The word ‘culture’ is one of those terms that needs to be handled with caution.
Its definition has varied over time and with context. In a very broad sense it concerns shared values and traditions that are passed on in some coherent form from one generation to another in a society. These might include a body of knowledge and beliefs, including moral behaviour, styles of art, patterns of relationships, and ways of conducting government, the specific aspects of a society by which it may be distinguished from another.
Cultures are seldom frozen—it is simply not possible for a culture to remain unaffected by changing political and economic conditions—but often cultural symbols, such as specific gods or rituals and depictions of kingship, are used again and again by rulers or ruling classes in order to reassert authority or establish their legitimacy. These symbols become important rallying cries when a culture is under threat. It is normal, however, for cultures to be in a tension between forces for change and forces for continuity. In some areas, as with an open sea like the Mediterranean or one with many trade networks, there is continuous cultural interchange. Incoming cultures can be welcomed and adapted by their recipients or emphatically rejected by them. Cultures can collapse completely or be transformed into something virtually unrecognizable from what went before. Massive if slow transformations of the Mediterranean world took place, for instance, with the expansion of the Roman empire and, later, with the coming of Christianity and Islam as life was shaped to new purposes. A crucial, and challenging task for the historian is to understand how and why cultural change takes place. This becomes particularly difficult when there is only the chance survival of artefacts, pottery, or metal goods, whose original purpose, purely functional, perhaps, or ritualistic, is impossible to recover.
Just as a clear definition of what is meant by a ‘culture’ is not easy to make, so it is difficult to say what gives a particular culture the status of a ‘civilization’. The word ‘civilization’ suggests cultural and political superiority, an attitude adopted by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans as they compared themselves to other ‘barbarian’ peoples around them. Yet as every culture tends to think itself superior to its neighbours, it is important to move beyond such value judgements to give a broader definition of ‘civilization’ that can provide the setting for the cultures discussed in this book. Crucial to the notion of ‘civilization’ is political and cultural stability and this normally means a state, a defined territory over which a king, a religious ruler, or some other form of government, claims control. From earliest times civilization and city life have appeared to be inseparable, although what sustains urban living varies. A city may be founded as a religious centre, the focus for the worship of a god, or as the setting in which a ruler displays himself, often through monumental buildings. Many settlements gain their energy from trading, and so exist primarily as centres where people meet to buy and sell, where goods are unloaded from water, or where trade routes cross. Often functions overlap—a capital may become a port or a ruler draw his authority from the ancient religious meaning of a site. In a trading city there are opportunities for craftsmen to transfer raw materials into textiles, metal implements, or works of art for the elite, so manufacturing quarters grow up, often close to the market-place, and there are finished goods to be sold back to visiting traders. In short, civilizations usually show social complexity and specialized skills.
In order to survive the inhabitants of cities spawn creative solutions. They have to, in order to deal with the administration of day-to-day survival, when so many have to be fed and given fresh water, and their waste (and dead bodies!) safely removed. The rules of trading need to be regulated, order imposed through a defined authority, the ruler, his officials, or even the people themselves. Records have to be kept and so means of transferring information into a permanent, comprehensible form, writing, develops. The one who does the writing, the storehouse keeper or an elite class of scribes, and the functions of writing vary from culture to culture. The city reinforces its own status through its buildings. Its walls may be as much a mark of its power as a means of defence. (This was certainly true of ancient Mesopotamia where the normal and often exaggerated boast of conquerors was that they had destroyed an enemy city’s walls even if archaeological evidence shows that they had not!) As many examples from Egypt and the Near East show, walls provide an excellent setting for reliefs that can proclaim the power of a ruler or his gods. Yet a city is more than its rulers. The interaction of the people themselves encourages the exchange of ideas and their diffusion. So begins the lively interchange of cultures that will be such an important theme of this book.
No city can exist if it does not draw on surpluses of food and in most cases this comes from the surrounding land. Civilization and the control of food surpluses go hand in hand, but the process of accumulation can occur in different ways. A state may have control over valued sources, tin, silver, iron ores, which it can trade for food. It may win resources through war and then use them to fuel further expansion. It may simply develop a highly efficient bureaucracy centred on the king that channels surpluses up to his court in ‘taxation’ (as in ancient Egypt). One of the underlying questions that has to be asked of all the civilizations in this book is how surplus was accumulated and used to sustain the civilization discussed.
For the Mediterranean world the beginnings of civilization are normally placed in the Ancient Near East. (The term is generally used by scholars of these ancient cultures, despite the preferred Middle or Near East today.) The Ancient Near East is defined here as covering the area which now stretches from Turkey eastwards across to the Caspian Sea and southwards from there to take in modern Iran and Iraq. In the south-west it includes the modern Syria, Israel, Jordan, and the Lebanon. In the period covered here and in Chapter 6 there were major centres of civilization in Mesopotamia, Palestine, Phoenicia, to the north of Palestine (the modern Lebanon), Syria, and Anatolia, on the central plain of modern Turkey. Egypt, although comparatively isolated within the Nile valley, was in continuous interaction with the area. As its civilization had many unique features it will be dealt with separately.
