The Origins of Ancient Mesopotamian Civilization

Welcome to the History of the World podcast. My name is Chris. This is episode 21, The First Towns. In the last few podcasts, and especially in the recent podcasts regarding megaliths, we recognize the requirement for human cooperation on a huge scale being required Stonehenge could not have been built unless everyone involved cooperated and understood the benefits to their society of their cumulative action. As Neolithic villages expanded and populations grew, it was necessary to cultivate more crops and livestock to be able to feed the growing population. It was absolutely necessary for there to be a good water source, such as a river nearby. However, such was the demands of the rivers that humans had to consider a way of altering their settlements to enable them to be able to keep the waters of the river under control. Rivers don't necessarily do what you want them to do. Sometimes they dry up. Sometimes they flood. Humans needed to be in control of these things in order to preserve the guarantees of their harvests. So humans started to irrigate the land, and this would have required large-scale cooperation of the likes required to construct the largest megalithic monuments. Humans built dikes and canals, which in turn would feed reservoirs. Further to this, the canals and reservoirs would have needed to have been maintained to prevent a buildup from silt from rendering them less effective. Farming methods. Irrigation was not the first place that humans appear to have turned to in order to increase the yield of their agriculture. Humans had first learned that the animals that they were farming had many uses to the human population as a whole. Oxen were believed to have been exploited for their natural power, as humans recognized that an oxen could easily pull a sled of resources. It is believed that this was going on in the Fertile Crescent by 3500 BCE, as it appears that technology was quickly advancing and that humans were starting to use the power of oxen to pull an aardplough, enabling humans to prepare tougher soils for cultivation of crops. Humans would have also discovered how to attach wheels to their sleds to enable oxen to pull the first carts. Further to this, humans would have been domesticating horses to serve the same purpose, certainly in areas such as the Eurasian steppes. A lot of the clues that we have about the advances in these technologies exist in artworks and sculptures, which is how we know that the ideas and objects such as ploughs and carts have been invented. These new oxen-driven ploughs made comparative light work of ploughing the fields, which would have previously taken a number of workers a lot of time to execute. Another advantage of the oxen-drawn ploughs is that where there is an oxen, there has to be oxen dung, and dung is good for crops due to its ability to keep the soil in more of a fertile condition. So fertilization through manure may well have accidentally been discovered this way. It appears to be a reality that farming was a bit of a lottery. Many humans were in the lap of the gods when it came to the success of their harvest. So much was down to natural events as it can still be to this very day. A society of people with failed crop harvests could very quickly disintegrate into chaos. On the other hand, if a society was successful at producing crops, then they could produce a surplus, which in turn could be considered as wealth. Those peoples who required crops from this surplus would have been forced to trade whatever they had to gather what they needed. Growth of settlements. Back in episode 17 of the History of the World podcast, we discussed the emergence of Chattelheuk. Chattelheuk was a Neolithic settlement that emerged in modern Turkey in the 8th millennium BCE before it was ultimately abandoned in the 6th millennium BCE. During this time, it has been speculated that at its peak, Chattelheuk was the home of at least 5,000 people and maybe even as many as 8,000. Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian who wrote the book, Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, which was published in 2014. The book itself comes across in a very sober and pragmatic style, but one point that Harari makes is that the social dynamic of a group of human individuals changes once that group's number rises to the realms of 150 individuals and beyond. So it is suggested that a group of less than 150 individuals can get to know each other intimately enough to be able to coexist as a controlled society of people. But once you go beyond this, then there needs to be some form of code to follow and to enable the group to coexist as a society. To give you an example of what this could mean is that a country may be able to coexist peacefully due to having a law. Everyone within that country understands the law and understands that they have to live within the law. Therefore, the society stands less chance of breaking down. To administer a code of law, you would need a person or persons to decide the law and to decide the consequences of breaking the law. So at that point, somebody is elected to hold a post which is above the rest of society. Maybe you could call that person a president of the society, but already now we are starting to see the advantage of there being a social hierarchy within a society. If a large society with a cohesive social hierarchy goes up against a large society with no leadership or code, then it seems likely that the former would fare better. So the president of a Neolithic society may be referred to as a king. The question would have to be asked, why should anyone listen to the king? Well, if those who were close to the king championed