The Sumerians

The Sumerians were an ancient people from southern Iraq, who built the world’s first civilisation. Historians credit them with inventing writing, mathematics, literature and the wheel. The thousand year Sumerian civilisation rose and fell while mammoths still worked the earth.

Ancient Sumer is the land where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet the sea – the southern part of Mesopotamia. The coastline was further north than today, the land was greener, and the rivers ran a different course. The cities of Sumer stand now as ruins in the desert.

At first glance, Sumer seems an unlikely place for cities. Unlike in Egypt, river floods were violent and unpredictable. Few trees grew and metal was scarce. The soil of southern Iraq is notoriously prone to salination. The Sumerians learned to tame the rivers and build canals to extend them inland, where they grew wheat, barley, chickpeas, onions and other crops. As timber was scarce, they built houses and temples from clay and sundried mudbrick.

Sumerian was a language isolate, meaning it bore no relationship to the neighboring Semetic and Indo-European tongues or any language spoken today. The Sumerians could have come from India, North Africa or land now swallowed by the Persian Gulf. Their many stories include that of a flood from long ago.

Cuneiform script involved etching symbols into wet clay using a reed stylus. It is from their extensive writings we know so much about Sumerians today. They recorded stories, hymns, inventories, poetry, and the deeds of their kings. The world’s oldest known piece of literature – the Epic of Gilgamesh – was first written in Sumerian.

The Sumerians organised cities through complex bureaucracies. They knew how to measure weight, sail, study the stars, tax and build city walls. Sumerian armies marched in tightly packed units of spearmen, backed by archers and wagons drawn by donkeys. Their merchants traded with their neighbours, including those as far afield as Africa and the Indus Valley. They imported not only wood and metal, but ivory, lapiz lazuli and gold.

For most of their history, the Sumerian cities were independent, ruled first by priests and then ‘big men’ or kings. Around 2400 BC, Eannatum, king of Lagash, took over Sumer by force and proclaimed his victory on the Stele of Vultures. He was in turn overthrown by Lugal-Zage-Si of Umma, who fell to Sargon a Semetic speaking king from Akkad in the north. Three centuries later, the Akkadian Empire fell to raiders from the mountains and Sumer returned to native rule – this time by the kings of Ur.

The ’Third Dynasty of Ur’ ruled Sumer for a century. King Ur-Nammu inscribed a code of laws, predating the more famous and harsher Code of Hammurabi by three hundred years and built the Great Ziggurat of Ur, which still stands today.

Climate change was Sumer’s downfall. Centuries of bad practice led to exhaustion of a soil plagued increasingly by salt from the mountains upstream. In place of wheat, farmers grew barley. Semetic speaking tribes pushed into Sumer as drought and famine forced them from the Syrian Desert. As the price of bread shot up and trade collapsed, invaders ravaged the land. Ur and its dynasty fell around 2,000 BC.

As the people of Sumer abandoned their cities and dispersed across Mesopotamia, their spoken language died out. Written Sumerian, revered by the Assyrians and Babylonians who followed, survived as a language of temples and priests for another two thousand years, much as Latin did in the west.

Iranian Civilisation

Iran has one of the oldest and most influential civilisations in the world. Iranian culture dominated Central Asia and the Middle East from the time of Cyrus the Great to the Islamic Conquests and in some ways continues to do so.

Greater Iran includes the countries and peoples who speak Iranian languages, from the Euphrates to Indus Rivers. These include:

• Persians (Iran)
• Kurds (Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria)
• Tajiks (Tajikstan, Afghanistan)
• Pashtuns (Afghanistan, Pakistan)

Other nations that were once a part of Iranian empires but today have different cultures include Iraq, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. ‘Stan’ is the Persian word for land.

Persia is the old Greek world for Iran and its English name until 1932. The modern Persian language swapped the P sound for F, so ‘Persia Proper’ is today Iran’s Fars province. The Persian language is Farsi. The Zoroastrians who fled to India when the Muslims took over before the language changed are called the Parsi.

‘Iran’ comes from the Sassanian name for Persia, ‘Eran-Shahr’ which derives from ‘Aryan’. All Persians are Iranian but not all Iranians are Persian.

