EARLY CIVILIZED LIFE

For as long as we know there has been at Jericho a never-failing spring, feeding what is still a sizeable oasis. No doubt it explains why people have lived there on and off for about 10,000 years. Farmers clustered about it in late prehistoric times; its population may then have numbered 2,000–3,000. Before 6000 BC it had great water tanks which suggest provision for big needs, possibly for irrigation, and there was a massive stone tower which was part of elaborate defences long kept in repair. Clearly its inhabitants thought they had something worth defending; they had property. Jericho was a considerable place.

For all that, it was not the beginnings of a civilization; too much was still lacking and it is worth considering for a moment at the outset of the era of civilization just what it is we are looking for. It is a little like the problem of pinning down in time the first human beings. There is a shaded area in which we know the change occurs, but we can still disagree about the point at which a line has been crossed. In many places in both western and eastern Asia around 5000 BC farming villages provided the agricultural surpluses on which civilization could eventually be raised. Some of them have left behind evidence of complex religious practice and elaborate painted pottery, one of the most widespread forms of art in the Neolithic era. Somewhere about 6000 BC brick building was going on in Turkey at Çatal Hüyük, a site only slightly younger than Jericho. But by civilization we usually mean something more than ritual, art or the presence of a certain technology, and certainly something more than the mere agglomeration of human beings in the same place.

It is a little like speaking of ‘an educated man’: everyone can recognize one when they see him, but not all educated men are recognized as such by all observers, nor is a formal qualification (a university degree, for example) either a necessary or an infallible indicator. Dictionary definitions are of no help in pinning down ‘civilization’, either. That of the Oxford English Dictionary is indisputable but so cautious as to be useless: ‘a developed or advanced state of human society’. What we have still to make up our minds about is how far developed or advanced and along what lines.

Some have said that a civilized society is different from an uncivilized society because it has a certain attribute – writing, cities, monumental building have all been suggested. But agreement is difficult and it seems safer not to rely on any such single test. If, instead, we look at examples of what everyone has agreed to call civilizations and not at the marginal and doubtful cases, then it is obvious that what they have in common is complexity. They have all reached a level of elaboration which allows much more variety of human action and experience than even a well-off primitive community. Civilization is the name we give to the interaction of human beings in a very creative way, when, as it were, a critical mass of cultural potential and a certain surplus of resources have been built up. In civilization this releases human capacities for development at quite a new level and in large measure the development which follows is self-sustaining. But let us turn to examples.

Somewhere in the fourth millennium BC is the starting-point of the story of civilizations and it will be helpful to set out a rough chronology. We begin with the first recognizable civilization in Mesopotamia. The next example is in Egypt, where civilization is observable at a slightly later date, perhaps about 3100 BC. Another marker in the western Mediterranean is ‘Minoan’ civilization, which appears in Crete about a thousand years later, and from that time we can disregard questions of priorities in this part of the world: it is already a complex of civilizations in interplay with one another. Meanwhile, further east and perhaps around 2500 BC, another civilization has appeared in India and it is to some degree literate. China’s first civilization starts a bit later, a little after 2000 BC. Later still come the Mesoamericans. Once we are past about 1500 BC, though, only this last example is sufficiently isolated for interaction not to be a big part of explaining what happens. From that time, there are no civilizations to be explained which appear without the stimulus, shock or inheritance provided by others which have appeared earlier. For the moment, then, our preliminary sketch is complete enough at this point.

About these first civilizations (whose appearance and shaping is the subject-matter of the next few chapters) it is very difficult to generalize. Of course they all show a low level of technological achievement, even if it is astonishingly high by comparison with that of their uncivilized predecessors. To this extent their shape and development were still determined much more than those of our own civilization by their setting. Yet they had begun to nibble at the restraints of geography. The topography of the world was already much as it is today; the continents were set in the forms they now have and the barriers and channels to communication they supplied were to be constants, but there was a growing technological ability to exploit and transcend them. The currents of wind and water which directed early maritime travel have not changed much, and even in the second millennium BC men were learning to use them and to escape from their determining force.

