3. FORGES, CITIES, STATES, SCRIPTS, FROM ROUGHLY 7000–1200 BCE

As chapter two demonstrated, farming emerged much more gradually, by more paths,

and in more diverse forms than the Neolithic Revolution model claims. The same is true of

what that model presents as the next milestones in “civilizational development.” These are

(i) refining and shaping metals; (ii) establishing cities and, thereafter, states; and (iii)

inventing writing.

Yet, amid the diverse ways these new practices emerged and were used, we can also

see that the denser settlements of the era after 7000 BCE faced a common set of material or

physical obstacles to their growth. We introduced these limits in chapter 1 and explore them

further in this chapter. These limits reflected facts about farming (including limits on crop

yields absent chemical fertilizers, and farming’s dependence on water); the consequences of

population density (notably the various ways that it spreads diseases); and basic physiological

properties of plants and animals, such as the energy (or food) needs of animals hauling wood

relative to the energy content of that wood.

Within these common constraints, technological and social innovations did

nonetheless create differences in outcomes that were important in their time. Careful seed

selection, intensive weeding and manuring, and various pest control strategies could raise

yields per acre, but only so far; the highest rice yields ever recorded anywhere before 1900,

for instance, were less than one-half of average yields in many countries today and less than

one-quarter of yields on today’s most productive farms.

The limits sedentarists and sedentarism faced must thus be kept in mind in studying

every moment of their histories until the shift, from roughly 1800 on, to the significant use of

fossil fuels. Yet it is equally important to recognize that within these limits, humans

produced profound cultural differences.

Ch. 3, p. 1

Finally, given the focus on technological innovations in this chapter, it bears repeating

that the earliest recovered example of any innovation in this era is rarely its earliest actual

occurrence; nor is it a reliable indicator of where the innovation first occurred. Recall, for

instance, that archaeological research to date has been focused far more on some regions—

notably Europe and the Middle East—than others. In addition, some evidence outlasts

others: Sumerian-fired clay tablets, containing the earliest known writing, are far more

durable than the plant materials on which many societies have written, thus making it

possible that writing first appeared elsewhere and earlier.

Metallurgy, Wheels, and Other Technologies

Various peoples made pottery by heating clay even before the Neolithic. Pots from

almost 20,000 BP have been found in China; however, since we have fired-clay figurines

from 30,000 BP, it is likely that some pots were produced somewhere, far earlier. Metal

goods, by contrast, appear only after the Neolithic. They could be shaped more precisely

than clay objects, with less labor; they hold a sharp edge better; do not shatter easily; and are

generally lighter.

Producing metal goods required considerable new knowledge. Since metals are rarely

found except as ores deposited in rock, people had to learn to both recognize and extract the

metal from such rocks. The latter typically meant crushing the rocks and then heating the

crushed material to great temperatures, requiring new knowledge of fire-making. Finally, the

extracted metal needed to be shaped, either by hammering it while hot or melting and pouring

it into molds (usually made of clay). As people worked with metals, moreover, they

discovered that mixing them as liquids produced new metals, or alloys, with distinct

properties. Some—bronze, for instance—became widely used.

All this knowledge must have been produced slowly, by a combination of accident

and experimentation, in the different areas that developed metallurgy. The knowledge also

Ch. 3, p. 2

spread, but required access to ore to be used (and truly mastered). Copper melts relatively

easily and was generally the first metal used, but it is uncommon near the earth’s surface; so

are lead, tin, and zinc, which melt even more easily and were also used very early.

The earliest known sites of sustained metal-working are in southeastern Turkey, used

copper, and date back to almost 8000 BCE—before both pottery and agriculture in the area.

Most early metal objects we have found there are ornamental—beads, bracelets, and

pendants. This is also true, for instance, in Central Eurasia (where metal-working began no

later than 5500 BCE) and in northern China (a later adopter, with only scattered finds before

1800 BCE). The unusual case is the Iranian plateau, where the oldest metal items (from 7500

BCE) include needles, axes, daggers, and picks (possibly for mining). That ornamental uses

generally came first suggests again that what we might see as the most obvious applications

of a new technology, based on our notions of “progress,” were often not why people

developed and valued that technology.

Copper was, far from ideal for most uses. But between 3500 and 3000 BCE, various

peoples learned that adding small amounts of tin to copper created bronze. The first

significant bronze industries were probably in either southeastern Turkey or the Caucasus.

What now seems a great breakthrough did not necessarily excite people as it happened,

however. Archaeologists have found a few bronze artifacts in the Balkans dating from 4800–

4100 BCE, but no signs of significant production there until 2,000 years later; in north China,

we find a few bronze artifacts around 3000 BCE, then nothing for over 1,000 years. Such

lags suggest that people found uses for the new material after having experience with it,

rather than having pursued its invention in response to pre-existing needs or desires.

Beginning around 3000 BCE, bronze spread rapidly across West and Central Asia—

whether imported or produced locally. Bronze was imported to Egypt starting around 3000

BCE, and was produced there by at least 2700 BCE.

Ch. 3, p. 3

Indus Valley bronze-making began around 3000 BCE. In China, large-scale bronze

production began much later, but then exploded around 1800 BCE; between about 1600 and

1200 BCE, China was probably the world’s biggest and most sophisticated bronze producer.

Most of geographic Europe was also a comparative latecomer, despite proximity to major

centers of early metallurgy; genuine smelting is not found there until about 1500 BCE

(mostly in Italy).

Bronze was used far more than copper for practical objects (pots and axes, for

instance) and by much broader segments of the population. Its production was typically the

work of specialized artisans, often at a distinct site away from homes.

Some bronze production involved vast trade networks. The city of Kanesh, in what is

today Turkey, acquired tin from 2,000–2,800 miles to the east and sold its bronze products in

places as far as 2,000 miles to the west.

Finally, bronze held a hard, sharp edge very well and was much less bulky than

stone. Bronze blades thus revolutionized warfare, thereby greatly influencing the histories of

early cities, states, and empires.

Metal tools probably also facilitated the invention of wheels. Archeologists have

found wheels in various places starting roughly when they acquired metal tools: around 5000

BCE in Iran and the Caucasus; between 3500 and 3000 BCE in numerous parts of the Middle

East, Central Asia, and Europe; and around 2000 BCE in China. In Africa, there were wheels

in Nubia and other societies south of Egypt by 400 BCE. In the Americas, Mayans

developed wheels by 1500 BCE, using them primarily for children’s toys.

Humans everywhere must have noticed repeatedly that objects that rolled were easier

to move than those that did not. But making a wheel is much harder than knowing this: it

requires a chisel to make a hard object round and the ability to cut a well-formed hole into the

center so that it can be fit tightly to an axle.

Ch. 3, p. 4

The earliest recovered wheels were mostly used for pottery making, but uses for

transportation appeared quickly thereafter: wheeled carts and wagons are found in

Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between 3500 and 3000 BCE. Chariots—

lighter, faster, horse-drawn wheeled vehicles with a driver standing inside—appeared by

2500 BCE in Mesopotamia, and soon after in Egypt. They had dramatic effects on warfare

and thus political organization; this occurred again when chariots spread to China (by 1650

BCE) and India (by 1500 BCE).

Later in this chapter, we describe two other major innovations with broad social

implications: the gradual development of irrigation after 5500 BCE and the increasing use of

writing after roughly 3500 BCE. But writing is less a technology that manipulates physical

objects in new ways—people had made marks on various surfaces for millennia—and more a

social technology, which required conventions for representing sounds and/or meanings by

means of visual figures. And though irrigation systems sometimes involved new physical

technologies, their basic elements—walls, ditches, and movable gates—were quite simple.

The biggest challenge in building and maintaining them was mobilizing and coordinating lots

of human labor.

Following farming, animal domestication, early metallurgy, and irrigation, moreover,

there was little comparably important change in any group’s control of objects until the

Industrial Revolution that began around 1800 CE—almost 5,000 years later! Technological

innovation continued, but with the notable exception of iron-working after 1200 BCE

(chapter 4), the spurt of new technologies that followed the Neolithic was followed by a long

period—extending into the 1700s CE—without comparably transformative new physical

technologies.

This is striking for at least two reasons. First, the Neolithic Revolution model predicts

the opposite: by its logic, denser populations, supposedly larger food surpluses, and greater

Ch. 3, p. 5

opportunities for specialization should have resulted in a continuation and acceleration in

technological “progress.”

Second, neither the physical resources, the conceptual tools, nor even the machines

that were central to post-1800 industrialization were out of reach far earlier. In Sichuan, for

instance, people burned natural gas to boil brine (thus making salt) by about 400 BCE; they

also made some use of coal. Babylonians, developed highly sophisticated mathematics,

allowing them by 200 BCE to solve problems using core ideas of the calculus (“A Closer

Look: Mathematics from Ancient Babylonia”). In Egypt, a crude steam engine had

apparently been built before 200 BCE, and a written account of how to make one survives

from around 50 CE. By all available evidence, however, steam engines were only used for

such purposes as opening and shutting temple doors without visible human labor.

