Like the ziggurats, the pyramids show that the ruling elites of their eras controlled massive resources labor and goods. As your book explains, the technology of the pyramids was really quite simple; what is most impressive is the massive amount of human labor that went to built what were in fact immense tombs for a few dead kings.
They were many scholars believe literally jumping off points for the dead ruler's soul, plus safe repositories for his body during period of its journey through the afterlife. Rulers and their priests justified these great construction jobs with the theory that the dead pharaohs could continue to help living Egyptians only if they safely travelled through the underworld to the realms of afterlife. During this period Egyptians seem to have believed that an afterlife was possible for only the pharaohs plus perhaps a few favored companions also buried in their or neighboring smaller pyramids.
The work was done during Innundation, when no work in the fields was possible, and most peasants were probably delighted to have a job that earned them food and maybe a little pay.
During this time the stones needed for construction could be floated over flood waters to get relatively close to the pyramids' construction grounds But such construction was still only possible during the few centuries c. Probably the custom also ended because the pyramids were so visible, and tomb robbers kept breaking into them, stealing the goods left to accompany the royal corpses in the afterlife, and often trampling even those corpses.
For whatever combination of reasons, later pharaohs therefore started instead building hidden tombs, in the usually forlorn hope of their own bodies avoiding similar fates. Middle Kingdom Changes: limited but important. The immense pharaoh's government power that built the pyramids continued, in an only somewhat more limited form, for well more than another thousand years of Egyptian greatness.
Probably this power continued in part because so many more people shared in its exercise and benefits. By the end of the Old Kingdom era, subordinate elites were growing more powerful, with far-flung regional landholdings and status that later O.
By the time the land fragmented, the elites had already established regional courts in which they continued the essence of Egyptian civilization despite the fall of the royal center. Priests and temples also survived by building temples that served more and more Egyptians, and by re-interpreting ideas of the afterlife to say that it might be possible for all Egyptians - if they managed to carry out lesser versions of the early royal death rituals more on this later.
About one hundred and fifty years after Old Kingdom Egyptian centralized rule fragmented, a new unifying dynasty put all of Egypt back together, restoring the whole structure of god-king central rule.
But now the priests and temples served all Egyptians in, of course, lesser and greater ways , and elite families served at court with at least some regional stability and roots of their own behind them. Yet this was not just a time in which the old warrior and priestly elites shared some more of the pharaoh's power. It was also a time of greater social mobility, in which the best ordinary man might rise to become a great scribe, priest, warrior, or member of the royal bureaucracy, and in which merchants and lesser regional elites lived better and had something of a middle status.
The result for Middle Kingdom Egypt was a vibrant society of many elites, some active at the royal court and others of importance in their own region. These elites came from land owning families however much the land was theoretically the pharaoh's, but the M. Most Egyptians were of course not elites, but rather ordinary farmers working their own land and landless peasants, with rights to live on elite-controlled land, but obligations to the land's masters.
While slavery existed, most were free. Women, while not fully equal, overall remained better off in Egypt than in evolving Mesopotamia, where their rights were already significantly limited by the time of Hammurabi, and would become much more limited later. As with almost all civilizations, Egypt's public sphere of royal rule, the battlefield, long-distance trade belonged almost completely to men - and it was in those places that new power developed, and new ideas brewed.
But especially as compared to other early civilizations, Egyptian women did very well, losing relatively few absolute legal rights, and maintaining that position throughout the period while most early civilizations saw women's rights increasingly limited as time went on. Egyptian women kept most of their legal rights even in marriage: they could craft special marriage contracts guaranteeing almost any special rights as vs. Hammurabi's Code's "one size fits all" limitations on married women.
Generally married, like single, women could not only own but actively control property, as well as leaving to heirs of their own choice. There were also relatively more paid occupations still open to them in the public sphere, including as priestesses and even occasionally as scribes.