Five Dynasties ruled Iran before Islam. They mainly followed the teachings of Zoroaster, a Bronze Age prophet:

• Medians (non-Persian Iranians, 678 – 549 BC)
• Achaemenids (Cyrus, Darius etc, 559 – 330 BC)
• Seleucids (Macedonian, 305 – 63 BC)
• Arcasids (Parthians, 247 BC – 224 AD)
• Sassanians (Persians, 224 – 651 AD)

As Western civilisation grew out of Rome, and Chinese out of the Han Dynasty, Iranian civilization sprang from the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Cyrus the Great conquered most of the known world and established an administration system that lasted centuries. Even Alexander the Great, who conquered it, retained the Persian system.

The Muslims who conquered Iran in the 600s ushered an age of foreign rule. Arabs, Turks and Mongols ruled Iran. Although the foreigners adopted elements of Persian culture, they were still considered foreigners. The greatest scientific advances of the Islamic Golden Age were made by Persians like Avicenna and Al Khwarezemi.

The Safavid Dynasty restored native rule in the 1500s. They retained Persian culture, made Persian, not Arabic, the country’s official language and made Iran the centre of the Shia Muslim world. In 1979 clerics overthrew the last Shah, Reza Muhammad of the Pahlavi Dynasty, and replaced the monarchy with a theocratic republic, ending 2,500 years of imperial rule.

Though Greater Iran is overwhelmingly Muslim today, it has given the world four religions:

• Zoroastrianism (900s BC -)
• Mithraism (200s BC – 300s AD)
• Manichaeism (200s AD – 1400s)
• Baha’i (1800s -)

Central to the Iranian philosophical and religious tradition is an emphasis on truth and spiritual purity.

Historically Persia lay between the eastern and western halves of Eurasia. The Silk Road ran through it meaning Chinese inventions like chess, gunpowder and silk came to Europe via Persia.

Among other things, Persia has given the world:

• lutes
• polo
• ice cream
• refrigerators
• windmills
• banks
• armoured knights
• poetry of Hafez and Rumi
• The Shahnameh (Book of Kings)
• Avicenna, father of modern medicine
• hospitals
• trigonometry
• carpets

While the Syrian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures were largely subsumed into Arabic, Iran retained its unique identity. Modern Islamic civilisation is arguably a mixture of Arabic and Persian influences. The Persian example helped internationalise Islam and allow it to spread as far as it has today. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, the spiritual father of Pakistan, claimed:

“If you ask me what is the most important event in the history of Islam, I shall say without any hesitation: “The Conquest of Persia.” The battle of Nehawand gave the Arabs not only a beautiful country, but also an ancient civilisation; or, more properly, a people who could make a new civilisation with the Semitic and Aryan material. Our Muslim civilisation is a product of the cross-fertilisation of the Semitic and the Aryan ideas. It is a child who inherits the softness and refinement of his Aryan mother, and the sterling character of his Semitic father. But for the conquest of Persia, the civilisation of Islam would have been one-sided. The conquest of Persia gave us what the conquest of Greece gave to the Romans.”

Sources: Richard N Frye – The Heritage of Persia (1962), Iran Review

See Also:

• Cyrus the Great
• The Sassanian Empire
• Mani of Babylonia
• Peoples of Afghanistan

Why Did Europe Take Over the World?

In 1750, China, India and the Middle East led the world in technology, power and sophistication, as they had for most of history.  In 1775 India and China controlled 66% of the world’s economy. Less than a century later the British ruled India and China accounted for only 5%. By 1900 all the Americas spoke European languages, and Britain, a formerly insignificant island, ruled a quarter of the world. How was that possible?

The crucible of ‘western civilization’, my classics professor once told me, was not the Greek victories over Persia but the Roman conquest of Gaul. Civilization arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia, spread to Greece, and from there Italy. When the Romans conquered the Mediterranean, their contribution was a thin layer over millennia of development. Western Europe, however, was not so civilized – so Roman laws, language, architecture and government provided cultural bedrock. At the cost of thousands of Gallic lives, Caesar’s conquest brought Western Europe into civilization’s fold.

Western Europe adopted the Roman model wholesale with limited contribution from the invading Germanic tribes. From then on Western Europe largely bore one legal and cultural heritage with a single script, all preserved by the Catholic Church and rediscovered in the Renaissance. Islam may have accomplished such unity in the Middle East but, like China and Eastern Europe, the region was beset by invasions from Central Asia. Arab civilization arguably never recovered from the Mongols’ sack of Baghdad.

Jared Diamond attributes Europe’s rise to guns, germs and steel. That is, being in the right place at the right time. Europe had the environment and the resources for state-building and, through ancient trade routes, was connected to other civilizations, their ideas, resources and diseases. More isolated parts of the world lacking the crops, animals or geographic conditions, did not develop so. The Roman script and a common religion helped spread ideas while, unlike imperial China, fragmented political boundaries fostered competition and innovation.