This scenario suggests, correctly, that at a very early date the possibilities of human interchange were considerable. It is therefore unwise to dogmatize about civilization appearing in any standard way in different places. Arguments have been put forward about favourable environments, river valleys for example: obviously, their rich and easily cultivated soils could support fairly dense populations of farmers in villages which would slowly grow into the first cities. This happened in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus valley and China. But cities and civilizations have also arisen away from river valleys, in Mesoamerica, Minoan Crete and, later, in Greece. With the last two, there is the strong likelihood of important influence from the outside, but Egypt and the Indus valley, too, were in touch with Mesopotamia at a very early date in their evolution. Evidence of such contact led to the view put forward a few years ago that we should look for one central source of civilization from which all others came. This is not now very popular. There is not only the awkward case of civilization in the isolated Americas to deal with, but great difficulty in getting the timetable of the supposed diffusion right, as more and more knowledge of early chronology is acquired by the techniques of radio-carbon dating.

The most satisfactory answer appears to be that civilization was likely always to result from the coming together of a number of factors predisposing a particular area to throw up something dense enough to be recognized later as civilization, but that different environments, different influences from outside, and different cultural inheritances from the past meant that men did not move in all parts of the world at the same pace or even towards the same goals. The idea of a standard pattern of social ‘evolution’ was discredited even before the idea of ‘diffusion’ from a common civilizing source. Clearly, a favourable geographical setting was essential; in the first civilizations everything rested on the existence of an agricultural surplus. But another factor was just as important – the capacity of the peoples on the spot to take advantage of an environment or rise to a challenge, and here external contacts may be as important as tradition. China seems at first sight almost insulated from the outside, but even there possibilities of contact existed. The way in which different societies generate the critical mass of elements necessary to civilization therefore remains very hard to pin down.

It is easier to say something generally true about the marks of early civilization than about the way it happened. Again, no absolute and universal statements are plausible. Civilizations have existed without writing, useful though it is for storing and using experience. More mechanical skills have been very unevenly distributed, too: the Mesoamericans carried out major building operations with neither draught animals nor the wheel, and the Chinese knew how to cast iron nearly 1,500 years before Europeans. Nor have all civilizations followed the same patterns of growth; there are wide disparities between their staying-power, let alone their successes.

None the less, early civilizations, like later ones, seem to have a common positive characteristic in that they change the human scale of things. They bring together the co-operative efforts of more men and women than in earlier societies and usually do this by physically bringing them together in larger agglomerations, too. Our word ‘civilization’ suggests, in its Latin roots, a connection with urbanization. Admittedly, it would be a bold person who was willing to draw a precise line at the moment when the balance tipped from a dense pattern of agricultural villages clustered around a religious centre or a market to reveal the first true city. Yet it is perfectly reasonable to say that more than any other institution, the city has provided the critical mass which produces civilization and that it has fostered innovation better than any other environment so far. Inside the city the surpluses of wealth produced by agriculture made possible other things characteristic of civilized life. They provided for the upkeep of a priestly class which elaborated a complex religious structure, leading to the construction of great buildings with more than merely economic functions, and eventually to the writing down of literature. Much bigger resources than in earlier times were thus allocated to something other than immediate consumption and this meant a storing of enterprise and experience in new forms. The accumulated culture gradually became a more and more effective instrument for changing the world.

One change is quickly apparent: in different parts of the world men grew more unlike one another. The most obvious fact about early civilizations is that they are startlingly different in style, but because it is so obvious we usually overlook it. The coming of civilization opens an era of ever more rapid differentiation – of dress, architecture, technology, behaviour, social forms and thought. The roots of this obviously lie in prehistory, when there already existed men with different lifestyles, different patterns of existence, different mentalities, as well as different physical characteristics. But this was no longer merely the product of the natural endowment as environment, but of the creative power of civilization itself. Only with the rise to dominance of western technology in the twentieth century did this variety rapidly begin to diminish. From the first civilizations to our own day there have always been alternative models of society available, even if they knew little of one another.

Much of this variety is very hard to recover. All that we can do in some instances is to be aware that it is there. At the beginning there is still little evidence about the life of the mind except institutions in so far as we can recover them, symbols in art and ideas embodied in literature. In them lie presuppositions which are the great co-ordinates around which a view of the world is built – even when the people holding that view do not know they are there (history is often the discovery of what people did not know about themselves). Many such ideas are irrecoverable, and even when we can begin to grasp the shapes which defined the world of men living in the old civilizations, a constant effort of imagination must be made to avoid the danger of falling into anachronism, which surrounds us on every side. Even literacy does not reveal very much of the minds of creatures so like and yet so unlike ourselves.

