Chapter Summary

The West is an idea that developed slowly during Greek and Roman civilization. Initially the Greeks referred to their homeland as the Europe—or “West.” The Romans took up the concept and applied it to the western half of their empire. Asia—or the East—was similarly a geographical innovation of the Greeks and Romans. Asia was that land that belonged to non-Greek cultures of Asia Minor, particularly the Persians. The Romans, too, regarded lands east of Greece as Asia. The name was retained and applied to other cultures beyond the Turkish peninsula such as China and India. Although what we refer to as “Western Civilization” began in the area that today we call the Middle East, we tend to associate the term more with developments in Europe, particularly after the birth of Christ. After the sixteenth century, Western civilization was exported through the process of conquest and colonization beyond the confines of Europe throughout the world. The exportation of Western civilization superimposed western culture on ancient traditions of art, science, economy, and politics in Asia, Africa, and the New World. The results of the exportation of Western civilization have been mixed. Both positive and negative results have emerged along with a new global culture.

The discovery of the 5000-year-old remains of a man in the Ötzi valley provided us with a glimpse of life in the Stone Age. The Ötzi man’s diet consisted of meat, vegetables and einkorn wheat bread. He dressed in a simple leather breechcloth, calfskin belt, leather upper garment made from goat skin, and bear skin soled shoes. He carried a copper ax and flint knife. None of his clothes were woven.

The first pre-humans appeared as early as five million years ago. They were toolmakers and survived by hunting and gathering. The first immediate ancestors of man, Homo sapiens, appeared over a hundred thousand years ago. One of the earliest varieties of Homo sapiens was Neanderthal man. Although closely related in structure and culture to modern man, Neanderthal man mysteriously disappeared about forty thousand years ago. Our immediate ancestors were Homo sapiens sapiens. All current races are descended from this subspecies. Early varieties of Homo sapiens sapiens lived as small bands of hunter-gatherers.

The Homo sapiens sapien’s original material culture (everything about human not inherited through biology) consisted of the production of stone and bone tools. By the late Paleolithic period (35,000-10,000 B.C.E.), early humans had produced art and appear to have formulated religious practices related to fertility and fecundity in the natural world around them. One of the best examples of cave painting is at Tassili-n-Ajjer in Algeria. In contains a painted record of life dating from 6000 B.C.E. to the time of Jesus.

Around 10,000 B.C.E., hunter-gatherers residing in the Middle East began to become more sedentary. They stopped following the herds of wild animals and began to exploit the resources of a single area more completely. The transition to sedentary communities was most prominent along the shores of the Mediterranean and the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. Sedentary life permitted more rapid population growth and created a demand for greater food supplies. The demand for a more intense exploitation of the environment led to domestication of animals and cereal agriculture.

Sedentary agricultural societies required more formal political organization in order to exploit the environment effectively. Religious rites of various types also became more important in agricultural societies.

Mesopotamia was not naturally well-suited to agriculture. Only the southern portions of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates—the area called Sumeria—were fertile, and limited rainfall necessitated irrigation. In order to ensure protection against neighboring nomadic peoples and make better use of the river plains, villages concentrated into larger urban centers. Urban development became pronounced around 3000 B.C.E.

The cities of Mesopotamia produced new social, political, and cultural systems. Religious priesthoods and military leaders created political and social elites. Beneath the elites were slaves, peasants who worked the land belonging to the elites, skilled workers who served the temple complexes, and free landowners. The Mesopotamian city-state also contained a large number of slave women who served as laborers in the textile industries. Although the overall status of free women was somewhat better, the Mesopotamian city-state established the male dominance pattern in households.

Mesopotamian city-states allowed economic specialization and technological advance. Innovations were made in irrigation, transportation on land and sea, pottery, and metalworking. Writing was also developed in Mesopotamia. As early as 3500 B.C.E. administrators were using simple drawings called pictographs made with a wedge on a clay tablet to keep records. Writing permitted greater centralization and control, enabled communication throughout the administrative units, allowed the management of commerce, and recorded the achievements of the political elites.

Mesopotamians believed in many gods that looked and acted like people. There were both greater and lesser gods. The greatest divinities were those of the sky, air, and rivers. Temple complexes called ziggurat dominated both the landscape and the economy of Mesopotamian city-states. Although the people sought a positive relationship with the gods through special rituals and donations in order to secure their protection and aid in this world, Mesopotamian religion did not offer hope of an afterlife.

Mesopotamia was divided into warring city-states until about 2300 B.C.E. The first ruler to unify the southern portion of Mesopotamia was Sargon of Akkad. Sargon conquered the other major cities and appointed his officials to govern them. He also broke the power of the local temple complexes by redistributing their lands and wealth among his followers. Sargon’s unification of Sumeria was a temporary accomplishment of a brilliant commander and ruler. His empire did not long survive him.