Yuval Harari credits ‘values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature’ – crucially capitalism and western science. While the ideologies of the Ottomans, Ming China and Mughal India promoted continuity and stability, those of England, France and Spain favoured ambition and greed.

Before 1492, the world’s civilizations were sure they knew the world.  Christianity, Islam, Confucianism or Buddhism provided answers to all the world’s mysteries with little room for the unknown. The Medieval worldview was strict and stagnant. Then, Colombus discovered the New World. A generation later, Amerigo Vespucci suggested the discovery was not Asia, as Colombus believed, but a new continent altogether.

Vespucci’s realisation taught Europeans a valuable lesson; admission of ignorance. For the first time, cartographers now printed maps with blank spaces – an open invitation for the intrepid. While the more advanced empires of India and China dismissed these discoveries and remained convinced they were the respective centres of the universe, states like Spain and Portugal embarked on an Age of Discovery. Hunger for knowledge, as much as land and wealth, drove the explorers of that age.

Capitalism was significant, for economies based on credit, not gold, can multiply wealth. Journeys across the world, colonies and railroads would not have been possible without investment banking, loans, interest and shares. Nor would the transatlantic slave trade.

A feedback loop resulted: science brings better technology, technology brings conquest, conquest brings wealth, wealth invests in science and so on. By extracting wealth from the rest of the world, European empires only increased their power. The more they developed, the more the technology gap, and their hubris, grew.

The factors involved in springing that feedback loop are too variant to attribute to simple determinism – geography, environment, economics,  accident and circumstance all played their part.

Sources: Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

See Also: 

• Empire
• What Makes an Animal Domesticatable?
• The 1769 Transit of Venus

Were We Better off as Hunter-Gatherers?

Humanity has come a long way. Since agriculture revolutionised life 10,000 years ago we have traded our tents and caves for high rise apartments and megacities. We have subjected the elements to our will and multiplied to the billions. Yet despite all mankind’s accomplishments, our neurology remains very much hunter-gatherer and ill-suited to the modern world. Is civilization worth it? Were we better off in our natural state?

Our ancestors worked less. Today’s hunter-gatherers in the Arctic Circle and Kalahari Desert ‘work’ an average of forty hours a week. They only live in such hostile climates, however, because more numerous farmers forced them from choicer lands thousands of years ago.  Ancient hunter-gatherers living in bountiful forests or river valleys laboured far less.  The work our foraging ancestors did perform, whether a day’s hunt, exploring new lands or sharpening spearheads around the campfire, was more exciting and fulfilling than sitting all day at an office or factory.

Hunter-gatherers enjoyed nutritious diets. Instead of dairy and grain, products of the Agricultural Revolution, they lived off wild fruit, fish, and meat, free from excess calories, sugar or saturated fat.  They were fit too; in contrast to our sedentary lifestyles where we get by with minimal physical exertion and pass on our ‘unremarkable genes’, hunter-gatherers were constantly on the move and used all parts of their body. The average Stone Age human was as fit as an Olympic athlete. As foragers were not reliant on a single food source like wheat, rice or potatoes, famine was almost unheard of.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were disease-free. Epidemics proliferate when dense numbers of humans concentrate in one place.  Sure, isolated forager bands lack immunity to modern diseases but before the Agricultural Revolution, said diseases did not exist. Hunter-gatherers do not require sewerage because there are so few of them while a lack of inter-connectivity impedes the spread of epidemics. 

Life expectancy of today’s hunter-gatherers is 30-40 years, 60 if discounting infant mortality. Though far healthier than a medieval peasant, our ancestors still lacked modern medicine. Serious injury could be a death sentence.

Like modern hunter-gatherers, our ancestors lived in tight-knit groups of 40-50 people (bands). Some bands were monogamous, others practised free love and collective parenting. All shared intense bonds within their community, however. Contact with other groups was minimal, and bands could go years without meeting outsiders. In contrast, we meet thousands of people in a lifetime. Ancient foragers valued strong social bonds more than possessions or ‘success’. As hunter-gatherers owned only what they could carry, there was noticeably less hierarchy or inequality.

I have previously discussed on this blog that hunter-gatherers are generally more violent than settled, industrial societies. Ancient foragers could easily flee from violent neighbours to new and uninhabited lands, however, a luxury not afforded to their modern counterparts. Intra-band violence depends on social customs and the temperament of its members. Without states to govern them, foragers lacked codified laws to restrict human behaviour and protect the needy. The tradeoff? They were free.

