Prehistory

Food Production

Survival in the face of the elements has been the struggle for most of human existence on the planet. Since their emergence, Homo sapiens have invested most of their time in hunting and food gathering and staying warm and dry during the periods known as the ice ages. Modern human beings migrated from their ﬁ rst home in Africa into Europe, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas, probably following herds of bison and mastodon, an early source of food. They were so successful in their hunting that many animal herds were reduced to the point of extinction.

As the climate changed and the ice receded, new possibilities for food production occurred. Our human ancestors began to gather edible plants and learned how to domesticate them. This was an agricultural revolution that allowed them to break free from their nomadic past and establish sedentary communities. Along with cultivating plants came the domestication of animals, probably ﬁ rst dogs and then livestock that would provide meat, milk products, as well as hides for clothing. Some animals became beasts of burden. In the division of labor between genders, women assumed domestic roles that included cooking, tending small animals, and weaving, while men did the farming, hunting, and herding of large animals. These new methods of food production could produce surpluses, which in turn allowed larger communities to develop, advancing civilization. Where conditions did not allow agriculture, nomadism continued. By and large, nomads existed on the fringes of the civilized world, and they failed to develop written languages. The agricultural revolution occurred ﬁ rst in Mesopotamia and spread afterward to Asia and Europe.

Fertile Crescent. Mesopotamia, or the Fertile Crescent, developed the world’s ﬁ rst cities, so it is not surprising that wheat and barley were ﬁ rst cultivated there. Irrigation and the drainage of swamps also ﬁ rst occurred there, around 5000 b.c.e. From time immemorial the Nile River overﬂ owed its banks bringing fertile silt and water to the narrow and proliﬁ c ﬂ oodplain. When the Nile failed, social upheaval and revolution often followed.

In China, agriculture began along the Yellow River valley around 10,000 b.c.e. with the domestication of millet, barley, and other crops. Rice was ﬁ rst grown along the Yangtze River valley around 5000 b.c.e. and later became the staple food for much of Asia. By 3000 b.c.e. the Chinese had invented the plow, and by 400 b.c.e., iron-clad farming implements. The agricultural revolution occurred along the Indus River valley before 5000 b.c.e., where farmers cultivated wheat, barley, peas, and other crops.

Farming became common across Europe by 3500 b.c.e., but for centuries afterward, farmers worked a piece of land until the soil wore out, then simply moved on to virgin ﬁ elds. Such practice is roughly the same as the “slash and burn” farming of seminomadic communities in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, still in use to the present day. A remedy for soil depletion was crop rotation: One plant replenished what another plant took from the soil the previous season. This method was practiced ﬁ rst in Europe around 1400 b.c.e. In the Western Hemisphere the agricultural revolution began ﬁ rst in Mexico, perhaps around 5000 b.c.e. The “three sisters” of diet in this part of the world—maize, beans, and squash—provided a balanced diet and source of nutrition for the indigenous people, and they required little labor to produce.

Beasts of Burden. The ﬁ rst beasts of burden to be domesticated were the donkey, the buffalo, and the camel, all by 3000 b.c.e. The llama was used in the Andes Mountains in South America. Animal husbandry lagged behind in the Americas because horses died out early in this part of the world and were only reintroduced by Europeans after 1500 c.e. Over the centuries people as far separated as the Celts and Chinese adopted the horse to great advantage. However, at ﬁ rst the horses were mainly used to pull war chariots; later for cavalry, and not commonly for agricultural labor.

Human diet throughout the world largely consisted of cereal grains, beans, vegetable oils, fresh vegetables and fruits, dairy products, occasional fresh meat, and fermented beverages made from either fruit or grains. Consumption of cereals came in many forms, but in Europe, the Near East, and the Americas mainly through coarse bread. White bread, made of ﬁ ne wheat ﬂ our without the germ, was most highly prized throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. In 350 b.c.e. a new strain of wheat suitable for such bread was cultivated in Egypt, and Egypt and North Africa thereafter became a granary for the Mediterranean peoples. Fruits and vegetables were consumed locally. Trade and migrations introduced new plants across Eurasia and Africa and resulted in great improvements in food production. Sub-Saharan Africa produced food surpluses with the introduction of the banana by the Malay peoples (of present-day Indonesia). Because of this fortuitous event, in the fourth century b.c.e. the city-states of Nigeria were able to ﬂ ourish. Another revolutionary product, sugarcane, was cultivated in India and the East Indies from 100 b.c.e., but its dissemination to Europe waited for the discovery of a process of reﬁ nement. Instead, honey and concentrated fruit were used for sweetening throughout much of the ancient world.

The New World offered a variety of plants not available in the Old World, most important maize, but also cacao, papaya, guava, avocado, pineapple, chilies, and sassafras. Several of the more common foods today originally come from the Americas: peanuts, potatoes, and tomatoes. The relationship between abundant food and community development was readily apparent in this hemisphere: Where farming ﬂ ourished (Mesoamerica and South America), city-states and civilizations abounded; but where farming lagged (North America), population centers were few and less organized. The “discovery” of the Americas by Western explorers had an enormous impact on diet and nutritional resources throughout the world.