him as somebody who had been spiritually elected by the gods, then that may be enough to convince the society of people to follow that king or else be in defiance of the will of the gods, potentially encouraging crop failures and the likes. So this would be a reason for all of society to listen to and follow the king, and the king would be sensible enough to appoint those close to him as his ministers. The ministers would be responsible for protecting the elite position of the king, as well as keeping a close eye on the health of the society of people for which the king was in control. Sometimes the fear of the gods would not be enough for some individuals to fall in line with the wishes of the current king, and this is a perfectly natural thing in human society. There is always someone who wishes to challenge the boss's position or opinion. If the king was particularly fond of being the king and receiving all of the grandeur that came along with it, then he may arrange for his ministers to give this rebel a good talking to, or maybe worse still, the king might just get rid of the offending individual altogether. So now we can see how an organized society may start to emerge. Irrigation. So let's go back to the subject of irrigation and why it is so important in regards to the next phase of the development of urban civilization. When we were discussing the first villages, we were discussing many sites near to the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean and southern Turkey. However, irrigation was about to change the fortune of those villages emerging in and around the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact start of irrigation, but it's completely possible that it could date back as far as 6,000 BCE and could have emerged around the banks of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers. It also seems to have had a direct effect on the health and wealth of those societies that were emerging in these places as the first affluent ancient societies are attributed to these areas. It does appear from archeological evidence that a typical farming village along a river's edge may begin the construction of canals alongside the water's edge and then subsequent smaller waterways which could feed the crop fields. This would give humans the power to do two things. Humans would be able to control the water's behavior more closely by blocking the canal according to their needs. If too much water was getting into the canal, you could block the canal's entrance with mud. The other advantage would be that the humans could channel water through otherwise barren areas of dry land unsuitable for farming, making them suitable and fruitful. As mentioned previously in the episode, though, a considerable amount of work would be needed not only to construct the new waterways, but indeed to maintain them. Silt is simply soil sediment which can build up and cause obstruction to the waterway, so it was very important that dikes were built along the canal's edge to not allow the silt and natural place to build up along the canal. However, this is still a difficult thing to prevent, so there would have doubtlessly been a degree of manual labor involved in removing silt buildup in the waterways also. The rivers of the Fertile Crescent could flood at particular times of year, so it was absolutely vital that humans were able to control this and use this to their advantage, as there were doubtlessly times of the year when the climate was more arid. Reservoirs and wells were constructed so that the water could be stored for these dry periods. Water lifting devices were constructed, such as the shaddath, which is a simple device that uses a counterbalance weight to lift heavy vessels of water from the canals and reservoirs. The successful irrigation of a farming village allowed the village to be able to sustain the lives of more individuals, so therefore the population would be able to grow. Farmers would still be encountering side issues as a result of the irrigation. A lot of the fertile soils could become quite salty as a result of the irrigation techniques, and as such, only salt-resistant crops could be grown, or even the field would need to be left fallow for a season or two until the soil recovered from the salinization just described. Social hierarchy. So we can see a trend emerging here. Agricultural techniques and science were advancing, and in turn this was allowing for population increase, which in turn was increasing the pressure on agriculture, creating side effects such as a necessity for water management and salinization, which in turn would put pressure on the society to develop expertise in dealing with such issues in order to advance their skills enough to be able to continue to grow their agricultural production. So this requires a lot of work from a lot of people, and those people must be willing to cooperate with each other to achieve the common goal. If we go back to earlier in the episode, we realized that there had to be some kind of law code in societies who were too big to be closely related to each other, so therefore there needed to be an elite ruling class. These people would be the kings of their society, and they would need to use their power and influence to convince people of their society to believe in their leadership. If we go back to our episode on the emergence of villages, then we discussed those nomads who stumbled across the first successful sedentary village societies and had to make a choice about whether to raid it, trade with it, or join it. Those that wanted to join it may have been the first people to have been introduced to law and code, so the villagers may have likely had an understanding with each other