None of these developments, in fact, triggered the widespread use of fossil fuels, the

systematic use of machines to turn heat energy into motion, or the application of mathematics

to everyday problems of production. People in many places used math to model the observed

movement of objects in the nighttime sky, but not, say, the power of a waterfall. For reasons

other than limits on their knowledge, humans remained for millennia within material

constraints that limited increases in life expectancy, speed and scale of transportation, metal

production, city and army size, and many other social parameters.

Review Questions:

1. How, in its useful properties, did bronze differ from copper? What are some ways the

spread of bronze affected social organization?

2. Produce a list that dates and briefly identifies the major technological innovations covered

in this chapter so far, including the ones that we say we will cover in more depth later (even

in other chapters). When does technological change seem to accelerate? When does it seem

to slow down? Why is it puzzling that it did?

3. What do we know about the invention and spread of the wheel? How was its development

intertwined with that of other emerging technologies? What do we not know about this topic

Ch. 3, p. 6

that you think is important?

4. How does this section distinguish between “physical technologies” and “social

technologies”? Is it better to see this as a categorical distinction—so that any given

innovation falls into one or the other of these categories—or as a continuum? Explain.

Ch. 3, p. 7

Early Cities

No one criterion distinguishes cities from other settlements. Population density

matters, but many early farming villages were densely populated without being very city-like.

Their houses were small and built very close together, and these villages used little if any

space for non-residential buildings. An impressive example is Merhgarh in the Indus Valley

at roughly 4000 BCE. Housing over 20,000 people in about one-quarter square mile, it was

denser than Manhattan today, but it lacked internal differentiation.

Another feature associated with cities is that the inhabitants typically regard the

settlement as a community distinct from the surrounding rural area. In this regard, since

archaeologists cannot interview the dead, they focus on material indicators of such a

distinction between a settlement and its surroundings—a wall, for instance. But Jericho—

with perhaps 2,000 people in 8000 BCE—had a wall, and early farming villages in Europe

typically built barriers distinguishing “inside” from “outside.” These cases lacked another

important feature of cities, however: their dependence on others elsewhere for their food.

Inhabitants of the earliest areas we consider cities primarily produced non-edible goods and

various services: pottery and cloth, sacred ceremonies and policing, for instance. They

obtained food, in turn, by trade and/or force. Along with this, early cities were typically sites

of specialized occupations: a more complex division of labor, often manifested through the

specialized buildings and districts that Merhgarh, for instance, lacked.

Moreover, because such settlements were not viable if flows from elsewhere were

disrupted, they often sought control over surrounding regions. The emergence of cities was

thus frequently followed by states. “State” is a complex term, which will become more fully

defined as we examine particular states. For now, however, we can say that a state is an

organization dedicated to making and enforcing rules for persons inhabiting a given area, thus

differentiating rulers and ruled.

Ch. 3, p. 8

Along with their association with early state formation, cities are also where we find

the earliest evidence of writing, probably at least in part because writing facilitated the

tracking of resource flows among people who were not in regular face-to-face contact. The

emergence of cities and states is thus, above all, a story about new ways of coordinating and

controlling people.

By the criteria we have identified here, the earliest strongly city-like or urban place

we know of was Uruk, on the Euphrates River in southern Mesopotamia (Map 3.#). It was

founded shortly after 4000 BCE: a period of increasingly dry climate, when many small

settlements were declining. Consolidation and subsequent settlement growth produced Uruk

(and other early cities in the Middle East and Egypt) and was accompanied, importantly, by

innovations in food preservation—cheese-making for instance.

By 3300 BCE, Uruk may have had 50,000 people in about one square mile. Most of

the cloth, pottery, and other goods its people made were sold in the city or the surrounding

countryside; however some, considered to be of special quality, were carried overland as far

as Egypt and Anatolia, or by water as far away as the Indus Valley (present-day Pakistan).

Waterborne trade was made easier by sails, probably invented shortly before this, in both

Egypt and Persia. Land transport would soon be improved by the spread of donkeys

(originally domesticated in northeast Africa, reaching the Middle East by 3000 BCE).

Non-residential buildings in Uruk included massive storehouses and public buildings

designed to impress, especially temples for its main deities and palaces for its leading

families. Often enormous, and featuring tall towers, these examples of monumental

architecture would have been visible from far away.

Monumental buildings and large walls signaled three important elements about cities

that possessed them. First, many early cities claimed a special relationship to unseen powers.

Their temples—at least in China and the Middle East—were places for communicating with

Ch. 3, p. 9

important Gods and were often designated as the only places this could occur. Such

important sites and activities involved specialized personnel: great temples typically had full-

time staffs, who often underwent lengthy preparation. Ordinary people might be allowed or

even required to attend certain temple events and perhaps to give and/or receive goods from

the temple’s warehouses, reinforcing their relationship with the Gods. But much of the time,

they were kept away to maintain the temple’s purity or sacredness.

Second, as we have noted, many early cities were centers of states. At least in theory,

one or a few persons ruled these early states; below them stood specialists in resource

extraction, dispute resolution, recordkeeping, and state-sponsored violence, including warfare

and policing. And while many early state leaders headed kinship groups, states typically

claimed authority over people beyond those recognized as related to their leaders.

Third, the emergence of specialized political and religious elites— as well as

specialized traders—was accompanied by vastly greater material inequality. As chapter 2

noted, nomadism generally constrained material inequality, and houses in the earliest

settlements rarely varied much. Graves there differed more than homes—both in size and in

the goods accompanying the corpse—but much less than in early cities. In early Nile Delta

cities, for instance, the largest 2% of the graves contain, on average, sixteen times as many

copper goods as the others. Urban palaces represented the extreme case of a trend toward

unequal housing. New and larger storage facilities also facilitated greater stratification of

wealth, while periodic distributions of goods (by temples and/or rulers) probably mitigated

this tendency, benefiting the poor and easing tensions that inequalities fostered.

Cylinder seals appeared in Mesopotamia and Persia roughly when cities did—by

about 3500 BCE (see Figure 3.#). These were small cylinders with images carved into them;

rolling them across a surface (such as wet clay) left a permanent mark associated with that

particular seal. They could thereby indicate the approval of a person who was not present or

Ch. 3, p. 10

identify ownership, much as signatures do: their rapid proliferation in this period speaks to

their value in an increasingly stratified world. (Stamp seals dated back to perhaps 7000 BCE,

but didn’t become equally widespread.)

Uruk traded with many places, and was also widely imitated, especially between about

3600 to 3100 BCE. Its pottery and textile styles, architecture, cylinder seals, and later its

writing spread across Mesopotamia, east to Persia, north to Anatolia, and west to the Levant.

But Mediterranean and Asian cities also arose independent of Uruk: roughly simultaneously

in Egypt (at Thebes), slightly later in the Indus Valley, and over 1,000 years later, in China.

Review Questions

1. What makes a place a city, other than simply having many people? How did those

characteristics of a city manifest themselves in Uruk?

2. The rise of cities is often associated with an increase in inequality. What evidence for or

against this linkage do you see in the cities discussed here?

3. The sites of early cities typically contain evidence that many of the occupants engaged in

some activity other than gathering, producing, or preparing food. What were some of these

specialized occupations? Which ones, if any, do we know represented functions that did not

exist in villages? Which ones were functions that we have encountered before, but which

were (or at least might have been) new as full-time occupations? Are there any that seem to

represent totally new activities?

Ch. 3, p. 11

Administering Cities and Countrysides

South Asia

The Harappan or Indus Valley urban complex remains a great puzzle. It is almost as

old as Mesopotamia’s. Some cities here date to 3200 BCE, with large cities appearing

around 2600. Spread across an area far larger than Mesopotamia, they exhibit too many

similarities for this to be coincidental. They share a sophisticated architecture and

infrastructure, including elaborate systems to drain floodwaters and sewage, and lots of

effectively waterproofed brick. The largest city, Mojendro-Daro, may have had 40,000

people. It also had what appears to have been an enormous temple complex, including a huge

dormitory for priests or priests-in-training. The city was built on a raised platform that

scholars estimate took about 400,000 person-days of labor to construct.

Yet despite these signs of complex coordination, we lack evidence of a state. There is

also little evidence of stark inequalities.

When we consider early African cities (chapter 7), we will find evidence that cities

could indeed appear absent states and significant inequality. We will return to the Harappan

evidence then, further examining the possible significance of urbanism without state-

formation. But in most of Eurasia, early city-formation was accompanied by the emergence

of states designed to awe and coerce people, both in the city and the surrounding countryside.