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Many ancient cultures were fascinated with the movement of the heavenly bodies because people thought that they exerted inﬂ uence on earthly events. The ancients carefully observed astral rhythms and computed how the seasons ﬁ t this schedule. Sumer, one of the earliest Mesopotamian cities, left behind the ﬁ rst calendar (354 days) by 2700 b.c.e.

China had developed a calendar system very similar to the modern one by 1400 b.c.e. In Central America the Maya developed an amazingly accurate calendar that could predict eclipses and planetary conjunctions that mirrored the modern way of calculating years, based on a commonly accepted event like the birth of Christ. Dionysius Exiguus (a Christian) invented the current dating system in the sixth century c.e.

Metal Forging. Copper smelting began in Catal Huyuk (perhaps the earliest city excavated, found in modern-day Turkey) before the Bronze Age. However, the people in northern Thailand were the ﬁ rst to make bronze (an alloy of tin and copper) around 4000 b.c.e. The ﬁ rst bronze foundry in China developed around 2200 b.c.e. Craftspeople among the Hittites of western Asia perfected iron making for their weapons by 1200 b.c.e.; iron work was also known in central Africa. The Iron Age reached China by 500 b.c.e. Being cheaper to produce than bronze, iron soon found widespread use in war and farming. The Chinese began casting iron a thousand years before Europeans did. At about the same time they began to cast iron the Chinese also began to make steel. Researchers have recently uncovered a Chinese belt buckle made of aluminum, showing that they began to reﬁ ne this metal some 1,500 years before Europeans. In the Andes area gold smelting, used largely for jewelry, developed around 200 b.c.e. After 600 c.e. Western Hemisphere cultures also began to smelt silver and copper but never processed iron or bronze. Rubber was ﬁ rst found among the Chavín culture of the Andes around 1100 b.c.e.

Scientiﬁ c Tools and Speculation. Peoples of the Near East were the ﬁ rst to develop writing. They used papyrus, animal skins, and clay tablets. The earliest surviving writing in China was found incised on animal bones and turtle shells and cast into bronze vessels. The Chinese invented paper around the beginning of the Common Era, a much cheaper medium than silk and less cumbersome than clay tablets or metal.

Western civilizations made strong contributions to the speculative disciplines of mathematics and sciences. The abacus was invented in the Near East around 3000 b.c.e., an indication of fascination for numbers, mathematics, and the sciences. Famous scientists include Pythagoras (500 b.c.e.), who, in addition to ﬁ guring out useful things related to triangles, developed both scientiﬁ c and eccentric theories about the physical universe. Euclid (300 b.c.e.) is still studied today for his insights in geometry, and his theory proﬁ ted another Greek mathematician, Aristarchus, who computed the distance between the Sun and the Moon c. 280 b.c.e. Archimedes in turn ﬁ gured out pi and invented such simple machines as the lever and the pulley. Greek astronomers also made observations and deductions that were unparalleled until Galileo during the European Renaissance.

Chinese mathematicians were ﬁ rst to use exponential formulae and scientiﬁ c notation (200 b.c.e.) and utilized several other innovations: the magnetic compass (1 c.e.), “negative numbers” (100 c.e.), and north-south, east-west parallels in maps (265 c.e.).

Industry and Medicine. Two civilizations used the wheel to advantage in their development. They were the Sumer (c. 3000 b.c.e.) and the Shang dynasty in China (c. 1700 b.c.e.). One practical application of the wheel is the wheelbarrow, invented by the Chinese in the ﬁ rst century c.e. Other “wheels” of great beneﬁ t but unrelated to transportation were the potter’s wheel, found in Mesopotamia as early as 3500 b.c.e., and the water wheel, a technology of hydrology invented around 500 b.c.e. The wheel was not used in transportation in the Western Hemisphere.

The Egyptians were the earliest glassmakers (c. 1500 b.c.e.), but by 100 b.c.e. Syria became a major exporter of high-quality glasswares. In manufacturing cloth the Chinese were the ﬁ rst to domesticate the silkworm and to cultivate mulberry trees during the Neolithic Period. Silk-weaving technology then spread elsewhere and by 550 c.e. had reached the Byzantine Empire. Cotton was woven and traded in the Indus River valley around 2500 b.c.e. Although cotton growing and spinning are adopted by other cultures, Indian textiles remain famous throughout the period.

