27 January 2009

 Western – Or the “West,” may have multiple meanings. The term is often associated with particular geographical, historical, religious, economic, political, cultural, etc. contexts (i.e. Europe/U.S.A., Rome/Greece, Christian, capitalist, monarchies/democracies, classical music/blue jeans/McDonald’s).  Civilization – has a political, economic, social, religious/intellectual, cultural system (but is often associated with “loaded” terms like progress, advanced state, development, superior sense of self and collective identity)  History – an account of past events, often written (can be oral/memory), that does more than just relay “facts” (names/dates/places) by attempting to given cause/effect relationships (the how and why)

 Economic system  Social system  Political system  Religious/Intellectual system  Cultural system  How do these things define civilization?

 Ethnography - The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.  Early hominids had: 1) bipedalism 2) very large brain 3) human larynx  Did climate changes spur human “evolution?”  Homo habilis – 2 to 3 million years ago  Homo erectus – 1.8 million years ago

 Between 160,000 and 200,000 years ago  About 40,000 years ago, the first “modern” human began to appear  A new species, began displacing old human populations and spread from Africa to the Americas, Australia and the Arctic  As challenges emerged they went through minor evolutionary changes in order to adapt

 The appearance of the first “man-made” stone tools around 2 million years ago to the introduction of metal tools around 5,000 years ago is called the Paleolithic Age (Old Stone Age)  Periodic cold climate changes, known as ice ages, occurred frequently considering the expanse of time. The last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago

 How might an Ice Age speed up social evolutions?  Climate change forced humans into small, highly mobile bands creating the “hunter/gatherer” society as did the genderization of roles create better efficiency  Because of the nomadic lifestyle, hunter/gatherers did not spend lots of energy on housing

 Prehistoric human societies existed at the mercy of environment and the constant search for food  Development of hunter/gatherer societies  Groups maintained their own territory; didn’t roam randomly  Develop early trade patterns  Tools for luxury goods like shells for jewelry  Technological development  Better weapons  Fire  Early Religious systems  Ritual disfigurement of the deceased  Burial rituals—do they believe in an afterlife? Hierarchy?

 Early communities organized around kinship and “marriage”  Staying put led to greater “advances” in “arts,” “sciences,” and “religious developments”

 24,000-22,000 B.C.E.

 Neolithic means “New Stone Age”  Discovery of agriculture and the domestication of animals  Called the Neolithic Revolution (10,000 – c. 4,000 B.C.E.)  From nomadic existences to settled life  Strong relationship between cultivating crops and population increase  First animal to be domesticated: sheep, 8500 B.C.E.  Led to gender-based division of labor and emergence of social hierarchy  Invention of irrigation (~6,500 B.C.E.) facilitated the establishment of settled agricultural communities in the Fertile Crescent

 The Earliest Monarchies  Absolutism  Essential duties:  symbolic father  Dynasty building  peace-keeper  Legal systems  warrior

 Polytheistic Religion  Gods and goddesses representing earthly and celestial elements  Priest figures celebrated gods with ceremony  Communal feasts to celebrate gods  Early calendars built around polytheistic religion

 Famine/insufficient nutrition  Plague  Division of labor  Gender  Social class  War

 Neolithic means “New Stone Age”  Discovery of agriculture and the domestication of animals  Called the Neolithic Revolution (10,000 – c. 4,000 B.C.E.)  From nomadic existences to settled life  Strong relationship between cultivating crops and population increase  First animal to be domesticated: sheep, 8500 B.C.E.  Led to gender-based division of labor and emergence of social hierarchy  Invention of irrigation (~6,500 B.C.E.) facilitated the establishment of settled agricultural communities in the Fertile Crescent

 Most historians trace the origins of “western civilization” to the land area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers  Mesopotamia=land between the rivers.  Geography allowed for the cultivation of surplus foods and so the Sumerians and Babylonians built large cities near the two rivers

 Mesopotamia, B.C.E.  Includes Sumer, Akkadian Empire, Assyria, and Babylonia  Egypt, Canaanites, Hebrews, B.C.E.  Hittites, Minoans, Mycenaeans, B.C.E.  Greek Dark Age, B.C.E.

