Antiquity: From the Birth of Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire - Tapa blanda

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Norman F. Cantor was Emeritus Professor of History, Sociology, and Comparative Literature at New York University. His many books include In the Wake of the Plague, Inventing the Middle Ages, and The Civilization of the Middle Ages, the most widely read narrative of the Middle Ages in the English language. He died in 2004.

De la contraportada

Bestselling author Norman Cantor delivers this compact but magisterial survey of the ancient world -- from the birth of Sumerian civilization around 3500 B.C. in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (present-day Iraq) to the fall of the Roman Empire in A.D. 476. In Antiquity, Cantor covers such subjects as Classical Greece, Judaism, the founding of Christianity, and the triumph and decline of Rome.

In this fascinating and comprehensive analysis, the author explores social and cultural history, as well as the political and economic aspects of his narrative. He explains leading themes in religion and philosophy and discusses the environment, population, and public health. With his signature authority and insight, Cantor highlights the great books and ideas of antiquity that continue to influence culture today.

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Excerpt

Chapter One

Hydraulic Despotisms

A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., themother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor,appeared in East Africa. She walked erect and was able to close herthumbs and forefingers to make tools for doing what her limbs wereunable to do. She was four feet tall and probably black. This is whatthe science of paleontology told us during the last four decades of thetwentieth century.

The earliest humans were related to primates, the apes and monkeys.Humans and gorillas share 92 percent of their DNA. The geneticconformity between humans and chimpanzees is significantly greater.Humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their DNA. It is possiblethat humans and chimpanzees are descended from the same speciesof animal long ago extinct. Or that humans evolved out of chimpanzeeswho gave up swinging from trees in order to find food on theground. Like chimps, humans tend to migrate in colonies. Gorillas aremore individualistic, but they, too, are often found to be migratingand living in small groups.

That humans are a species of primate is indisputable. The earliesthumans lived and traveled in small groups. They were hunters andgatherers. They gathered fruits and vegetables growing wild in thethen-great forests and savannas of East Africa and they hunted animalsthat they could kill and eat.

Like most humans today, they were carnivorous, but not entirelyso. As long as there were vegetables and fruits in abundance, they weresatisfied with a vegetarian diet. But fresh meat, eaten both raw andcooked, appealed to them.

Out of stones and bones, they made weapons to kill animals. Theirthroats and larynxes could utter sounds that allowed for communication between these humans, and over time, these sounds were shapedinto organized languages.

Frequently on the move in search of food, the humans very slowlydrifted northward and moved up the great rivers that flowed togetherto form the Nile valley. Around a hundred thousand years ago, thehumans reached the Nile delta and the Mediterranean Sea and beganto spread east and north from there. By this time they had learned tobe farmers, to plant seeds, to irrigate their croplands, and to build villagesand towns, drawing their sustenance from the cultivated earth.But they did not cease to hunt and gather.

The humans reached Europe - at first, the territory adjacent to theCrimea and the northern shores of the Black Sea - about 10,000 B.C.

Based on their excavations, archaeologists tell us that earlier,around 6000 B.C., two centers of rich and highly developed civilizationhad emerged in the Near East - in the northern extremity of Egyptand in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is today southern Iraq.

The availability of irrigation systems to water the land and producegrain and other food crops was the material foundation for thesetwo great river-valley societies, Egypt and Iraq. They were hydraulicdespotisms, in which a small ruling class, with the aid of soldiersand priests, commanded the material resources that gave sustenanceto these civilizations and allowed them to build cities, palaces, andtombs.

The soldiers made sure that the peasants and laborers did what hadto be done to maintain irrigation systems, harvest crops, and erectbuildings. The priests assured the masses that this forced-labor systemwas dictated by the gods, who were represented on earth by kings.

The Nile valley was for the most part a natural irrigation system,in which the great river overflowed once a year, covering the land withrich silt brought from East Africa, but pharaohs, as the Nile kingswere called, also built some major canals to improve upon natural irrigation.The Tigris-Euphrates valley was a scene of massive and complicatedirrigation systems built by human labor to pull the water inlandfrom the rivers.

We know about these two large and prosperous settlements ofIraq and northern Egypt exclusively from the material records offeredby archaeology. It was not until around 3500 B.C. that writing emerged in both societies. Each developed its own distinctive forms ofwriting.

For another millennium, these written records consisted entirelyof state business-accounts and letters, and panegyrics to the mightinessand divinity of kings. (By the dawn of writing, a half million peoplewere settled in each of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys, wherehuge temples and palaces were erected for kings, priests, and aristocrats,while the common people lived in small houses made of sun-driedbricks, or in tents.)

The forces for change in the two great societies of Egypt and Iraqwere, with one exception, external rather than internal. That oneexception was the attempt by Pharaoh Akhenaton (around 1330 B.C.)to create a new monotheistic religion (with similarities to Judaism)and eliminate the power of the traditional priests who served a multitudeof deities. This theological revolution was immediately reversedafter Akhenaton's death.

Otherwise, what happened in the two river-valley civilizations wasdetermined by wars spurred by invasions from without. In Egypt,dynasties enduring for centuries presided over irrigation and cultivation,huge edifices built by forced labor, and the manufacture of exquisitepaintings and jewelry. For a century, around 1100 B.C., Egypt wasinvaded and ruled by a "sea people," from western Asia, but then effectivepower returned to a native dynasty.

The history of the ancient Tigris-Euphrates valley was shaped by aseries of invasions from the north. As Sumerians, Chaldeans, Assyrians,and Babylonians succeeded one another, the structure of severely class-riddensocieties and agriculture-based economies did not change. Theseries of invasions and conquests ended around 500 B.C. with Iraqabsorbed into the expanding Iranian (Persian) empire to the east.

In the first century B.C., Egypt was absorbed into the expandingRoman empire, and remained its wealthiest province until the MuslimArabs took it over in the seventh century A.D.

Continues...

Excerpted from Antiquityby Norman F. Cantor Copyright © 2004 by Norman F. Cantor. Excerpted by permission.
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