| Hunter Gatherers | Agriculturalists | Pastoralists | Civilization | TimeMaps |
Hunter-Gatherers
Introduction
The history of the world is, in one of its aspects, the story of technology and the impact it had on society. This story starts with humans as hunter-gatherers.
Before the coming of farming, all humans gained their food by foraging for nuts, berries and insects, hunting wild game, large and small, and fishing.
A few hunter-gatherer peoples survive to this day, but the world of the hunter-gatherers, in which most ancient people followed this mode of life, is long gone. It disappeared in the millennia following 10,000 BCE, as farming and pastoralism gradually spread across the world.
Hunter-Gatherer Groups
The ancient hunter-gatherers lived in small groups, normally of about ten or twelve adults plus children. They were regularly on the move, searching for nuts, berries and other plants (which usually provided most of their nutrition) and following the wild animals which the males hunted for meat.
Each group had a large “territory” over which it roamed – large, because only a small proportion of the plants in any given environment were suitable for people to eat, and these came into fruit at different times of the year meaning a large area of land was needed to meet the food needs of a small number of people. The group’s territory had regular places where it stopped for a while. These might be caves or areas of high or level ground giving them a good all-round vision of approaching animals (and hostile neighbors), and where they would build a temporary encampment.
The Clan
These family groups belonged to larger “clans” of 50 to 100 adults, spread over a wide area and whose members regarded themselves as a “people”, descended from a common ancestor. Kinship was crucially important. This more than anything else gave them their identity and defined their place in the world. More practically, it told them who their friends and allies were, and governed whom they could or could not marry (incest, though differently defined at the margins, was a universal taboo, but marriage outside the clan was also restricted). Myths gave them their world view – how the universe was born, how humans came to be and so on – and there is clear evidence for spiritual beliefs, and indeed for belief in some kind of life after death.
Hunter-gatherer society
There may well have been individuals within clans particularly revered for their wisdom and judgement, or even credited with special magical powers; but it is highly unlikely that anyone exercised any significant authority over any group larger than the family group. There were no kings or chiefs in such societies. Moreover, the hunter-gatherer style of life prohibited the accumulation of more wealth by some individuals as opposed to others. For a start, there simply was not the necessary abundance of food to create surpluses. Moreover, the collective nature of hunting and foraging, and the reliance members of the group had to place on each other, meant that no one person could take a disproportionate share of the food. As a result, all members of a group shared more or less equally.
This equality in terms of material wealth may well have been reflected in an equality of status between men and women. In modern hunter-gatherer societies, at least, women tend to have a more respected place than is generally the case in traditional farming communities. Perhaps this a reflection of the fact that as the foragers rather than the hunters women provided most of the nutritional needs for the group.
Religion
The religious practices of hunter-gatherer peoples must have differed enormously from group to group. Animistic beliefs (in which many features of the natural environment are imbued with spirits) were probably common, and ancestor worship. It should be emphasized, that the concept of “religion” as a separate element of life and culture would have been foreign to our hunter-gatherer ancestors: for them, the spiritual dimension infused all activities, and all things.
The practice of both these religious traditions involves shamans. Shamans may well have been the most respected figures in hunter-gatherer society. Their sphere of activity would have gone well beyond what we consider religious; they would have been healers, judges, perhaps even law-makers and war leaders.
Technology
By 10,000 BCE, humans had a range of technologies to aid them in their exploitation of the environment. The most fundamental of these was the ability to make and maintain fire. Fire played an important part in the mythologies of later societies – the Greeks told the story of Prometheus, the great benefactor of mankind, stealing fire from the gods. This suggests that humans invested this capability with great reverence, tinged with fear.
Fire was certainly of enormous significance to their lives. It gave them warmth and light, extending their geographical habitat to the colder latitudes as well as into dark environments such as caves. It enabled them to continue communal life after nightfall, and must therefore have strengthened their ability to tell stories round the hearth – a key element in human culture. Fire allowed people to cook their food, thus expanding their source of nutrition to less digestible or tasty plants. It was also used to harden wooden spears, making it possible to kill larger animals.
The hunter-gatherer people of 10,000 BCE used stone, wood, bone and antlers for their weapons and implements. Some groups practiced primitive mining, or more strictly quarrying, for flint, digging shallow pits and trenches.
People wore clothing made from animal skins, which they sewed together using intricately-crafted bone needles. They had mastered the use of cords and threads fashioned from plant materials to aid them in making their clothes as well as for making baskets. They wove baskets to carry things in.
Their weaponry included spears, bows and arrows, and harpoons. This last brought the food resources of lake, river and shore within their grasp, and indeed coastal peoples ventured some distance out to sea in small boats made from reeds or logs. They had already domesticated one species of animal, the dog (probably around 15,000 BCE), which they used for hunting.
Some societies of 10,000 BCE already had distinctive styles of art. These ranged from crude patterns on their weapons and tools, through modeled clay figurines of animals and women (presumably fertility spirits), to the wonderful sequence of cave paintings of animals and mysterious symbols found in south western France and northern Spain, dating from 35,000 BCE to 9,000 BCE.
The impact of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle on the environment was far less than that of agriculture, but this is not the say that it was non-existent. Unwanted plants were cleared to allow more useable plants to grow, and in some cases whole areas are cleared by fire to allow game to thrive.
In a few favored locations hunter-gatherer peoples were able to establish permanent villages. These were usually on the coast, were communities could exploit abundant year-round marine resources as well as terrestrial plants and animals. Notable examples were to be found in ancient China, Japan and North America. In all these areas some quite large communities of some thousand inhabitants or more were able to develop.
The sedentary lifestyle in such settlements anticipated that of the early farmers. Indeed, some features of farming communities did appear here: the earliest pottery so far found by archaeologists comes from the Jomon culture, in Japan. For most hunter-gatherers, with their more mobile mode of life, clay pots would have been too heavy and fragile to carry.
