Why did civilizations emerge in so few places? There is no evidence that the "civilized" people of Mesopotamia, China, India, Egypt, or Central America were, in and of themselves, superior to the, "uncivilized" folk of Central Africa or the "barbarians" of Northern Europe.
Is it possible that environmental and geographical factors made possible the birth of the earliest civilizations. Let's take a look.
Egypt was and is defined by the Nile river. Before the Aswan Dam was built in the 1960s, the river rose and fell, twice a year, as regularly as clockwork. Its flood waters brought, in addition to life giving moisture, a constantly replenished supply of nutrient rich topsoil (i.e. mud) along 800 miles of the Nile Valley from the Delta to the Sudan.
Mountain snows and jungle rains far to the south feed the Nile. It simply does not rain in Egypt itself, and this narrow land is surrounded by deserts so harsh that ancient Egyptian culture was able to develop in almost complete isolation from Europe, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. As Napoleon would learn in 1799 and as Erwin Rommel would discover in World War II, the only practical invasion route is by sea or across the Suez peninsula. This is not to say that Egypt has been free from invaders. In fact, from the fall of Egypt to the Persian empire in the sixth century BCE until the 1950s, Egypt was ruled by outsiders: Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, and, finally the British.
The happy regularity of the Nile's floods meant that irrigation could be relatively easily arranged. The river rose slowly, not in torrents. It could be channeled into the desert, stretching the corridor of agriculture. One ancient historian noted that, so fertile was the Nile valley, farmers needed only to scatter seeds on the ground and let pigs walk over them a few times to push them into the ground. The harvest was abundant, predictable, and could support a large non-agricultural population of priests, warriors, craftspeople, and bureaucrats. Because the entire population of Egypt lived within sight of the river, the kings found collecting taxes and maintaining a centralized government to be much easier than did their counterparts in Mesopotamia. When the tax man came, there was simply no place to hide.
Although it would enjoy much less stability, Mesopotamia too was defined by its rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates. (The name Mesopotamia means "between the rivers.") These two great rivers rise out of the mountains of modern Turkey and, like the Nile, are also prone to flooding, but with a great deal more violence and unpredictability than the Nile. (Irrigation remains a key to Mesopotamian civilization and agriculture, and is currently a cause of conflict between the Turks and the Iraqi government. All of the oil in the world will do a country little good unless it has access to water.)
Whereas Egypt was isolated by desert and ocean, Mesopotamian civilizations had to contend with invasion from almost every side. Ancient Mesopotamian leaders were warrior kings, not gods or priests, though they might have taken on priestly roles or claimed descent from one God or another, as did Gilgamesh.
Further east in modern Iran was ancient Persia, a late arriving civilization, but one that would come to dominate all the others--for a time. Further West, Greek, Etruscan, and eventually Roman civilizations took hold fairly late and were derived from earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. Ironically, the cultures on the fringe of the earliest civilization--barbarians at the time we are discussing--will eventually come to dominate the older centers of civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia.
The history of the Ancient Near East is one of rising and falling empires. One city state comes to dominate its neighbors, usually because an effective ruler has come to power. He dies and is replaced by less effective rulers, or perhaps it is simply impossible for an empire to last beyond a certain time without becoming decadent and weak. States that were on the fringe begin to emerge: Babylon replaced Assyria. Within a lifetime, Babylon fell to Persia. Alexander the Great, a Macedonian Greek, overthrew a tottering Persian empire. The Greeks give way to Rome, and Rome, having absorbed bits and pieces of culture from all of its predecessors, fell to internal fighting, and barbarian assault everywhere.
But Rome never really went away. Byzantine emperors continued to wear the mantle of Roman authority until Constantinople fell to the Turks in the 15th century. Throughout the Middle Ages, ancient Rome held sway as the ideal of a universal government. German, French and Spanish Kings fought over who would wear the mantle of Holy Roman Emperor, as future scholars and monks struggled with the intricacies of Latin grammar.
But we are getting ahead of things a bit.
In 3000 BC we find the first Bronze Age, Mesopotamian civilization emerging: the Sumerian Sumer was nothing more than a dozen or so independent cities, each with a few thousand inhabitants. The largest of these cities was Ur.