Mesopotamia

In Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, early city-states fought each other frequently;

winners often became rulers over the losers. This led to the first empires political units in

which diverse populations, often with multiple languages, were subject to a common ruler.

These diverse persons did not become a single community—indeed their very heterogeneity

signaled the ruler’s greatness, as he (or occasionally she) alone connected the entire empire.

Often, the group which the ruler came from had special privileges within the empire.

Ch. 3, p. 12

Sometimes, however, its members faced particularly strict discipline, especially if they

provided the empire’s soldiers.

The earliest known empire is the Akkadian. Starting from Akkad, near Uruk, its

leader Sargon and his successors conquered numerous cities along the Euphrates River

between roughly 2334 and 2224. At its peak, it was roughly the size of Texas.

Egypt, Nubia, and the Levant

Meanwhile, a more durable empire was emerging further west: the Old Kingdom of

Egypt. Egypt has been called “a gift of the Nile.” The river provided water in an otherwise

arid landscape, and its annual flooding fertilized the soil. It was also unusually good for

transportation. It flows from south to north, emptying into the Mediterranean, but the

prevailing winds blow north to south. Thus, once Egyptians developed sails, they could

supplement muscle power with free energy from wind when going upstream and from the

current when going downstream.

Consequently, wealth clustered around the Nile, and controlling key points along the

river greatly increased a ruler’s power. Starting around 4000, some families concentrated

control over several such spots, all far from the coast. By 3200-3000, one ruler had defeated

all his rivals.

A relatively unified state emerged, forming the core of the eventual empire. The ruler

(pharaoh) and his key supporters had huge agricultural estates, worked by forced laborers

under literate managers. Much of what these estates produced was sold, either locally or far

away. The pharaoh appointed governors to rule areas he could not directly oversee; they

received grants of land and laborers, conditional on their service. He rotated these officials,

so they could not consolidate independent power bases; he commanded a large army; and he

claimed a special relationship to the Gods, making himself and the priests assisting him

necessary for ensuring harmony between people and the cosmos. Early Egyptian rulers

Ch. 3, p. 13

claimed, in fact, to be earthly incarnations of both Osiris, the God of the afterlife, and Horus,

the sky God. (Akkad’s founding emperor, Sargon, only claimed that the Gods favored him,

though one of his successors, like Egyptian rulers, claimed to be a God.) The early pharaohs

built temples, palaces, and tombs even larger than those in Mesopotamia; these included the

first pyramids, built as royal burial chambers around 2600 BCE, and containing enormous

quantities of goods.

The pharaohs first consolidated power in areas south of the Nile Delta; in the Delta

itself, the river’s branching, and the resulting dispersal of settlements, made it harder for

anyone to monopolize control (Map 3.#). But the Delta soon became richer and more

populous than the up-river areas. It had more land with adequate water, and the slower

current there deposited more soil-enriching silt. Being closer to the coast, the Delta was also

well positioned for trade; this brought in metals, construction timber, immigrants, and ideas.

But the Delta did not produce a unified political regime of its own. Instead, it was

conquered by kings from the south, without being completely subordinated. Pharaohs rarely

lived or were buried in the Delta and were often suspicious of its people; in about 2800 BCE

they placed their capital at Memphis, just slightly before where the Delta began. But they

gradually gained power over the Delta too: by 2700 BCE, there was an Egyptian empire,

which scholars call the Old Kingdom. Even earlier—by no later than 3000 BCE—the

pharaohs and their top officials had highly profitable estates in the Delta: vast properties,

either seized from local people or laboriously reclaimed out of what had been wilderness.

The land was worked by labor gangs, rather than being divided into small, family-managed

plots; the estates mass-produced bread and beer for the workers’ rations, plus products for

sale. Fusing southern power and Delta wealth made Egypt a superpower for its time, but also

proved to be an enduring source of tension.

Ch. 3, p. 14

South of Egypt, in Nubia (roughly today’s Sudan), the Nile also became lined with

agricultural villages by 3500 BCE. Pastoral nomads lived further south, and both east and

west of the agricultural zone, further from the Nile (Map 3.#). Groups there traded with each

other, with Egypt, and further up the Nile. By 2700 BCE—perhaps by 2900—Egyptian

soldiers were invading Lower Nubia, seeking to control its gold, ivory, and other exports.

While there are many gaps in our records, it appears that Egypt exercised some control here,

but was then pushed out between roughly 2300 and 2150 BCE; Egyptian records indicate

that a Nubian state existed by this time, ruling perhaps 200,000 people. Moreover, by about

2000 there was definitely a state, Kush, in Upper Nubia, that was strong enough to be a

serious rival to Egypt; Nubians and Egyptians traded, fought, and sometimes inter-married

for centuries to come. We will say more about Nubia in chapter 7, in discussing African

histories of this same time. Though useful for organizing knowledge, regions, we should

remember, are not discrete units with sharp boundaries, and there are always places that can

be placed in more than one of them.

The Levant had no large cities or significant states that we know of until about 2000

BCE, despite successful agriculture and plenty of contact with Egypt and Mesopotamia.

When rich Levantine cities did emerge, most were connected to long-distance trade. And in

both the Levant and the northern Mediterranean, the period from 3500 to about 2200 saw a

gradual, partial, standardization of prestige goods: over time, elite tombs in what would

become Turkey, Greece, Italy, southern France, and Spain begin to feature cosmetics,

tattooing needles, and other items resembling those found in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

China

We know very little about the earliest cities and states in what is now China. The first

known city, Erlitou, dates to about 2000 BCE. It has long been held that “Chinese

civilization” began around this time, in the Yellow River valley, gradually diffusing

Ch. 3, p. 15

southward and eastward. Recent research, however, suggests a different picture, with many

interacting and diverse sites of innovation, rather than a single source of a common Chinese

culture.

Texts written from the sixth century BCE onward mention a Xia dynasty, founded

between 2200 and 2000 BCE; this alleged fact was repeated without much question until the

1920s. But there is no direct evidence of the Xia. Most archaeologists today (especially

outside China) instead see the Shang Dynasty, which ruled from roughly 1570–1045 BCE, as

the first large and durable “Chinese” state. Shang texts indicate that other states also existed,

but we know almost nothing about them. The Shang themselves probably ruled much less

territory than historians once thought (Map 3.#).

The first Shang capital, from about 1500 to 1300 BCE, was called Erligang; the

second, from shortly after 1300 until 1045, was Anyang, about 125 miles further north.

Erlitou, Erligang, and Anyang all featured large palaces and temples, plus graves with

enormous quantities of goods. Anyang’s population may have reached 120,000—bigger than

Washington, DC, in 1860.

Shang rituals included human sacrifice. People (especially war captives, but also

Shang subjects) were sacrificed during burials of high-status people and other significant

occasions. A typical human sacrifice involved about ten victims, mostly young males, but

some involved up to 400. Some victims were apparently supposed to serve high-ranking

dead in the afterlife.

Within their territory, the Shang were powerful. They extracted vast amounts of

wealth, coordinated large-scale production, staged elaborate spectacles, and sustained a social

system involving huge inequalities.

Bronze metallurgy was widespread and important. Small-scale production existed in

various parts of today’s China by about 2000 BCE, then exploded sometime after 1800, as

Ch. 3, p. 16

noted before. By 1500 north China was probably the world’s leading bronze producer in both

volume and technical sophistication.

Shortly after these techniques and products appeared in Erligang, however, we find

them duplicated almost exactly elsewhere. A tomb at Xing’an, roughly 300 miles beyond

any point the Shang plausibly conquered, includes spectacular bronze goods, rivalling

anything in Shang territory; the production techniques are so similar that independent

invention is implausible. However, the site also holds goods utterly unlike anything found in

the North, while lacking some objects that would have been part of any elite Shang burial. It

also includes writing in a non-Shang script we cannot decipher. The man buried in the tomb

was thus almost certainly part of a wealthy society that was independent of the Shang but had

enough contact with them to learn their metallurgical techniques. Excavations at Sanxingdui,

far to the west, reveal yet another distinct but overlapping material culture.

The Shang, then, clearly belonged to a diverse, multi-centered world. Texts from

Anyang report interactions across hundreds of miles, including imports of salt and other

valuables from over 300 miles away. But we do not know what relationship these remote

locales had to Anyang: were they colonies? Allies? Rivals? Merely trading partners?

Some key resources, such as copper, seem to have been produced by communities comprised

of persons from many different places who, in common, obtained the skills necessary for

extraction and settled down. In some cases, these socially diverse, or polysocial,

communities remained clearly independent while showing no signs of significant internal

hierarchy; others were at least partly subordinated to Anyang or other urban centers.

