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History and Evolution:
By William E. Steinman:
Part 8, The Cradles:
May 12, 2003:
In Part 7 we looked at the ages of man from a technical development
perspective. In these same times man was experiencing a great
deal of development of a social nature. We had large migrations,
wars, and the founding of civilizations. These first civilizations
occurred at some very specific locations of earth which were particularly
conducive to human habitation. One of these is called the cradle
of civilization.
That is a bit off the mark. So far as I can determine, there were four different birthplaces of civilization although some older history books focus on only one or two. The first of these in time was the one we call Mesopotamia and is what we usually call the cradle of civilization. This area is contained in the state we now call Iraq. It seems that an organized agrarian civilization blossomed in this area some time before 5000 BC. That is somewhat prior to the Bronze Age which evolved around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia.
A bit later, about 3000 BC, another civilization grew up in the Nile River delta of Egypt. This is the one which seems to have the most romantic attraction to the Western world. This area became known to us partly due to its role in Jewish history and mythology. Still later, around 2500 BC, another civilization appeared in the Indus River valley. The Indus River flows through the country we now call Pakistan. This civilization did not last long. It disappeared about 1000 years later. No one knows why for sure. The educated guess is that it was overrun by invading Aryans.
Now we get to the larger mystery. There was a fourth civilization that grew up along the Yellow River (Huang He) in China. I don't know how history is taught in our American schools now. When I was a youngster there was no history of China. It was as though China did not exist. All of our history began lightly in the Middle East and came quickly through Europe. England was acknowledged as the bad guys who we had to fight for independence. Most of the significant events, it seems, occurred in America. Anything that occurred elsewhere was unimportant or bad.
When mentioned at all, the Chinese were a dangerous mysterious sneaky people. Inscrutable is a word we associated with them. Nevertheless, the Yellow River valley is know to some as the cradle of Chinese civilization. Somewhere between 10,000 and 3000 BC an organized agrarian culture grew up in this river valley.
All of these civilizations had common elements which were conducive to organized urban development. Foremost of these are the long rivers with flood plains of some kind. These rivers brought very fertile earth from higher regions to the plains. This allowed cultivation of the land between times of flood. Given the very reliable agricultural opportunity offered by these flood areas, stable urban development naturally followed. Surpluses were produced and, for sure, a upper class developed in all of these places. So we have an elite wealthy class and a royalty kind of priest class as primitive religions developed.
For human development the prime value of an elite class lies in its leisure time. For some, this was time to pay attention to more sophisticated pursuits including scientific inquiry. Creative behavior is not usually the province of the worker in the field. Most of these were just a breath away from death or slavery and had no time for contemplation. Inventions and scientific inquiry had to come from the leisure upper class. History shows us that enough of this class made the effort. Not all were simple freeloaders riding on the backs of the oppressed human workers. Some paid their way handsomely.
Let us look at the social organization of Egypt as one example of these first civilizations. At the bottom of the heap, as always, were slaves, usually captured in foreign adventures. Not much better off were the agrarian workers who were tied to the land and who paid part of their production to the state. The land, of course, was owned by the king. The king had his clerks and high officials who had income lands assigned to them by the king.
With the surpluses from managed agricultural production, Egypt was able to support a large class of skilled tradesmen. As we know, some magnificent artifacts came out of that, like the pyramids. The social hierarchy was, the gods, the king, the dead who could intervene in the affairs of the living, the elite, the tradesmen, the workers, and the slaves. To be sure, it was not all as clean and simple as that, but that is sufficient for our needs.
The task of the king was to keep order, judge mankind, and appease the gods and the dead. He was to be on earth forever with this task. He was also a god but not as high as the non-earthly gods. His power, however, derived from the gods. One of his main preoccupations was in the preparation of his own tomb wherein he would go into the next world at which time he would be succeeded in the role of king. The king lives forever, but the man or woman moves on. It seems there was a great deal less sexism in this ancient culture than we have now. In fact, we know from history and from Hollywood's portrayals that it was possible for a woman to ascend to the throne.
One thing that stands out for me in this social order is the
invariant nature of religious development. I can allow the benefit
of a doubt and say that these earlier primitive religion ideas
began as attempts to understand an inexplicable natural world.
However, what begins as an attempt to understand ends up as an
organizing and controlling mechanism in the culture. It becomes
a tool to control the rabble and keep them as rabble. I find this
to be a constant in spiritual situations throughout history. These
thoughts on social and religious structures will need further
development as we go along. They will fit into my theme of human
evolution.
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