A World Slowly Changing
In the world of 10,000 BCE, a man might live all his life without meeting anyone from another group or tribe. This meant that ideas and techniques spread very slowly, taking lifetimes to travel long distances. This was a world where change was imperceptible. But this did not mean that it was not taking place.
The Birth of Civilisation - The First Farmers (20000 BC to 8800 BC)
The Neolithic Revolution
The coming of farming is often called the “Neolithic Revolution”. The word “Neolithic” is derived from the Greek for “new” (neo) and “relating to stone” (lithic), and this period is often called the New Stone Age. The innovation in stone-making technology which this label implies was that people started polishing stones, rather than just chipping them, as they had done before. Why was this so important? Because, besides making axes and arrow heads for hunting, they were now making tools for farming, such as scythes and hoes. For these, the stones needed polishing, to give them a flat but sharp edge.
The transition from hunter-gathering to farming is described as a “revolution” by some historians, because it constituted the crucial breakthrough which made possible all later human advances. Moreover, during its course every aspect of peoples’ lives was transformed. It was probably the single most important development on world history.
Before we go any further, it is important to note that the Neolithic Revolution also gave rise to a second kind of economy, based on the raising of domesticated animals (sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses and so on). This is called pastoralism. Some see this as a specialist kind of agriculture, but pastoralism involves a lifestyle so different from that of most farmers that it is dealt with in a separate article [see Early Pastoralists].
A backward step?
It is very doubtful whether the people involved in this “revolution” actually noticed that they were living in a time of change. The transition took place over many generations, probably in a sequence of many tiny steps taken in response to practical problems. For hundreds, even thousands of years, early farmers continued to forage for fruit and berries and hunt wild game, and it was only gradually that their economy shifted more towards agriculture. It would only have been when the farming population grew to an extent which restricted hunting and foraging that they became less important.
The gradual nature of the transition also meant that people would not have noticed that, in some ways, their lifestyles were getting more onerous and less healthy. Farmers were creating a more reliable source of food, but their diets were becoming increasingly restricted. Farming and related activities also required much harder work than hunting and gathering. The human remains of early farmers show more health problems, and somewhat shorter lives, than amongst hunter-gatherers.
Some scholars have argued from this that the coming of farming was a step back for humankind (*). Without this step, though, no further advances would have been possible. Moreover, the archaeological record needs careful interpretation. It could be, for instance, that the remains we have from hunter-gatherer days are of people who tended to be of higher status (the bodies of the majority being just left to wild animals to dispose of), which may well have implied above-average age at death. Also, the existence of less healthy individuals in the archaeology of early farming communities implies societies that were able to allow their weaker members to survive – which most today would consider a positive thing.
The World in 10,000 BCE
In 10,000 BCE, the topography of the Earth was much as it is today, albeit with plenty of “small” differences, such as the English Channel not yet dividing the British Isles from the rest of Europe (that was to happen about 7000 BCE), and the coastlines of China and Mesopotamia being different (by some hundreds of miles in places!). For the past 12,000 years or so, we have been living in a period of comparative topographical stability, which some scientist think may be coming to an end.
Across the continents, the basic distribution of human races was more or less as it would be until about AD 1500, when Europeans ventured out across the oceans. The Mongoloid peoples lived in eastern Asia, with an off-shoot in the Americas; the Black races inhabited Africa south of the Sahara; the Caucasoids lived in Europe, western and southern Asia and northern Africa; and the aboriginals lived in Australia and New Guinea.
Socially speaking, however, the world of 10,000 BCE was very remote from that of today. For a start, it was an empty world. There were perhaps ten million humans in total. All were hunter gatherers – that is, they hunted animals and gathered wild plants for their sustenance.
A Changing World
The world was changing, however. It was getting warmer, and had been for several thousand years. The last Ice Age had started to retreat about 17000 BCE (a process that would not be complete until ten thousand years later). For a further few thousand years more, some regions would experience climatic changes associated with this warming. Notably the lush grasslands of northern Africa would gradually give way to the greatest desert on Earth, the Sahara.
The world was changing in another way, too. Humans were beginning to acquire capabilities that would eventually enable them to re-fashion much of the planet’s surface to meet their own particular needs.
In pre-agricultural, hunter gatherer societies, the average population density was no more than 10 people per square mile. Farming, however, concentrates edible plants and animals into a much smaller area of land, ensuring that it could support many more people. In early agricultural society it took about 25 acres of land to feed one family. This meant that people did not have to regularly move from place to place, and that more stable settlements could be formed; it also meant that the natural environment where farmers settled was altered to allow the few species of plants and animals useful to humans to flourish at the expense of all other species.
The Origins of Farming
Evidence for the harvesting of wild cereal grasses dates to around 10,000 BCE in the Middle East; and the first flint sickles to have been found probably came from this period. There is no evidence of cultivation of the soil at that time, but by 9000 BCE the crucial breakthrough had occurred in Palestine and southern Turkey (according to our current knowledge), where cereals such as wild emmer and barley, which flourished in the region, were deliberately grown and bred.
It seems that quite separate centers of farming appeared in China (based on millet in the north and rice in the south) and later, Sub-Saharan Africa (based on various tropical plants); a third center may have been South Asia. These formed the nuclei of different farming expansions. Another center of very early plant domestication was in New Guinea, where gardens of large peas, beans, cucumbers and water chestnuts were grown, but this seems to have remained quite isolated.)
While the domestication of selected grasses was taking place, something similar was occurring with some animals. The first traces of sheep-keeping go back to around 9000 BCE, in northern Iraq. Within a thousand years or so, goats, pigs and cattle had been added to the list. Once domesticated, these animals were bred to improve their usefulness to humans, and soon they were yielding not only meat for food and skin for clothing, but also milk for additional nutrition. They also produced manure, an excellent fertilizer.