Some Shang records indicate interventionist economic policies—archaeologists have

found, for instance, pits with as many as 1,000 sickles, made to be distributed to farmers. But

only a tiny fraction of Shang texts survives. Those that do mostly list official actions and/or

plans. We do not know how much non-government writing there was; it is hard to even pose

Ch. 3, p. 17

that question precisely, since we do not fully understand the relationship between Shang-

appointed officials, kin-group leaders, and communities.

Surviving Shang writings include many divination texts; they record questions asked

to the Gods and answers received, as read in physical signs. Other texts report sacrifices and

royal responses to prophecies. It is striking how bureaucratic the interactions with spirits

appear to be in these documents. For example, offerings made and responses received are

reported in much the same ways as transactions with people, and the pacifying of human

rivals is reported like that of angry spirits. We cannot tell how much relations with the spirits

were modeled on the management of human affairs, or vice versa. In fact, it seems that these

were not considered sharply separated types of activity—what we would call “religion” and

“politics”—but two parts of a single effort to honor greatness and achieve stability.

Review Questions

1. Consider the description of Harappan (Indus Valley) civilization above. What about it do

you find surprising? Why?

2. What are empires? How do they differ from states?

3. Discuss the steps by which a unified monarchy came into being in Egypt. What were

some geographic features of Egypt in particular that facilitated the emergence of such a

concentration of power there? What were some factors that limited that consolidation of

power?

4. We note in passing that large cities and, especially, strong states developed much later in

the Levant, between Egypt and Mesopotamia, than in those two regions, despite the Levant

having areas of prosperous agriculture and access to inter-regional trade. What questions

does this suggest to you, either about this region or about the general history of city- and

state-building? Why?

5. In what ways did the Shang dynasty in China resemble the early empires of Egypt and

Mesopotamia? Could the region that included the Shang capital be equally well described as

having been an interacting cultural, political, and economic zone, without the kind of

dominant center of authority that makes for an empire? What evidence do you see on each

Ch. 3, p. 18

side of that question? What else would you want to know in order to decide? Is the question

of whether the Xia actually existed relevant to this debate? Why or why not?

Ch. 3, p. 19

WritingWe may never identify the first instance of writing, since—as we noted earlier—the

plant the plant materials that are often used as surfaces for writing (meaning any marks

representing sounds or words) decay. It is even conceivable that limited uses of such marks

occurred in many places and times in the distant human past, but without this giving rise to

anything like writing capable of representing all (or nearly all) of the sounds and words of

spoken language. The emergence of writing in this fuller sense seems to have been

intertwined with the emergence of early cities and states—albeit not in one uniform way.

The earliest writing we have recovered fell far short of writing (or written languages)

in this fuller sense. Having visual marks to express “5 sheep” is quite different from being

able to convey everything (or nearly) that a spoken language can—and there were many

possibilities in between.

Scholars are uncertain, moreover, which of the earliest written languages were

independent inventions and which were influenced by others. Most scholars recognize at

least five independent cases, however. In both Egypt and Sumer, writing (in the fuller sense)

appeared by 3200 BCE; in the Indus Valley, by 2600 BCE; in China, no later than 1200 BCE

and perhaps much earlier; and in Mesoamerica, by 600 BCE. Importantly, in all five, there

were cities and states. That said, in Mesoamerica the emergence of writing seems to have

been much less intimately connected with administration than in Sumer, Egypt, and China,

and more immediately related to multi-media artistic displays, and too little is known about

the Indus Valley case to assess its relationship to administration. Here, we will discuss only

Sumer—and it, only briefly (Map 3.#), while noting that Egyptian and (to a lesser extent)

Chinese writing developed in similar ways, broadly speaking. We will turn to the

Mesoamerican case in chapter 8.

Ch. 3, p. 20

In the centuries before writing corresponding to spoken Sumerian appeared, images

on cylinder seals became increasingly complex: the designs become more elaborate, and

many seals tell picture-stories about exercising power. One, for instance, depicts a ruler—

shown bigger than anyone else—and a group of armed men celebrating while other men sit

on the ground, hands tied behind their backs.

The earliest documents in Sumerian come from Uruk, from around 3300, when the

growing city had recently gained dominance over several other towns—thus limiting face-to-

face communication among state officials. These first documents mostly list objects and/or

government offices. Sumerian writing at this time had over 900 distinct signs, and learning

them was difficult; scribes attended special schools, and literacy was rare. At the same time,

this writing had quite limited capacities. There was no way to represent grammatical

functions, in the way “-ed” in English indicates “past tense” and “-s” indicates plurality.

There was also no punctuation and no use of word order to convey meaning, making “Joe hit

Fred” indistinguishable from “Fred hit Joe.” The earliest writing thus seems to have been

useful for doing one specific thing that speech cannot: create a durable and consultable

record. But it could not do many of the things that can be done with any spoken language—

tell a story, for instance.

Gradually, though, Sumerian writing was refashioned so it could duplicate more of

the spoken language. By about 2800 BCE, it had signs that conveyed grammatical functions;

a century later, some royal inscriptions included narrative. The oldest known personal letters

date from about 2400 BCE. The earliest surviving literary work, Gilgamesh, did not attain

the form in which it has been recovered until around 1800 BCE, but it includes fragments

from many centuries before that. All these uses required new written signs—words for

emotions, for instance—as well as more ways to convey grammatical relationships; some of

these methods took centuries to become conventional.

Ch. 3, p. 21

Finally, as written Sumerian gained a greater and greater capacity to duplicate spoken

language, it was also altered to require far fewer symbols and to become easier to learn. The

eventual development of alphabets—allowing all words in a spoken language to be conveyed

with just two or three dozen signs—represents a particularly dramatic simplification of

writing, but even writing that did not go alphabetic (notably Chinese) became simpler with

time.

As written languages became simpler, they also often became less of a tool of top-

down control than they appear initially to have been. Indeed, some scholars have argued that

simplifications occurred slowly because professional scribes preferred complexity as

protection for their positions, while elites preferred a world in which only those who had

skilled assistants could create durable records. Such arguments are speculative—there is no

known document that says “Writing is hard; let’s keep it that way”—but seem plausible,

given that early writing was clearly tied to the exercise of power and became simpler quite

slowly.

Review Questions

1. Describe the evolution of written Sumerian, with an emphasis on how its expressive

capacity broadened over time, how it became easier to learn and use, and how its functions

changed.

2. How does the growth of writing seem to have been connected to the expansion of political

power in the cases we describe? Are there significant variations among these cases?

Ch. 3, p. 22

Irrigation and the Great Drought

Concentrated populations need reliable water supplies, but many early cities received

relatively little rainfall. The lower Indus Valley, for instance, probably got no more rain than

Phoenix, Arizona, today. An average year’s rainfall near Anyang could support agriculture,

but the area experienced severe annual and seasonal fluctuations. Mesopotamia, Egypt, and

the Indus Valley also get extraordinarily hot. Thus, storing and managing water was vital.

The Himalayan Mountains have Earth’s largest concentration of ice and snow outside

the polar regions. The rivers running off of them—including the Indus and Yellow Rivers—

are particularly seasonal, often flooding when swollen with meltwater. They also shift course

fairly frequently, as the higher, faster-moving water of flood season escapes the old banks

and carves a new channel.

Annual flooding allowed Indus Valley farmers to divert some river water to their

fields by building small dams and ditches; this practice was widespread by 3000 BCE. Wells

also appeared early in this rain-scarce region. They were probably equipped with a shaduf—a

seesaw-like mechanism that allowed people to lower a bucket into the well and then raise it;

shadufs were also used in Egypt by about 1800 BCE. The most complex waterworks in the

Indus Valley were drainage systems, reservoirs, and deep wells for cities.

North China’s Yellow River Valley also featured simple irrigation works at an early

date, but not sophisticated water systems like those of Harappan cities. More surprisingly,

well before 3000 BCE (and perhaps as early as 5000 BCE), people here began growing

paddy-field rice, which is not native to the region. This is a highly productive crop, but

requires lots of labor for building and maintaining dikes around the paddies and for pumping

water into or out of them when timely flooding or drying does not occur naturally. Paddy

rice therefore indicates a large population. With time, however, the river cut a deeper,

narrower channel, eliminating much of the flat, marshy land suited for paddies; a drier

Ch. 3, p. 23

climate after about 2500 BCE compounded that effect, and rice-growing disappeared from

north China for centuries. Here, then, human ingenuity was not enough to sustain ever-

higher levels of production, and complex irrigation may have become less important just

before cities and states emerged.

Moreover, the construction of large barriers to prevent Yellow River flooding only

began around 600 BCE, when political authority in that region was becoming increasingly

fragmented and contested (chapter 4). Chinese myths written down at that time claim that

legendary ancient kings proved their worthiness and made civilization possible by preventing

floods; later, some modern scholars argued that the need to mobilize large amounts of labor

to control water required, and thus invariably led, to the rise of particularly strong and

repressive states. But early China, supposedly an example of this rule, actually contradicts it;

early water control measures and early state-formation were not consistently related to each

other.

