical. Rather, they represented neat geometric proportionalities such as were familiar from mathematical school texts of the period. Likewise in the realm of pictorial art the proportions of the human body reflected the local fractional system, 60-based in Mesopotamia, decimalized in Egypt and its Aegean culture area. Individual personal details thus were dissolved into the stream of traditional cosmological prototypes.
A universal mode of self-expression was social behavior at meals, above all at the periodic festivals of social integration. Individuals were supposed to reflect moderation and balance in their drinking and eating habits. A ritual standardization of servings among table companions symbolized their common rank and public status. In this way order was put into personal self-expression in general.
Summer Table of Contents