Early farmers mostly raised both crops and animals. The two activities are complimentary, as animals provided traction for plows and manure for crops, as well as being an important source of food. Areas of poor soil and little rainfall, however, are unsuitable for growing crops. In such places, such as in the grasslands of the Middle East and central Asia, some groups specialized in pastoralism – the keeping of herds of animals. Whilst their numbers were far fewer than the farmers, the pastoralists were to have a big impact on world history, right up to recent times. They are dealt with in a separate article, Early Pastoralism.
New Technologies
The domestication of plants and animals led to a host of other technological advances. Some were directly connected with agriculture, others were made possible by the more settled lifestyle that the Neolithic Revolution brought about.
Pottery
By 7000 BCE, pottery was being made in Middle Eastern villages. This is an important marker for archaeologists, as pottery is associated with truly settled life – its weight, bulk and fragility make it unsuitable for the wandering life of the hunter-gatherer. It also requires firing at high temperatures, a technique involving large brick-built kilns.
The early potters made their pots by adding coils of clay, layer upon layer. Later, around 4000 BCE the potter’s wheel came into use in the Middle East. One feature of this was that (initially at any rate) pots become less highly decorated. This was because the potter’s wheel allowed the mass-production of ceramics, showing that larger and denser populations were providing a strong market demand for ceramics, which were now being produced by full-time potters. These signs of increasing specialization are indications that urban civilization is on its way.
Incidentally, the wheel was used in pottery long before it was applied to transport. This later development took place amongst pastoral peoples on the steppes north of the Black Sea.
Textile technologies
Textile technologies were also very important to early farmers. Whereas hunter-gatherers had used the skins of animals to clothe themselves, the domestication of plants and animals gave farmers access to new textiles, superior in every way. Flax (for making linen) was one of the first recorded crops; and with sheep and goats, people had regular access to animal wool. Later, the cotton plant was domesticated (firstly in the Indus Valley civilization), and later still (in China, c. 3000 BCE) the silk worm began to be cultivated for the fibre it produced.
All these fibers required processing to make them fit to wear, with spinning and weaving being the core activities. Hunter-gatherers knew simple spinning techniques, which only required small sticks around which to wrap fibers. These gradually evolved into hand spindles, a process completed by 5000 BCE at the earliest (the spinning wheel, a comparatively complex machine, would not appear for thousands of years).
Weaving is a more complicated process, but hunter-gatherers certainly practiced basketry, which uses the same basic principles as textile weaving. Looms are required to weave any large amount of cloth, however, and, being comparatively large and heavy, these would not have been easy for hunter-gatherer groups to carry around with them. Once settled villages had appeared, however, looms soon came into use, with the earliest dating to c. 7000 BCE.
Decoration
Hunter-gatherers had certainly produced decorative items for wear, using small stones, bone, teeth and so on. The early farmers inherited these practices, and added to the range of materials used. Obsidian, a type of volcanic glass, seems to have been accorded mystical significance and was traded over wide areas; and metals such as copper and tin were used in jewelry. At this stage these soft metals were hammered into shape and were not suitable for use in either farming or warfare.
Plows
A crucial development in early agriculture was the invention of the plow. The earliest farmers used digging sticks and hoes to prepare the ground for cultivation. The lightly scratched soil would soon become exhausted, and farmers had constantly to clear new ground. To do this they set fire to the stumps and brush that was left over from cutting the trees, and this also left the soil rich in potash and lime. Once cleared and fired, the new land was able to give several years of good harvests, and after it had ceased to do so, was left waste as the farmers moved on to another area to clear and fire. This primitive approach is known as “slash and burn” or “swidden” farming.
The two-man plow – one man pulling on a rope in front, the other pressing the plow’s point into the ground – made its appearance in the Middle East around 7000 BCE. Later, a cross-beam was added for greater rigidity and control.
Eventually, from about 4000 BCE, the use of cattle transformed plowing, making it possible to cultivate larger areas and deeper soils. The castration of bulls to turn them into oxen seems to have first happened in northern Iraq at about the same time, and this also aided plowing. A little later, the invention of the yoke in Mesopotamia meant that two oxen could be bound firmly together to pull much heavier plows. These developments would have allowed increasingly intensive farming, as the deeper the ground is turned the more slowly it becomes exhausted. Also, cattle and other animal manure would have helped fertilize the soil.
Irrigation
A major advance in farming practices occurred in 6000 to 5000 BCE, as farmers began to settle the plains of Mesopotamia. The climate here is very dry, except in spring when the rivers Tigris and Euphrates break their banks and flood a huge area around about. The floods makes the soil very fertile, and of course provide a lot of water, but for only a short period of time. To take advantage of this situation the settlers had to learn to control the supply of water so that it was available throughout the growing season. The farmers developed techniques of irrigation, constructing a system of dykes and dams to hold the water back from their villages during the spring floods, and digging ponds and channels to take the river water to their fields for the rest of the year.
This process was repeated in the Nile and Indus valleys (in Egypt and South Asia respectively) a little later. The Yellow River valley in China has a rainier climate, so irrigation was not so essential in getting agriculture started here; however, irrigation schemes would later be undertaken on a large scale to make farming more intensive, along with the drainage of large swamps to create new farmland and the construction of dams to control the devastating flood waters of the great river.
In the Yangtze valley of central China, rice crops grown in flooded (“paddy”) fields was pioneered. This required perhaps the most sophisticated system of water control of all.
The Spread of Farming
Modern genetic techniques suggest that agriculture was largely spread by the slow migration of farmers themselves. It also seems clear that in some times and places, such as in northern South Asia, it was spread by the passing on of agricultural techniques to hunter-gatherers. The farming “frontier” seems to have pushed outwards into hunter gatherer territory at the rate of about one mile per year. It therefore took several millennia to spread throughout western and southern Asia, and across northern Africa (including Egypt) and Europe. By 3500 BCE most human beings were farmers, and would remain so until the Twentieth century.