In the Middle East, the increasingly dry climate that took hold as cities and states

were emerging made controlling water increasingly vital. Well-digging increased in

Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt after about 4000, as well as elsewhere in the

Mediterranean, in parts of Europe, and in the Indus Valley. By about 3500, there were small

dams and irrigation ditches along the Euphrates in Mesopotamia and along various rivers in

the Levant. Manipulation of the Nile had begun even earlier. By 3500, Egyptians were

measuring the river’s depth to predict floods more accurately; around 3100, a pharaoh,

mobilizing large numbers of workers, combined several small dams and some canals

(including one over twelve miles long) to create the first known artificial lake.

These innovations helped sustain growing populations but also had significant

environmental costs. When river water dumped on Mesopotamia’s soil evaporated, salts that

had been dissolved in the water remained; salt buildup gradually made the land sterile. Even

Ch. 3, p. 24

massive efforts only partially reversed this damage; instead, people often abandoned fields,

and eventually whole settlements. Meanwhile, population growth and large-scale urban

construction reduced Mesopotamia’s tree cover exacerbating flooding, erosion, and the

gradual drying out of the regional climate. Vulnerability to drought remained.

The Great Drought circa 2200–1800 BCE

Much of the world began getting drier around 4000 BCE. Around 2200 BCE, this

greatly accelerated, causing catastrophes in many places, including everywhere covered in

this chapter. Serious drought continued for a century, and returned periodically until about

1900 BCE.

Several densely populated societies and their states, were devastated. In

Mesopotamia, the Akkadian empire collapsed, amid mass starvation, multiple rebellions

(some pre-dating the drought), palace intrigue, and invasions by mountain-dwellers—perhaps

seeking the lowland crops that they had previously acquired through trade. Poetry composed

years later blamed a king who allegedly offended Akkad’s chief God. After decades of

conflict, a new urban-based dynasty (called Ur- III) expelled the invaders and re-established

an extensive empire, but only briefly. When a wetter climate returned—beginning around

2000 BCE, but mostly after about 1800—so did large urban-based states; most were centered

in slightly cooler, wetter areas further north. Egypt’s Old Kingdom collapsed around 2180

BCE. Here, too, some problems pre-dated peak drought: nobles were becoming more

independent, claiming ownership of lands that the pharaoh considered temporary loans. But

drought—confirmed by record-low Nile flood measurements—was probably decisive; the

next centralized state, which scholars call the Middle Kingdom, did not stabilize until around

2040 BCE.

In the Levant, virtually all cities disappeared; so did roughly three-quarters of

Anatolian towns. The Indus Valley cities, less rainfall dependent, apparently declined more

Ch. 3, p. 25

gradually and less traumatically. But major cities there were largely abandoned by 1900

BCE, even as small Harappan-style settlements appeared elsewhere.

We know little about how ordinary people experienced these events. Food shortages

probably hit them hardest, and violence surely affected them too. But the disasters

emphasized in written records—the destruction of temples and palaces, the exile and misery

of elites—were not their suffering. Some may have even been glad when structures that had

oppressed them crumbled. Either way, cities and empires eventually rebounded.

Review Questions

1. Why was irrigation important in the areas occupied by many of the earliest known states?

2. How did the particulars of water management differ among Mesopotamia, Egypt, the

Indus Valley, and North China?

3. What were some of the negative consequences of agriculture and irrigation in

Mesopotamia?

4. Where and when did the Great Drought occur? What effects did it have on Mesopotamia

and Egypt in particular?

5. How much do we know about how the impact of the great drought may have varied across

different groups within particular areas? What do we not know?

Ch. 3, p. 26

Post-Drought State-Formation

South Asia

Post-drought developments in the Indus Valley are poorly understood. The existence

of Harappan society was only discovered around 1920. Previously, both South Asian and

Western scholars had believed that “civilization” in the area—with writing, cities, states,

intensive agriculture, and so on—began only with the societies, later than the Harappan, that

had produced the region’s oldest surviving long texts: poems called the Vedas.

The Vedas include Gods central to modern Hinduism, making them an attractive

starting point for modern Indian history. So too, their language is both distinct from that of

the Harappans and ancestral to Sanskrit, which is ancestral in turn to modern Hindi. Finally,

while Vedic societies had horses, the Harappans probably did not. The leaders of the Vedic

societies identified themselves as “Aryans,” meaning “the pure.”

Starting in the nineteenth-century, scholars argued that these “Indo-Aryans” (as the

scholars called them) were an off-shoot of an earlier “Aryan” population that lived in Central

Asia, where horses were common. There had been migrations from that region into not only

South Asia but also Europe, Persia, and the Middle East. So too, there is evidence of similar

influences from these migrations in these dispersed receiving locations, such as shared words,

shared names for deities, and increased use of horses in places where they had previously

been unimportant. However, later scholarship indicates that the migrations had come not

from a single group or population, but from different parts of Central Asia.

Earlier scholars portrayed the Aryans as conquerors—an image which has suited

modern politicians, in various countries, claiming Aryan descent. In fact, however, the

Central Asian immigrants seem instead to have mixed with the existing populations where

they entered. In the Indus Valley, the immigrants were probably pastoralists who settled first

on the outskirts of existing communities, and acquired power gradually.

Ch. 3, p. 27

Nineteenth-century scholars, however, thought the “Indo-Aryans” had fully replaced

an earlier “primitive” people. The discovery of Harappan societies changed that view, yet

some scholars insisted nonetheless that the subsequent population was purely Aryan. Either

the Central Asians had vanquished the Harappans in battle (highly unlikely, since we have no

archaeological evidence of large-scale violence) or the Harappans had, somehow, died out

prior to “Aryan” migration. But some Harappan sites still had inhabitants even after the

Great Drought, and some Harappan texts were written as late as 1900 BCE. Given these

many flaws in the arguments for a pure “Aryan” past and heritage for India, most scholars

today believe that the societies from which the Vedas emerged represented, instead, a mixture

of “Aryan” immigrants and the area’s earlier inhabitants.

Whatever its origins, Vedic culture spread dramatically during the second millennium

BCE: first throughout the Indus Valley, then eastward into the plains surrounding the Ganges

River. Vedic style artifacts, including Sanskrit texts, appear in sites further and further east

during the later second millennium BCE; moreover, the later Vedas, unlike the early ones,

mention places in the Ganges region (Map 3.#). Behavioral norms consistent with Vedic

texts became increasingly important, particularly for elites: examples include sacrificial

rituals, funerary practices, and the beginnings of practices (discussed below) which are today

called caste.

As noted, the Central Asian immigrants probably began as pastoralists who settled on

the outskirts of existing communities, interacting and mixing with them. As whatever

authority Harappan cities had exercised over the countryside weakened, some of these

immigrant and mixed communities began offering protection to surrounding villages; they

gradually became politically dominant, while absorbing more of the earlier residents into

their ranks.

Ch. 3, p. 28

The Vedas, however, emphasize warfare, not peaceful immigration and gradual

ascendancy. Warfare using horse-drawn chariots probably was important in later expansion,

as it was in spreading the influence of other Central Eurasian migrants. Early Vedic texts

gave warriors the highest status, but priests were also essential to legitimate government.

Some warrior-rulers designated themselves “kings,” but many did not.

Within the many small areas of rule or states emerging across India, agriculture

became more intensive, while specialized crafts and long-distance trade increased. The later

Vedas and other texts codify this proliferation of specialists, dividing society into four ranked

categories: priests (brahmans); warriors (kshatriya); civilian elites, including big merchants

(vaishya); and a fourth group (shudra) that engaged in various manual occupations. Priests

now outranked warriors. Each group had different rules and its members were expected to

marry within their own category (a practice called endogamy).

This system differed sharply from the earlier clan-based social system. Previously,

elites obtained labor from their less-well-off relatives; now they obtained it from people with

whom they were forbidden to have kinship ties. As this system developed, those placed in

different castes were also often forbidden to engage in certain activities together, notably

eating. Over time, the shudra category in particular was sub-divided more finely by

occupation, producing smaller social segments that were, at least theoretically, endogamous

and thus hereditary. Some aspects of this system remain part of Indian society today.

However, the system has also undergone many changes and has always been less rigid in

practice than in theory.

This new social order spread out widely but did not form a unified empire or,

apparently, large states or cities. From roughly 1500 to 500 BCE, social distance between

leaders and others seems to have increased, and political authority became increasingly

separated from kinship. No state became as large as major kingdoms in the Middle East or

Ch. 3, p. 29

China. Nor did kings claim to be either Gods or unique conduits to the Gods, as many did in

those places. And while kings ruled some areas, others became small republics, ruled by

councils of male-lineage leaders.