According to Genesis, Adam and Eve lived in ignorant bliss. According to Thomas Hobbes, life in the state of nature was ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ Our ancestors lived in a more violent and dangerous world than modern affluent societies, if not previous centuries, and few of their babies survived. Those that did, however, grew to be fitter, healthier and better-connected adults.

Conversely, we have far more possessions, knowledge and opportunities at our disposal. Life may be safer, easier and more comfortable than it has ever been but advertising and mass media constantly remind us how it could be better. What is happiness other than subjective well-being measured against expectations? Some scholars suggest nothing could surpass ‘the wild excitement and sheer joy experienced by a forager band on a successful mammoth hunt’. Ignorance is bliss. Given our psychological makeup has yet to catch up with the rapid change in life over the past 10,000 years, they could be right. ‘Happier’ and ‘better off’, however, are difficult concepts to define – it all depends on what you value.

Sources: Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Phys.org

See Also:

• How Violent are Hunter-Gatherers?
• Ainu
• Apache
• Fuegians
• Haida
• Inuit
• Plains Nations
• Ruc
• Sentinelese

What Makes an Animal Domesticatable?

Why don’t we farm hippopotamuses for their meat? They are fat enough. Why can we ride horses but not zebras? Why did humans domesticate some animals but fail with others?

In Chapter 9 of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Zebras and Unhappy Marriages, Jared Diamond describes the ‘Anna Karenina Principle.’ That is: ‘Domesticatable animals are alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.’ For an animal to be domesticated it must meet a strict set of criteria. Any animal not meeting them cannot be domesticated.

1. Diet. Domestic animals must be fed en masse for cheap. Carnivores and picky herbivores who cannot eat grass or grain fall short.
2. Growth rate. Domesticated animals must grow quickly to be worth raising. While elephants and gorillas take 15 years to reach full size, a cow takes two.
3. Problems of captive breeding. Many animals refuse to mate in captivity and thus cannot be bred.
4. Nasty disposition. Aggressive animals cannot be domesticated. We cannot ride zebras, for example, because zebras are wild and vicious. In zoos they bite more people than tigers. Wild hippopotamuses kill more people than crocodiles.
5. Tendency to panic. Being fast, unpredictable and easily panicked, deer and antelope are too difficult to herd. Reindeer are an exception.
6. Social structure. Domesticated animals need to be comfortable in large groups and a rigid hierarchy which humans can take over. Antelope and bighorn sheep are too territorial and will fight each other instead of cooperating as domestic sheep and cattle do.

Domesticated is not the same as tamed. Many animals can be tamed, that is behaviourally modified to cooperate with humans. Domestication requires selective breeding of a new species which cooperates with and serves humans. It is how a wild boar becomes a pig.  So while elephants and horses can be used for transport and warfare, elephants are too difficult to breed in captivity and therefore cannot be domesticated. Tame elephants have to be captured from the wild.

Of the 148 species of large herbivores which could provide food and/or transport to humans, only 14 are domesticated:

• sheep (descended from the mouflon sheep, Middle East)
• goat (bezoar goat, Middle East)
• cow (aurochs, Eurasia/North Africa)
• pig (wild boar, Eurasia/North Africa)
• horse (Ukraine)
• Arabian camel (Middle East/ North Africa)
• Bactrian camel (Central Asia)
• llama/alpaca (guanaco, Andes)
• donkey (African wild ass, North Africa)
• reindeer (northern Eurasia)
• water buffalo (China/Southeast Asia)
• yak (Himalayas)
• Bali cattle (banteng, Southeast Asia)
• mithan/gayal (guar, India/Southeast Asia)

Dogs, although not ‘large’ or herbivorous, tick the boxes. Jared Diamond argues that, like pigs, dogs are in fact omnivores.

The benefits of domestication are many. Some of the above serve as beasts of burden, others a source of clothing or milk. All could be eaten, allowing for bigger populations. Warriors on horseback held a massive advantage over those on foot.

There is a correlation between where these species originated and where human civilization developed. 13 of the 14 domestic herbivores originated in Eurasia and only one (llamas) in South America. Australia, North America and southern Africa had none.  It is no coincidence that five domesticatable species originated in the Middle East, the cradle of civilization. However, it was not only animals; the distribution of wild grains was also a deciding factor in where the first civilizations were born.

Sources: Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies