the beginnings of civilization, 10,000–1150 b c e · 2019. 2. 20. · 12 chapter 1 the beginnings...

The Beginnings of Civilization,

10,000–1150 B.C.E.

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� Defining Civilization, Defining Western Civilization� Mesopotamia: Kingdoms, Empires, and Conquests

� Egypt: The Empire of the Nile

IN 1991 HIKERS TOILING ACROSS A GLACIER IN THE ALPSBETWEEN AUSTRIA AND Italy made a startling discovery:a man’s body stuck in the ice. They alerted thepolice, who soon turned the corpse over to archae-ologists. The scientists determined that the middle-aged man had frozen to death about 5,300 yearsago. Ötzi the Ice Man (his name comes from theÖtztal Valley where he perished) quickly became aninternational celebrity. The scientists who examinedÖtzi believe that he was a shepherd leading flocks ofsheep and goats to mountain pastures when hedied. Grains of wheat on his clothing suggested thathe lived in a farming community. Copper dust in hishair hinted that Ötzi may also have been a metal-worker, perhaps looking for ores during his journey.An arrowhead lodged in his back indicated a violentdeath, but the circumstances remain mysterious.

Ötzi’s gear was state-of-the-art for his time. Hispossessions showed deep knowledge of the naturalworld. He wore leather boots insulated with densegrasses chosen for protection against the cold. Thepouch around his waist contained stone tools andfire-lighting equipment. The wood selected for hisbow offered strength and flexibility. In his lightwooden backpack, Ötzi carried containers to hold

burning embers and dried meat and seeds to eat onthe trail. The arrows in his quiver featured a naturaladhesive that tightly bound bone and wooden pointsto the shafts. The most noteworthy find amongÖtzi’s possessions was his axe. Its handle was madeof wood, but its head was copper, a remarkable inno-vation at a time when most tools were made ofstone. Ötzi was ready for almost anything—exceptthe person who shot him in the back.

Ötzi lived at a transitional moment, at the end ofwhat archaeologists call the Neolithic Age, or “NewStone Age,” a long period of revolutionary change last-ing from about 10,000 to about 3000 B.C.E. in whichmany thousands of years of human interaction withnature led to food production through agriculture andthe domestication of animals. This chapter begins withthis most fundamental encounter of all—that betweenhumans and the natural world.

The achievement of food production lethumans develop new, settled forms of communi-ties—and then civilization itself. The growth of civ-ilization also depended on constant interactionamong communities that lived far apart. Oncepeople were settled in a region, they began trad-ing for commodities that were not available in

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their homelands. As trade routes extended overlong distances and interactions among diversepeoples proliferated, ideas and technologyspread. This chapter focuses on two questions:How did the encounters between early humansocieties create the world’s first civilizations? And,what was the relationship between these civiliza-tions and what would become the “West”?

DEFINING CIVILIZATION,DEFINING WESTERNCIVILIZATION

� What is the link between the food-producing revolution of the Neolithic era and the emergence of civilization?

ÖTZI THE ICE MANThis artist‘s recreation shows Ötzi inhis waterproof poncho carrying hisstate-of-the-art tools.


12 CHAPTER 1 The Beginnings of Civilization, 10,000–1150 B.C.E.

tion grew more complex. The labor of most peo-ple supported a small group of political, mili-tary, and religious leaders. This urban elitecontrolled not only government and warfare,but also the distribution of food and wealth.They augmented their authority by buildingmonuments to the gods and participating in reli-gious rituals that linked divinity with kingshipand military prowess. Thus, in early civilizationsfour kinds of power—military, economic, politi-cal, and religious—converged.

As Map 1.1 shows, a number of civilizationsdeveloped independently of each other across theglobe. This chapter focuses on the Mesopotamianand Egyptian civilizations because many of thecharacteristics of “Western civilization” origi-nated in these areas. The history of “Western civi-lization” thus begins not in Europe, the coreterritory of the West today, but in what we usuallycall the Middle East and what ancient historians

Anthropologists use the term culture to describeall the different ways that humans collectivelyadjust to their environment, organize their expe-riences, and transmit their knowledge to futuregenerations. Culture serves as a web of intercon-nected meanings that enable individuals tounderstand themselves and their place in theworld. Archaeologists define civilization as anurban culture with differentiated levels ofwealth, occupation, and power. One archaeolo-gist notes that the “complete checklist of civi-lization” contains “cities, warfare, writing,social hierarchies, [and] advanced arts andcrafts.”1 With cities, human populationsachieved the critical mass necessary to developspecialized occupations and a level of economicproduction high enough to sustain complex reli-gious and cultural practices—and to wage war.To record these economic, cultural, and militaryinteractions, writing developed. Social organiza-

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MAP 1.1The Beginnings of CivilizationCivilizations developed independently in India, China, central Asia, and Peru, as well as in Egypt andsouthwest Asia. Western civilization, however, is rooted in the civilizations that first emerged in Egypt and southwest Asia. Learn on MyHistoryLab


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Defining Civilization, Defining Western Civilization 13

in the Zagros Mountains in Southwest Asia. Pigs,which adapt well to human settlements becausethey eat garbage, were first domesticated around7000 B.C.E. By around 6500 B.C.E., domesticationhad become widespread.

Farming and herding were hard work, butthe payoff was enormous. Even simple agricul-tural methods could produce about 50 timesmore food than hunting and gathering. Thanksto the increased food supply, more newbornssurvived past infancy. Populations expanded,and so did human settlements. With the masteryof food production, human societies developedthe mechanisms not only to feed themselves, butalso to produce a surplus, which allowed for eco-nomic specialization and fostered the growth ofsocial, political, and religious hierarchies.

The First Food-Producing CommunitiesThe world’s first food-producing communitiesemerged in southwest Asia. People began cultivat-ing food in three separate areas, shown onMap 1.2. Archaeologists have named the first areathe Levantine Corridor (also known as the FertileCrescent)—a 25-mile-wide strip of land that runsfrom the Jordan River valley of modern Israel andPalestine to the Euphrates River valley in today’sIraq.† The second region was the hilly land north ofMesopotamia at the base of the Zagros Mountains.The third was Anatolia, or what is now Turkey.

The small settlement of Abu Hureyra near thecenter of the Levantine Corridor illustrates howagriculture developed. Humans first settled herearound 9500 B.C.E. They fed themselves primarilyby hunting gazelles and gathering wild cereals.But sometime between 8000 and 7700 B.C.E., theybegan to plant and harvest grains. Eventually theydiscovered that crop rotation—planting differentcrops in a field each year—resulted in a muchhigher yield. By 7000 B.C.E. Abu Hureyra hadgrown into a farming community, covering nearly30 acres that sustained a population of about 400.

call the “Near East.”* By 2500 B.C.E., when, as wewill see, city-states in Mesopotamia formed aflourishing civilization and Egypt’s Old Kingdomwas well-developed, Europeans still lived only inscattered agricultural communities. Without thecritical mass of people and possessions thataccompanied city life, early Europeans did notdevelop the specialized religious, economic, andpolitical classes that characterize a civilization.

Making Civilization Possible: The Food-Producing RevolutionFor more than the first 175,000 years of their exis-tence, modern humans, known as Homo sapienssapiens (“most intelligent people”), did not pro-duce food. Between 200,000 and 100,000 yearsago, Homo sapiens sapiens first appeared in Africaand began to spread to other continents. Scientistsrefer to this stage of human history as the Pale-olithic Age, or Old Stone Age, because peoplemade tools by cracking rocks and using their sharpedges to cut and chop. These early peoples scav-enged for wild food and followed migrating herdsof animals. They also created beautiful works ofart by carving bone and painting on cave walls. By45,000 years ago, these humans had reached mostof Earth’s habitable regions.

The end of the last Ice Age about 15,000years ago ushered in an era of momentouschange: the food-producing revolution. As theEarth’s climate became warmer, cereal grassesspread over large areas. Hunter-gatherers learnedto collect these wild grains and grind them up forfood. When people learned that the seeds of wildgrasses could be transplanted and grown in newareas, the cultivation of plants was underway.

People also began domesticating pigs, sheep,goats, and cattle, which eventually replaced wildgame as the main sources of meat. The first signsof goat domestication occurred about 8900 B.C.E.

*Terms such as the “Near East,” the “Middle East,” and the“Far East”—China, Japan, and Korea—betray their West-ern European origins. For someone in India, say, or Russiaor Australia, neither Mesopotamia nor Egypt is located tothe “east.”

†The term Levant refers to the eastern Mediterranean coastalregion. “Levant” comes from the French: “the rising [sun]”—in other words, the territory to the east, where the sun rises.


A few generations later, the inhabitants of AbuHureyra began herding sheep and goats to supple-ment their meat supply. These domesticated ani-mals became the community’s primary source ofmeat when the gazelle herds were depleted about6500 B.C.E.

Families in Abu Hureyra lived in small, rectan-gular dwellings containing several rooms. Archaeo-logical evidence shows that many women in thecommunity developed arthritis in their knees, prob-ably from crouching for hours on end to grindgrains. Thus, we assume that while men hunted andharvested, women prepared food. The division oflabor along gender lines indicates a growing com-plexity of social relations within the community.