 The “West’s” first large-scale societal structure and system  Developed the wheel, writing, complex math, complex metal working (bronze), and the first empire (Akkad)  What “cultural” developments arose from Mesopotamia? What of ourselves can we recognize in this society?

 Writing (and so history) began in Sumer  Cuneiform (wedge- shaped) written language  Pictographic  Increasingly intricate and abstract  Expertise required  Leads to advances in math, science, engineering, metallurgy, etc.

 Mesopotamia made up of small city-states  Agricultural expansion led to political centralization  Power in Mesopotamia held by king and religious elites  ~2,350 B.C.E., Sargon, ruler of Akkad, was the first to unite the small city-states into one kingdom – Sumer (southern)  The Akkad kings toppled by the Babylonians ~ 2,000 B.C.E.

 4 Main social distinctions in Mesopotamia  Nobles  Free Clients of the nobility  Commoners  Slaves (society was not, however, organized on the foundations of slavery)  Society was generally organized around religion  pleasing of gods and goddesses  The temple (ziggurat) was the meeting place and temple

 Mesopotamian religion was  polytheistic  gods and goddesses representing almost everything in the cosmos  Gods and goddesses were human, with supernatural powers, particularly in regards to the natural world  Such religious ideas spawned efforts to create myths about the origins of the world  The Epic of Gilgamesh is a Sumerian creation story

 Environment determined much of development possibilities  Power and authority centralized and out of this comes elite class and social hierarchies  Emergence of large-scale empires  In this period Civilization then defined by urban settlements, religious cultural foundations, writing, diversified agricultural economy, organized political structures  Such organization (political, social, and economic) appears in a form that seems to typify much of western civilization through the pre-modern era (until 1789 A.D. or C.E.)

 The most important geographical feature of Egypt is the Nile River  regular flooding of the Nile provided irrigation and fertilization for Egyptian agriculture,  many natural resources to exploit, making Egyptians more self-sufficient (perhaps isolated, to some extent) than the Mesopotamians  Egyptian society unified by the Nile  religion, ideology, daily ritual, based on the idea that the Nile was a “gift” from the gods

 Early Political unity of Egyptian communities into a larger “Egypt” is called the Old Kingdom (~3,000- 2,000 B.C.E.)  Further centralization of Egyptian authority in the form of pharaohship during the Middle Kingdom period (~2,000-1,500 B.C.E.)  Egypt would later be characterized by imperial expansion during the period of the New Kingdom (~1,600-1,200 B.C.E.)

 Egyptians developed complex ideas about the afterlife  rooted in the natural world with emphasis on cycles (i.e. regular flooding of the Nile).  Evidence for this: great tombs and pyramids  The pharaoh was the “king” of Egypt  a “god” on earth (the son of the sun-god Re),  the chief priest  the embodiment of “Egypt” (as state, geographical entity, etc.)  the focal point of religion and politics  All of Egypt belonged to the king and everyone served him  Power reflected in the structure of the tombs and pyramids  A royal administration kept track of Egypt’s natural resources and controlled Egypt’s economy

 Maat – authorized order of the universe (truth, balance, order, law, morality, justice)  The Egyptians have advanced writing system—hieroglyphics  used it to communicate in various forms (not just a religious function, or learned only by elite scribes)  the basis of advances in chemistry, medicine, mathematics, engineering and architecture  A heterogeneous population, the Egyptians were divided into 3 broad groups:  King and high-level officials at the top  Low-level officials, priests, professionals, artisans, and wealthy farmers in the middle  Peasants, who made up the bulk of the population, at the bottom (slavery existed, but was not foundational for the Egyptian economy)

 Invasion from Africa and the Near East shattered Egyptian power  Libyans in the north and the Nubians to the south  The spread of Egyptian culture came not from its own imperial ambitions  rather from the borrowing/embracing of Egyptian ideas by invaders  Egypt never recovered, never really re-unified under the kind of power displayed during the Old and New Kingdoms  The decline led to the success of other societies  Phoenicians, Syrians and Hebrews and the prosperity of smaller, independent city-states that fragmented out of the Egyptian Empire’s dissolution