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
Shortly after 1600 BC the irrigated societies of Mesopotamia were devastated internally by a militarized privatization. Feudal authority was delegated to local big-men already by about 2000 BC. Hitherto public institutions began to pass into the hands of Amorite chieftains from the western desert and also to local military rulers. These corrosive dynamics led to the economic collapse of southern Mesopotamia, making it prey to the invading Kassites. The canals silted up and temples were looted of thousands of years of savings.
Throughout the Near East and Mediterranean, the coming of the Iron Age overwhelmed Bronze Age social institutions. Local populations were overlayered by invaders composed mainly of Indo-European speakers, Assyrians, Egyptians, Libyans, and other ethnic groups. Towns and temples were looted, palaces were burned, and populations were reduced to serfdom.
Around 1200 BC some 90 percent of the Greek population died in the natural disasters, folk wanderings, and invasions by the Peoples of the Sea and “Dorians” following the collapse of Mycenaean society. This first Dark Age of civilization in Mediterranean Europe (1200–750 BC) was the crucible in which modern “western” societies were formed.
Victorious groupings established themselves as closed aristocracies. They enthroned their heroes as city patrons and finally, with Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors, as gods. The classical towns were smaller than the Mesopotamian capital cities such as Uruk and Lagash had been. Handicraft industry was conducted on a smaller scale by individual “households” (the Greek oikos) than had been the case with the large Bronze Age temple estates and palaces. The division of labor was not carried to as far a degree as before.
The new aristocracies based their power increasingly on absentee landownership and monetary wealth lent out as usury capital. They became cosmopolitan by intermarrying with families of similar neighboring communities.
The upshot was a Hellenistic Age whose laws legitimized private property ownership “free” of any communal control or policy overrides. This spirit survives in today’s Roman-based law, which in classical times provided freedom for wealthy land owners and creditors to deprive the mass of society of its freedom. Stoic historians idealized the earlier Bronze Age as having been a Golden Age. But against these mythical and oral traditions of an earlier epoch of justice, aristocracies enthroned their concept of order as consisting of their hereditary appropriation of property and wealth.
Winter Table of Contents