Similar patterns of agricultural developmentcharacterized the early histories of other regionsin southwest Asia. By 6000 B.C.E., for example,the Anatolian town of Çatal Hüyük (meaning“Fork Mound”) consisted of 32 acres of tightlypacked rectangular mud houses that the towns-people rebuilt more than a dozen times as theirpopulation expanded. By 6700 B.C.E. about 6,000people lived in houses built so closely togetherthat residents could only enter their homes by

walking along the rooftops and climbing down aladder set in the smoke hole. Such a set-up, whilephysically uncomfortable, also strengthenedÇatal Hüyük’s security from outside attack.

Archaeologists have uncovered about 40rooms that served as religious shrines. The paint-ings and engravings on the walls of these roomsfocus on the two main concerns of ancientsocieties: fertility and death. In these scenes, vul-tures scavenge on human corpses while womengive birth to bulls (associated with virility).These shrines also contain statues of goddesseswhose exaggerated breasts and buttocks indicatethe importance of fertility rites in the villagers’religious rituals.

Only a wealthy community could allow somepeople to work as artists or priests rather than asfarmers, and Çatal Hüyük was wealthy by thestandards of its era. Much of its wealth rested ontrade in obsidian. This volcanic stone was the mostimportant commodity in the Neolithic Agebecause it could be used to make sharp-edged toolssuch as arrowheads, spear points, and sickles forharvesting crops. Çatal Hüyük controlled theobsidian trade from Anatolia to the Levantine

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The Beginnings of Food Production

MAP 1.2The Beginnings of FoodProductionThis map shows early farmingsites where the first knownproduction of food occurredin ancient southwest Asia.

Learn on MyHistoryLab



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Defining Civilization, Defining Western Civilization 15

Corridor. With increasing wealth came wideningsocial differences. While most of the burial sites atÇatal Hüyük showed little variation, a few corpseswere buried with jewelry and other riches, a prac-tice that indicates the beginning of distinctionsbetween wealthy and poor members of the society.

The long-distance obsidian trade thatunderlay Çatal Hüyük’s wealth also sped upthe development of other food-producing com-munities in the Levantine Corridor, the ZagrosMountains, and Anatolia. These trade networksof the Neolithic Age laid the foundation for thecommercial and cultural encounters that fos-tered the world’s first civilization.

Transformations in EuropeIn all of these developments, Europe remained farbehind. The colder and wetter European climatemeant heavier soils that were harder to cultivatethan those in the Near East. The food-producingrevolution that began in southwest Asia around8000 B.C.E. did not spread to Europe for anotherthousand years, when farmers, probably from Ana-tolia, ventured to northern Greece and the Balkans.Settled agricultural communities had become thenorm in southwest Asia by 6000 B.C.E., but notuntil about 2500 B.C.E. did most of Europe’s hunt-ing and gathering cultures give way to small, widelydispersed farming communities. (See Map 1.3.)

CHRONOLOGY: THE FOUNDATIONS OF CIVILIZATION

150,000 years ago Modern humans first appear in Africa45,000 years ago Modern humans spread through Africa, Asia, and Europe15,000 years ago Ice Age ends11,000 years ago Food production begins in southwest Asia9,500–3,000 years ago Settled villages, domesticated plants and animals, and long-distance trade

appear in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt

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Megalith buildersEarly agricultural areas

MAP 1.3Neolithic Cultures inEuropeDuring the Neolithic period,new cultures developed asmost of the peoples of Europechanged their way of lifefrom hunting and gatheringto food production. Trade andwarfare constructed networksof village communities, buttwo key components ofcivilization—writing and cities—did not emerge inthese centuries.



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As farmers and herders spread acrossEurope, people adapted to different climates andterrain. A variety of cultures evolved from thesedifferences but most shared the same basic char-acteristics: Early Europeans farmed a range ofcrops and herded domesticated animals. Theylived in villages, clusters of permanent familyfarmsteads. Jewelry and other luxury goods leftin women’s graves might indicate that these vil-lage societies granted high status to women,perhaps because these communities traced ances-try through mothers.

Two important technological shifts ushered insignificant economic or social change in these earlyEuropean groups. The first was metallurgy, the artof using fire to shape metals. Knowledge of metal-lurgy spread slowly across Europe from theBalkans, where people started to mine copperabout 4500 B.C.E. Jewelry made from copper andgold became coveted luxury goods. As trade inmetals flourished, long-distance trading networks

evolved. These networks provided the basis for themeeting and blending of different groups of peo-ples and different cultural assumptions and ideas.

The introduction of the plow was the secondsignificant technological development for earlyEurope. The plow, invented in Mesopotamia inthe late fifth or early fourth millennium B.C.E.,became widely used in Europe around 2600B.C.E. The use of plows meant that fewer peoplewere needed to cultivate Europe’s heavy soils.With more people available to clear forest lands,farming communities expanded and multiplied,as did opportunities for individual initiative andthe accumulation of wealth.

As a result of these developments—and ashad occurred much earlier in the Near East—thesocial structure within European villages becamemore stratified, with growing divisions betweenthe rich and the poor. From the evidence ofweaponry buried in graves, we know that the war-rior emerged as a dominant figure in these early

STONEHENGEThis megalithic monument in southern England consists of two circles of standing stoneswith large blocks capping the circles. It was built without the aid of wheeled vehicles ormetal tools, and the stones were dragged from many miles away.


Mesopotamia: Kingdoms, Empires, and Conquests 17

European societies. With the growing emphasis onmilitary power, women’s status may have declined.

These early Europeans constructed enduringmonuments that offer tantalizing glimpses of theircultural practices and religious beliefs. Around4000 B.C.E. Europeans began building communaltombs with huge stones called megaliths. Mega-liths were constructed from Scandinavia to Spainand on islands in the western Mediterranean. Thebest-known megalith construction is Stonehengein England. People began to build Stonehengeabout 3000 B.C.E. as a ring of pits. The first stonecircle of “bluestones,” hauled all the way from theWelsh hills, was constructed about 2300 B.C.E.Only an advanced level of engineering expertise,combined with a high degree of organization oflabor, made such construction possible.

The purpose of these magnificent construc-tions remains controversial. Some archaeologistsargue that Stonehenge was used to measure themovement of stars, the sun, and the planets. Oth-ers view it as principally a place for religious cer-emonies. Recent excavations suggest a thirdpossibility: Stonehenge may have been a complexdevoted to healing ceremonies. All three theoriescould be correct, for ancient peoples commonlyassociated healing and astronomical observationwith religious belief and practice.

If we recall the “complete checklist” needed fora civilization—“cities, warfare, writing, social hier-archies, [and] advanced arts and crafts”2—we cansee that by 1600 B.C.E., Europeans had checked offall of these requirements except cities and writing—both crucial for building human civilizations. Therest of this chapter, then, will focus not on Europe,but on the dramatic developments in southwestAsia and Egypt from the sixth millenium B.C.E. on.

MESOPOTAMIA: KINGDOMS,EMPIRES, AND CONQUESTS

� What changes and continuities characterizedMesopotamian civilization between theemergence of Sumer’s city-states and the riseof Hammurabi’s Babylonian empire?

Long before the early Europeans living inBritain began to build Stonehenge, the first civ-ilization and the world’s first empires emergedon the Mesopotamian floodplain. Standing atthe junction of the three continents of Africa,Asia, and Europe, southwest Asia became themeeting place of peoples, technologies, andideas.

The Sumerian KingdomsAbout 5300 B.C.E. the villages in Sumer in south-ern Mesopotamia began a dynamic civilizationthat would flourish for thousands of years. Thekey to Sumerian civilization was water. Withouta regular water supply, villages and cities couldnot have survived in Sumer. The nameMesopotamia, an ancient Greek word, means“the land between the rivers.” Nestled betweenthe Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Sumerian civi-lization developed as its peoples learned to con-trol the rivers that both enabled and imperiledhuman settlement.

The Tigris and Euphrates are unpredictablewater sources, prone to sudden, powerful, anddestructive flooding. Sumerian villagers firstbuilt their own levees for flood protection anddug their own small channels to divert floodwa-ters from the two great rivers to irrigate their drylands. Then they discovered that by combiningthe labor force of several villages, they couldbuild and maintain levee systems and irrigationchannels on a large scale. Villages merged intocities that became the foundation of Sumeriancivilization, as centralized administrations devel-oped to manage the dams, levees, and irrigationcanals; to direct the labor needed to maintainand expand the water works; and to distributethe resources that the system produced.

By 2500 B.C.E., about 13 major city-states—perhaps as many as 35 in all—managed theMesopotamian floodplain in an organized fash-ion. (See Map 1.4.) In Sumer’s city-states, theurban center directly controlled the surroundingcountryside. Uruk, “the first city in human his-tory,”3 covered about two square miles and hada population of approximately 50,000 people,



including both city-dwellers and the peasantsliving in small villages in a radius of about tenmiles around the city.

Sumer’s cities served as economic centerswhere craft specialists such as potters, toolmak-ers, and weavers gathered to swap informationand trade goods. Long-distance trade, made eas-ier by the introduction of wheeled carts, enabledmerchants to bring timber, ores, building stone,and luxury items unavailable in southernMesopotamia from Anatolia, the Levantine Cor-ridor, Afghanistan, and Iran.