Since "civilization" is our word, not theirs, what defines the Sumerians as "civilized?"
Writing: They had developed a means of written communication and record keeping. Conveniently for us, they wrote on tablets of soft clay by pressing a reed stylus into the clay. Once fired, these "cuneiform" tablets are virtually indestructible.
Writing is, like speech itself, a complex a phenomenon. The writer must find a way to encode objects, ideas, and acts in such a way that they can be learned and understood by a reader far removed in time and space. When you first learned to read, you trained your mind to recognize these curved lines as letters, each of which represented a sound. By putting the sounds together, you decoded the meaning represented by the letters. Eventually, however, you became skilled at recognizing entire words. That is, you no longer need to sound out the letters d-o-g in order to visualize the four legged furry animal that chases c-a-t-s, barks at night, and digs holes in the back yard.
The development of writing apparently moved in the opposite direction from that in which you learned to read. "Phonetics", i.e., the representation of sounds by symbols, was perfected by the Phonecians rather late. Rather, the earliest written languages were pictographic. A few wedge marks in the clay might represent a star which, eventually, might evolve into a representation of the heavens or of the idea of divinity.
Learning such a pictographic language is an enormous task, however, for it requires thousands and thousands of characters--one for each noun and verb in the language.
Law Codes: In addition to a written language, the Sumerians and their successors had formal laws. Every culture, even the most primitive, has customs and rules within which the society functions. Laws are different from such customs. They impose definite penalties for specified infractions. Though they may reflect the will of a king or council, they are not entirely arbitrary.
Mathematics: The Sumerians also developed a mathematical system with sixty--rather than our ten-numerals. This 'sexigesimal' system of mathematics survives in our methods of telling time: with sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour. It is also reflected on our maps and compasses: there are 360 degrees in a circle after all.
They also developed a systematic system of weights and measures. A necessary precursor to money is a set of agreed upon values. The king can put his stamp on a piece of lead and guarantee that it weighs the same as every other similarly stamped lead piece. Thus a pound of butter is a pound of butter; it weighs the same every day. It is a short step to putting the royal stamp on gold and silver and copper and agreeing that these are worth a bushel of wheat, a dozen oxen, or a goatskin of wine. The value is never in the gold or silver, except that a society agrees on its value in labor or commodities. Societies can, and have, agreed on virtually anything, including bits of paper, sea shells, cigarettes, and tulip bulbs as recognized modes of exchange.
For all of its innovations Sumer was still only a dozen or so cities who fought with each other regularly--which eventually weakened the whole system. They were dependent on trade for many of their raw materials, even stone was a rarity. Their construction was of mud brick, but they could do some impressive things with those bricks. Their most notable constructions were their Zigagurats, artificial mountains whereby people who perhaps once lived in the mountains could approach their deities.
2371 BC, Sargon, King of Akkad, conquered all of Mesopotamia. Akkadians spoke a Semitic language akin to modern Hebrew and Arabic.
Sargon died 2316. His successors were less successful than he and his empire dissolved around 2230 BC allowing the Sumerians to regain control of southern Mesopotamia. 2000 BC, another Semitic people, the Amorites, invaded, destroyed Ur, established a capital at Babylon. The kingdom was in turmoil until 1792 BC, when Hammurabi came to power, uniting the kingdom under his own remarkable administration.
Hammurabi is best known to us for his law code discovered in 1901 in Susa. It is almost intact and while it is not the first law code, (it reflects a high degree of development from earlier Sumerian codes), it is quite remarkable for what it tells us about ancient Mesopotamian society.
But what do law codes tell us?
Another Semitic people closely related to the Akkadians emerged as a power with the reign of Tiglath-Pileaser I (1115-1077 BC). Their capital was Nineveh in northern Mesopotamia. Although it had regular ups and downs in competition with other powers of
Asia Minor and Egypt, Assyria reached its height in about 665 BC when it controlled all of Egypt, Palestine, Western Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Urartu (between Black and Caspian Seas) and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, making it the greatest imperial power up to that time. This is going a long way from a single city state that manages to dominate a few of its neighbors. It demands organized armies, tax collectors, accountants and other assorted bureaucrats.