The settling of farmers on new land led to hunter-gatherers being either pushed off their land, or annihilated, or absorbed into the expanding farming population.
Wherever farming went, the more reliable food source which it produced led to a massive upswing in population, and to dramatic reductions in the variety of local flora and fauna, as more and more land was given over to just a few varieties of plants and animals of use to humans. For the first time, humans were deliberately altering the land for their own purposes. Large areas were turned into fields and pastures, and any plants and animals not useable were ruthlessly uprooted and relentlessly kept away.
Large regions, notably the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia and the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in South and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China, were totally transformed: forests cleared, swamps drained, fields laid out, rivers dammed, channels dug, ponds constructed, hillsides terraced, villages built. In short, whole landscapes were domesticated.
Away from the river valleys the transformation was patchier and less pervasive, as Stone Age farming practices did not allow intensive agriculture in any but the most favorable locations.
Early farming societies
The coming of farming led to a radical transformation of human society. Whereas hunter-gatherers had lived in small family groups, erecting temporary shelters in their wanderings across the landscape, farmers settled down in more permanent villages. Many of these were tiny hamlets of less than fifty or so individuals; but some villages, especially in more fertile ares (such as river valleys) could house several hundred inhabitants. Eventually some of these would grow into towns and cities.
Authority
Neolithic villages would have been structured along clan lines: groups of families tracing their origins back to a (frequently mythical) common ancestor. Villages would have included one or more of these clans. The clan leaders were the village elders, and where more than one clan existed, one “royal” clan would often have provided a village “king”.
It seems clear that in most cases the role of a “king” was religious rather than political, with no means of coercing his fellow villagers to obey him. In the days when religion was a hugely important part of life, however, with no real demarcation between the spiritual and the material, such village “kings” would usually have been the preeminent authority-figures in their communities.
In modern-day parlance, villages would have been “independent” from one another (though we must bear in mind that the whole concept of “independence” would have been incomprehensible to the people of the time, just as the concept of “politics” as an activity in its own right, distinct from religion or normal social intercourse, would have been). There would however have been cult centers which commanded the reverence of people from all the villages in an area. The villagers would have visited the local shrine regularly, using the opportunity to exchange produce, make inter-village marriage alliances, discuss matters of joint concern or try to resolve disputes between villages. Such inter-village relations would have been underpinned by the religious sanction deriving from the cult, and the shrine’s shamans or priests would have lent their authority and prestige to helping maintain peace between the people of different villages. In all likelihood they would have been called on to hear disputes, and to make decisions applying to more than one village.
The moral authority of such cult centers could only go so far, however. Inter-village disputes often became more intense than could be resolved peaceably. Indeed, as anthropologists attest, cult centers often did not even try to resolve inter-village disputes, and clashes between villages were frequent, and often lethally violent.
Social class
Neolithic farming practices were very unproductive by later standards, and early farmers were generally able to grow only enough food for their own needs, and little more. This meant that almost everyone had to spend their time in agriculture or related activities. Except in the most favored locations, as we shall see, there was no surplus to feed a significant class of non-farmers (professional artisans or soldiers, for example).
It is clear, however, that many communities included individuals – hereditary headmen, for example, or cult priests – who enjoyed higher status than the rest, and it is quite possible that some of these would have been able to live off the gifts offered by the other members of the community.
There would also have been present in many villages some of inferior status to the rest – people captured in raids, for example, or condemned to slavery through committing some crime. These would have had considerable social stigma attached to them, and would have had to undertake roles which other villagers would shun – as domestic servants in the headman’s house, for example, or slaves on his farm.
Rudimentary class distinctions were thus beginning to show themselves in some Neolithic communities. On the other hand, early farmers had to work cooperatively in order to clear land, plow fields and harvest crops. The concept of private property lay far in the future. These factors – as well as the smallness of the surpluses available – will have limited the scope for different classes. It was only in the river valleys, as the populations there grew denser and produced larger and larger surpluses, that true class-based societies began to appear for the first time [The Origins of Civilization].
Women
Women may well have had lower status in farming communities than amongst hunter-gatherers, although, since we really know very little about either ancient hunter-gatherers or early farmers, we can’t be sure. It is the case, however, that in many of today’s hunter-gatherer societies women have a higher status than in traditional agricultural communities.
If an increased inequality between the sexes was indeed the case, the fact that women provided most of the nutrition in hunter-gatherer groups may have been a factor. In farming communities men were the main breadwinners, with women allocated the more ancillary roles of child care, food processing and clothes making. It is also possible that hunter-gatherer groups, if they were to survive in a hostile environment, would have needed all members, of whichever sex, to have the trust and respect of all the others. The ability to rely on each other could have made the difference between life and death on a regular basis. In farming communities, which were larger and had a more reliable food source, this was perhaps less so.
Religion
Animistic beliefs (in which many features of the natural environment are imbued with spirits) and ancestor worship were probably common in Neolithic times. By the end of the period the polytheistic religions – which differ from animism in having a more restricted pantheon of gods and goddesses, which are not identified with natural phenomena so closely – practiced in ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia and amongst the Indo-European peoples had clearly emerged.
As with the hunter-gatherers before them, it should be emphasized that the concept of “religion” as a separate element within life and culture would not have been understood by the people of this period. For them, the spiritual dimension infused all activities and all things.
One of the striking developments of Neolithic times is the appearance of numerous religious centers, easily identifiable in the archaeological record. Examples have been found all over Eurasia, with megalith (standing stones) sites as far apart as England and Korea. The ever larger and more elaborate temple complexes of Mesopotamia became the nuclei around which the earliest cities grew up.