Within each city-state, an elite group of res-idents regulated economic life. Uruk and the

other Sumerian city-states were redistributiveeconomies. In this type of economic system, thecentral authority (such as the king) controlledthe agricultural resources and “redistributed”them to his people (in an unequal fashion!).Archaeologists excavating Uruk have foundmillions of bevel-rimmed bowls, all the samesize and shape—and, as the archaeologistRobert Wenke notes, “surely one of the ugliestceramic types ever made outside a kinder-garten.”4 One theory is that the bowls wereration bowls—containers in which workersreceived their daily ration of grain. What iscertain is that the bowls were mass-produced,

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MAP 1.4Kingdoms and Empires in Southwest AsiaBetween 3000 and 1500 B.C.E., the Sumerian city-states, Sargon’s Akkadian Empire, and Hammurabi’s empire inBabylon emerged in southwest Asia. Learn on MyHistoryLab


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and that only a powerful central authoritycould organize such mass production.

In the earliest era of Sumerian history, tem-ple priests constituted this central authority.Sumerians believed that their city belonged to agod or goddess: The god owned all the lands andwater, and the god’s priests, who lived with him(or her) in the temple, administered theseresources on the god’s behalf. In practice, thismeant that the priests collected exorbitant taxesin the forms of goods (grains, livestock, andmanufactured products such as textiles) andservices (laboring on city building and irrigationprojects), and in return provided food rations forthe workers from these collections.

As Sumer’s city-states expanded, a new formof authority emerged. The ruins of monumentalpalaces as well as temples testify to the appearanceof powerful royal households that joined the tem-ple priesthood in managing the resources of thecity-state. Historians theorize that as city-states

expanded, competition for landincreased. Such competition ledto warfare, and during warfare,military leaders amassed powerand eventually, became kings.

The king’s power rested onhis military might. Yet to retainthe people’s loyalty and obedi-ence, a king also needed reli-gious legitimacy. Kingship,then, quickly became a key partof Sumerian religious tradi-tions. Sumerians believed that“kingship descended fromheaven,” that the king ruled onthe god’s behalf. According to aSumerian proverb, “Man is theshadow of god, but the king isgod’s reflection.”5 To challengethe king was to challenge thegods—never a healthy choice.The royal household and thetemple priesthood thus workedtogether to exploit the labor oftheir subjects and amass power

and wealth. Religious and political life werethoroughly intertwined.

Although the Sumerian city-states did notunite politically—and, in fact, frequently foughteach other—a number of factors created a singleSumerian culture. First, the kings maintaineddiplomatic relations with one another and withrulers throughout southwest Asia and Egypt, pri-marily to protect their trading networks. Thesetrade networks also helped tie the Sumeriancities together and fostered a common Sumerianculture. Second, the city-states shared the samepantheon of gods. The surviving documentsreveal that Sumerians in the different city-statessang the same hymns, used the same incantationsto protect themselves from evil spirits, andoffered their children the same proverbialnuggets of advice and warning. They did so,however, in two different languages—Sumerian,unrelated to any other known language, andAkkadian, a member of the Semitic languagefamily that includes Hebrew and Arabic.

BEVEL-RIMMED BOWLSThese bowls, found in abundance at Uruk, were mass-produced with amold rather than a wheel. Porous, they cannot hold liquids, but ratherwere most likely used to carry the laborer’s daily wages in grain.



The Akkadian Empire of Sargon the GreatThe political independence of the Sumerian city-states ended around 2340 B.C.E. when they wereconquered by a warrior who took the name Sar-gon (“true king”) and built a capital city at Agade(or Akkad), the ruins of which may rest under themodern city of Baghdad. With the reign of Sargon(ca. 2340–ca. 2305 B.C.E.), the history ofMesopotamia took a sharp turn. Sargon createdthe first empire in history. The term empire identi-fies a kingdom or state that controls foreign terri-tories, either on the same continent or overseas.Except for relatively brief periods of fragmenta-tion, imperial rule became the standard form ofpolitical statehood in southwest Asia for millen-nia. Because an empire, by definition, bringstogether different peoples, it serves as a cauldronof cultural encounters. As we will see, suchencounters often transformed not only the con-quered peoples, but the conquerors themselves.

Map 1.4 shows that the empire Sargon builtembraced a string of territories running far westup the Euphrates River toward the Mediter-ranean. Sargon was probably the first ruler inhistory to create a standing army, one that waslarger than any yet seen in the Near East. Thisformidable fighting force certainly helps explainhow he conquered so many peoples. To meldthese peoples into an empire, however, requirednot only military power but also innovativeorganizational skills. The formerly independentSumerian city rulers became Sargon’s governors,required to send a portion of all taxes collectedto Akkad. Akkadian became the new adminis-trative language, and a standard measurementand dating system was imposed to make record-keeping more efficient.

Raising the revenues to meet the costs of run-ning this enormous empire was vital. Akkadianmonarchs generated revenues in several ways.They, of course, taxed their people. Hence, theMesopotamian proverb: “There are lords and thereare kings, but the real person to fear is the tax col-lector.”6 They also leased out their vast farmlandsand required conquered people to pay regular

tribute. In addition, Akkadian kings depended onthe revenue generated by commerce. They placedheavy taxes on raw materials imported from for-eign lands. In fact, most Akkadian kings madelong-distance trade the central objective of theirforeign policy. They sent military expeditions as faras Anatolia and Iran to obtain timber, metals, andluxury goods. Akkadian troops protected interna-tional trade routes and managed the maritime tradein the Persian Gulf, where merchants broughtgoods by ship from India and southern Arabia.

Akkadian troops also waged war. Warfareduring this era changed with the use of twonew military technologies. The composite bowboosted the killing power of archers. Multiplelayers of wood from different types of trees aswell as bone and sinew added to the tensilestrength of the bow and so increased the dis-tance an arrow could fly and the speed atwhich it did so. The second important militaryinnovation was an early form of the chariot, aheavy four-wheeled cart that carried a driverand a spearman. Mounted on fixed wheels (andso incapable of swift turns) and pulled by don-keys (the faster horse did not come into useuntil the second millennium), the early chariotmust have been a slow, clumsy instrument. Yetit proved effective in breaking up enemyinfantry formations.

The cities of Mesopotamia prospered underAkkadian rule. Even so, Akkadian rulers couldnot hold their empire together for reasons thathistorians do not completely understand. Oneolder explanation is that marauding tribes fromthe Zagros Mountains infiltrated the kingdomand caused tremendous damage. More recentresearch suggests that civil war tore apart theempire. Regardless of the cause, Akkadian kingslost control of their lands, and a period of anar-chy began about 2250 B.C.E. “Who was king?Who was not king?” lamented a writer duringthis time of troubles. After approximately a cen-tury of chaos, the kingdom finally collapsed.Sargon, however, lived on in the memories andfolk tales of the peoples of southwest Asia as themodel of the mighty king.



The Ur III Dynasty and the Rise of AssyriaWith the fall of Akkad, the cities of Sumerregained their independence, but they weresoon—and forcibly—reunited under Ur-Nammu(r. ca. 2112–ca. 2095 B.C.E.), king of the Sumeriancity of Ur, located far to the south of Akkad.Ur-Nammu established a powerful dynasty thatlasted for five generations.

The Ur III dynasty (as it is called) developedan administrative bureaucracy even more elabo-rate than that of Sargon. Like all bureaucracies,it generated vast amounts of documents—wehave more documentary sources for the Ur III erathan for any other in ancient southwest Asia.Local elites, who served as the king’s governors,administered the empire’s 20 provinces. Toassure their loyalty, they were often bound to theking by ties of marriage. As governors, theselocals controlled the temple estates, maintained

the canal system, and acted as the highest judgein the province. Significantly, they did not con-trol the military. Ur III’s kings set up a separatemilitary administration and made sure that thegenerals assigned to each province came fromsomewhere else. In this way, the king could besure that the general owed his allegiance to theroyal household, not to the local elite. Ur’s kingsalso strengthened their power by assuming thestatus of gods. Royal officials encouraged thepeople to give their children names such as“Shulgi is my god” to remind them of the king’sdivine authority.

Despite their sophisticated bureaucratic appa-ratus and their claims to divinity, the kings of Urproved unable to stave off political fragmentationindefinitely. Rebellions increased in size andtempo. About 2000 B.C.E., semi-nomadic peoplesknown as Amorites began invading Mesopotamiafrom the steppes to the west and north. The

THE SUMERIANS AT WARThis Sumerian battle wagon, a heavy four-wheeled cart pulled by donkeys, appears on the“Standard of Ur” (ca. 2500 B.C.E.). Excavated in the 1920s, the “Standard” is actually awooden box, about 8.5 × 20 inches, with an inlaid mosaic of shells, red limestone, and lapislazuli. One panel of the mosaic depicts a Sumerian war scene, the other a banquet; hence,archaeologists have labeled the panels “War” and “Peace.”


Amorites seized fortified towns, taking food andsupplies and causing widespread destruction.Their invasions destabilized the economy. Peas-ants fled from the fields, and with no food or rev-enues, inflation and famine overcame the empire.Ur collapsed, and Mesopotamia shattered againinto a scattering of squabbling cities.