The Chinese have a long and venerable history of homeopathy and natural remedies in health care. Acupuncture started in China (2500 b.c.e.). The Mesoamericans are known to have acquired a vast knowledge of the medicinal use of plants. Chroniclers in the New World listed some 1,200 indigenous medicinal plants that sprang from native treatments and traditions. The Greek world is known for its well-published and imitated physicians, as well as remedies for ailments. The famous Greek physician Hippocrates wrote the Corpus Hippocraticum (400 b.c.e.), a textbook for medical doctors. Other Greek physicians of note included Erasistratus of Chios who explained heart valves (250 c.e.) and Galen (third century c.e.), whose medical writings provided advice for centuries to come.

SOCIAL AND CLASS RELATIONS

The social structure of the earliest civilizations shows hierarchies and a concentration of power among certain elites. There were few matriarchal societies in the ancient world; most were patriarchal and polygamous among the wealthy social classes. As civilizations developed and expanded, their social structures often had to be modiﬁ ed. Sometimes this resulted in a decentralization of power, even on rare occasions, as in ancient Greece, in democracy. At other times changes were forced by foreign invasions.

Egypt. The apex of Egyptian society was the pharaoh since he (or more precisely, his “house” or the institution that he incarnated) stood as the intermediary between the world of gods and of human beings. The pharaoh’s main duty was to maintain maat, an apotheosized state of cosmic balance or justice for his whole realm. Pharaoh owned vast tracts of land and sometimes vied with priests for control and status. His ofﬁ ce was hereditary and dynastic. History records one woman, Hatshepsut, who served as regent for more than 20 years until the son of the previous pharaoh could assume power.

When the Nile failed and Egyptian life was disrupted, the ruling dynasty lost credibility and provincial administrators, the priestly class, or foreigners intervened, resulting in the installing of a new dynasty. One group of outsiders who seized power sometime around 1600 b.c.e. was the Hyksos, a Semitic people. However, by 1300 b.c.e. a native dynasty had returned to power, and the outsiders were expelled. The conservative nature of Egyptian society, reinforced by the regularity of the Nile and the insularity of the land, made for few social and class changes in its long history.

India. Plentiful artifacts and architectural remains from the Indus River civilization survive but so far the writing has not been deciphered. The Indo-Europeans brought social and class changes when they settled in northern India around 1500 b.c.e. Their hierarchic and warlike society can be seen in the mythology narrated in their Sanskrit scripture, the Vedas. Their class structure and suppression of native peoples resulted in the imposition of the caste system that dominates Indian society to this day. Although the Indo-Europeans did not settle in southern India, they nevertheless inﬂ uenced the darker-skinned Dravidian people there, who also adopted the caste system. Aryan religion was modiﬁ ed around 500 b.c.e. by new concepts introduced by the Upanishads and by new protest religions called Buddhism and Jainism. After reaching its maximum inﬂ uence from the reign of Emperor Ashoka (c. 280 b.c.e.) to the Gupta dynasty (c. 350 c.e.), Buddhism largely faded from Indian society but spread to China and Southeast Asia.

China. Rulers of the Shang dynasty (c. 1700–1100 b.c.e.) established themselves as the sole intermediary between the human world and the spirit world, as did its successor, the Zhou (Chou) dynasty (c. 1100–256 b.c.e.). Zhou rulers relied on a network of feudal relations to extend the Chinese empire and claimed their right to rule under the concept called “mandate of heaven.” This was a double-edged sword as heaven rewarded virtuous rulers and punished unjust ones through giving the people the right to revolt.

The decline of Zhou power and centuries of civil wars culminated in the uniﬁ cation of China under the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty. The Qin uniﬁ ed their conquest through the imposition of absolute government power, under an ideology called Legalism. The brief experiment with Legalism made the next dynasty, Han, turn to Confucianism. Confucian society divided the people into four nonhereditary social classes: the scholar-ofﬁ cials, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Confucians taught that the family was the center of society. It remained China’s ofﬁ cial ideology from the second century b.c.e. to the 20th century c.e.

Preliterate nomads along its northern frontier confronted the sedentary Chinese civilization. The most formidable among them from the late Zhou to the post-Han era were called the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu), whose defeat by the Han rulers after c. 100 b.c.e. led to the opening of the Silk Road that would link China with India, Central Asia, Persia, and Rome. In addition to the exchange of economic goods, Buddhism and some Western ideas entered China via this commercial route.

Classical Greece. For all the democratic reforms attributed to the ancient Greeks, only Athens and its allies accepted this form of “equality under the law,” and even then the rights were brief in duration and limited to male citizens. Because of the stubborn autonomy that each city-state claimed for itself, it is hard to sum up Greek social and class relationships. In general, Greeks despised kings, prized local identities, often quarreled among themselves, and nonetheless cooperated in matters of athletic competition. They also agreed about the superiority of the Greek language, religion, and commerce compared with those of other peoples. They rarely mixed with non-Greek “barbarians.” Non-Greek slaves, who did the work too undigniﬁ ed for Greeks to do, were grudgingly accepted. Family and marriage were valued because survival depended on having enough children so that the next generation would protect the city with an army and take care of the citizens in old age.