These early example of monumental architecture reflect the increasing organization of religious life within communities. The cult centers were undoubtedly tended by priests, who conducted the public rituals which were the focus of all community life. They may well have been the successors to the earlier shamans (who continued to exist in many places), and like them, were the most revered figures in the community. Their sphere of activity would have gone well beyond what we consider religious; they would have been judges, arbitrators and probably law-makers. In the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere, some of their number would become the scribes and officials in the states that would emerge at the end of the Neolithic; the high priests would become kings.
Trade
Highly-prized items such as pieces of obsidian could travel long distances within the Neolithic world, and extensive trade routes have been identified. However, these items were not carried by professional merchants over long distances; rather, the trade was carried out be a series of local exchanges, with communities swapping goods with one another, perhaps as part of their efforts to maintain peaceable relations with one another. The nearest the Neolithic world got to specialist traders were the nomadic pastoral groups, some of whom may have used the contacts they made with settled peoples to exchange goods over a wide area. This has certainly been the case in more recent times.
The End of the Neolithic
The Neolithic period began to draw to a close shorty after 4000 BCE, as urban, literate societies began to emerge in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus valley. In other places, the Neolithic lasted longer, and was only brought to an end as the Bronze Age spread from Mesopotamia, from the mid-3rd millennium BCE onwards.
Even then, the great majority of the people lived and worked as their Neolithic ancestors had done, as bronze was too expensive to be used widely in farming. It would only be with the spread of iron tools, in the centuries after 1000 BCE, that Neolithic practices and lifestyles could at last be superseded.
* for example, Y N Harari, in Sapiens: A Brief History
Early Pastoralists
Pastoralism means the herding of animals – mainly sheep, goats and cattle but in some places yaks, llamas and camels. It often implies a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life, with groups following their herds from pasturage to pasturage to ensure that there is enough grassland for their animals.
Because the heartlands of civilization have almost always lain in fertile areas which can support large, dense populations, pastoralists have often appeared to be on the margins of history. In fact, though, they have played a key role in world history on repeated occasions, as well as acting as carriers of trade and influences – technological, cultural, religious – between different civilizations.
The origins of pastoralism
Early farming communities had to learn how to make best use of the land which they occupied. For some this meant focussing more on crops than animals; for others, in less fertile landscapes, it meant focussing more on raising livestock.
In the grasslands and highlands of Eurasia, the dry climate and poorer soil made it hard to make a living from growing crops. In these regions, small groups developed a lifestyle based on keeping flocks and herds of animals. These groups became the first pastoralists.
Animals, particularly sheep and cattle, require large amounts of grazing land to feed on, and need to be regularly moved from place to place to find fresh pastures. A pastoral economy therefore demands much more land than one based on crop-growing, and supports a smaller population. Most pastoral societies, therefore, consist of small groups which tend to follow a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life. In many cases, there is an annual cycle of grazing the herds in cooler, mountain pastures during the summer and bringing them down to warmer grasslands in winter (a practice known as transhumance).
Pastoralism probably originated in early Neolithic times, when, in areas not suited to arable farming, some hunter-gatherer groups took to supplementing their traditional way of life with keeping domesticated cattle, sheep and goats.
Pastoralism in the ancient Middle East
Pastoralism has always been important in the Middle East, much of which, being very dry, is unsuitable for arable farming. The archaeological record suggests the presence of pastoralists in Palestine as early as 8000 BCE.
The rise of irrigation farming and, later, urban civilization, in the great river valleys of Mesopotamia would have given pastoralism an extra boost. The dense populations that now arose in the great river valleys progressively shifted to intensive crops growing in order to feed themselves. Animal husbandry would have become less important to them, as it took up a lot of land which could be more efficiently used for crops. The people of the river valleys still needed animal products, however, and for these they relied increasingly on the animal herders.
Relations with farming populations
These lived on the less fertile grasslands on the margins of the irrigated areas. An exchange system grew up in which pastoralists swapped their hides, wool, milk, meat, horn and bone, or even live animals, for the villagers’ grain, peas, and so on; and probably for some professionally-produced craft goods as well. This exchange allowed the animal herders to specialize more on their pastoral activities.
Pastoral tribes became an important element in the ancient Middle East. Most of the time, relations between city-dwellers and farmers, on the one hand, and pastoralists on the other, were probably reasonably harmonious. It is likely that animosity was never far way, however. The differences in lifestyles bred mutual suspicion and contempt.
At regular intervals open hostilities broke out between them. In these the nomads, despite their fewer numbers, had a military edge because of their mobility. Coalitions of nomadic groups could quickly bring concentrated force to bear on certain points, and as quickly disperse. Farmers would have found this harder to deal with, tied as they were to their own plots of land.
Also, the nomadic lifestyle was a hard one, and competition between nomadic groups for scarce resources made low-level warfare endemic between them: they were inured to warfare in a way that farmers were not. This too would have given them an advantage when it came to fighting. As a result, Middle Eastern history was characterized by frequent nomadic raids, migrations and outright conquests.
Camels
Sometime before 1000 BCE some pastoralists succeeded in domesticating camels. This allowed pastoral groups to penetrate much deeper into the Arabian desert. The Bedouin way of life, in which small bands of nomads based on scattered oases in the deep desert, became possible.
Some pastoral peoples of the Middle East
In the Middle East, the pastoralists mostly belonged to the Semitic races (though not all Semites were pastoralists – witness the Canaanites). The first to make a major impact on history were the Akkadians, then the Amorites, the Hebrews, the Aramaeans, the Chaldeans, and later the Arabs. Other non-Semitic pastoralists who made an impact on the ancient Middle East were the ancestors of the Hittites, the Mitanni (who ruled Syria and northern Mesopotamia c. 1500 BCE), the Kassites (who ruled Babylonia for some four centuries) and the Iranians. All these groups originated on the steppes of central Asia.