China

As we have seen, the earliest Chinese writings mention kings. The Shang appear to

have had the biggest kingdom, but just how big is unclear. The evidence that they had a huge

empire comes from their successors, the Zhou Dynasty, who overthrew them in 1054 BCE

(chapter 4). Zhou texts claimed that Heaven had once given the Shang a mandate to rule “all

under heaven,” but that when the Shang became immoral, Heaven transferred that mandate to

the virtuous Zhou. The idea that the Shang had claimed “universal” authority was taken for

granted until recently; but the Zhou, having conquered the Shang, had had an interest in

exaggerating the Shang’s domains. In practice, moreover, the Shang remained culturally

oriented as much toward Central Asia as toward what became China. Among the many Inner

Asian practices they adopted was charioteering, which became a favorite male aristocratic

activity after about 1200.

Chariots, Warfare, and the Middle East’s New Empires

The Middle East also borrowed chariot-based warfare from Central Asia, long before

China did. Post-drought fighting in this area produced increasingly large empires; it was

probably here that building a large empire first became an ideal for great rulers.

Chariot-pulling was not the only possible combat use for horses, nor necessarily the

most effective one. Its spread and persistence probably owed as much to status concerns as

to practicality.

Before 1200 BCE, very roughly, riding directly on animals was considered

unbecoming for high-status individuals. The Gods of the Rig Veda, for instance, all ride in

chariots; only in the later Vedas do they ride directly on animals. Portrayals of royal hunts

Ch. 3, p. 30

between roughly 2500 BCE and 800 BCE generally show rulers in wheeled vehicles, rather

than on horseback, though this must have helped hunted animals get away. Wheeled vehicles

are also common in elite tombs from West Asia and Europe, beginning well before 2000

BCE.

The early vehicles that elites rode were too heavy and slow for battlefield use. But

by about 1800 BCE, an accumulation of small technical advances—spoked wheels replacing

solid disks, using thinner sheets of metal, lighter woods, more leather, and so on—made

much lighter vehicles possible: some early wagons weighed 1500 pounds, while an Egyptian

chariot from about 1400 BCE weighed roughly 75 pounds. Chariots thereby became fast,

maneuverable, effective weapons.

Cutting-edge chariots were expensive; so was training to use them. An Anatolian

manual dated about 1300 BCE describes a seven-month training program for chariot horses;

riders also needed extensive instruction. Thus the spread of chariot warfare often increased

the social distance between elite and regular soldiers, strengthening state power and

increasing inequality. The centuries-long dominance of chariots, even though fighting on

horseback eventually proved superior, again shows that people did not always choose “what

worked best,” even in matters of life and death.

After Egypt’s Old Kingdom collapsed during the Great Drought, various regional

kingdoms emerged. The Nile Delta, in particular, gained autonomy, and also experienced

considerable cultural change, accelerated by large-scale Levantine immigration. While a new

king, Mentuhotep II (reigned 2060–2010 BCE), theoretically reunified Egypt, his relationship

with the Delta was tenuous. He was more oriented toward Nubia, which provided gold,

among other things.

As post-drought recovery quickened (beginning sometime after 2000 BCE), Egyptian-

Levantine trade increased. Egyptian rulers established military outposts in Canaan (roughly

Ch. 3, p. 31

today’s Lebanon, Jordan, part of Syria, and Israel/Palestine) to control that trade, but did not

intervene much in day-to-day life as long as local leaders pledged loyalty and continued

trade. These exchanges—and others stimulated by improved sailing techniques—made the

Delta even more cosmopolitan.

About 1650 BCE a dynasty called Hyksos arose in the Delta. Foreigners played

major roles in this regime, as did imported technologies: chariots, compound bows, better

metallurgy, and armor with bronze scales. Later Egyptian accounts claim that Hyksos also

vandalized traditional temples, while importing new, unfamiliar, Gods and customs. A

century of warfare followed between Hyksos and Middle Kingdom rulers based further up

the Nile; when Hyksos finally fell, between 1550 and 1540 BCE, many immigrants and their

descendants were expelled. (Many scholars believe that this rise and fall of immigrant

influence—long remembered in Egypt—forms part of the basis for the Biblical story of

Exodus).

Egypt’s New Kingdom, generally dated from the defeat of Hyksos around 1550 BCE,

gradually consolidated control throughout Egypt. It also gained indirect control over much of

Nubia and Canaan, establishing patron/client relationships with kings there. At its maximum

extent (roughly 1425–1300 BCE), Egyptian power reached the upper Euphrates valley,

bordering the Hittite kingdom (discussed below) near today’s Turkey-Iraq border.

Elite women had greater political influence in the New Kingdom than before. One

woman, Hatshepsut, even became Pharaoh (reigned 1479–1458), though this was very

controversial. Many official portraits gave her a beard, and both male and female pronouns

ae used for her in texts. After her death, her son attempted to destroy all records of her.

A second striking but short-lived episode was Akhenaton (reigned 1350–1334 BCE)

promoting monotheism: the doctrine that there is only one God. Starting around 1345,

Akhenaton began diverting funds away from temples for Amun (king of the Gods) to temples

Ch. 3, p. 32

for the sun God Aten; around 1342 he removed Amun’s name from various royal

monuments. He built two huge new temples to Aten and installed statues of himself and his

chief wife, Nefertiti, claiming they were earthly incarnations of Aten (and compromising the

idea of monotheism). He closed various other Gods’ temples and excised the plural form of

“God” from some inscriptions.

This probably did not affect ordinary people very much. They could not enter the

great temples and joined official rituals only during special festivals and processions. But

later, Akhenaton also attacked the worship of more popular Gods, including Osiris. God of

the Nile, Osiris was also chief judge in the post-death underworld, granting eternal bliss to

deserving people; he had a hugely popular following.

Akhenaton’s religious reforms were apparently unpopular both with elites (especially

priests serving other Gods) and commoners. His successor reversed them.

The next pharaoh also re-emphasized foreign policy, which Akhenaton had de-

emphasized. A high priority was regaining control over various Canaanite kings who had

been Egypt’s clients, but had recently asserted greater independence. This led Egypt into war

with the Hittites, who had absorbed various post-drought kingdoms, including Assyria and

Babylonia.

Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites

Assur, founded around 2500 BCE, became an independent city-state when the

Akkadian empire collapsed, around 2100 BCE. A commercial center, it established several

trading colonies elsewhere; the best known, because archeologists have recovered over

20,000 letters to and from its residents, was Kanesh, about 700 miles away in central

Anatolia. In 1803 BCE a new ruler seized Assur’s throne and began expanding militarily,

building an Assyrian Empire.

Ch. 3, p. 33

Assur had huge trade networks. Tin and precious stones came from at least as far as

today’s Afghanistan; the tin, combined with copper from today’s Russia and Ukraine, made

bronze that was exchanged for Anatolian wool, some of which was then traded to Greece for

gold and silver. Mesopotamian textiles moved in all directions. Commercial partnerships

involved as many as fifteen investors, who might be either families or corporate entities (such

as temples, or even towns). Many partnerships undertook only one trading mission, but

others endured as long as twelve years. Tax rates were negotiated with local rulers.

Assemblies of family representatives governed Assur’s merchant colonies; they

settled internal disputes and represented the colony before the ruler of the surrounding

territory. The assembly in Assur itself appears to have been, in many respects, more

powerful than the king. (Letter writers sometimes simply called the assembly, “The City.”)

It handled most judicial and administrative matters (especially with respect to commerce),

settled some disputes referred from the colonies, and created many laws. Key documents,

including tax records, were deposited with the assembly, not at the king’s palace. The

assembly chose its leaders, who served one-year terms. Male citizens were divided into “big

men” and “small men,” probably based mostly on wealth; “small men” could sometimes, but

not always, participate in assemblies.

Not only is the king a minor figure in the letters we have, they also barely mention the

temples and festivals honoring official Gods. Far more letters mention offerings to lower-

ranking deities, and sometimes ancestors, often at what were probably family-run chapels.

The apparently peripheral position of kings and official Gods in the minds of these

prosperous citizens suggests that Assyria, while no democracy, was not certainly not

dominated by an all-powerful king. This is quite different from what scholars had concluded

before the letters to and from residents of Kanesh were discovered and scholars relied solely

on official texts and excavations of the palace and great temples. This raises questions about

Ch. 3, p. 34

whether some other ancient societies, for which we only have palace- and temple-centered

sources, would also look very different if we found their private records.