Assyria and BabyloniaFor a long period, the political unity Sargon forgedin Mesopotamia remained elusive, as states andpeoples fought each other for control. This periodof political fragmentation allowed for an impor-tant development: a partial “privatization” of theMesopotamian economy, as individuals began totrade on their own behalf. Not connected in anyway to the temple or the palace and, therefore,outside the redistributive economy, many of thesefree people grew prosperous. Merchants travelingby land and sea brought textiles, metals, and lux-ury items such as gold and silver jewelry and gemsfrom lands bordering the Mediterranean andalong the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.

Assyrian merchants, for example, developedan elaborate trade network linking the city-stateof Assur with Anatolia. (See Map 1.4.) In Assur,they loaded up donkey caravans with tin andtextiles for an arduous 50-day journey to thesouthern Anatolian city of Kanesh. (The surviv-ing documentation is so detailed that we knowthat each donkey carried 150 pounds of tin or 30textiles weighing about five pounds each.) Oncethey arrived in Kanesh, the merchants sold thedonkeys, exchanged their merchandise for silverand gold, and headed back to Assur. Meanwhile,Assyrian merchants stationed in Kanesh soldthe tin and textiles throughout Anatolia. Theenterprise was risky—a storm, bandits, or a sickdonkey could imperil it—but the profits werehuge: 50–100 percent annually. Building on thiseconomic prosperity, Assur (or Assyria) flour-ished as a powerful city-state until one of themost powerful empire-builders in the history ofancient southwest Asia reduced its power.

By 1780 B.C.E., the kingdom of Babylonhad become a mighty empire under Hammurabi

(r. 1792–1750 B.C.E.). Hammurabi neverentirely conquered Assyria, but he dominatedMesopotamian affairs. Like Ur-Nammu and Sar-gon, Hammurabi developed a centralized admin-istration to direct irrigation and building projectsand to foster commerce throughout his realm.Both his law code (discussed later in this chapter)and his surviving letters to his royal agents revealthat no detail of economic life was too small forHammurabi’s notice. In one letter, for example,he ordered his agent to give “a fallow field that isof good quality and lies near the water, to Sin-imguranni, the seal-cutter.”7 Hammurabi didnot, however, reverse the partial “privatization”of the economy that had developed during theera of political fragmentation. Babylonian soci-ety contained a prospering private sector of mer-chants, craftspeople, farmers, and sailors.Hammurabi liked to think of himself as a benev-olent ruler, a kind of protective father. Hedeclared, “I held the people of the lands ofSumer and Akkad safely on my lap.”8

Nevertheless, Hammurabi and his succes-sors imposed heavy taxes on their subjects.These financial demands provoked resentment,and when Hammurabi died, many Babylonianprovinces successfully revolted. The loss ofrevenue weakened the Babylonian imperial gov-ernment. By 1650, Hammurabi’s empire hadshrunk to northern Babylon, the territory Ham-murabi had inherited when he first becameking. Hammurabi’s successors remained incontrol of northern Babylon for another fivegenerations, but by 1400 B.C.E., a new people,the Kassites, ruled the kingdom.

Cultural Continuities: The Transmission of Mesopotamian CulturesAlthough the rise and fall of kingdoms andempires punctuated the political history ofMesopotamia between the emergence of Sumeriancivilization in 5300 B.C.E. and the collapse of Baby-lon in 1500 B.C.E., Mesopotamian culture exhib-ited remarkable continuity. Over these millennia,



Sumerian religious values, architectural styles, lit-erary forms, and other cultural concepts wereabsorbed, transformed, and passed on by the vari-ous peoples they encountered in both commerceand conquest.

THE MESOPOTAMIAN WORLD VIEW: RELIGIONReligion—powerfully influenced by Mesopotamia’svolatile climate—played a central role in the Sumer-ian and, hence, the wider Mesopotamian worldview. The Sumerians did not tend to think of theirgods as loving or forgiving. Sumerian civilizationarose on a floodplain subject to extreme and unpre-dictable climate conditions, with results rangingfrom devastating drought to torrential floods.Sumerians knew firsthand the famine and destruc-tion that could result from sudden rainstorms, vio-lent winds, or a flash flood They envisioned each ofthese natural forces as an unpredictable god who,like a human king or queen, was often unfair andhad to be pleased and appeased:

The sin I have committed I know not;The forbidden thing I have done I do not

know.Some god has turned his rage against me;Some goddess has aimed her ire.I cry for help but no one takes my hand.9

Sumer’s religion was polytheistic. Sumeriansbelieved that many gods controlled their destinies.In the Sumerian pantheon, the all-powerfulking Anu, the father of the gods, ruled the sky. Enlilwas master of the wind and guided humans in theproper use of force. Enki governed the Earth andrivers and guided human creativity and inventions.Inanna was the goddess of love, sex, fertility,and warfare. These gods continued to dominateMesopotamian culture long after Sumer’s cities losttheir political independence. After Hammurabi con-quered most of Mesopotamia, Babylon’s city-godMarduk joined the pantheon as a major deity.

Because the priests conducted the sacrificesthat appeased the often-angry gods, the priest-hood dominated Mesopotamian culture as didthe temples in which they served and the gods towhom they sacrificed. In the center of every

Sumerian city stood the temple complex, com-prising temples to various gods, buildings tohouse the priests and priestesses, storage facilitiesfor the sacrificial gifts, and looming over it all,the ziggurat. As the photograph of the ziggurat ofUr reveals, ziggurats were enormous square orrectangular temples with a striking stair-stepdesign. Ur’s ziggurat, built around 2100 B.C.E. byUr-Nammu, had a 50-foot high base, on whichthree stairways, each of 100 steps, led to the maingateways. The top of Ur’s ziggurat did not sur-vive, but in Ur-Nammu’s time, a central staircasewould have led upward to a temple.

Ur-Nammu built Ur’s ziggurat to house thechief god of the city. The Sumerians believed thatone god or goddess protected each city, and thatthe city should serve as an earthly model of thegod’s divine home. Towering over the city, thedeity’s ziggurat reminded all the inhabitants ofthe omnipresent gods who controlled not onlytheir commerce, but their very destiny.


ZIGGURAT OF URBuilt of mud-brick, the Ziggurat of Ur was the focalpoint of religious life in the city. This vast temple wasbuilt by King Ur-Nammu of the Third Dynasty(2112–2095 B.C.E.) and restored by the Britisharchaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley, in the 1930s.


THE MESOPOTAMIAN WORLDVIEW: SCIENCE?Struggling to survive within an often hostile envi-ronment, Mesopotamians sought to understandand control their world through the practice ofdivination. To “divine”—to discern or to“read”—the future, a local wise woman or apriest looked for the messages imprinted in thenatural world, such as in the entrails of a deadanimal or in an unusual natural event. Once aperson knew what the future was to hold, he orshe could then work to change it. If the omenswere bad, for example, a man could seek toappease the god by offering a sacrifice.

Divination and religious sacrifice seem tohave little to do with science—and in Westernculture in the twenty-first century, “religion” and“science” are often viewed as opposing or at leastseparate realms. Yet the Mesopotamian practiceof divination helped shape a “proto-scientific”attitude toward the world. Much of divinationconsisted of “if . . . then . . .” equations:

If a horse attempts to mount a cow, thenthere will be a decline in the land.

If a man’s chest-hair curls upward, he willbecome a slave.

If the gallbladder [of the sacrificial sheep] isstripped of the hepatic duct, the armyof the king will suffer thirst during amilitary campaign.10

Such statements seem silly, not scientific. Yetthey rest on one of the fundamentals of modernscience: close observation of the naturalworld. Only by observing and recording thenormal processes of the natural world couldMesopotamians hope to recognize the omensembedded in the abnormal. Moreover, in thepractice of divination, observation of individualevents led to the formulation of a hypothesis ofa general pattern—what we call deduction, acrucial part of scientific analysis. In their effortto discern rational patterns in the natural worldto improve the circumstances of their own lives,Mesopotamians were moving toward the begin-nings of a scientific mentality—a crucial aspectof Western civilization.

This proto-scientific understanding iseven more evident in the technological, astro-nomical, and mathematical legacy of ancientMesopotamia. Sumerians devised the potter’swheel, the wagon, and the chariot. They devel-oped detailed knowledge about the movement ofthe stars, planets, and the moon, especially asthese movements pertained to agricultural cycles,and they made impressive innovations in mathe-matics. Many Sumerian tablets show multiplica-tion tables, square and cube roots, exponents,and other practical information such as how tocalculate compound interest on loans. The Sume-rians divided the circle into 360 degrees anddeveloped a counting system based on 60 in mul-tiples of ten—a system we still use to tell time.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING Perhaps the Sume-rians’ most important cultural innovation waswriting. The Sumerians devised a unique script torecord their language. Historians call the symbolsthat Sumerians pressed onto clay tablets withsharp objects cuneiform, or wedge-shaped, writ-ing. The earliest known documents written in thislanguage come from Uruk about 3200 B.C.E. Writ-ing originated because of the demands of record-keeping. By around 4000 B.C.E., officials in Urukwere using small clay tokens of different shapes torepresent and record quantities of produce andnumbers of livestock. They placed these tokens inclay envelopes, and impressed marks on the outersurface of the envelopes to indicate the contents.By 3100 B.C.E., people stopped using tokensand simply impressed the shapes directly on a flatpiece of clay or tablet with a pointed stick or reed.