Royal women definitely had real status within the royal family; a number were important when young boys inherited the throne, and about five actually ruled, one as a female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Women of all levels continued to appear in public, rather than being increasingly expected - if elite - to stay within the private sphere of their own men's household. Scholars have a number of guesses about why Egyptian women lost less power, status and autonomy. Some suggest that the greater power of the pharaoh meant less absolute elite family control of property and status, and thus less motive to control the women of their families.
Others emphasize Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt's relative lack of warfare and standing armies; military dominance usually sparks increased emphasis on things male. Egyptian Knowledge, Beliefs and Culture. Writing : Like the Sumerians, the Egyptians invented their own system of writing called hieroglyphics. They , too, started with pictures which became more and more standardized as symbols, and then added other symbols for sounds and concepts. It is quite likely that they were did so having heard that the Sumerians had already done something of the sort, but since all of their symbols are different, it is fairly clear that they at most borrowed the idea that it was possible, rather than the system of writing itself.
The priests of the era taught that this writing was literally a gift of the gods, intended to allow communication with them. As with Sumer, almost certainly priests were the first users of writing, but scribes soon also served rulers, merchants, and eventually increasing although always small numbers of literate Egyptians.
Egyptians used ink on papyrus for their permanent records, which certainly were therefore lighter and more easily stored than Mesopotamia's clay tablets of course, they were also more easily destroyed.
In general, hieroglyphic writing worked almost exactly the same way in Egyptian civilization as did cuneiform in Mesopotamia. Some scholars point out that we have less epic literature from Egypt than was produced in Mesopotamia with Gilgamesh being an outstanding example , but there is no real agreement on what this means.
Perhaps literature was lost, perhaps life in a kinder land meant more enjoyment of the here-and-now and less poetry about human misery. Just for fun: The above hieroglyphics are somewhat bogus, but fun. The are the course instructor's name Sara Tucker created by an online computer program that assigned an hieroglyph symbol to each letter of our modern alphabet. While the website that generated this image no longer exists, another one has appeared.
Knowledge: Like Mesopotamians, Egyptians also developed a numbering system, and reliable calendar, the basics of engineering and metal-smithing, etc. Beliefs: Like Mesopotamians, Egyptians believed in many gods. Unlike Mesopotamians, Egyptians seem to have worshipped fairly kindly gods, and - by the Middle Kingdom - believed in the possibility of a good afterlife. Rebirth and life after death is a central part of the Osiris story, as is the pattern of Egyptian god-kingship.
Your book tells you that, according to ancient Egyptian belief, Osiris was a god who once ruled Egypt. He was killed by his jealous brother Seth or Set , who eventually cut up his body and scattered the pieces across the land. These pieces were each discovered and brought together by Osiris's loving sister and wife Isis.
The pieces were mummified, and then Isis turned into a kite-bird, and with her wings fanned life back into Osiris. Later Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, got vengence on Seth. Osiris was made god of the Underworld we'll go into this more below, when we get to the Book of the Dead.
There he judged the souls of the dead by Old Kingdom Egyptian beliefs, perhaps only dead pharaohs made it to his judgement, and thus the chance for a good afterlife. Some legends say Horus then ruled Egypt for quite a while, before becoming a god of the sky. Pharaohs were seen as playing the Horus role, as living-god sons of the more senior gods. A good many different things of significance can be seen in this story. Pretty clearly all of this is a death and rebirth story, reflecting the earthly cycles of the seasons and of harvest, flood, and new harvest.
In its later versions, with Osiris judging the souls of all sorts of Egyptians, it definitely offers a more optimistic vision of the afterlife than does the Sumerian Gilgamesh story.
While having male gods at its center, it also shows a female, Isis, playing a crucial, active role - it is she who both gathers the fragments of Osiris and fans life back into them. Finally it also gives one mythical basis for the great Egyptian belief in mummification.
In essence, Egyptians believed that after death the body had to be preserved, in order to give a safe refuge for the dead person's soul, which might be floating around for quite a while after death. As mentioned above, originally the idea may have been that only pharaohs and a few friends could achieve an afterlife among the gods, but by the Middle Kingdom priests and temples assured ordinary Egyptians that, with proper mummification, rituals, and attention from descendants, all could hope to achieve survival after death.
