THE STORY OF MAN

AN INTRODUCTION TO 150,000 YEARS OF HUMAN HISTORY

CYRILL AYDON

CARROLL & GRAF                       2007

PART II

 

Chapter 5: The Invention of the State

Chapter 6: Empires of Bronze

Chapter 7: The World in 1000 BC

In 4000 BC the population of the world was around 30 million. Had a census of the world been taken in 1000 BC, it would probably have shown a total nearer 120 million. More than half lived in four regions of long-established agricultural settlement. These four, each with a population of or approaching 20 million, were: China; the Indian subcontinent; Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and Iran; Europe.

The emphasis of the previous two chapters on the early history of South-west Asia and the Mediterranean is justified, because of the worldwide influence of many of the developments there. But it also reflects the quantity of information available. Archeological digs in South-west Asia have uncovered a vast store of written records, on clay, stone and papyrus, that enable us to read what peoples of these civilizations were doing and saying.

• We know that the Indus Valley, in present-day Pakistan, was the home of a civilization that was already ancient in the third millennium BC.
• Agriculture had spread to this region from the Fertile Crescent, and, as in the Fertile Crescent, it was at first confined to upland regions.
• Like the Nile, the Indus flooded every year, and spread rich alluvial soil over a wide area growing wheat, barley, rice and cotton.
• By 2500 BC, this system of mixed farming was supporting a population of around 5 million, spread over a vast area.
• It contained two great redbrick cities – Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro – whose civic amenities would not have shamed the finest cities of Mesopotamia.
• Starting around 1900 BC, this civilization went into decline, and its cities were abandoned.
• Floods were undoubtedly partly to blame. In other places, desiccation seems to have been the principal explanation, as rivers dried up completely.
• By 1000 BC it was just a folk memory for the inhabitants of the villages that remained.
• The technologies that China imported from peoples’ further west included the cultivation of wheat and barley, the manufacture of bronze, the idea of the chariot and those two supreme inventions of the people of the Steppes, the ridable horse and the stirrup.
• In return, Europe and western Asia received benefits too numerous to list. Porcelain; paper; gunpowder; and the magnetic compass are just a few of the Chinese inventions that would later find their way along these two great arteries of trade: the coastal route around the Indian Ocean, and the Silk Road across Central Asia.
• In 1000 BC, what we call ‘China’ was what it had been for hundreds of years, and what it would remain for hundreds of years to come: a collection of independent feudal states, each with its own army, and each ever ready to go to war with the others.
• Across the sea in Japan no comparable civilization had yet arisen
• Far away to the south, similarly undisturbed by contact with the outside world, and scattered thinly across their inhospitable continent, the native peoples of Australia practiced a mobile hunting and gathering lifestyle little changed from that of their ancestors of 3000 years before.

To the north and east of Australia, hundreds of islands that in 4000 BC had not yet received their first human footprint were now home to permanent settlements. Over a period of 2000 years, beginning around 3000 BC, the Pacific Ocean had been the scene of an astonishing succession of voyages by the ancestors of the peoples who are nowadays classified as Micronesians and Polynesians. Starting from South-east Asia, they had colonized the whole of Indonesia and the Philippines by around 2000 BC. By 1500 BC, guided by the stars, and aided by their profound knowledge of the behaviour of ocean currents, they had traversed the whole of Micronesia and Melanesia, and settled just about every island in 4 million square miles of ocean. In 1000 BC, their fishing and farming villages covered almost the entire western Pacific, south of the Tropic of Cancer and north of New Zealand.

• On the other side of the Pacific, the descendants of the original settlers of the Americas had prospered and multiplied.
• This corner of the world contained no animals suitable for domestication. It did, however, possess several wild food plants with a potential for improvement, including maize, squash and beans.
• Starting around 3000 BC, these people had engineered an Agricultural Revolution that owed nothing at all to the labour of beasts, or to the meat they might have provided.
• In spite of these disadvantages, they had created a farming culture that was able to support a sizable population.
• Their most striking achievement was the transformation of maize from an insignificant wild cereal into a source of nourishment that would eventually provide something like 90% of the food requirements of the peoples of Central America.
• The most notable culture in Central America in 1000 BC was that of the Olmecs, who lived around the southern shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
• Like mature agricultural societies everywhere, these people engaged in long-distance trade.
• The great age of the Olmec culture lasted for 500 years, from 1300 BC to around 800 BC, but their art and their religion, including their cult of the jaguar, and their building of pyramids, exercised a powerful influence on later civilizations, right up to the Aztecs of the 16^th century.
• 2000 miles to the south, in present-day Peru, another highly individual system of agriculture had developed in the Andean highlands, where nature had assembled a rich assortment of plants and animals crying out for domestication.
• It is clear that by 1000 BC, a farming culture based on terraced fields on the valley sides was already a thousand years old.
• The plants involved included a cereal – quinua – and the potato, which was to become one of the world’s most important food crops.
• Their animals included the guinea-pig and three members of the camel family, the alpaca, the guanaco and the llama, that provided milk, meat and wool, and performed a vital role as pack animals.
• Our final destination in this worldwide round-up is the continent of Africa, where our story began. Its most densely populated region in 1000 BC was still the Nile Valley area of Egypt.
• It represented only 1% of the area of the continent, but it contained 50% of its people.
• Further west, 4000 years of drought had created the Sahara Desert. It was emptier than it had been for 20,000 years.
• The scourge of sleeping sickness, carried by the tsetse fly, rendered some parts of the continent virtually uninhabitable, and desperately weakened the populations of many others.

In the belt of open savannah south of the Sahara, and north of the tropical rain forest, an Agricultural Revolution had occurred that owed little or nothing to similar developments elsewhere. The population involved in this farming culture was small, as were the settlements, and evidence of its extent and timing is hard to come by. Cattle were important, and the crop plants included sorghum and millet, two plants that are today the staple food of millions. But as far as technology was concerned, the peoples of sub-Sahara Africa still lived in the Age of Stone. The Bronze Age, which had created such turmoil elsewhere, had passed them by.

Chapter 8: The World of the Greeks