Rome. Early Rome overturned its Etruscan kings and became a republic dominated by a group of men who made decisions for all the citizens. These leaders were called senators, and they came from an aristocratic class called the patricians. Commoners (or plebeians) owned small plots of land and were full citizens of the early republic, but their role in government was limited to veto power of plebiscites and election of their own spokesmen, called tribunes. Class struggles led to civil wars and the disintegration of republican institutions.

As Rome acquired land outside the Italian peninsula, two changes occurred that affected Roman society: First, the patrician class beneﬁ ted because successful wars increased its wealth and power; second, the old system of running Roman politics failed to cope with the new empire’s demands. The plebeians abandoned their small farms and moved to the city for economic opportunities. Rome’s leaders were increasingly compelled to provide “bread and circuses” to keep the unemployed citizens content. Popular disenchantment with the new arrangements and the leaders’ tendency to foment civil war motivated the likes of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony to experiment with new forms of government. Though the ofﬁ ce of Caesar (a term that came to mean both emperor and demigod) proved popular, there was still an undercurrent of discontent from classes as diverse as the original patricians of the Republic days and newly acquired slaves, numbering up to one-third of the city’s population. Spartacus led a throng of disgruntled slaves in 73 b.c.e., requiring eight legions to quash the uprising. Julius Caesar, the hero of the new imperial age, was murdered in the Senate by old guard Republicans on the Ides of March, 44 b.c.e.

The Caesars adapted by expanding the opportunities for citizenship and by giving slaves and freedmen opportunities to gain wealth and improve their status. However, there is no evidence that wealth disparities diminished over the whole imperial period. The steady rise of inadequacies of the Roman religion led to the spread of Christianity among all ranks for Roman society.

The Americas. Mesoamerican and Andean peoples became more hierarchical and stratiﬁ ed as urbanization increased. Birth, lineage, and occupation determined one’s place in these civilizations. The overall class structure was pyramidal with the ruler and nobility on top, followed by a priestly class, a warrior class, merchants and traders, artisans and crafts workers, then agriculturalists, with servants and slaves on the bottom. The whole schema was cemented together by a mythology that resembled that of Shang China or pharaonic Egypt: The gods approved of the elites as guardians of the secret lore concerning such things as astronomy, calendrical calculations, and ritual, which enabled them to stay in power. While there is some evidence of lowerclass discontent, the preponderance of evidence indicates that wars, invasions, and ecological bottlenecks—not internal class conﬂ icts—were primarily responsible for the decline of classic Mesoamerican civilizations.

Literary Classics and Monasteries. The ability to read and write was considered almost magical by potentate and peasant alike in the ancient world. This fascination with the written text explains why those ancient religions that survived are scripture based. Reading and writing became particularly useful as cities and civilizations required more complex administration and organization. At ﬁ rst, writing was complicated and unwieldy (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese pictographs), and few could master the thousands of symbols in each written language. As a result certain societies honored the scholarly class or compelled their administrators to pass literacy tests (such as in China under the inﬂ uence of Confucianism, beginning in the Han dynasty). In the New World only the Maya devised a written language utilizing a system of 800 glyphs.

Some ancient scripts evolved and became syllabic or hybrids of pictures and sounds (such as Mesopotamian cuneiform), which reduced the number of symbols from thousands to hundreds. When Ugarit reduced its symbols to 30, cuneiform became the standard script in the Near East for laws and literature. The Phoenicians were important because they perfected the alphabet letters to represent sounds. Soon the Greeks added vowels, and the alphabet as we know it was invented. The alphabet was simple enough that many could learn it and gain access to literature and history and thus power. Israel gave an institutional place to the prophet as a critic of the ruling king and priest, and the prophet’s critique—once it was written down—became a powerful statement to future generations about the limits of power. Greece ﬂ ourished in the ﬁ fth century b.c.e. in the arts and sciences because it too encouraged literacy among its people.

In many civilizations monastic societies were seen as separate from the secular society. The roots for Western monasticism came from Anthony of the Desert (late 300s c.e.) and the “Desert Fathers and Mothers” of Egypt (300–500 c.e.), indicating Eastern Christian inﬂ uence on the Latin Church. Benedict (c. 500 c.e.) is called the father of the monastic movement in the West. His rule came at a critical time for Western civilization, because various barbarian tribes had broken through the frontiers and were destroying cities and institutions, yet the empire had taken few measures to preserve its manifold cultural heritage. The monasteries of Benedict and his followers provided an alternate society, a counterculture with its own meritocracy and value system. By the end of the period it was the monasteries that powerfully preserved culture and encouraged progress: They showed hospitality to displaced refugees, they developed and retaught agricultural techniques, they recopied precious manuscripts, and they eventually returned to recivilize the people that were once were proud Roman citizens. The only Western library of the sixth century c.e. that functioned after Rome’s decline was Benedict’s at Vivarium. Similarly, Hindus and Buddhists honored monastic institutions as well as individual ascetics.