There therefore grew up a huge business, centered around the priests and the temples, for preserving bodies correctly. Your text describes the process in some limited detail. It has been suggested that Egyptian medicine was probably better than that of most early civilizations, thanks to the anatomical knowledge priests gained while preparing so many bodies for mummification.
While poor Egyptians could hope for only the cheapest mummification, if that, still the expansion of the practice is one clear example of how Egyptian tradition did change significantly underneath the surface of its great continuing patterns. Kings, priests and commoners were now all united within one great belief system from which all could hope to benefit - and of course priests had also assured themselves permanent importance and employment by whoever could afford their services to the dead.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is without doubt the most famous window we have onto Egypt's fully-developed religious beliefs. There actually was no one "book," rather that is the name given to the collection of many papyrus scrolls found in sarcophagi something like coffins and tombs. Most seem to have been created perhaps toward the end of the Middle Kingdom or during the subsequent New Kingdom era of c.
They have been called "cheat sheets" and "AAA trip guides" for the dead in their journey through the underground and to the afterlife. These were provided by priests for a fee to accompany the dead as they voyaged through the complex and dangerous world of many gods. Some of the problems the dead were believed to face had to do with Egyptian "childish gods.
But eventually successful souls reached another sort of test, one that no "cheat sheet" could help. If they got that far, all had to appear before Osiris, as Judge of the Underworld, and have their hearts weighed for good and bad deeds. If the heart weighed more than a feather, the dead were fed to crocodiles, and perished for all eternity.
From this part of the Book , we see that Egyptian gods were no longer believed to be entirely childish or uninterested in humankind. The nature of what counted for good and bad deeds is especially interesting. Certainly they included showing due respect to gods and their priests , but mostly they had to do with good human behavior towards each other. Thus good deeds included refraining from harming or cheating other persons, and also in carrying out ones obligations to family and friends.
Egyptian religious beliefs and practices clearly changed from the early days when only pharaohs could hope for eternal life, and all of Egypt's resources went toward the tombs of a very few men. Indus River Valley Civilization, c. This segment is much shorter than that for either Egypt or Mesopotamia, because we know much less about the vanished - and for a while "lost" in terms of our knowledge of it - earliest civilization of India. Yet it appeared almost as early as the two great Middle Eastern civilizations, and for a while perhaps reached about the same heights.
Thus your study topic says:. The question is put this way because what we do now know about the Indus or Harappan civilization is almost completely based on archeological excavations of the area.
Specific memory that the civilization ever existed was lost until 19th-century re-discoveries, and although writing from that era has been discovered, scholars are not yet able to decipher it. Geographic Context. Indus River civilization formed, not surprisingly given its name, along the seven rivers in the area of what is now the Indus River system. As your text explains, all the rivers involved have since shifted course at least some, and several have dried up completely, including the once-very important Hakra River.
As in Egypt, probably advanced neolithic farming and herding peoples had contacts with Mesopotamian seaborne traders, and so learned something about the advantages of more complex ways of life from the earliest Sumerians.
Increasingly scholars date the Indus civilization's appearance from about BCE it was once put a good deal later; some scholars would put it somewhatt earlier, although almost all would put its emergence just slightly later than Egypt's..
Two great city excavation sites are the source of much of our present knowledge of this civilization. The larger of the two is Mohenjo-daro, located on the Indus itself, somewhat north of the area of river plain known as Sind.
Note that Sind is shown on the above map - it is not shown on the Chapter 3 map in your text. The smaller of the two great city sites is Harappa, located about miles upstream, on a major tributary river. The entire river system is at the western edge of the Indian sub-continent. Although open to outside contact, especially by sea, the Indian subcontinent is also significantly separated from the Middle East and the rest of Asia by a whole range of physical barriers.
These include several very high mountain ranges to the north and west, patches of desert to the west, jungle to the east, and a great extent of seacoast. The greatest of the mountain barriers is the Himalaya Mountains, which across the top of whole length of the Ganges River, and across the northern end of the Indus River system.