With the fall of Sargon’s unified Sumerian state, political dominance passed farther to the north, to the middle region of Mesopotamia. By 1750 B.C.E. the city of Babylon exerted its influence over all the city-states between the rivers. The greatest ruler of Old Babylonia was Hammurabi, who is most famous for his strict code of laws imposed on all the city-states of his empire. The laws covered all aspects of Babylonian life: commerce, agriculture, marriage, crime, professional licensing, and domestic tranquility. Babylonian mathematicians also made significant advances in science and technology. Like Sargon before him, Hammurabi was unable to construct a lasting political unification of Mesopotamia. By 1600 B.C.E. the Babylonian Empire fell to foreign invaders, the Hittites from Anatolia. The Indo-European Hittite state emerged in Anatolia under the cultural influence of Mesopotamian civilization. The state expanded on the basis of political centralization, iron metallurgy, and the use of the war chariot. The Hittites destroyed the Babyonian state around 1600 B.C.E. and continued to expand southward until they came in contact with Egyptian civilization.

The Nile River valley that gave rise to Egyptian civilization was capable of supporting a dense population. Unlike Mesopotamia, the Nile ecology was more easily converted to sedentary agriculture and required little human intervention to produce crops. The Nile valley was also protected along its length by deserts; thus its agricultural settlements did not require walls for defense. Agricultural villages first appeared in the Nile valley about 4000 B.C.E. The agricultural communities were at first divided politically into two halves: northern or Lower Egypt near the Nile delta and southern or Upper Egypt.

Around 3150 B.C.E. the ruler or pharaoh of Upper Egypt, Narmer, united the two halves and established a single capital at Memphis. Old Kingdom Egypt lasted from around 2770-2200 B.C.E. The king or pharaoh was a living god who was responsible for the flooding of the Nile and the preservation of ma’at, the harmony of the universe. Old Kingdom Egypt, protected by its surrounding deserts, was less militarized than Mesopotamia. The kings, known as pharaohs were viewed as divine administrators. The royal administration was peopled by priests and trained bureaucrats that governed agriculture, allocated labor to public works, and managed the organization of trade. Local governors administered local districts called nomes. Although Egyptian women were allowed to own property and engage in business, they were not educated and therefore were not allowed into the bureaucracy. Most important in the religious life of the Old Kingdom were the cults of the dead pharaohs. King Zoser, the first ruler of the Old Kingdom, began the practice of building pyramids surrounded by temples to serve the spirits of departed rulers. The first pyramids was built at Sakkara. These burial complexes became the focus of public works and employing thousands of laborers.

By 2200 B.C.E. the unified Old Kingdom fragmented and royal authority disappeared. Provincial governors exercised political authority for nearly two hundred years. Temple priesthoods and religious foundations devoted to cults of the dead began to receive greater and greater amounts of land and wealth to support their devotion to the departed spirits. Eventually, the practice of creating shrines to the dead spread beyond the royal family to other members of the royal administration and then gradually to all men who could afford the costs of embalming and burial. After 200 years of political fragmentation the governor of Thebes, a city in Upper Egypt, restored the unified government and established the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (around 2050-1786 B.C.E.). There was less distance between the elites and the common population in the Middle Kingdom. The administration was opened to all men of talent, including men born outside of Egypt. Foreign invaders from Palestine, the Hyksos, brought the Middle Kingdom to a close, although the foreign rulers adopted the customs of the defeated Egyptians. The Hyksos were also responsible for bringing new military technology—the horse driven war chariot and new bronze swords—into Egypt.

The Theban ruler Ahmose I expelled the Hyksos and initiated the New Kingdom (around 1560-1087 B.C.E.). The rulers of the New Kingdom extended Egyptian control beyond the Nile valley for the first time. Under Thutmose I (1506-1494 B.C.E.), Egyptian authority ran from Nubia in the south to the borders of Mesopotamia in the north. The expanded frontiers of Egypt brought the Nile valley civilization into contact with the other civilizations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

Egyptian politics was often a precarious balance between the kings and the priesthoods of the religious cults. During the New Kingdom, King Amenhotep IV (1364-1347 B.C.E.) attempted to curtail the authority of the traditional religious cults by creating a new deity, the sun-disk god Aten. Amenhotep moved to a new capital dedicated to Aten and changed his name to Akhenaten in honor of the new god. The radical religious reform did not outlive Akhenaten. The next pharaoh, Tutankhamen, restored the traditional cults and festivals. With the restoration of the ancient religion came the return of the political struggle between the kings and the priesthoods. King Ramses II (1289-1224 B.C.E.) temporarily stopped the advance of the Hittites into Egypt, but the New Kingdom disintegrated shortly thereafter. The internal collapse of the Egyptians was mirrored in the fall of other centers of civilization at the same time.