TRADE AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES

From the beginning humans have migrated and mixed with one another. The ﬁ rst migration took place out of Africa to the Near East some 100,000 years ago, when humans spread across Europe and Asia. The ice ages provided land bridges for travel to parts of Oceania (60,000 b.c.e.) and North America (14,000 b.c.e.). DNA tests indicate that every human living in the far corners of the world can be traced back to a common ancestor in Africa. This prehistoric wanderlust continued after the beginning of civilization, enriching the civilization’s heritage. Archaeological records shows that the “cradles of civilization” were not so isolated.

Even the most advanced of empires had contacts with lands and peoples that they considered outsiders and inferiors. For example, Mesopotamia (3000 b.c.e.) could produce food for its burgeoning population and cities along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, but where would it obtain copper and tin for bronze making, except in far-off Cyprus? Ancient Egypt (2600 b.c.e.) acted as though it had everything it needed because of the Nile, but where would it get its wood and ivory, not to mention its slaves, except from Semitic peoples in Phoenicia and Syria? These interactions are conﬁ rmed by physical remains found by archaeologists in each of these respective sites. As history progressed and wealth and resources became more concentrated around cities, trade and cultural exchanges become more deliberate. In fact, a reliable barometer of the health of a civilization can be found in the level of trade and exchange it maintains with others.

Along with the movement of goods among the ancient cities in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China, there were movements of peoples and tribes that affected the balance of power and development. One of the most signiﬁ cant migrations for later language and cultural development involved the expansion of Indo-European peoples around 1600 b.c.e. from their homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas. For reasons unknown they moved in several directions: toward present-day Iran and India, toward the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, and toward the Middle East into Mesopotamia. Those who moved into Iran gave their land its name. By 500 b.c.e. the descendants of these Aryans, under Cyrus the Great, had conquered the largest empire the world had yet seen. In India these hierarchical foreigners replaced the Indus River valley city-states. The new society had an Indo-European language, known as Sanskrit, and its religion based on the Vedic scriptures replaced the religion of the natives.

Cultural Penetration and Subversion. Indo-Europeans met with stiff cultural resistance from the Dravidian people of southern India. Their harsher views moderated, and eventually the hybridization of their Vedic religion and local cultures emerged. All of these profound changes were the results of the Indo-European encounter with the peoples of India and resulted in the development of several great religions. The Indo-Europeans also moved to the south and west of their original homeland. They marched into Mesopotamia around 1600 b.c.e. and formed the Hittite Empire but could not keep control of the ever-shifting puzzle of native city-states. All that remained of the Hittite legacy was the war-making technology of chariots, war horses, and iron weapons. In the West they made an impact on the Mediterranean world, replacing the dominant Minoan civilization of Crete with their Mycenaean culture. Greek language, literature, and ethnic identity resulted with the mixing of the Mycenaeans and later immigrants called Dorians and Ionians.

The Indo-European Greek culture formed the underpinnings of modern Western civilization. Greek culture captivated the Romans, who conquered the Greeks and were in turn conquered by the higher Greek civilization. Eventually, Roman patricians insisted on their sons being educated by Greek tutors, or on sending their sons to Athens for schooling. Most important, modern Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) came from the same Latin-GreekIndo-European family.

Another people who profoundly inﬂ uenced other civilizations through their travels were the Phoenicians, a seafaring and adventurous people from modern Lebanon who settled as far away as Britain and even navigated around the Horn of Africa. Their greatest contribution to world progress was the invention of the alphabet. With an alphabet of 24 letters, simplifying earlier writing systems of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform, the Phoenician script was adopted by the Greeks, who incorporated vowels, and subsequently by many other cultures.

Religious Exchanges. Three exchanges did not involve goods or people but, rather, religions: Christian inﬂ uence on Rome, Jewish inﬂ uence on Islam, and Islamic inﬂ uence on Europe. Christianity began in the highlands of Galilee and Judaea. It showed these roots profoundly, especially when it directly clashed with the Roman emperor cult, because of its Semitic respect for monotheism and its interpretation of a Jewish doctrine called the “kingdom of God.” Such differences led to periodic persecution and martyrdom of Christians under Roman rule. Marginalization only increased the appeal of the new religion. By 310 c.e. the Christian message had reached even the ruler Constantine, who converted to Christianity, resulting in an era of Christian expansion. The early enthusiasm of the Christian preachers had already pushed beyond the traditional territories of Diaspora Jews: India claims to have had contact with the apostle Thomas by 50 c.e., Armenia by 325 c.e., Axum in Africa by 350 c.e., Persia by 488 c.e., and western Europe by 600 c.e.