Pastoralism in central Asia
The great expanses of grassland in central Asia were well suited to a pastoral economy. The sheer vastness of the steppes in this region meant that groups ranged over far greater distances than in the Middle East, and had less regular access to the produce of farming communities. They came to depend more on their animals, every part of which was exploited: wool and skins for clothes and tents; milk, meat and blood for sustenance; bone and horn for weapons and implements.
Horses, wheels, carts and chariots
It was here that, between 4000 and 3500 BCE, groups of people first domesticated horses. They did so for their meat and milk, rather than for riding: the tough little steppe ponies were too small for that. Some however may have been used to drag primitive sleighs along the ground, used to help carry goods on the regular migrations these nomadic people undertook. By 3000 BCE these sleighs had had wheels attached to them, to make the earliest carts. A thousand years spoked wheels allowed heavy carts to evolve into light carts, or chariots. These may have been developed first to help the people herd their horses, or for hunting; they were soon being used for war, and were to have a far-reaching impact on the civilizations of the Middle East and China.
A related development, also used in both hunting and warfare, was the composite (sometime called the compound) bow. This was a bow made of horn, sinew and wood glued together, which allowed it to pack much more punch than one made entirely of wood.
The Indo-Europeans
The early nomadic groups who domesticated horses and then developed wheeled vehicles and chariots, are thought by most scholars to be the ancestors of a group of peoples who spoke a language which we call “Indo-European”. They spread out from their homeland north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, across the central Asian steppes westward into Europe, eastward to what is now northern China, and southward into Iran and the Indian subcontinent. In so doing, they spread their language, which became ancestral to the Indo-European group of today: most European languages (including Greek, Latin, the Romance languages of French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, and the Germanic, Scandinavian and Slav languages), Iranian and several languages in South Asia.
They also spread their polytheistic religion into Europe, where it evolved into the religions of ancient Greece, Rome, the Celts, and the Germans and Norse peoples. In Iran it formed the context in which Zoroastrianism eventually arose; and in South Asia it became the Vedic religion of early India and formed the context in which Buddhism and mature Hinduism emerged.
Horseback riding
Sometime about 1000 BCE, pastoral groups in the central Asian steppes, having bred larger and larger horses, took to riding on horseback. Horse-borne warriors are much swifter and more mobile even than chariot-borne ones, and this skill gave these nomads a huge advantage over other peoples. Civilized cultures soon adopted horse riding (the Assyrians were probably the first to do so, and the Chinese did so somewhat later), and horse cavalry was to remain a major component of armies right up to the 20th century. For thousands of years, though, the steppe nomads, as a result of lives spent on horseback, were by far the most adept at this kind of warfare. Coupled with the hardihood that their lifestyles gave them, and the toughness of their ponies, they would have an impact on the history of Eurasia out of all proportion to their numbers. Right up to the 17th century, when central Asia fell under the control of the expanding empires of Russia and China, nomadic peoples posed a danger to settled agriculturalists.
The nomadic peoples who would have the most impact on world history were the Scythians, the Huns, the Bulgars, the Magyars, various Turkish tribes, and the Mongols.
Pastoral peoples in other parts of the world
Early pastoral societies also arose in India and Africa. The arid regions of central India are very suitable for the pastoral way of life, and here the distinctive zebu cattle were domesticated. In North Africa, Berber and Taureg peoples took to herding sheep and goats, while pastoral cultures also arose in the Sudan (ancient Nubia), the savannah belt south of the Sahara (were the Fulani people would later predominate), and in east Africa (including such peoples as the Somalis and Masai). All these specialized in cattle herding.
Some features of pastoral societies
Hundreds of pastoral groups have made themselves known to world history, each with its distinctive culture; however, some features were common to many such societies.
Clans and tribes
Nomadic societies are based on small groups made up of extended families, or clans, moving their herds from place to place at regular intervals. A number of such clans form a tribe. The clans of a tribe congregate in one location at regular intervals – perhaps once a year – to trade with one another, forge marriage alliances, and deal with matters concerning the entire tribe. They then disperse again to their various ranges.
For nomads, control of strategic resources, particularly watering places and good pasturage, was vital. Each tribe and, within this, each clan, claimed privileged access to certain of these; and if this access was denied, disputes resulted. When a dispute arose between two clans of the same tribe, the tribal elders would try to deal with it. They often failed to prevent low-level hostilities and violent vendettas lasting several generations. If a dispute between two or more tribes arose, tribal warfare would result.
The steppes saw frequent clashes between tribes as one sought to expand its pasturelands at the expense of another, which often spilled over as raids into the territories of neighboring farming peoples. This situation gave rise to a culture which stressed warlike qualities as well as a ruthless will to achieve advantage by whatever means. Both in the Middle East and central Asia, cunning and trickery were part of the nomad’s stock in trade, side by side with open-hearted generosity and hospitality.
Equality
Women had a more respected position in some pastoral societies than others. In all groups, leadership was exercised by men. The continual warfare will have reinforced this situation. It will also have produced a regular intake of war captives, especially women and children (most men on a defeated side would have been massacred). Some members of nomadic societies, therefore, were slaves. On the whole, however, pastoralists tended to have more egalitarian societies than farmers, and certainly more so than civilized ones.
Exchanges
Because nomadic groups travelled comparatively long distances, they were in a good position to trade with the settled populations in which they came into contact. This may have taken the form of gift exchanges, to maintain peaceable relations between the different groups.
Linked to this, in the central Asian steppes especially, the vast areas covered meant that, even from an early date, the nomads acted as a conduit of ideas and technologies – such as wheels, chariots, metallurgy and horse riding – between the more sedentary civilizations they bordered.
Impacts on the environment
The nomadic way of life clearly alters the landscape less overtly than does arable or mixed farming, but his does not mean it has no impact at all. Over generations, grazing herds tend to favor certain plants over others, so that the plant cover in pasturelands become less varied. Also, pastoralists sometimes use fire as a way of turning forest into pasture, and of rejuvenating pasturelands. This can have a significant impact on the type of plants present in such a landscape. Fire and grazing can also prevent forests from growing, and if on mountain slopes, this can lead to erosion.