It is in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean that the stimulating effects of different cultures upon one another first become obvious, and no doubt it is much of the story of the appearance of the earliest civilizations there. A turmoil of racial comings and goings for 3,000–4,000 years both enriched and disrupted this area, where our history must begin. The Fertile Crescent was to be for most of historic times a great crucible of cultures, a zone not only of settlement but of transit, through which poured an ebb and flow of people and ideas. In the end this produced a fertile interchange of institutions, language and belief from which stems much of human thought and custom even today.

Why this began to happen cannot exactly be explained, but the overwhelming presumption must be that the root cause was over-population in the lands from which the intruders came. Over-population may seem a paradoxical notion to apply to a world whose whole population in about 4000 BC has been estimated only at between 80 and 90 million – that is, about the same as Germany’s today. In the next 4,000 years it grew by about 50 per cent to about 130 million; this implies an annual increase almost imperceptible by comparison with what we now take for granted. It shows both the relative slowness with which our species added to its power to exploit the natural world and how much and how soon the new possibilities of civilization had already reinforced man’s propensity to multiply and prosper by comparison with prehistoric times.

Such growth was still slight by later standards because it was always based on a very fragile margin of resources and it is this fragility which justifies talk of over-population. Drought or desiccation could dramatically and suddenly destroy an area’s capacity to feed itself and it was to be thousands of years before food could easily be brought from elsewhere. The immediate results must often have been famine, but in the longer run there were others more important. The disturbances which resulted were the prime movers of early history; climatic change was still at work as a determinant, though now in much more local and specific ways. Droughts, catastrophic storms, even a few decades of marginally lower or higher temperatures, could force peoples to get on the move and so help to bring on civilization by throwing together peoples of different tradition. In collision and co-operation they learnt from one another and so increased the total potential of their societies.

The peoples who are the actors of early history in this region belonged to the light-skinned human family (sometimes confusingly termed Caucasian), which emerged in Europe. It is one of the three major regional groups of the species Homo sapiens (the others being African and Asian). Linguistic differences have led to other attempts to distinguish them. All the peoples in the Fertile Crescent of early civilized times have been assigned on philological grounds either to ‘Hamitic’ stocks who evolved in Africa north and north-east of the Sahara, to ‘Semitic’-language speakers of the Arabian peninsula, to peoples of ‘Indo-European’ language who, from southern Russia, had spread also by 4000 BC into Europe and Iran, or to the true ‘Caucasians’ of Georgia. Most of these classifications are suspect, but they give some idea of the dramatis personae of the early history of the Fertile Crescent and its environs. Their historic centres all lay around the zone in which agriculture and civilization appear at an early date. The wealth of so well-settled an area must have attracted peripheral peoples.

By about 4000 BC most of the Fertile Crescent was occupied and we can begin there to attempt a summary of the next 3,000 years which will provide a framework for the earlier civilizations. Probably Semitic peoples had already begun to penetrate it by then; their pressure grew until by the middle of the third millennium BC (long after the appearance of civilization) they would be well established in central Mesopotamia, across the middle sections of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The interplay and rivalry of the Semitic peoples with other groups, who were able to hang on to the higher lands which enclosed Mesopotamia from the north-east, is one continuing theme some scholars have discerned in the early history of the area. By 2000 BC the peoples whose languages were of the Indo-European group have also entered on the scene, and from two directions. One of these peoples, the Hittites, pushed into Anatolia from Europe, while their advance was matched from the east by that of the Iranians.

Between 2000 BC and 1500 BC branches of these sub-units dispute and mingle with the Semitic and other peoples in the Crescent itself, while the contacts of the Hamites and Semites lie behind much of the political history of old Egypt. This scenario is, of course, highly impressionistic. Its value is only that it helps to indicate the basic dynamism and rhythms of the history of the region in ancient times. Much of its detail is still highly uncertain (as will appear) and little can be said about what maintained this fluidity. None the less, whatever its cause, this wandering of peoples was the background against which the first civilization appeared and prospered.

By J. M. Roberts & Odd Arne Westad in "The Penguin History of the World", Penguin Books, UK, 2013, sixth edition, volume 2, chapter 1. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.