Babylon was another city-state that emerged when pre-drought empires collapsed. It

remained small until the reign of Hammurabi I (ruled 1792–1750 BCE). After first allying

with Assyria and expanding cautiously, Hammurabi became more aggressive starting in

1763. By 1755 he had created the largest post-Akkad empire yet; it lasted only a few

decades, but Hammurabi’s descendants ruled Babylon itself for over 150 years. Babylon’s

legacy includes what is generally considered the world’s oldest known written literature,

including the previously-mentioned Gilgamesh, a lengthy epic about a hero challenging the

Gods to obtain immortality for humans.

Hammurabi is most famous for issuing the oldest known written legal code: a

compilation of his own edicts, earlier decisions and extrapolations from their principles, and

local custom. The code reveals a highly stratified society, treating slaves, commoners, and

elites very differently. Criminal penalties depended on the victim’s status: the higher a

victim ranked, the more severe the penalty. The code not only covered what we would

consider crimes but also fixed prices for many goods and services, decreed that certain goods

had to carry warranties, and made rules governing divorces, inheritances, and other family

matters.

Hammurabi’s code reads as if he was an all-powerful law-giver; how true that was is

unclear. Babylonian cities, like Assyrian ones, generally had assemblies, but we do not know

how influential they were; moreover, rural areas were governed differently. Newly

conquered people seem to have had virtually no rights in Babylonia or in other Middle

Eastern empires: enslavement, deportation, and even killing (mostly of men) were common.

But in cities that negotiated their submission—rather than fighting to the end—non-slaves

were not subject to absolute rule.

Ch. 3, p. 35

Around 1650 BCE a Hittite empire took shape north of Babylonia. By 1590, though, it

was collapsing, and various semi-nomadic pastoralists occupied its territory. Renewed

expansion began around 1420 BCE, and by about 1322, the Hittite empire reached its fullest

extent—covering most of present-day Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, and parts of Northern Iraq.

Unlike most other state-building peoples we have discussed here, the Hittites remained

largely rural; those not involved in government mostly farmed (holding land in common) and

herded animals. They allowed cities within their empire considerable autonomy, including

the right to worship their own Gods. The Hittites’ religion included many large public

sacrifices: mostly of animals, but occasionally including humans (probably war captives).

The empire was multi-lingual, but most writing was in Hittite. Among its most notable

features are the oldest surviving chronicles which not only listed events but explicitly

searched for patterns that might represent regularities in human behavior. Also unusual was

that some royal documents showed kings admitting mistakes.

Hittite expansion peaked roughly when Egypt was focused inward, on Akhenaton’s

religious reforms. Beginning around 1320, Egypt became more assertive again, and the two

empires clashed in Syria beginning in 1291 BCE. In 1274 they fought what is probably the

largest chariot battle in history, involving 5,000–6,000 chariots plus tens of thousands of foot

soldiers.

The battle was indecisive, and the war continued until 1258, weakening both sides. A

few decades later, both collapsed in the face of invasions by peoples using new technologies:

iron, mounted archery, and improved ships. Like bronze and chariots before them, these new

technologies were accompanied by new kinds of organization, leading to radical changes

across vast areas.

Review Questions

Ch. 3, p. 36

1. After archaeologists discovered the Harappan civilization, many scholars concluded that

the Harappans had been conquered by an Aryan invasion. Why? Why have many twentieth-

century politicians also been interested in making that claim? Why do many scholars now

believe that the Aryan influx was originally a fairly peaceful immigration? And if it was,

how can we explain how the Aryans wound up ruling?

2. What were the new practices that the Aryans seem to have brought to India? How does

political authority seem to have worked as they spread across the plains surrounding the

Ganges River?

3. What technological developments were needed to make horse-drawn chariots a crucial

element in warfare? How did social norms contribute to making charioteering, rather than

horseback riding, a dominant military practice for centuries?

4. Discuss the emergence of the New Kingdom in Egypt. How did this process reflect the

long-standing upstream/downstream tensions within Egypt that were outlined earlier in this

chapter? How did it reflect dynamics particular to the period during and soon after the great

drought?

5. What do our surviving records suggest about how political authority worked in Assyria?

In Babylonia? How does the availability or absence of particular kinds of evidence shape our

understanding of each case?

Ch. 3, p. 37

Boundaries of Material Possibility, Up to the Industrial Revolution The shift to sedentary farming, along with the new technologies discussed in this

chapter, greatly increased humans’ ability to concentrate energy for specific ends. Even

small horses can pull loads ten times heavier than strong humans can; and for short periods,

horses run much faster. A cultivated acre of sedentary farming generally can feed far more

people an acre used by more mobile persons. Metallurgy provided tools far superior to stone

and wood ones. Importantly, in all these cases, people harnessed solar energy stored in plants

by using those plants to feed muscles or fires. Subsequent tweaks—breeding stronger

animals, protecting crops from birds, paving roads so wheels faced less friction—further

improved this energy capture.

But there were limits. Like persons in more mobile societies at this time and earlier,

those engaged in sedentary farming still mostly harvested energy from that year’s

photosynthesis, with only small additions from earlier years (stored in grain, animals, or

wood), along with small additions, in a few locations, from water currents or winds.

Plants, moreover, need nutrient-rich soil to capture solar energy. Land thus became a

constraint on humans’ energy harvesting, with trade-offs among different uses: an acre

growing grain was an acre not growing timber, grass for horses, or useful non-foods like

cotton. Land elsewhere might be plentiful, but importing food from far away used much of

the energy stored in crops, since animals that transported them needed to eat. A packhorse

carrying a load of oats sixty miles, for instance, might need half the load to do that work.

Efficient wagons on smooth roads could improve that number, but only within limits.

Only recently have people captured vastly more energy by burning large amounts of

fossil fuels: coal, oil, and gas, composed of millions of years of compressed dead plants and

animals. In doing this, humans tap eons of photosynthesis all at once. With so much energy

Ch. 3, p. 38

available, bulky things can far more easily be moved over long distances: while a horse might

out-pull ten humans, a diesel tractor can out-pull 4,000. Until this recent change, people—

whether highly mobile or highly sedentary—lived in what chapter one labelled the pre-

industrial or biological energy regime.

How, within this regime, did the material constraints facing societies based on

sedentary farming compare to those facing largely mobile societies? From the perspective of

industrial societies, what stands out are shared constraints, modified but not overturned by

having farms, cities, and metal-working—and in some ways made more pressing by those

innovations.

Sedentary agriculture increased how much food each acre could produce, since it

covered that acre exclusively with plants the farmer selected. Farmers could raise yields

further by selecting for particular traits—corn with large ears, for instance. In late pre-

industrial times (1700 CE), three acres of top-yielding English wheat could sustainably feed

one adult, or perhaps one adult and a small child; three acres of Mexican maize might feed

five adults; three acres of prime Japanese rice paddies might even feed fifteen people.

(“Feed” here means “provide enough calories,” though an all-grain diet would be quite

unhealthy.) In the same era, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists needed far more land per

person. How much is hard to gauge, but by this time, societies based on sedentary agriculture

had an average population density thirty times the rough average for foraging and pastoral

societies. Sedentary farming thus concentrated people—and power. The implications for

human well-being were ambiguous, however—to recall a key point from chapter 2; and

limits on per- acre yields meant that populations faced a ceiling that is low by today’s

standards.

Many sedentary farmers in many times and places before the industrial era tried to

raise per-acre output, but with limited success By 1200 CE, if not earlier, a few farms in

Ch. 3, p. 39

scattered areas produced per-acre yields that were rarely surpassed until after 1850. Before

then, increasing food supplies thus depended on bringing lower-yielding farms closer to a

region’s top-performing ones (rather than on further improving the yield of the latter), and

above all, on converting unfarmed land into farms. Matching one’s neighbors’ best yields

was often hard, moreover. Even adjacent farms often differ in sunlight, slope, drainage, soil

chemistry, and other qualities. In some densely populated places, average yields may have

doubled between 1200 and 1800 (though increases of some 50% were probably more

common), but often only through greatly intensifying labor. And maximum yields, as noted

above, barely increased. By contrast, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, based on fossil fuels

and twentieth-century chemistry, along with fossil-fuel powered pumps that move water great

distances, have allowed worldwide average cereal yields to more than triple just since 1960—

though at great environmental costs, making uncertain how long such yields can be sustained.

Energy limits in the biological energy regime particularly restricted overland

movement of very heavy items, such as stone and wood. At least in the places we know

about, people almost never shipped firewood more than fifty overland miles before railways.

Yet luxuries prized by elites—including gems, furs, and gold—travelled huge distances even

before the Neolithic. Seashells are found 600 miles from any shore as far back as 21,000

BCE; obsidian was traded across parts of present-day Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Iraq at least

16,000 years ago; Baltic amber was found in Egypt (roughly 2,000 miles away, mostly

overland) by 5,000 years ago.