When nomadic pastoralists encroach on farmland their impact can be devastating for farmers. This is especially so on the marginal agricultural land on the frontier zones bordering the deserts. The grazing of herds can quickly reduce plant cover. This makes the soil unstable, and erosion soon follows. Much land that was once well suited to crops, especially in the Middle East, has been permanently rendered fit only for the grazing of sheep and goats, which can survive in semi-desert landscapes. What has made this worse is the contempt which nomads feel for farmers and farming; the spoiling of agricultural land has sometimes been quite deliberate.
One modern problem, overgrazing, has tended not to occur on a significant scale in the past, in that nomads have been skilled in culling unwanted animals and keeping their herds to optimum sizes. It has mainly been when the populations amongst the herders themselves have expanded, as has occurred after the introduction of modern medicines, that their herds have ballooned in numbers too, beyond the capacity of their environments. This has been a particular problem in regions with fragile ecosystems, such as is found for example in the Sahel, on the southern margins of the Sahara desert.
Civilization: its origins and early development
States and cities
The coming of farming had allowed the growth of settled populations to take place, but it did not make the coming of civilization inevitable. With the rise of civilization, small-scale, village-based societies became large-scale ones with cities, advanced technologies, and the capability to mobilize the labor of thousands of workers to achieve specified ends. How did this development, after farming probably the most significant development in world history, come about?
The key to the emergence of civilization is the rise of two social
institutions, the State and the City. Both are dependent upon one another:
cities cannot exist without states, and states without cities (in the
broadest definition of that term “cities”, that is including settlements
the size of what today today would be considered very small
towns).
States and cities must therefore have emerged in tandem.
The Neolithic context
For millennia farmers had grown enough food for their own needs, but little else.
In terms of material wealth, there was little differentiation between families or individuals within village society. All members of the community worked in the fields (which were probably communally-owned by clan or village) and tended the herds. The village crafts – weaving, spinning and pottery – were carried out by groups of farmers and their families in the time they could spare from food production and preparation. When fighting was needed, all village males were involved. And all participated in the village ceremonial and religious life.
The early farmers lived in small, self-contained communities of perhaps three hundred people, usually less. Each village was an independent community. Local cult centers commanded the reverence of people from all the villages in an area, and their priests will have been called upon to hear disputes or make decisions affecting more than one village. They had no power to control or coerce the people to submit to their decisions, however, apart from religious sanction (though these would have been very powerful).
These were far from being centers of “states”. There was no political authority exerting consistent control over an area on a day-to-day basis, no army, no bureaucracy, no taxes. The villagers were not subjects of a king, nor were they citizens of a republic. Their communal loyalties lay with their own villages; inhabitants of other villages were aliens, and assumed to be hostile. The moral authority of the cult centers could only go so far, and inter-village tensions often became more intense than could be resolved peaceably. Clashes between villages were frequent and violent.
How then did states covering comparatively large territories emerge?
In the river valleys
A small number of major river valleys in different parts of the Eastern Hemisphere played a critical role as cradles of civilization: it was here that all the “original” or “foundational” civilizations – those which did not owe their development to other, older civilizations – emerged. The great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and China all belonged to this category (whilst those of Greece, Rome, Japan and Korea are examples of secondary civilizations, as they owed their existence to earlier ones).
River valleys offer areas of well-watered, fertile soil which, because of their very high agricultural productivity, can give rise to large human populations concentrated in a comparatively small area. But why did this situation lead to a completely new kind of society, qualitatively quite different from what had gone before? Why didn’t the rise of large populations in river valleys simply result in a multiplication of small-scale farming villages, closely scattered across the plains?
The answer to this question is to some extent reliant on intelligent guesswork, as no records have survived from these millennia – writing comes at a late stage in the emergence of civilization. However, modern scholars have developed explanations for how civilization emerged which are consistent with the wealth of archeological evidence available to them.
Wheat in the Hula Valley, Israel.
Spring floods in dry climates
In the fertile river valleys, large rivers provide plentiful water (vital for growing crops) plus huge amounts of fresh, fertile mud brought down from the mountains where the rivers start. In the spring, the rain and snow melt from the mountains causes the rivers to flood large areas of land, where the water and mud creates some of the most productive farmland in the world.
The flood waters only cover the plains for a few weeks, however, before flowing on to the sea. In places such as Mesopotamia, Egypt and the north-west Indian subcontinent, the rest of the year is hot and dry, meaning that crops soon wilt and die. Early farmers therefore found these areas difficult to settle. It was only when they started digging pools and constructing dams to keep some of the floodwater from flowing away, and irrigation channels to carry the stored water to their fields, that agriculture could begin to flourish here.
Once irrigation agriculture had become established in these river valleys, crop yields were abundant. This led to population growth on a scale never before seen. The valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt and the Indus in the north-west Indian subcontinent became home to large, dense concentrations of people.
At this point, several new factors kicked in.
Conflict and co-operation
The first factor was that the increasing density of the population multiplied opportunities for conflict between villages. This factor will have been intensified as several communities drew water from the same rivers, leading to disagreements over access to valuable water resources.
The second factor was that, while conflict increased, so did the need for different communities to cooperate with each other. The spring floods brought not only life-giving water and mud, they also brought life-threatening deluges which from time to time swept whole villages away. Dams and dykes had to be constructed to control the flow of the rivers and keep the floodwaters within their proper bounds: the more people able to work on these dams, the better.
A third factor was that the much more productive agriculture that these water-control measures brought about enabled farmers to grow more food than they themselves could consume. These surpluses allowed a growing section of the population to concentrate their efforts on non-agricultural pursuits such as government, administration, warfare, art and craft work.