about acceptable conduct within the village, and anyone who wanted to join the village needed to understand that they would be required to accept that code of conduct as their own. As the villages became towns and the requirement for a ruling class was necessary for the larger and more complex population, then the ruling class may have demanded a tribute from those people living in the town, and subsequently, any outsiders who joined the town would have had to have agreed to pay a tribute to the rulers. The rulers would then have had to have decided among themselves how best to distribute the tribute to their people in order to maintain the social health of the town. Therefore, the value of the individual and what the individual could contribute to his society started becoming more and more important. So if you had something to contribute to your society, then great stuff, because you can climb the ladder of success. Those who did not have much to contribute could be forced into a life of destitute slavery. Let us try to see how we believe societies could have developed when studying what we know of the world already against what we see in the world today, so we understand the necessity for a ruler or a ruling class in order for large societies containing thousands of people to be able to work as a cohesive society. The ruling class would have had to have worked hard to maintain control, and may have relied on different tactics to achieve this. If a ruler could convince his society that his position was essential to the success of the community, then it would surely support him or her or them. The ruler then might take a sacred essence within his society, with those who were born into the society being taught by their elders to follow the code of the town, or else face the wrath of the ruler, who would control the fortune of the town or even the individuals. The ruler would need close supporters, which we could refer to as ministers. These ministers would have taken the weight of responsibility away from the rulers and dealt with the day-to-day affairs of the town, such as the distribution of resources, the collection of tribute, and the construction of irrigation projects. These will have been the men that the rulers would have valued the most, and as such, they would have received everything that they needed, making them the wealthiest people in their society. Most of the society would have been put to work either by being made to clear silt from waterways or by ploughing fields or by carrying water or any other menial task that required little skill. If these people didn't work hard enough, then it is likely that they would have felt pressure from the ministerial class to get their act together, and there would have been little room for excuse when the health of the society was on the line. Those individuals with skill would have likely have been treated better by the rulers, those who could create metal tools for the farm workers to improve their gathering ability, those who could weave baskets or create ceramic pots for storage of resources, those who could create attractive-looking ornaments that would excite desire among those who would be willing to make contributions in return for owning one of these attractive creations. All of these people could be described as the craftsmen of their society and would have attracted more contribution than those who laboured for others. Towns would have even started developing a merchant class, those individuals who were able to take the resources and the crafts of the town and establish trade links with other towns to bring more of a diverse resource into the town. The successful merchants would bring wealth to their hometowns by their clever abilities to seek opportunities and negotiate, and as such, they would be held in higher regard than the craftsmen of the town. Possibly above the merchant class and beneath the ministerial class would have perhaps been the earliest type of nobility. These people would have been the project managers who were responsible for the distribution of workers to complete the irrigation construction or the regional governors who were responsible for collecting tribute and handing it over to the ministers or the leaders of the military groups who were responsible for protecting the town from raiders and even leading raids into neighbouring towns. We may even have seen the descendant of the archaic shamanic individuals who in this busy town were becoming more secular by proclaiming the sacred status of the ruling class and ensuring that the people of the town were sufficiently kept obedient by means of spreading fear of spiritual consequences to individuals who did not obey the law of the town. These people would have been the first kind of priests. So we are now seeing how high numbers of people living together have forced prehistoric human tribes to become more like a modern society, and we believe it to have happened naturally purely because it makes sense for things to have transpired like this when it is considered from a logical perspective. Very little exists in terms of a point of reference for how these societies developed. It is still prehistory after all. Another thing that we do believe may have started to shift during this period is the role of women in society. We mentioned there being an air of equality at Catalhoyuk when we studied it in episode 17. We could find no evidence of there being a ruling class, and we had every reason to believe that women played a vital role in their society by being directly involved in the gathering of resources. However, this seems to have changed during the Neolithic period. Most scholars tend to agree that the female role in society appears