Speed was also limited before fossil fuels. The fastest horses can run about thirty-five

miles per hour, but only for two minutes, and carrying only a lightweight jockey. Caravans

carrying freight rarely exceeded forty miles a day. Even the most efficient and costly relay

systems—carrying only letters, and switching horses frequently—were slow from our post-

Ch. 3, p. 40

fossil fuel vantage. In 1800 emergency messages to and from the Chinese emperor could

theoretically travel 200 miles per day, but seventy miles was more typical. By 1830,

however, railroads could haul huge loads seventy miles in under three hours; today, messages

cross the world almost instantly.

Shipping constraints limited the size of cities. The world’s two biggest cities around

1 CE, Rome and Chang’an (present-day Xi’an, China), probably reached one million people

each; only a few others approached that level before 1800, and none greatly surpassed it,

except briefly.

Surprisingly, some of these constraints might relax in less hospitable areas. Camels,

horses, and oxen eat grass; they could therefore feed off some land that could not feed people,

and was often unclaimed. Consequently, pack animals crossing sparsely populated

grasslands often got their energy for free, from the perspective of humans driving them. This

undergirded trade along the Silk Roads across Eurasia, the trans-Sahara trade of salt for gold,

and various other long-distance, pre-modern exchanges. Such travel also spread ideas; but

this travel required relatively favorable social and political conditions. If people who

controlled the few oases on these routes charged heavily for food and water there, trade

suffered; traffic also declined if traders could not move securely through sparsely populated

stretches. In the 1600s the physical cost of carrying silk 1,000-plus miles from Isfahan (in

today’s Iran) to Aleppo (in today’s Syria) was less than 5% of its original price; but socially

imposed costs—whether deemed “customs duties,” “bribes,” or “theft”—were many times

higher. These trade routes were thus extremely sensitive to how rulers and would-be rulers

acted, while rulers in desert and steppe—for whom even a 2% transit fee on luxury goods

might exceed the taxes a small local population could pay—often rose and fell with revenues

from trade. This mutual sensitivity made politics and trade along these routes highly volatile.

Ch. 3, p. 41

Water transport had major advantages. Getting power from winds and currents meant

feeding fewer muscles, and boats suffered much less friction than land vehicles. Thus, large

cities, big ironworks, and so on usually bordered navigable water. But these advantages went

only so far: except on the remarkable Nile, boatmen who floated downstream eventually had

to muscle their way back upriver. Shippers planned their loads accordingly; they might take

lumber downstream, while seeking lighter, expensive goods as return cargoes.

Open-water sailors had more ways to maximize their use of free energy: timing the

currents, adjusting sails, and so on. But errors in doing so—or bad luck—could prove fatal.

People gradually increased their sailing skills, improving both speed and safety. But long

ocean voyages, in particular, remained hazardous: about 15% of Spanish ships sailing

between Manila and Acapulco between 1565 and 1815 were shipwrecked. Moreover, the

high seas, like thinly populated land routes, had security issues: an armed escort raised costs

enormously, and even arming one’s own sailors meant feeding a larger crew and reducing

cargo space. Ocean-shipping gradually became more efficient within the biological energy

regime —as often due to social achievements, such as suppressing pirates, as to technological

ones—but the gains look small compared to what steamships enabled.

Until fossil fuels, then, reliance on biological energy powerfully shaped material life:

making it essential, for instance, that the large majority of humans help produce food. There

was much local variation, but throughout the post-Neolithic, pre-industrial period, close to

80% of people in most sedentary societies lived on farms. Near the end of that long period, a

few societies raised their own food with under 70% of their people on farms, but this was

exceptional. Most communities more urban than that imported food. (By contrast, the US

produces a food surplus with 1% of workers in farming.)

Meanwhile, energy-intensive production remained limited and hard to sustain.

Smelting a ton of iron required at least four tons of wood; shaping it required significantly

Ch. 3, p. 42

more. As chapter 1 noted, a reasonably efficient eighteenth-century furnace consumed the

annual growth of about thirty forest acres for each ton of iron; at that rate, producing just the

iron in the two main cables of the Golden Gate Bridge (24,500 tons) would have required a

forest two and a half times as large as the city of San Francisco. With lower-quality ores or

less-efficient technology, fuel needs became much higher still.

Not surprisingly, large-scale metallurgy often proved unsustainable: whether due to

miscalculation, greed, or desperation (during a war, for instance) people sometimes produced

iron until their forests disappeared, wrecking both ecology and industry. Ship-building was

another activity that often produced short-term power and glory followed by ecological crisis.

Ships required huge amounts of timber; they also needed other materials, such as pitch and

resins for water-proofing, requiring many hours of boiling over wood-fueled fires.

Transportation difficulties also meant that cities needed to be remarkably compact and

obtain most bulky and/or perishable supplies from nearby. Ancient Rome had a population

density five times that of contemporary Chicago, even though it had very few buildings

above ten stories; some other pre-industrial cities were equally dense, even with shorter

buildings. (Beijing had almost no residential buildings over two stories before the twentieth

century.) Consequently, most urban residents—and their animals—lived close together. Few

of them, moreover, had running water. Not surprisingly then, sanitation, contagious diseases,

and fires were huge problems.

One result was the urban graveyard effect. Until almost 1900, there were more

deaths than births in most cities, which therefore needed rural immigrants just to avoid

shrinking. The strength of this effect varied with climate, technology, and social practices.

Chinese and Japanese urbanites, for instance, kept death rates down by boiling all their water

and efficiently transferring human and animal waste to the countryside (for fertilizer); some

European and Indian cities had poorer sanitation, but built with more stone and less wood,

Ch. 3, p. 43

reducing fires. In short, people made various useful adaptations, but here again, the effects

pale compared to what has become possible in the last 150–200 years.

Villages were often healthier than cities, but death rates were high there, too, especially

for children; in many societies, half of children died by age six. (Those making it to six,

however, had a decent chance of reaching sixty—perhaps 50% in some relatively healthy

communities.) Population therefore grew very slowly by modern standards (Table 3.1). And

even achieving that modest population growth reported required very high pregnancy rates.

Various studies show that women in pre-1800 Europe who married by twenty and remained

married until fifty averaged between 7.5 and nine children (plus some miscarriages); their

Chinese counterparts, between 5.5 and eight apiece. Today, by contrast, women world-wide

average 2.5 children each, and 2.1 children per woman would stabilize world population.

Finally, although pre-industrial “civilization” allowed historically unprecedented

concentrations of various kinds of power, these concentrations were smaller than modern

ones, and different in character. In purely physical terms, a bulldozer probably focuses more

power at a given location than an Egyptian pharaoh or Mughal emperor could. Speaking

more broadly, pre-modern limits on the total number of non-farmers implied much stricter

limits on numbers of soldiers, government officials, and record-keepers. On the one hand,

then, high population densities—especially in cities, but also in most villages—meant that

almost nobody had much privacy from their neighbors and relatives. On the other, most

governments knew remarkably little about their people (which also limits what historians can

know), and found it even harder to mobilize them. The contrast with today’s world is

fundamental: many of us know very little about our neighbors, but even relatively weak

governments—along with banks, insurance companies, and Google—know a great deal about

us. This should remind us both that almost everything is subject to historical change—and

that other eras may well have had their greater freedoms, as well as their greater constraints.

Ch. 3, p. 44

Review Questions:

1. Re-read your answer to question D.7 in chapter 1 about the nature of the biological energy

regime. Provide an improved response, thinking about what you have learned in this chapter.

2. For each of the activities listed below, describe how the biological energy regime imposed

limits on what sedentary societies could do:

a) Food production

b) Transportation

c) Metallurgy

d) Creating and sustaining larger cities, government bureaucracies, and armies

3. How was city life in the biological energy regime different from life in the countryside

during the same era? How did energy constraints in particular shape urban life?

4. Given the energy needs of transport animals, under what conditions could long-distance

overland transport confer a material (or practical) benefit? How did these conditions shape

the politics of sparsely populated grasslands and deserts across which long-distance overland

trade moved? How did those politics affect that trade?

Ch. 3, p. 45

Chapter Review Questions 1. Given the vulnerability of any community that relies on outsiders for food, how can we

explain the spread of cities across the vast region covered in this chapter? How, if at all, do

the explanations vary across regions?

2. How was the development of writing connected to the development of more centralized

political authority? What roles did writing take on beyond those useful to practical

administration? How does having written records change the kinds of historical questions we

can ask?

3. Some modern writers have suggested that the great drought provides our oldest model (or

at least the oldest one for which we have written as well as archaeological records) of what

the social impact of dramatic climate change in our own future might look like. What lessons

might be drawn from this episode? What limits do you see to such analyses?

4. How, if at all, do the post-drought empires described in the later part of this chapter differ

from the early states described in “Administering Cities and Countrysides”? Do these

changes suggest any common patterns that hold across regions? If so, describe those

patterns.

Ch. 3, p. 46