To the northwest, the Hindu Kush is the greatest of the other mountains that block entrance to India along all but a few western routes. This left India mostly open to travellers coming either by sea, through a few western mountain passes, or from the west across the southern reaches of the Indus the area of Sind.
Today scholars believe that the Indus peoples came to form their civilization in much the same way that first the Mesopotamian and then the Egyptian peoples did. Local Indus-area communities organized to build large irrigation works, and from these came the surpluses, the specialists, the hierarchies, etc that supported the city populations while they concentrated full-time on new specialized occupations that produced the complexity that we call civilization.
What we know of them comes first from their cities that scholars have excavated. We know that they built using bricks - sun-dried for above-ground work, but longer lasting, more expensive kiln-dried ones for foundation work. Their two great cities were laid out on very similar, very orderly grid patterns, and contained covered drainpipes it is believed to carry away sewage. Significant numbers of their residential houses were several stories high, with individual drainage systems connecting to the city sewers.
At the center of Mohenjo-daro there was a large building containing a large tank or pools, with waterproof linings and pipes capable of filling them with water. Go see a good a photograph of this Great Bath archeological site. Clearly water was not only important for Indus farming, but also in some way for life within its cities. The cities also had walls, presumably for defense against possible attacks by some kind of outsiders.
Most scholars point out that there must have been some strong organizing leadership to produce such uniform, labor-intensive city-wide brick construction, but they do not know under what kind of authority or elites, or whether they persuaded or compelled obedience. We do know that the bronze spearpoints found were very fragile and likely to crumble after one use.
We also know that the Indus peoples were very good metalworkers, had access to quite good amounts of metal ore, and were able to vary their exact proportions of bronze alloy to fit specific needs, Thus some scholars speculate that spearpoints may have been seen as not needing to be used again and again.
This would suggest a society not dominated by warriors engaged in frequent, serious combat. If this was so, it seems natural to wonder if perhaps Indus area priests retained a greater share of power than those in city-state Mesopotatmia.
So far, we simply don't know. This reality is accurately reflected in the Priest-King name usually given to the statue, found at Mohenjo-daro, of what certainly seems to be an elite man of some sort. So what else do we know, at least a little more dependably? Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies" are at war, the extent to which the "Allies" and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their own objectives.
When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history - "Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in trenches.
We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic?
Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to? After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed - a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up!
Their missiles go up and come down. When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's denounced as "emotive" Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies", as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the "Allies" look bad.
Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the "terrible beauty" of war.
When invading American soldiers from the army "that's only here to help" are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and "exposes the evil at the heart of the regime". But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation.
When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US Government officials don't deny that they're being being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of war"! They call them "unlawful combatants", implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! So what's the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget?
And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide. When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention , there was vulgar jubilation in the American media.
In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as "balanced" when their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists "embedded" with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war.
Non-"embedded" journalists such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people are undermined even before they begin their reportage: "We have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities.
One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is "resistance" or worse still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy is deceit. The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism. Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by Bs or be mowed down by machine-gun fire.
Anything short of that is cheating. And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with very little food. We're still waiting for the legendary Shia "uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating" army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television productions work to tight schedules?
It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over. After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the "Allies" have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city.
Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise the dying economy, you understand. These and other disputes finally led King Hammurabi of Babylon to create the B.
Code of Hammurabi regarding water theft and negligence. The Code devoted hundreds of laws to irrigation systems. Assyria Assyrian civilization developed a tradition of putting down civil unrest and defeating its enemies by withholding a vital survival-dependent resource water from an expanding population.
In the s B. In this instance Jerusalem is saved by digging a conduit from wells outside the city walls to cut off enemy water supplies.
Assyrian kings following Sennacherib used water as a strategic weapon in international conflicts to come. For example, in the later half of the Century, King Assurbanipal seized water wells as a war strategy against Arabia.