to have diminished in value and that society moved from egalitarian to patriarchal during the Neolithic, although argument does exist about whether it happened before or after the establishment of a class-based society as we just described. Certainly though, there is a feeling that men wanted to have sons, believing them to have more value in their communities, and women were consigned to the role of being baby producers. Eridu. This episode has really advanced us forwards in terms of the balance of society, and we are now really close to recognising that threshold between prehistoric cultures and ancient cultures. We have recognised that the balance of power and wealth has shifted towards the rivers of the Fertile Crescent as the Neolithic period has developed in that area of the world. It is very difficult to pinpoint much of the society changes, but it is believed that this shift in society was most relevant to a period between 5000 and 3000 BCE. The Nile River is to be found in the northeast of the African continent and in the west of the Fertile Crescent. This valley would represent the area which ancient Egypt would emerge in in around 3100 BCE. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers are in the east of the Fertile Crescent and would follow a distinct path from Egypt. We refer to this area as Mesopotamia. The important thing that is believed in relation to the towns emerging along these river valleys is that there was no firmly established or known political connection between them at this point in history. It is believed that they were really no more than city-states with their own independent law codes, and their connection to other city-states was not a lot more significant than as a trading post. In the south of modern Iraq is an archaeological site called Eridu. We would recognize this as being within the area that we call Mesopotamia, due to the fact that it is near to the Euphrates River. Eridu has no less than 14 archaeological levels. The oldest level dates to around 5400 BCE. Eridu is significant, and there are things that need to be mentioned at this stage. Eridu is one of the very many settlements which are believed to have emerged in this area of Mesopotamia, and it is thought as one of the, if not the oldest. The nearby river of the Euphrates and the Tigris, which runs parallel to the Euphrates through Mesopotamia, lead out into the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf is believed to have been larger in this area, and subsequently Eridu is believed to have been not far from its banks, even though on a map today, it looks like it is a significant distance away. Therefore, fertility of the land and irrigation opportunities would have been higher. Eridu would have in fact been around marshlands, and there are a number of mounds which signify where the settlement is believed to have been situated. The Eridu archaeological site was originally investigated in the 1850s, with significant studies being made there after the Second World War in the 1940s. The archaeological evidence suggests that Eridu was somewhat a sophisticated city of life, trade, and religion. This is supported by some of the artistry excavated at the site, which seems to point towards these things. The religion aspect of Eridu is due to the significant ruins of a ziggurat. Ziggurats are very common throughout Mesopotamia. They are believed to be the centrepiece of Mesopotamian temples. Ziggurats were constructed a little bit like pyramids. They had large bases with different levels that decreased in size as you approached the top. However, there are only a few levels, so they looked more like a palace than a pyramid. They were built with bricks, some sunbaked and others fired. Each ziggurat may well have supported a temple or a shrine at its physical peak, although there is not much archaeological evidence of this. We only have the suggestions of ancient texts to go by, which also suggests that ziggurats were not built for the general public, but were exclusive to the priestly classes. It is believed that Eridu started out as a humble village before 5000 BCE and over the course of the next 2000 years had become a settlement of no less than 4000 people. Dwellings were built from either reeds or mud bricks. Archaeology demonstrates that Eridu was a significant site of fishing, with much in the way of equipment such as nets and weights being excavated as well as dried fish remains. Eridu has been described as many as the first city. Whether or not this is true is extremely debatable, but Eridu does have as good a claim as anywhere. What we do know about Eridu is that it is in a significant area of the world which links the prehistoric world to the ancient world. It is based in Mesopotamia, which is going to serve as a very important area of the world with the emergence of many cities and the emergence of political connections between these cities. A great deal of the upcoming podcasts are going to be centred on this area of the world because the significance of the culture changes that are going to take place over the course of the next centuries are completely impossible to ignore. The balances of power are going to be fierce and relentless as we start seeing significant and necessary advances in culture and understanding within these emerging city-states, which comes down to us in the earliest writings that have been discovered since this period. So next time we are going to concentrate on Mesopotamia and identify those very earliest of settlements and try to understand more about the cultural character of the region so that we can enter the ancient period with a solid platform of understanding of this particularly significant area of the world.