A second surprising cultural contact involved the Diaspora Jews in the Arabian Peninsula. When Jews were expelled from their homeland by Roman invasions, they often went into the Eastern world instead of the West. One place they congregated was Mecca (500 c.e.), a trading and religious center, halfway between Yemen and Egypt and at the crossroads of trade from the Persian Gulf. Here they established synagogues and dialogue with their Arab hosts, one of whom the Qur’an says was Muhammad. Much of the Qur’an presupposes the stories and ideas of the Jewish Bible.

Exchange by Conquest. Cultural exchanges also resulted from military conquests and empire building. Alexander the Great conducted a campaign against the Persians around 330 b.c.e. Alexander, a Macedonian, had been shaped by the Greek worldview due to his being held hostage in Greece, his compliance with Greek customs and lifestyle, his education by the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle, and his own personal mission to spread Hellenism abroad. After his lightning-like world conquest, he began to set up Greek institutions throughout his empire, demanding Greek as the lingua franca and violently repressing certain native religions (such as Zoroastrianism). He began to demand divine homage as king in the manner of the Persians. He diminished the role of Greek city-states and increased a sense of being an “empire citizen.” He caused trade between Asia and the Mediterranean to increase markedly. His military conquest resulted in profound cultural hybridization.

Another form of exchange was caused by conquest. Since the third century b.c.e. a nomadic people called the Xiongnu had raided and warred with the sedentary Chinese. Chinese victories and expansion after c. 100 b.c.e. caused the Xiongnu to migrate westward, creating a snowball effect on the Gothic peoples who had settled on the frontiers of Rome for decades. When the Asian nomads (also known as the Huns) pushed through Hungary into Roman frontier areas in 376 c.e., the Goths ﬂ ed into the Roman Empire. They ﬁ rst sacked Rome in 410 c.e. In 441 c.e. Attila the Hun launched a devastating attack and advanced all the way to Rome. The whole Roman order came apart, and the ensuing chaos led to the “Dark Ages.”

The Mauryan Empire at the end of the fourth century b.c.e. controlled the Indian subcontinent, but its cultural inﬂ uence went far beyond it. Indian Buddhist missionaries began proselytizing in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Afghanistan, and Central Asia, bringing a new religion, as well as Indian civilization. Indian trade and cultural identity not only survived the fall of the Mauryan Empire but expanded under the Gupta Empire in the fourth century c.e. The impact of the Indians on Southeast Asia was so strong that the region was called “Indianized Asia.”

China dominated East Asia culturally and politically. Beginning in the second millennium b.c.e. Chinese civilization expanded from the Yellow River valley, assimilating various groups of peoples. Successive rulers of the Han dynasty incorporated present-day Korea and Vietnam into the Chinese empire. They also conquered areas deep in Central Asia, expelling or subjugating nomadic tribes including the Xiongnu. By the ﬁ rst century b.c.e. the two great empires, the Roman and Chinese, had extended dominion over much of the Eurasian world, imposing the Pax Romana and the Pax Sinica. The resultant trade and cultural interactions along the Silk Road that linked Chang’an (Ch’ang-an, the Chinese capital) and Rome by land and sea and that included Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, and the Middle East would survive the fall of both the Roman and Han and Gupta Empires. Trade exchanges between Asia and Europe picked up markedly after 500 b.c.e. due to several factors, among them improved roads and navigational techniques. New religions also encouraged missionaries to go abroad to spread their faiths.

Throughout Central and South America, from as early as 2000–1500 b.c.e., there are physical remains of artifacts that were made in far-away areas of the New World, thus, proof of exchange. There was by 1000 b.c.e. a network of pan-Mesoamerican communication that connected central and southern Mexico as far south as Nicaragua. These contacts spread farming innovations into new adjacent areas. It is possible that the same sharing of information occurred between the Andes urban areas and Mesoamerica. The great city of Teotihuacán (450 c.e.) in central Mexico was a hub of travel and trade. Its road network connected the city to the North American Southwest, the Mayan highlands, and west to the Paciﬁ c.

African connections to the outside world began during the reigns of several Upper Nile pharaohs, expanded under the Persian Empire and Ptolemaic dynasty, and reached a high point under the Romans, who utilized North Africa as a breadbasket region. Romanized Africa also became a base for Christian missionary activity. In fact, the church’s leading early thinker, Augustine, came from modern-day Tunisia. Ancient Egypt and later the kingdom of Axum in present-day Sudan acted as important links in trade and in the transmission of ideas and technologies between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

URBANIZATION

The founding of cities depends on several factors but none more important than an abundant supply of food and water. For this reason, in the ancient world it was common for cities to be located near rivers and coasts. Some examples of this principle at work are the cities of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China, the Indus River in India, and the Nile River in Egypt. Other factors can also explain the location of cities. For example, Constantinople became a thriving city without either good local farmland or freshwater because of its strategic location. Aqueducts and massive cisterns were built to bring in water from afar.