As commodities and trading became morecomplex, the number of symbols multiplied.Learning the hundreds of signs required intensivestudy. The scribes, the people who masteredthese signs, became important figures in theroyal and religious courts as their work enabledkings and priests to regulate the economic life oftheir cities. Sumerian cuneiform writing spread,and other peoples of Mesopotamia and south-west Asia began adapting it to record informa-tion in their own languages.



THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH Writing made a literarytradition possible. Sumerians told exciting sto-ries about their gods and heroes. Passed on andadapted through the ages, these stories helpedshape ideas about divine action and humanresponse throughout Mesopotamian history.

One of the most popular of these stories con-cerned the legendary king Gilgamesh of Uruk.Part god and part man, Gilgamesh harasses hissubjects. He demands sex from the youngwomen and burdens the young men with con-struction tasks. The people of Uruk beg the godsto distract this bothersome hero. The gods sendthe beastly Enkidu to fight Gilgamesh, but after aprolonged wrestling match that ends in a draw,the two become close friends and set off on aseries of adventures. The two heroes battle mon-sters and even outwit the gods. Finally the godsdecide that enough is enough and arrange forEnkidu’s death. Mourning for his stalwartfriend, Gilgamesh sets out to find the secret toliving forever. In the end, immortality eludes his

grasp. A mere mortal, Gilgamesh becomes awiser king, and his subjects benefit from his newwisdom. He realizes that while he must die, hisfame may live on, and so he seeks to leave behindhim a magnificent city that will live forever inhuman memory.

The Epic of Gilgamesh as we know it wasrecorded in Akkadian, but it is clear that the sto-ries date from long before the rise of the Akka-dian Empire. Recited and read by Mesopotamianpeoples for millennia, the Gilgamesh story’s influ-ence extended beyond the borders even of theempires of Sargon or Hammurabi. Its themes,plots, and characters reappear in revised form inthe literatures of such diverse peoples as theancient Hebrews (recorded in the Hebrew Bibleor Old Testament) and the early Greeks. Thesepeoples, however, reworked the stories in accor-dance with their own cultural values. As a Sumer-ian tale, the Epic of Gilgamesh demonstrates aMesopotamian world view in its emphasis on thecapriciousness of the gods, the hostility of nature,and the unpredictability of human existence. Itoffers no hope of heaven, only resignation to life’sunpredictability and the chance of finding somesort of reward during one’s short time on earth.

LAW AND ORDER Mesopotamian culture alsomade a lasting imprint on future societies throughanother important innovation: the code of law,preserved in written form. Archeologists have sofar uncovered three Sumerian law codes, the earli-est dating to around 2350 B.C.E. The most famouslawgiver of the ancient world was the Babylonianempire-builder Hammurabi. The Law Code ofHammurabi—282 civil, commercial, and criminallaws—is the world’s oldest complete survivingcompendium of laws. We do not know to whatextent these laws were actually implemented.Many scholars argue that the code was a kind ofpublic relations exercise, an effort by Hammurabiboth to present a social ideal and to persuade hispeople (and the gods) to view him as the “King ofJustice.” (See Justice in History in this chapter.)

What is clear is that Hammurabi’s lawsunveil the social values and everyday concerns of


CUNEIFORM TEXTSThe cuneiform, or “wedge-shaped” letters, on thisclay tablet date from about 3000 B.C.E. The tabletlists what are probably temple offerings under thecategories day one, day two, and day three.



JUSTICE IN HISTORY

Gods and Kings in Mesopotamian Justice

Mesopotamian kings placed a high priority onruling their subjects justly. Shamash, the sungod and protector of justice, named two ofhis children Truth and Fairness. In the prefaceto his law code, Hammurabi explained therelationship between his rule and divine justice:

At that time, Anu and Enlil [two of thegreatest gods], for the well-being of thepeople, called me by name, Hammurabi, thepious, god-fearing prince, and appointed meto make justice appear in the land [and] todestroy the evil and wicked, so that thestrong might not oppress the weak, [and] torise like Shamash over the black-headed peo-ple [the people of Mesopotamia].12

Mesopotamian courts handled cases involvingproperty, inheritance, boundaries, sale, and theft.A special panel of royal judges and officials han-dled cases involving the death penalty, such astreason, murder, sorcery, theft of temple goods, oradultery. Mesopotamians kept records of trials andlegal decisions on clay tablets so that others mightlearn from them and avoid additional lawsuits.

A lawsuit began when a person brought a dis-pute before a court. The court consisted of threeto six judges chosen from among the town’sleading men, such as merchants, scribes, andofficials in the town assembly. The judges couldspeak with authority about the community’s prin-ciples of justice.

Litigants spoke on their own behalf and pre-sented testimony through witnesses, written doc-uments, or statements made by leading officials.Witnesses took strict oaths to tell the truth in atemple before the statue of a god. Once theparties presented all the evidence, the judgesmade their decision and pronounced the verdictand punishment.

Sometimes the judges asked the defendants toclear themselves by letting the god in whose

THE LAW CODE OF HAMMURABIHammurabi receives the law directly from the sungod, Shamash, on this copy of the Law Code.

Source: Stele of Hammurabi. Hammurabi standing before thesun-god Shamash and 262 laws. Engraved black basalt stele.1792–1750 BCE, 1st Babylonian Dynasty. Louvre, Paris, France. (c) Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.



name the oath was taken make the judgment.The accused person would then undergoan ordeal or test in which he or she had tojump into a river and swim a certain distanceunderwater. Those who survived were consideredinnocent. Drowning constituted proof of guiltand a just punishment rendered by the gods.

The following account of one such ordealcomes from the city of Mari, about 1770 B.C.E.A queen was accused of casting spells on her hus-band. The maid forced to undergo the ordeal onher behalf drowned, and we do not knowwhether the queen received further punishment:

Concerning Amat-Sakkanim . . . whom the rivergod overwhelmed. . . . : “We made her under-take her plunge, saying to her, ‘Swear that yourmistress did not perform any act of sorceryagainst Yarkab-Addad her lord; that she did notreveal any palace secret nor did another personopen the missive of her mistress; that your mis-tress did not commit a transgression against herlord.’ In connection with these oaths they hadher take her plunge; the river god overwhelmedher, and she did not come up alive.”13

This account illustrates the Mesopotamian beliefthat sometimes only the gods could make deci-sions about right and wrong. By contrast, the fol-lowing trial excerpts come from a homicide case inwhich humans, not gods, made the final judg-ment. About 1850 B.C.E., three men murdered atemple official named Lu-Inanna. For unknown rea-sons, they told the victim’s wife, Nin-dada, whatthey had done. King Ur-Ninurta of the city of Isinsent the case to be tried in the city of Nippur, thesite of an important court. When the case came totrial, nine accusers asked that the three murderersbe executed. They also requested that Nin-dada beput to death because she had not reported themurder to the authorities. The accusers said:

They who have killed a man are not worthyof life. Those three males and that womanshould be killed.

In her defense, two of Nin-dada’s supporterspointed out that she had not been involved inthe murder and therefore should be released:

Granted that the husband of Nin-dada, thedaughter of Lu-Ninurta, has been killed, butwhat had the woman done that she should bekilled?

The court agreed, on the grounds that Nin-dadawas justified in keeping silent because her husbandhad not provided for her properly:

A woman whose husband did not supporther . . . why should she not remain silentabout him? Is it she who killed her husband?The punishment of those who actually killedhim should suffice.

In accordance with the decision of the court, thedefendants were executed.

This approach to justice—using witnesses,evaluating evidence, and rendering a verdict in acourt protected by the king—demonstrated theMesopotamians’ desire for fairness. This courtdecision became an important precedent thatlater judges frequently cited.

For Discussion

1. How would a city benefit by letting a panel ofroyal officials make judgments about life-and-death issues? How would the king benefit?

2. How do these trials demonstrate theinteraction of Mesopotamian religious,social, and political beliefs?

Taking It FurtherGreengus, Samuel. “Legal and Social Institu-

tions of Ancient Near Mesopotamia,” inCivilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. JackM. Sasson, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrick-son Publishers, 2001). Describes basic princi-ples of law and administration of justice,with a bibliography of ancient legal texts.



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CHRONOLOGY: MESOPOTAMIAN CIVILIZATION

ca. 3000 B.C.E. Sumerian city-states emerge

ca. 2340 B.C.E. Sargon unites Sumerian cities into the Akkadian Empireca. 2250 B.C.E. Collapse of the Akkadian empireca. 2100 B.C.E. Ur-Nammu reunites Sumerian cities; empire of “Ur III”ca. 2000 B.C.E. Collapse of Urca. 1790 B.C.E. Hammurabi creates the Babylonian empireca. 1400 B.C.E. Kassites overrun Babylon

family life. In a patriarchal society, the husband/father possesses supreme authority in the family.Hence, Hammurabi’s code declared that if awife had a lover, both she and her lover wouldbe drowned, while a husband was permittedextramarital sex. If a wife neglected her duties athome or failed to produce children, her husbandhad the right to divorce her. Yet Mesopotamianwomen, at least those in the “free” class, werenot devoid of all rights. If a husband divorcedhis wife without sufficient cause, then he had togive her back her entire dowry. Unlike in manylater societies, a married woman was an inde-pendent legal entity: She could appear in courtand she could engage in commercial contracts.Some Babylonian women ran businesses, such assmall shops and inns.