Not all ancient peoples were organized in well-developed cultures such as Mesopotamia and Egypt. Genesis describes the wanderings of the family of the patriarch Abraham. Originally from the city-state of Ur, Abraham’s tribe carried a mixed culture of Mesopotamian and nomadic origins. The clan was patriarchal in structure, and women played a subordinate role. The group worshipped a single deity peculiar to the clan, although they recognized the existence of other gods. Descendants of Abraham’s clan entered Egypt in the period of disorder and foreign invasion at the end of the Middle Kingdom. They were probably reduced to slavery after the expulsion of the Hyksos and the establishment of the New Kingdom. During the decline of the New Kingdom, the descendants of the original clan left Egypt under the leadership of Moses. During the years of migration and the subsequent conquest of Palestine, the contacts with other cultures modified the political structure and belief system of followers of Moses—now known as the tribes of Israel. They became strictly monotheistic and accepted the god Yahweh (whom they had adopted from a tribe in the Sinai desert). The Israelites also accepted a strict code of laws received from Moses.

The Israelites succeeded in conquering Palestine at a time when both the Hittites and Egyptians were powerless to prevent their takeover of the disputed territory. While at first the Israelites remained a loose confederation of tribes, they were forced to consolidate under the threat of invasion by the neighboring Philistines. After an initial defeat, the religious leaders of the Israelites consented to the creation of a kingdom. The Kingdom of Israel reached its zenith under David (around 1000-961 B.C.E.) and Solomon (around 961-922 B.C.E.). Under these monarchs Jerusalem was established as the capital and religious center of Israel. Political unification led to royal tyranny, particularly under Solomon. In order to protect the sacred covenant with Yahweh, prophets criticized the kings, called for reform, and established a tradition of religious opposition to absolutism.

The unification of Israel ended after the reign of Solomon with the division of the kingdom into two halves: the kingdom of Israel in the north with a new capital at Shechem, and the kingdom of Judah in the south with the traditional capital at Jerusalem. Both kingdoms fell to foreign invaders. The Assyrians captured Israel in 722 B.C.E., and the New Babylonian Empire conquered Judah in 586 B.C.E. The Babylonians carried off many of the elite of Judah to Mesopotamia, where the captives restructured their understanding of the covenant and began to emphasize strict monotheism. When the captives returned to Judah from their years of exile, they brought with them a reconstructed Judaism that was particularly concerned to maintain religious purity uncontaminated by other beliefs. Two traditions emerged. The Pharisees produced a body of oral law, the Mishnah, that eventually became the Talmud. The Pharisees also taught that a messiah would emerge to restore the independence of the Hebrews. The more conservative Sadducees emphasized the traditional Torah.

The civilization that overcame Old Babylonia, New Kingdom Egypt, and Israel was the Assyrians. The Assyrians tied together Mesopotamia, Palestine, and the Nile River valley. They successfully created a more unified and homogeneous empire than any of their predecessors.

Assyria began as a small state without significant resources in northern Mesopotamia. After a revolt that threatened to destroy the early Assyrian state, Tiglath-pileser III (746-727 B.C.E.) began the construction of the Assyrian empire. Assyrian military success was based on a professional rather than a volunteer army. The Assyrian state god not only sanctioned but demanded military activity. Ruthless measures consolidated conquests. Assyrian kings liquidated the elites of conquered territories, transported populations from one conquered territory to another to break down regional identities, and carried out campaigns of terror against populations that resisted Assyrian advances. Despite the ferocity and thoroughness of Assyrian methods, the subject states of Media, Babylonia, and Egypt succeeded in destroying the Assyrian Empire in 612 B.C.E.

The fall of Assyria led to the brief resuscitation of Babylonia in the central portion of Mesopotamia. The New Babylonian Empire reached its height under King Nebuchadnezzar II. The New Babylonian Empire fell to the Persians in 539 B.C.E.

The Medes and the Persians were Indo-European peoples who settled in Iran. Although the Medes helped destroy the Assyrian Empire, they were quickly overshadowed by the Persains. Under kings Cyrus II (r. 585-529 B.C.E.) and Cambyses II (r. 529-522 B.C.E.) the Persians brought the Middle East and Egypt under their control. The Persian religion is known as Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrians worshiped a god called Ahura Mazda (Lord Wisdom) from whom all good things are derived. The Persians were tolerant toward the conquered peoples allowing them to follow their religious traditions and requiring only tribute and taxes as a sign of submission.