Important cities had to be defensible. Examples of ancient sites that could withstand invasion were the Phoenician city of Tyre, situated on an island; Corinth in Greece had an acropolis on a high hill overlooking the harbor; and Petra in present-day Jordan, located in a desert and reachable only via a narrow and winding route through a pass. Similarly Chang’an, ancient capital of China, was protected by nearby mountain passes that held back nomadic invaders. Even cities that did not have natural defenses could survive, for example, Sparta, located on a plain, or Rome, whose seven hills above the Tiber River were not adequate for protection, because both developed formidable armies.

Protective Walls and Impressive Monuments. Walls and fortiﬁ cations protected most ancient cities. One of the oldest cities in the world (7000 b.c.e.), Jericho was known in the Bible for its reputedly impenetrable walls that protected the 2,000 people who lived there, making it a large settlement for its day. Other cities constructed ingenious gates, towers, and moats as safeguards against enemies. Among the cities most famous for their gates were Mycenae (Agamemnon’s capital, 1200 b.c.e.), which had a famous “Lion Gate,” and Babylonia, which had its awesome Ishtar Gate (550 b.c.e.). Both of these gates were as much intended to impress as to defend. The Mauryan capital, Pataliputra (200 b.c.e.), reputedly had 570 towers and a moat. Moats were also used in Maya cities as early as 250 c.e.

Rulers decorated their capital cities with monuments and public works to ﬂ aunt their power and impress their residents and visitors. A good example is the colossal complex of Teotihuacán (450 c.e.), located near modern-day Mexico City. It had 200,000 residents and 600 pyramid temples (the largest one 700 feet long at its base, 215 feet high) in the city. Later, the Aztec described it as the “Place of the Gods.” The bas-relief monumental art of Nineveh showed foreigners cringing in fear before Sennacherib, Assyria’s king. The Egyptian pyramids of Giza were intended to solidify pharaoh’s image as the keeper of maat, or cosmic balance. The Parthenon was built by Pericles to demonstrate Athens’s preeminence among the Greek city-states in the ﬁ fth century b.c.e.

The armies and laborers who defended the cities presupposed adequate manpower. Many great states used mercenaries to staff defenses and slaves to labor on public works tasks. The ﬁ rst emperor of China, who uniﬁ ed the country in 221 b.c.e., made intolerable demands on his people to build walls, canals, and roads. Similarly, in the city of Jerusalem the biblical king Solomon put alien residents into servitude and taxed his subjects to poverty in order to build a temple, several palaces, and other huge projects. Rome relied heavily on the labor of its slaves, which totaled one-third of its population by 100 b.c.e.

Cities of Myth and Origin. Ur (5000 b.c.e.) was situated on the banks of the Euphrates River. Ur was a Mesopotamian religious center for centuries and the site of a famous ziggurat tower, perhaps something like the Tower of Babel. Several thousand years later it was cited in the Jewish Bible as the homeland of Abraham. Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa (2300 b.c.e.) were cities on the banks of the Indus River and its tributary in present-day Pakistan. Both were well populated and developed according to an urban plan.

The Shang dynasty built its capitals in the fertile, silt-enriched lands of the middle Yellow River basin of China. One capital named Ao was surrounded by a wall, 30 feet high and 65 feet wide, that took 19,000 men working 330 days a year for 18 years to build. The pharaohs ruled over Memphis and Thebes on the Nile, and their urban monuments stood as testimony to the power and prestige of Egypt. According to their own reckoning, ancient Egyptians felt no need to colonize in this period because they felt that inferior peoples would come to them from abroad for their plentiful resources and superior culture.

Some of the most spectacular ancient urban centers were in the Americas, along the Peruvian coastal plain, the central Andes Mountains, and in Mesoamerica. Each city celebrated its origin with a mythological tale. If a city was newly founded, it would claim continuity with some other well-known divine ﬁ gures and traditions to buttress its quest for respect.

Differing reasons attracted people to live in cities, and they debated about how to design cities to create the “good life.” Cities answered a multitude of human needs. They offered potential for civic ennoblement (temples, schools, plays, libraries, the arts, parks, and palaces), or they could be the breeding ground of demagoguery, decadence, and disease. How to create the ideal city motivated the Hebrew prophet Zechariah (the Bible), the Greek philosopher Plato (The Republic), and the Mauryan political adviser Kautilya (Arthashastra, or Treatise on Polity) to give instruction about governing ideal cities.

WARFARE

The main elements of war making were basically the same in 3500 b.c.e. as they were in 600 c.e., although the size of armies and the scope of wars increased signiﬁ cantly over time. Techniques and technologies may have improved, but all wars involved the combatants in hand-to-hand struggle, usually with swords and spears, and long-distance ﬁ ghting using bows and arrows, in siege warfare, and in cavalry combats. The following is a short list of some techniques and technologies of warfare that showed advances over the period.

Cavalry. The horse came onto the battleﬁ eld pulling chariots as the Indo-Europeans moved out of their homeland in the crossroads of Europe and Central Asia. It was a remarkable innovation. Sumer was known to have used donkey-driven chariots a bit earlier (3000 b.c.e.), but the Indo-European Hittites (1400 b.c.e.) on horse chariots rode into the heartland of Sumer without challenge.

The next advance after cavalry became an important component in warfare was the invention of the stirrup by Asian nomads around 300 b.c.e. About the same time the nomadic Huns nailed a metal horseshoe on the hoofs of their animals. With these inventions horses could go farther and faster and the riders gained fuller control over their mounts.

India was the ﬁ rst land to use elephants in battle. Alexander the Great ﬁ rst encountered the war elephant in India. Later the Romans prized them highly. But elephants did not adapt well to cold. When Hannibal invaded Italy, only one elephant survived the march across the Alps.

Infantry and Iron Weapons. The horse did not make infantry obsolete. Improvements in providing protection for foot soldiers came with Sumer’s use of the shield (2500 b.c.e.). In Alexander the Great’s day a whole company of ﬁ ghters would march into battle linked together by shields to form a moving wall. This formation is called the “phalanx.” Ordinary citizen soldiers could learn the coordination and discipline involved with the phalanx, and this esprit de corps continued into civic life and social interaction. In ancient Greece a dynamic of participatory government sprang from this expectation of battleﬁ eld accountability. When combined with Athens’s newfound opportunities on the sea, the aristocracy based on cavalry gave way to democracy based on infantry and navy. Individual body armor, used with the shield, protected soldiers in battle. By 250 b.c.e. the Chinese had developed body armor made of metal plates. The idea of “knights in shining armor” doing pitched battle is a fancy of the Middle Ages, as iron was simply too heavy and valuable for large-scale use. The Parthians (c. 250 c.e.) claimed that their horses ate Iranian mountain alfalfa and were strong enough to bear their warriors in full (though mostly noniron) armor.

The marauding Hittites inaugurated the Iron Age with iron weapons replacing bronze ones. By 1000 b.c.e. iron was common for weapons all over the Mediterranean world and spread to China after 500 b.c.e. Even the Celts had become experts at smelting and used wrought iron on the battleﬁ eld by 750 b.c.e.

Sieges and Archers. The Assyrians, most feared warriors of the Near East, excelled in war-making technologies and organization (extensive secret police, propaganda), crafting a united and long-lasting empire out of Mesopotamian city-states. When they advanced against the walls and gates of cities, Assyrians used battering rams and siege engines that struck terror in the hearts of the inhabitants. When their soldiers marched outside the city walls before battle, the Assyrians would race around with their chariot-driven platforms of archers and mow down their hapless opponents. For 500 years the techniques of besieging cities did not change much, until the Romans invented the catapult in 500 b.c.e., which hurled boulder and ﬂ aming ﬁ reballs against the defenses of their enemies. Sieges and Archers. The Assyrians, most feared warriors of the Near East, excelled in war-making technologies and organization (extensive secret police, propaganda), crafting a united and long-lasting empire out of Mesopotamian city-states. When they advanced against the walls and gates of cities, Assyrians used battering rams and siege engines that struck terror in the hearts of the inhabitants. When their soldiers marched outside the city walls before battle, the Assyrians would race around with their chariot-driven platforms of archers and mow down their hapless opponents. For 500 years the techniques of besieging cities did not change much, until the Romans invented the catapult in 500 b.c.e., which hurled boulder and ﬂ aming ﬁ reballs against the defenses of their enemies.

The bow and arrow were among the earliest primitive weapons used throughout the world. For the Greeks of the Iliad the bow and arrow were despised and considered effeminate compared with hand-to-hand combat, the true test of heroes. Xerxes’ Persians (490 b.c.e.) and Marcus Aurelius’s Romans (170 c.e.) used archers to great advantage, as their arrows would blacken the skies before the charge of their infantry and cavalry. The Chinese found ways of perfecting aim and power with the crossbow; later the composite bow originated among the nomadic tribes of the Asian steppes. Both were more accurate and powerful than the simple bow.

Navies. In the 14th century b.c.e., the Achaeans (Greeks) and others took to the sea. By 1200 b.c.e. the ﬁrst-known sea battle was fought: the Mediterranean Sea Peoples against the Egyptians. Assyria and India each had seagoing ships by the early 700s b.c.e. Besides the Phoenicians and possibly the Etruscans, the Athenians were one of the ﬁrst states to make seafaring their mainstay. From them the use of the trireme ship (a vessel with three rows of oars) took on decisive importance in warfare. Athens survived by controlling the seas. Navies became more and more important as civilizations increased their trade and social contacts. However, for the most part ships were used for cargo transportation, raiding, and exploration. In warfare they had a limited role. Thus, the natives of Oceania put their seafaring to use in colonizing places such as Hawaii and the Easter Islands, and the Phoenicians explored Britain and rounded the Horn of Africa.

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