Many of Hammurabi’s laws seem harsh: If ahouse caved in because of faulty workmanshipand the householder died, then the builder wasput to death. If a freeman hit another freeman’spregnant daughter and caused her to miscarry,he had to pay ten silver shekels for the unbornchild, but if his blow killed the daughter, thenhis own daughter was executed. Yet throughthese laws Hammurabi’s Code introduced oneof the fundamentals of Western jurisprudence:the idea that the punishment must suit thecrime (at least in crimes involving social equals).The principle of “an eye for an eye” (rather thana life for an eye) helped shape legal thought insouthwest Asia for a millennium. It later influ-enced the laws of the Hebrews and, thusthrough the Hebrew Bible (the Christian OldTestament), still molds ideas about justice.

Babylonia’s rulers. For example, many of thelaws focus on the irrigation system that madeBabylonian agriculture possible. One such lawreads: “If a man has opened his channel for irri-gation and has been negligent and allowed thewater to wash away a neighbor’s field, he shallpay grain equivalent to the crops of his neigh-bors”—or be sold as a slave.11

Hammurabi’s law code buttressed Babylon’ssocial hierarchy by drawing legal distinctionsbetween classes of people. The crimes of aristo-crats (called free men) were treated moreleniently than were the offenses of commonpeople, while slaves were given no rights at all.If an aristocrat killed a commoner, he or she hadto pay a fine, whereas if a commoner killed anaristocrat, he or she was executed. But the codeof Hammurabi also emphasized the responsibil-ity of public officials and carefully regulatedcommercial transactions. If a home was robbed,and city officers failed to find the burglar, thenthe householder had the right to expect reim-bursement for his losses from the city govern-ment. If a moneylender suddenly raised interestrates beyond those already agreed on, then heforfeited the entire loan.

Almost one-quarter of Hammurabi’sstatutes concern family matters. The laws’ focuson questions of dowry and inheritance reflectthe Mesopotamian view of marriage as first andforemost a business matter. The Sumerian wordfor love literally translates “to measure theearth”—to mark land boundaries and designatewho gets what. Hammurabi’s laws also high-light the patriarchal structure of Mesopotamian


Egypt: The Empire of the Nile 29

EGYPT: THE EMPIRE OF THE NILE

� What distinctive features characterizedEgyptian civilization throughout its longhistory?

As the civilizations of Mesopotamia rose andfell, another civilization emerged far to thesouth: Egypt. A long and narrow strip of land inthe northeast corner of Africa, Egypt dependedfor its survival on the Nile, the world’s longestriver, which flows north into the MediterraneanSea from one of its points of origin in easternAfrica 4,000 miles away. The northernmostpart of Egypt, where the Nile enters theMediterranean, is a broad and fertile delta. Theriver flooded annually from mid-July to mid-October, leaving behind rich deposits of siltideal for planting crops. Unlike in SouthwestAsia, the annual floods in Egypt came withclockwork regularity. For the Egyptians, naturewas not unpredictable and random in itsdestruction, but a benevolent force, generous insharing its riches.

Egypt was also fortunate in another of itsphysical features: it rested securely between twodesert regions that effectively barricaded it fromforeign conquest. Whereas Mesopotamia stoodat the intersection of three continents, vulnerableto invading armies, Egyptian civilizationemerged in a far more easily defended position.Egyptian history, then, is remarkable for itspolitical stability. This stability, combined withthe predictability and generosity of the Nile, mayexplain the confidence and optimism thatmarked Egyptian culture.

Historians organize the long span ofancient Egyptian history into four main periods:Predynastic and Early Dynastic (10,000–2680B.C.E.), the Old Kingdom (ca. 2680–2200 B.C.E.),the Middle Kingdom (2040–1720 B.C.E.), andthe New Kingdom (1550–1150 B.C.E.). Times ofpolitical disruption between the kingdoms arecalled intermediate periods. Despite these peri-ods of disruption, the Egyptians maintaineda remarkably stable civilization for thousandsof years.

Egypt’s Rise to EmpireLike the peoples of Mesopotamia, the Egyptianswere originally hunter-gatherers who slowlyturned to growing crops and domesticating ani-mals. Small villages, in which people could coor-dinate their labor most easily, appeared along thebanks of the Nile between 5000 and 4000 B.C.E.By 3500 B.C.E., Egyptians could survive comfort-ably through agriculture and herding. Smalltowns multiplied along the Nile, and market cen-ters connected by roads emerged as hubs whereartisans and merchants exchanged their wares.

Toward the end of the Predynastic period,between 3500 and 3000 B.C.E., trade along theNile River resulted in a shared culture and wayof life. Towns grew into small kingdoms whoserulers constantly warred with one another,attempting to grab more land and extend theirpower. The big consumed the small, and by3000 B.C.E., the towns had been absorbedinto just two kingdoms: Upper Egypt in thesouth and Lower Egypt in the north. These twothen united, forming what historians term theOld Kingdom. (See Map 1.5.)

THE KINGS AND THE GODS IN THE OLD KINGDOMIn the new capital city of Memphis, the Egyptiankings became the focal points of religious, social,and political life. While in Mesopotamia, kingswere regarded as the gods’ representatives onearth, as sort of semi-divine intermediaries,Egyptian kings were acknowledged as divine,gods on earth who ruled Egypt on behalf of theother gods. In the Old Kingdom, Egyptianscalled their king “the good god.” (The labelpharaoh was not used until the New Kingdom.)Egyptian religious tales emphasized the divinityof the king. In one such story, the god Osiris,ruler of Egypt, was killed and chopped into bitsby his evil brother, Seth. Osiris’ son, Horus,avenged his father by defeating Seth and reclaim-ing the Egyptian throne. All Egyptian kings,then, embodied Horus during their reign.

The story of the conflict between Osiris andSeth not only emphasized the divinity of theking, it also stressed the central theme of the



Egyptian worldview: the struggle between theforces of chaos and of order. Seth embodied theforces of evil and disorder. In defeating Seth,Horus overcame chaos and restored what theEgyptians called ma‘at to the world. The wordma‘at has no English equivalent; in variouscontexts, it can mean truth, wisdom, justice, orstability. Ma‘at was the way the gods had madethe world—everything in its proper place,everything the way the gods wanted it to be.

The king’s essential task was to maintain ma‘at,to keep things in order and harmony. The king’spresence meant that cosmic order reigned andthat the kingdom was protected against forcesof disorder and destruction.

Like the Mesopotamians, the Egyptiansbelieved in many gods, but in Egypt the godswere not prone to punish men and women with-out reason. Because the Nile River flooded regu-larly and predictably, each year leaving behindrich soil deposits, the natural world seemed farless harsh and erratic to the Egyptians. They thusregarded their gods as largely helpful. OrdinaryEgyptians tended to pray to minor householdgods, such as Tauret, portrayed as a pregnanthippopotamus who protected women duringchildbirth. Official religion, however, centeredon the major state gods, worshiped and housedin monumental temples across the kingdom. Thesun god Re was one of the most importantEgyptian deities. Re journeyed across the skyevery day in a boat, rested at night, and returnedin the morning to resume his eternal journey. Byendlessly repeating the cycle of rising and setting,the sun symbolized the harmonious order of theuniverse that Re established. Evil, however, inthe form of Apopis, a serpent god whose coilscould trap Re’s boat like a reed in the Nile, con-stantly threatened this order. Re’s cosmic journeycould continue only if ma‘at was maintained.

THE PYRAMIDS One spectacular feature ofEgyptian religion in the Old Kingdom wasthe construction of pyramids. These elaboratemonuments reflected Egyptian emphasis on theafterlife. The earliest pyramids, erected around2680 B.C.E., were elaborate temples in whichpriests worshiped statues of the king surroundedby the enormous mud-brick monument. Thepyramid contained compartments where theking could dwell in the afterlife in the same lux-ury he enjoyed during his life on Earth. KingDjoser (2668–2649 B.C.E.) built the first pyramidcomplex, and the world’s first monumental stonebuilding, at Saqqara near Memphis. Knowntoday as the Step Pyramid (pictured on p. 34),this structure rests above Djoser’s burial place

Sinai

Delta

MinoanCrete THE

LEVANT

Desert

Desert

Nile

R.

Euphrates R.

Tigris R.

Mediterranean Sea

Red Sea

Memphis

Avaris

Tell el-Amarna

ThebesHierakonpolis

LOWEREGYPT

UPPEREGYPT

NUBIA

CANAAN

ANATOLIA

SYRIA

HITTITEEMPIRE

Cyprus

MESOPOTAMIA

PUNT

0 200 mi

0 200 km

Old Kingdom Middle KingdomNew Kingdom

Egypt: The Old Middleand New Kingdoms

MAP 1.5Egypt: The Old, Middle, and New KingdomsAs this map shows, Egyptian power expanded fromits base along the Nile delta, first southwardalong the Nile River, and then, through trade andconquest, into southwest Asia. Egypt’s control ofmineral resources, especially gold, turquoise, andcopper, played an important role in its commercialprosperity. During the New Kingdom, Egyptiansconverted trading dominance into politicalcontrol, with the reconquest of Nubia and theextension of Egypt’s empire into Canaan and partsof Syria. Learn on MyHistoryLab


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and rises high into the air in six steps, whichrepresent a ladder to Heaven.