Kings, officials and overseers
These factors led to the rise of supra-village centers of power. In Mesopotamia, and probably in other places as well, these originated as cult centers which had commanded the religious allegiance of people for many centuries. These found themselves increasingly called upon to ensure fair access to water resources, settle disputes between villages and co-ordinate water control measures.
From here it would have been a small step for the cult centers to pro-actively manage the water resources over a wide area by directing the construction and maintenance of new dams, ponds and irrigation channels. In this process they gained control of the labor of the villagers, and increasingly also the food surpluses produced by the villagers.
These trends promoted the growth of a hierarchy of officials and overseers who came to have great power over the rest of the population. At their head stood a divinely-sanctioned monarch. What had originally been a small cult-center had grown into a temple-palace complex, surrounded by a large, walled settlement which can be recognized as a city; and a loose conglomeration of villages had become a “city state”.
This origin of royal power in the need to manage water resources over a wide area is reflected in the titles of the early chiefs and kings of ancient Egypt, who were known as “water chiefs”. In Mesopotamia archaeologists can trace the evolution of cult centers over thousands of years (c. 5000 BC to c. 2500 BC) from single-roomed buildings to multi-building temple and palace complexes. Around these, villages of a hundred or so families grew into settlements of thousands of families; and simple societies composed only of farmers had grown into complex, class-based societies of craft workers, soldiers, officials, priests and rulers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamia
The role of war
Another factor was at play in the rise of urban societies: warfare. This served to turbo-charge all the processes described above.
In the great river valleys of Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus and later the Yellow river, several centers of power emerged simultaneously. Inevitably, tensions arose between these centers, which resulted in warfare on a scale which overwhelmed the ability of individual villages to protect themselves. In Mesopotamia at least, many villages physically disappeared as their populations relocated to the safety of the new walled cities.
Professional armies soon made their appearance. The increasing scale of warfare can be seen in the construction of city walls in all the major river valley civilizations; in the rich hordes of weapons and armor found in tombs; and in early sculptural reliefs showing organized military formations marching to battle. These forces needed feeding and equipping, and the farming populations, knowing that their security depended upon them, would have had little choice but to pay the taxes to do so. Furthermore, the appearance of specialist soldiers in the pay of the city elites greatly increased the latter’s coercive power over the rest of the population (as well as introducing a new and destabilizing element within the elites’ power-structures).
Controlled societies
Early records from Mesopotamia – and, judging by the great public works that the elites of early Egypt and the Indus Valley were able to throw up, the same was true here as well – show that the rulers and their officials exercised an extraordinary level of supervision over the economic life of these states.
The farmers’ labor was used to construct irrigation canals, dykes, store houses and city walls, as well as larger and larger temples, royal mausoleums and palaces. The surplus food they grew was extracted from them and distribution as deemed necessary by the ruler and his officials.
The task of receiving, storing and distributing the surplus, was complex and onerous, and soon required officials to develop means of recording the flow of produce. A new administrative tool came into use: writing.
Early writing
Archaeology can trace the evolution of a script in Mesopotamia from about 4000 BCE until 3000 BCE, by which time it had become a full writing system. This was the cuneiform script which was written by impressing wedge-shaped writing implements into wet clay tablets, which were then dried.
In Egypt, hieroglyphic writing gives the impression of arriving fully formed some time before 3000 BCE. This form of writing would be used on public stone monuments. The Egyptians developed other forms of writing for more common usage: the cursive script, derived from hieroglyphic system, which was used in formal government and religious documents, and much later, the demotic script, which was used for informal and everyday use.
In the Indus Valley civilization very little remains of what might be writing has been found, and it has not been deciphered.
In the case of Mesopotamia and Egypt, masses of written texts have survived, and show that in both cases their writing systems, developed originally for purely administrative purposes, soon became the vehicles for such great literature. Works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BCE, Mesopotamia) and the Book of the Dead(c. 1550 BCE, Egypt) would not have been conceived of by the early officials who were struggling to administer taxes and record transactions.
Chinese particulars
In north-central China is a river valley as great as any of the others mentioned above, that of the Huang He, or Yellow River. Unlike the others, however, its climate is not bone dry but provides enough rain for growing crops; irrigation was not therefore an immediate cause of the rise of Chinese civilization. However, the loess soil found in northern China is one of the most fertile of anywhere in the world, allowing a large, concentrated population to grow up here. Also, flooding is a major problem, well reflected in the Chinese origin myths, and would have acted as a powerful motivator for the rise of area-wide centers of authorities.
Many of the pressures which made for the emergence of urban, literate civilization elsewhere were therefore present here, but not all. This, and fact that agriculture came somewhat later to northern China than to the Middle East, may help explain why cities, states and literacy emerged in China somewhat later than in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley.
This may also explain why early civilization in China presents a somewhat different aspect to those elsewhere. There were no great public works like the Pyramids of Egypt, the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia or the great walls and well-laid out streets of Harappa and Mohenjo daro. This suggests there was not the same degree of control over the labor force. Indeed, the records indicate a looser political structure, resembling more a feudal state than the centralized, bureaucratic states of Mesopotamia, Egypt and (judging by the uniformity of their town planning) the Indus Valley cities. Such control would only come to China later. When it did come, however, it would produce major irrigation projects and massive public works such as the Grand Canal and the Great Wall of China.
Further study
For the world before civilization, see
The World of Hunter Gatherers
For the advancement of agriculture, see
The Coming of Farming
For a closer look at the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia,
see
History of Ancient Mesopotamia
For a closer look at the rise of the civilization of ancient Egypt,
see History of Ancient Egypt
For a closer look at the rise of civilization in South Asia, see
the
Indus Valley Civilization
For closer look at rise of civilization in ancient China and East Asia,
see
History of East Asia, Part 1
https://www.timemaps.com/encyclopedia