In addition, Syria seized water wells in its war against Arabia and it cut off water supplies when it besieged the city of Tyre in the 7th Century B. Assyria was not the only great power at this time to rely on the water weapon. Babylonia In the s B. In B. The armies deliberately caused a flood by diverting the Khosr River. They then floated their siege engines on rafts and took over the city. Noting that the Euphrates River cut the city of Babylon in half, Nebuchadnezzar built a series of canals to create defensive moats around the huge walls of the city.
The canals diverted the Euphrates to run between the three impenetrable inner and outer walls of the city. The river access points to the canal system were secured with iron grates.
According to Herodotus, who wrote years after Nebuchadnezzar but did not mention his name, wrote that the Babylonians had access to fresh water through bronze gates strategically placed in the inner walls throughout the city.
This was due in part to the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great and the re-shaping of history. If a kingdom diverted the water supply to flood Babylon, as Sennacherib had done years earlier, Babylon would be impenetrable because of its system of brick towered walls and canals. Ironically, it was the Euphrates River that enabled the Persians to defeat Babylon. In the middle of the night, during the Babylonian feast, Persian troops under Cyrus the Great diverted the river north of the city and marched in on the dry riverbed, right through the iron gates.
Gleick records that river diversions were planned to stop wars between Italian city states in the s. The Romans were known to have salted Carthaginian water wells after conquering them in the Punic Wars. The water weapon has not been retired. In fact, it has been used in recent warfare.
Chiang Kai-shek flooded parts of the Yellow River in order to destroy the invading Japanese army in The tactic was successful, however 10, to 1 million Chinese people were displaced from the flooding. Also, in Vietnam, American forces commonly bombed dykes which drowned or starved million North Vietnamese people. Yet even this was still a relatively confined area: Mesopotamia had 25, sq km of irrigated land — similar in size to early dynastic Egypt. From the fourth millennium BC came the first large cities, then states, whose culture and society would influence every aspect of life across west Asia — and further afield.
In the third millennium BC, there were around 40 cities in Sumer and Akkad that made up the Babylonian plain. One big city-state, Lagash whose site is more than 3km across , had 36, male adults in the third millennium BC, suggesting upwards of , people altogether. Uruk was probably of similar size. Each controlled an extensive territory: at Nippur, for example, subsidiary villages clustered around five main canals and 60 smaller ones, joined by a web of countless small irrigation ditches — all subject to laws, customs and close control.
These urban developments were fed by a trading network which, in the case of Uruk, linked Anatolia, Syria and the Zagros. Recent research has shown that Mesopotamia might not only have given birth to the world's first trading culture, but also the earliest private treaty stock market. It is not surprising then that writing, written law, contract law, and international treaties are all found for the first time in the area.
Not only does history begin at Sumer, but so does economics. So who were the people who made this breakthrough in human history? The Sumerians were the prehistoric population of the southern plain of Iraq. Their ethnic and linguistic affiliations are not yet clear; their language is not related to any known language, though there are many theories.
During the third millennium BC a close cultural symbiosis took place between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, who lived in the middle of the plain — the area around and south of modern Baghdad. Many of the civilisational achievements of Mesopotamia are the product of that symbiosis. Sumerian itself, though, had died out as a living language by around BC, leaving it only the preserve of Babylonian scientists, scholars and liturgists.
By the time the last Sumerian texts were copied in cuneiform in the Hellenistic age of the second century BC, the language had long been superseded by Akkadian as the language of literature in Mesopotamia. And the Sumerians themselves had long disappeared into the multiracial mix that was ancient Iraq.
In the s, when the first major excavations were conducted in Iraq, it was still commonly held that the cultural progenitors of western civilisation were the classical world of Greece and Rome and Judaeo-Christian religion.
Though the Book of Genesis mentioned Uruk, Akkad and Babylon, it was never suspected that these much older civilisations had had a profound influence on the civilisations of the Near East and the Mediterranean world. At that time it was also not known that Mesopotamia had led the way in the invention of writing and literature; in mathematics, science, astronomy and geometry; in the invention of the wheel; and in the earliest law codes.
Even today, when we count time and space in multiples of 12 and 60, we do so because of the Mesopotamians. But if Mesopotamia was a place of cultural and technological innovation, it was also the site of constant conflict.
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