The legacy of this area both to the other civilizations of the ancient world and to the modern world is immense. It includes the earliest examples of settled agriculture, the first cities and temples, and with them systems of administration that fostered the emergence of writing. The alphabet originated in the Levant in about 1500 bc. The world’s first kingdoms and empires, the beginnings of metalwork, and building in brick are found in Mesopotamia. Three major world religions, the only monotheistic ones, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have originated in the area. As the civilizations of the Ancient Near East were not isolated from each other nor from the outside world, all these developments spread to the Mediterranean world and beyond. The extensive records kept by Babylonian mathematicians and astronomers entered the Greek world in the third century bc and the data allowed the plotting of the movements of the stars over time. Even so one must be careful not to see the cultures of the Ancient Near East as inevitable precursors of western civilization. The complexity of the relationships over centuries of interaction will be stressed throughout this book.
The landscape of the Near East is a varied and often formidable one. In southern Iraq there were marshes (although much of the Iraqi marshland has been drained in recent years), in Jordan and Syria desert, in Iran mountains topped with snow. In southern Mesopotamia there is a flat plain rich in silt brought down by the Tigris and Euphrates (the name Mesopotamia itself comes from the Greek for ‘between two rivers’). To the north and east of the plain lie mountain ranges, whose melting snows provide these two rivers with their annual floods. There are high plateaux— Anatolia, 500 metres above sea level, and Iran with its inhospitable central deserts— and more mountain ranges, north and south of Anatolia and along the Lebanese coast. These different environments have hosted both sophisticated city-states and nomadic peoples whose relationships with each other have added to the complexity of the area’s history. The more resilient Near East economies combined cereal production, and thus a settled population, with pastoralism, the husbanding of goats, sheep, and cattle. Typically, successful city-states of the Ancient Near East grasped a territory around them and consolidated their position through the control of trade, often over routes that remained unchanged for centuries. It was a precarious existence, there were few easily defensible borders, and many states collapsed after only a century or two. However, it was probably just this changing pattern of cultures that made the area such a rich source of innovation.
The rediscovery of the Ancient Near East by the west began in the nineteenth century. The pioneers were a mixture of European diplomats, gentleman scholars, soldiers, and colonial administrators, and this was when these ancient cultures were appropriated into a story of ‘western civilization’ (The late Edward Said has explored this appropriation critically in his influential Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London, 1978.) The motives of the pioneers were varied but among the most important were the determination to prove the truth of the Bible through finding evidence for its accuracy as history and to accumulate collections of treasures for their own national museums. The great palaces of Assyria, Khorsabad, Nimrud, and Nineveh were stripped of their magnificent reliefs, which are now to be found in British and French museums.
One of the major discoveries, by British archaeologists in the second half of the nineteenth century, was the vast library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh with its collection of Mesopotamian literature. The cuneiform script in which the tablets were written was eventually deciphered from a trilingual inscription carved by the Persian king Darius on a rock at Behistun by an Englishman, Henry Rawlinson (1810-95). The literature and complex history of the region could now start to be unravelled. A decisive moment came in 1872 when George Smith, working on Assyrian tablets in the British Museum, found a text describing a great flood and instantly placed the biblical texts in a wider cultural context. Now the ever-increasing numbers of tablets and a more sophisticated understanding of the contexts in which they were written has added immeasurably to our knowledge of the region and its history.
Sites in Mesopotamia may have been occupied over 6,000 years and the accumulated remains are enormous. The citadel of one city, Nineveh, is so huge that it is estimated that it would take another 6,000 years to excavate it according to modern methods. It also became obvious that concentrating digs on such massive sites gave a false impression of Mesopotamian culture especially when there were still traditions of ‘treasure-hunting, that highlighted prestige finds over the more mundane debris of everyday living. The impact of a broader, more anthropological, approach pioneered by American scholars such as Robert Braidwood in the 1940s forced archaeologists to concentrate on what it was actually like to live in ancient Mesopotamia. Surveys of larger areas showed how individual cities and settlements were linked to each, often through canals. Here the American Robert Adams was a pioneer with his survey of 8,000 square kilometres of Diyala province in eastern Iraq in the 1960s. In the cities themselves, meticulous examination of ordinary houses, such as the Abu Salabikh project in southern Iraq, a relatively small but well-preserved city site from the third millennium Bc, is shifting interest towards ordinary lives.
In recent years, major irrigation and building projects have threatened the survival of many sites. A major blow, the full extent of which is still unknown, to the history of the Ancient Near East, has been dealt as a result of the looting on ancient sites in the aftermath of the invasions of Iraq and the breakdown of order in other states. (According to one survey, the holes in Iraq add up to 3,700 acres of destruction.) Major museums in the region have been looted; even some of the treasures of Tutankhamun in the Cairo Museum were damaged or disappeared in January 2011. Sites are hard to protect and small antiquities easy to dig out and smuggle out to unscrupulous dealers. With the sequence of events and details of daily living of so
Map 1
Many of these cultures still obscure, this is a devastating loss. Work on many important projects has been interrupted and only now, 2012 at the time of writing, are the first archaeological excavations being resumed in Iraq.
World History