The Assyrian empire developed, and probably earned, a nasty reputation from the people they conquered, and their own records and art that has been discovered in the last century suggests that they could indeed be bureaucratic and brutal. Best known for their destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, in which they permanently exiled the population, their art is the art of warfare and hunting, the brave warrior, the lion, the moment of the kill were their artistic ideals.
With the emergence of Assyria, the age of the small, independent kingdom was pretty much over anyway. Small kingdoms only advanced when the great powers were either equally matched or were all weak.
Assyrian power was ended in 612 when Nabopolassar of Babylon and the King of Media, Cyaxares, combined to destroy the city of Ninevah.
In the Battle of Carchemish in 605, the last of Assyrian power was destroyed by Babylon, even though Egypt aided Assyria (and remarkably, Judah aided Babylon, getting King Josiah killed to no avail).
An ancient kingdom already, it came to dominate the Ancient Near East when Nabopolassar took Nineveh, and his son, Nebuchadnezzar crushed the Assyrian host at Carchemish. Babylon simply took over the old empire after putting down a few rebellious cities--including Jerusalem.
The last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, lost the confidence of the people, perhaps because of his religious innovations. He ignored the worship of Marduk for the worship of Sin, the moon god.
Thus, when the upstart Persian king, Cyrus marched to the city of Babylon, his army was welcomed as liberators--which may have been a ploy to survive, or may reflect dissatisfaction with the way things were.
This leads us to the Medes and the Persians, whose importance and whose regular conflict with the Greeks makes me want to put them off to another day, for now we need to look to another part of the world, not strictly the Ancient near east, but still vital to our story, Egypt
We know a great deal about Egypt, or we feel we do, because the climate of Egypt is so incredibly dry, even fragile papyrus scrolls--papyrus being a reed growing in the Nile that can be flattened, dried, and written upon much more conveniently than clay tablets.
That would have availed scholarship nothing except for a happy accident in 1799 when Napoleon, in an ill-fated expedition to Egypt, invited some 150 savants, or scholars, to accompany his army. They traveled up and down the Nile, drawing pictures and copying inscriptions, which they often could not read. The publication of this monumental Description de l'Egypte made Egypt famous again. Even more significantly, a French soldier while digging a ditch found a rock with funny writing, actually three kinds of funny writing--the Rosetta Stone. Written in hieroglyphics, demotic, and Greek it proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Unfortunately, that set off rather a boom in Egyptology, which was generally interpreted as going to Egypt, shovel and pick axe in hand, and carting away anything that could possibly be moved--mummies being the first choice of course, Thus we find some of the best Egyptian art--before the Egyptians started their own museums to protect their history--in museums outside of Egypt.
Egypt had been inhabited since 5 or 6 thousand BC, always along the thin strip of land that flooded in July and September. Egypt progressed from smaller to larger states until there were two kingdoms, lower and upper Egypt, which around 3000 BC were united into a single kingdom. The pharaoh's crown is really a double crown, representing the two kingdoms.
Pharaoh, by the way, is a Hebrew word for the kings of Egypt.
There are several broad eras, but stability is remarkable.
Thinite period 3000-2700
Old Kingdom2700-2300 This was the era of the God-Kings, builders of the great pyramids, requiring, Heroditus tells us--100,000 workers and 20 years for the largest.
But were pyramids and mummies as important as they seem. We have tended to look at Egyptians as worshippers of death, expending awesome wealth to ensure that the Pharaoh and the nobility had a pleasant afterlife. Nothing much was promised the peasant. But Egypt was a complex place with a history longer than it is possible for us to imagine,
They were not a particularly war-like people, although not averse to warfare, for warfare tends to interrupt the flow of things, and irrigation agriculture requires a steady labor supply and can be easily damaged.
It was probably both inevitable and for the best that Egypt came to be dominated by all-powerful kings for whom everyone was a slave in one sense or another. Egypt had to have stability to feed itself, and its growing population would have perished quickly had the irrigation system not been always working.
The pyramids might have been something of a public works project, giving employment to the peasants during the long flood time.
Egypt clashed occasionally with other ancient near eastern powers. In the 300s it was absorbed by Alexander the Great's empire, and was dominated, in turn, by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and British, before becoming independent in the 20th century.