In the centuries after Djoser’s reign, kings con-tinued building pyramids for themselves andsmaller ones for their queens, with each tombbecoming more architecturally sophisticated. Thewalls grew taller and steeper and contained hiddenburial chambers and treasure rooms. The GreatPyramid at Giza, built around 2600 B.C.E. by KingKhufu (or Cheops), was the largest human-madestructure in the ancient world. It consists of morethan two million stones that weigh an average oftwo and a half tons each. Covering 13 acres, itreaches over 480 feet into the sky.

Building the pyramid complexes was a longand costly task. In addition to the architects,

painters, sculptors, carpenters, and other special-ists employed on the site throughout the year,stone masons supervised the quarrying andtransport of the colossal building blocks. Peas-ants, who were organized into work gangs andpaid and fed by the king, provided the heavylabor when the Nile flooded their fields everyyear. As many as 70,000 workers out of a totalpopulation estimated at 1.5 million sweated onthe pyramids every day. Entire cities sprang uparound pyramid building sites to house theworkmen, artisans, and farmers. The construc-tion of elaborate pyramids stopped after 2400B.C.E., probably because of the expense, butsmaller burial structures continued to be built forcenturies

DJOSER’S STEP PYRAMIDDjoser ascended to the throne of Egypt around 2668 B.C.E. and immediately ordered hisvizier Imhotep to oversee the construction of his tomb. Up until this point, Egyptians con-structed pyramids out of mud brick, but Imhotep deviated from tradition and chose stone.



THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORDER IN THE OLDKINGDOM The king and the royal family stoodat the top of the Old Kingdom’s social andpolitical hierarchy. As a god on earth, the kingpossessed absolute authority. All of Egypt—allthe land, every resource, every person—theoreti-cally belonged to the king. Yet royal Egyptianswere not free to act in any way they mightchoose. Maintaining ma‘at meant followingcarefully regulated rituals at almost all times.The rules that governed royalty differed fromthose for commoners. Kings, for example, hadmany wives and frequently married their daugh-ters and sisters, whereas ordinary Egyptians weremonogamous (a man took only one wife) andmarried outside the family.

Below the royal family stood the nobility,made up of priests, court officials, and provincialgovernors. Men in these ranks carried out theking’s orders. Egypt, like the Mesopotamianempires, was a redistributive economy. Thekings’ officials collected Egypt’s produce andredistributed it throughout the kingdom. The jobof keeping records of the kings’ possessions andsupervising food production fell to the scribes,who were trained in hieroglyphic writing.Hieroglyphs (literally “sacred carvings”) repre-sented both sounds (as in our alphabet) andobjects (as in a pictorial system). Learning thehundreds of signs for literary or administrativepurposes took years of schooling. It was worththe effort, however, for knowledge of hiero-glyphs gave scribes great power. For 3,000 years,these royal bureaucrats kept the machinery ofEgyptian government running despite the riseand fall of dynasties.

Ordinary Egyptians fell into three cate-gories: skilled artisans, peasants, and slaves.Craftsmen and skilled workers such as millersand stone masons stood below the nobility onthe social ladder. Employed in large workshopsowned by the king or nobility, the craftsmenserved the privileged classes above them.Below them were the peasants, who not onlyfarmed, but also labored on public works suchas temples, roads, and irrigation projects. As in

medieval Europe, these peasants were tied to theland: They could not leave the estates that theyfarmed for the king or nobility, and if the landwas sold, they passed on to the new owner aswell. Slaves occupied the bottom of the socialladder. They toiled on monumental buildingprojects as well as within the temples and royalpalaces. Slavery, however, was not dominant inthe Egyptian economy. Free Egyptians did mostof the work.

Free Egyptian women—whether from thenobility or the skilled artisans—possessed clearrights. They could buy and sell property, makecontracts, sue in court, and own their own busi-nesses. In a marriage, the husband and wife wereregarded as equals. Women dominated certainoccupations, such as spinning and weaving, andeven worked as doctors.

WHERE IS MA‘AT? THE COLLAPSE OF THE OLDKINGDOM Around 2200 B.C.E. the Old Kingdomcollapsed, perhaps because terrible droughtslowered the level of the Nile. Famine followed.The king could no longer maintain ma‘at, andthe political order collapsed. For 200 years,anarchy and civil war raged in Egypt duringwhat historians call the First IntermediatePeriod.

The chaos and disorder of the First Interme-diate Period resulted in a significant religiousand cultural shift. The optimism that had char-acterized Egyptian culture gave way to uncer-tainty and even pessimism as Egyptianswondered how to restore ma‘at in a world soout of balance:

Whom can I trust today?Hearts are greedy,And every man steals his neighbor’s goods.14

In their quest to make sense out of thechaos, Egyptian writers began to emphasizerewards in the afterlife as recompense forrighteous action here on earth. In the OldKingdom, Egyptians had sought to act justly inaccordance with ma‘at because they wereconfident that right action would be rewarded



in the here and now. In the new climate ofturmoil and hunger, however, they found com-fort in the idea that although the good sufferedin their earthly life, they would be rewarded inthe life to come. During this period, the Egyp-tians developed the concept of a final judg-ment—the earliest known instance of such anidea in human history. After death, a person’sheart would be weighed in the balance againstma‘at. Those who tipped the scales—thosewho failed the test—would be consumed bythe Devourer, a god with a crocodile’s head.But those who passed would live like godsin the afterlife. (See Different Voices in thischapter.)

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM The First IntermediatePeriod ended when the governors of Thebes, acity in Upper Egypt, set out to reunify thekingdom. In 2040 B.C.E., Mentuhotep II(r. 2060–2010 B.C.E.) established a vigorousnew monarchy, initiating the Middle Kingdom.(See Map 1.5.) He and his successors restoredma‘at to Egypt: They rebuilt the power of themonarchy, reestablished centralized control,and repaired Egypt’s commercial and diplo-matic links to southwest Asia. Prosperity andstability returned.

Yet the Middle Kingdom was not a reincar-nation of the Old Kingdom. The chaos of theFirst Intermediate Period modified politicalideas and social relations. The king was nolonger an omnipotent god. Capable of makingmistakes and even of being afraid, the MiddleKingdom monarch appeared in texts as a lonelyfigure, seeking to serve as a good shepherd tohis people. With this new concept of kingshipcame a slightly altered social order, with thenobility possessing more power and autonomythan in the Old Kingdom.

New developments also marked religion.With the return of ma‘at—with life on earthmore prosperous and stable—Egyptians began tosee the final judgment as more of a problem thatneeded to be solved than as a source of comfort.How could one enjoy life and yet be assured of

living like a god for eternity, rather than beingconsumed by the Devourer? To be sure that theypassed the final judgment, Egyptians had them-selves buried with special scarabs. A scarab is asmall figure of a dung beetle, but these funeralscarabs featured human heads and carried magicincantations or charms. This powerful magicprevented the heart from testifying against theindividual when it was weighed in the finaljudgment. In other words, it was a kind of falseweight, a finger on the scales, a way to deceivethe gods and ensure passage to the afterlife.

ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHER CIVILIZATIONS WhileEgypt’s position between two deserts guaranteedits military security, it did not isolate Egypt fromthe rest of the ancient world. During both theOld and Middle Kingdoms, Egyptian kingsforged an economic network that included trad-ing cities in the Levant, Minoan Crete (seeChapter 2), the southern Red Sea area calledPunt, and Mesopotamia. To protect the traderoutes along which raw materials and luxurygoods were imported, rulers did not hesitate touse force. They also, however, used diplomacy tostimulate trade.

Egyptian interactions with Nubia (modernSudan) were particularly important. Rich in goldand other natural resources, Nubia also bene-fited from its location at the nexus of traderoutes from central and eastern Africa. Agents ofEgyptian rulers, called Keepers of the Gatewayof the South, tried to protect this trade by keep-ing the peace with the warlike Nubian tribes.Slowly, Egyptian monarchs made their presencemore permanent. King Mentuhotep II, whosereign marked the start of the Middle Kingdom,not only reunified Egypt but also gained controlof Lower Nubia. This expansion of Egyptiancontrol ensured the free flow of Nubianresources northward. Around 1900 B.C.E., KingAmenemhet built ten forts at strategic locationswhere trade routes from the interior of Africareached the Nile River. These forts reinforcedEgyptian access to Nubian gold, ivory, and othernatural resources.



What strange conditions everywhere!When I look behind [me], there is persecution,

trouble.Like one who has not made libations to his god,Nor invoked his goddess when he ate,Does not make prostrations nor recognize

[the necessity of] bowing down,In whose mouth supplication and prayer are

lacking,Who has even neglected holy days, and ignored

festivals . . .Like one who has gone crazy and forgotten

his lord,Has frivolously sworn a solemn oath by his god,

[like such a one] do I appear.For myself, I gave attention to supplication and

prayer;My prayer was discretion, sacrifice my rule.The day for worshipping the god was a joy to

my heart;The day of the goddess’s procession was profit

and gain to me.The king’s blessing—that was my joy. . . .I wish I knew that these things would be pleasing

to one’s god!What is good for oneself may be offense to

one’s god,What in one’s own heart seems despicable may

be proper to one’s god.Who can know the will of the gods in heaven?Who can understand the plans of the underworld

gods?

DIFFERENT VOICES EXPLAINING EVIL IN ANCIENT TIMES

The gap that separates twenty-first-century West-ern readers from the inhabitants of ancientMesopotamia or Egypt is huge, and yet some oftheir questions sound familiar: Why do the goodand the just suffer? Where do we turn for hopewhen life seems hopeless? The two documentsbelow offer different responses to evil times. Thefirst is an excerpt from a lengthy poem inscribed onfour tablets during the Akkadian Empire inMesopotamia. The Akkadian era was generallyprosperous, but as this document shows, daily sur-vival remained difficult for many. The second docu-ment comes from the tumultuous intermediateperiod following the collapse of Egypt’s Old King-dom. The writer may have been king of one of thefragmented states that emerged as the Old King-dom disintegrated. In The Instructions forMerikare, he shares with his son the lessons he haslearned in a world gone mad.

I. From Mesopotamia: I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom

I turn around, but it is bad, very bad;My ill luck increases and I cannot find what is right.I called to my god, but he did not show his

face,I prayed to my goddess, but she did not raise

her head.Even the diviner with his divination could not

make a prediction,And the interpreter of dreams with his libation

could not elucidate my case. . . .

Attracted by Egypt’s stability and prosperity,peoples from different lands settled in the NileValley. They took Egyptian names and assimi-lated into Egyptian culture. The government set-tled these immigrants, as well as war captives,throughout the kingdom where they could mixquickly with the local inhabitants. This willing-ness to accept newcomers into their kingdomlent Egyptian civilization even more vibrancy.

Immigrants from Canaan (modern-dayLebanon, Israel, and parts of Jordan and Syria)played a significant role in Egyptian historytoward the end of the Middle Kingdom. Around1720 B.C.E., centralized state control began todeteriorate (for reasons that remain unclear),and Canaanites began to seize political controlover the regions in which they had settled. A cen-tury of political decentralization and chaos—the



Where have humans learned the way of a god?He who was alive yesterday is dead today.. . .As for me, exhausted, a windstorm is driving

me on!Debilitating Disease is let loose upon me;An Evil Wind has blown [from the] horizon,Headache has sprung up from the surface of

the underworld. . . .Feebleness has overcome my whole body,An attack of illness has fallen upon my flesh.

II. From Egypt: The Instruction for Merikare

Be just that you may prosper upon the earth;soothe the weeper, do not oppress the widow;

Do not deprive a man of his father’s goodsnor interfere with high officials in their functions.

Beware of punishing unfairly,and cause no injury—that will not help you! . . .

The Conclave of the gods that judges suffering Man—you know They are not lenient

On that day of judging the poor wretch,in that hour of weighing out his life.

and it is painful when the guilty is a wise man.

Do not fill your heart with length of years,for They see lifetimes in an hour.

A man lives on after his final mooring,and his deeds are heaped beside him.

Existence over There is certainly forever,and one who takes it lightly is a fool;

But one who reaches there free of wrongdoing—

he shall live on like a god,wide-striding like the Lords of all eternity.

Sources: I. James B. Pritchard (ed.), The Ancient NearEast: Supplementary Texts and Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 597–598. II. Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology. Translated by John L. Foster (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 195–196. Copyright © 2001. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

For Discussion

1. What picture of Akkadian religious practicecan we draw from the first document?

2. In this excerpt from I Will Praise the Lord ofWisdom, the anonymous author files a sort ofcosmic complaint. What grievance does hepresent?

3. In the second excerpt, what advice does theking offer to his son Merikare? What does hewant his son to understand?

4. How does The Instruction for Merikare demon-strate the new religious concepts that theEgyptians developed in response to the disap-pearance of political stability and economicprosperity during the First Intermediate Period?

5. Each of these documents reveals timelessexistential concerns, but how do they pointto the specific historical contexts in whichthey were written?


Second Intermediate Period—ensued, with evenlarger groups of Canaanite immigrants settling inEgypt’s Delta region:

Foreigners have become people [i.e. Egyp-tians] everywhere. . . .

See now, the land is deprived of kingshipby a few men who ignore custom.15

By approximately 1650 B.C.E., one of theseCanaanite groups had established control overthe entire northern delta region and forced theEgyptian rulers there to pay them tribute. The eraof Hyksos rule had begun. Although Hyksosmeant “rulers of foreign lands” in Egyptian, theHyksos dynasty (ca. 1650–1540 B.C.E.) quicklyassimilated Egyptian culture. They used Egyptian


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names and symbols, worshiped Egyptian gods,and employed native Egyptians to staff theirbureaucracies and keep their state records—inEgyptian hieroglyphs.

But the Hyksos, and the Canaanite immi-grant community from which they emerged, notonly absorbed Egyptian ways, they also trans-formed them. Canaanite immigrants broughtwith them into Egypt a vital skill: the ability tomake bronze. An alloy of copper and tin, bronzeis much harder and lasts much longer than eithercopper or tin alone. From about 3500 B.C.E.when people living in northern Syria and Iraqbegan making bronze, the technology spreadslowly throughout southwest Asia. Archaeolo-gists talk about the “Early Bronze Age” (roughly3500–2000 B.C.E.), the “Middle Bronze Age”(ca. 2000–1550 B.C.E.), and the “Late BronzeAge” (ca. 1500–1100 B.C.E.). It was in the Mid-dle Bronze Age, then, that Canaanite immigrantsintroduced bronze to Egypt. Bronze meant newpossibilities in agricultural, craft production—and war.

In particular, bronze made possible the horse-drawn light chariot. This advanced military tech-nology was already revolutionizing warfarethroughout southwest Asia, Anatolia, and Greecewhen the Hyksos brought it to Egypt. Unlike ear-lier chariots, the Bronze Age model featured onlytwo wheels fixed to an axle for easier maneuver-ing. Bronze spokes made the wheels moredurable. Two men wearing bronze chain-mailarmor rode into battle on each chariot, one driv-ing the horses, the other shooting bronze-tippedarrows at the enemy. Troops of trained charioteersand bowmen easily outmaneuvered the traditionalmassed infantry forces and inflicted terrible casu-alties on them from a distance.

Chariot warfare reshaped the economic poli-cies and foreign relations of Egypt, its rivals, andits allies. Imperial systems of governing and rev-enue collection became more sophisticated andcentralized as rulers sought to meet the expensesof training and supplying armies of charioteers byexpanding their economic resources. As a result,empires flourished as never before. Archaeologiststhus see the period after approximately 1500

B.C.E. as a new era, the “Late Bronze Age,” aperiod of unprecedented imperial stability andinternational exchange. In Chapter 2, we willexamine the international structures of this periodin detail. In the section below, we continue thestory of Egypt as it reemerged as a great power.

The New Kingdom: The EgyptianEmpire in the Late Bronze AgeEgypt’s New Kingdom began about 1550 B.C.E.,when King Ahmose I (r. ca. 1550–ca. 1525 B.C.E.)expelled the Hyksos from Egypt. During the NewKingdom, Egypt’s kings first took the titlepharaoh, which means “great house”—or masterof all Egyptians. As Map 1.5 shows, Ahmose’snew dynasty not only reasserted the monarch’sauthority and rebuilt the power of the centralstate, it also pushed Egypt’s territorial boundariesinto Asia as far as the Euphrates River.

BUILDING AN EMPIRE: MILITARY CONQUEST AND TER-RITORIAL EXPANSION A large standing army madethe New Kingdom conquests possible. Trained inthe new chariot warfare and equipped with thecomposite bow (long known in Mesopotamia,but introduced into Egypt during the New King-dom), Egypt’s army was a mighty fighting force.One man in every ten in every village was forcedinto military service. Egyptian officers supple-mented these troops with both mercenaries hiredabroad and soldiers recruited in conqueredregions of Palestine and Syria.

Egyptian attitudes toward non-Egyptians alsoencouraged the imperial expansion of the NewKingdom. Egyptians divided the world into twogroups: themselves (whom they referred to as “ThePeople”) and everyone else. Egyptians believed thatforces of chaos resided in foreign lands where thepharaoh had not yet imposed his will. Thus, it wasthe pharaoh’s responsibility to crush all foreignpeoples and bring order to the world.

In their drive to establish order in theworld, Egyptian rulers in the New Kingdomclashed with kingdoms in Anatolia andMesopotamia. Under the dynamic leadership ofThutmose I (r. 1504–1492 B.C.E.), the armies of



Egypt conquered southern Palestine. A coali-tion of Syrian cities slowed further advance,but by the end of the reign of the great con-queror, Thutmose III (r. 1458–1425 B.C.E.),Egypt had extended its control over the entirewestern coast (see Map 1.5). Thutmose III ledhis armies into Canaan 17 times and strength-ened the empire’s hold on it and Syria. Canaanproved an economic asset, both because of itsown natural resources and because it was avital trading center with ties to Mesopotamiaand beyond.

The New Kingdom also regained controlover Nubia about 1500 B.C.E. To strengthen theirgrip on the area, pharaohs encouraged Egyptiansto establish communities along the Nile Riverthere. These Egyptian colonies exploited the fer-tile river lands in Nubia for the benefit of thepharaoh.

KEEPING AN EMPIRE: ADMINISTRATIVE AND DIPLO-MATIC INNOVATION The Egyptians amassed avast empire with military might. They main-tained it with

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