1 The First Civilizations PDF

The Ancient
Mediterranean
World
From the Stone Age
to A.D. 600
Robin W. Winks
Late of Yale University
Susan P. Mattern-Parkes
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New York Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
2004
Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winks, Robin W.
The ancient Mediterranean world :from the Stone Age to A.D. 600 I Robin W. Winks,
Susan P. Mattern-Parkes.
p . cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 13 978-019-515563-1 (pbk.)
ISBN 0-19-515562-9 - ISBN 0-19-515563-7 (pbk.)
I. Mediterranean Region-civilization. I. Mattern-Parkes, Susan P. II. Title.
DE71.W57 2004
930'.09822-dc22 2003058493
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
Contents
Maps, Boxes, and Chronological Tables vii

Preface: The Value of History ix
1. THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 1

What Is History? 1
The Origins of Civilization 2
The Archaeological Record- The First Modern Humans-The Beginnings
of Agriculture-A New Complexity: Some Neolithic Sites
The First Civilizations: The Eastern Mediterranean in the
Bronze Age 13
The Bronze Age-Mesopotamian Civilization-Egypt in the Bronze
Age- The Canaanites- The Hittites- The Aegean- The Collapse of
Bronze Age Civilization
Israel and Judah 44
Myth and History- The Hebrew Bible-Early Israel- The Monarchy and
the Babylonian Exile-Society and Family-Religion and Law
Summary 52
2. GREEK CIVILIZATION: HELLAS AND HELLENISM 54
The Dark Age 55
Population Decline and Dark Age Culture- Lejkandi-Homer and
Oral Poetry
The Archaic Age: Hellas and the City 58
Hellas- War and the City: The Rise of the Polis-Literature and Culture
in Archaic Hellas
The Classical Age: The Empire and Culture of Athens 74
The Persian Empire-The Persian Wars-Herodotus: The First
History- Greeks and Barbarians- Democracy and Empire: Athens at Its
Height- Culture in Imperial Athens- The Peloponnesian War-Athens
after the War-Society in Classical Athens
The Hellenistic World 101
The Macedonian Conquerors-Greeks and Natives-Judaism in the Second
Temple Period-Greek Culture in the Hellenistic Period
Summary 117
3. THE ROMANS AND THEIR EMPIRE 118

Roman Origins 118
Who Were the Romans?- From Village to City-The Etruscans
v
vi The Ancient Mediterranean World
Government and Society in the Early Republic 123

The Ruling Class-Plebeians and Patricians-Society in the
Twelve Tables-Warfare and the Conquest of Italy-Conquests Overseas-
Imperialism and Culture
The Late Republic: Society in Crisis 133
The Aristocracy-Peasants: Gracchus' Land Reform-Slaves-The Knights :
Provincial Government and Corruption-Soldiers: Marius ' Military Reforms
and Sulla's Dictatorship-Cicero and Roman Society-Pompey and
Caesar-The First Emperor
The Empire 145
The Emperors-The Emperor and the City of Rome-The Army-Taxes-
Roads and Cities-Law-Greek Culture in the Roman Empire
Life in the Provinces 165
Imperial Rule: The Example of fudaea-The Army in Roman Britain-
Society in Roman Egypt
Crisis and Reform in the Third Century 177
Wars and Emperors-Economic Crisis-Diocletian and the Later
Roman Empire
Summary 182
4. CHRISTIANITY AND THE LATE ANTIQUE WORLD 184
Paganism 184
The Rise of Christianity 187
The New Testament and the Gospels-Paul-Persecution and Martyrs-
Bishops and Theologians
Christianity in the Later Roman Empire 195
The Conversion of Constantine-Heresy and Schism-Monks and
Ascetics-Christianity and Social Change-Literature: St. Augustine
and the Classics
The Decline of the Western Empire 208
Franks- Visigoths- Ostrogoths-Vandals-Barbarian Legal
Codes-Justinian
Muhammad and the Rise of Islam 216
Summary 217
Suggested Readings 219

Index 231
Maps, Boxes, and
Chronological Tables
Maps
The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age 14
Israel and Judah in the Iron Age 45
Archaic and Classical Hellas 60--61
Classical Athens 80
The Hellenistic World, circa 185 B.c. 104
Italy in the Republican Period 124

The Roman Empire in the Second Century A.D. 148-149
Imperial Rome 151
The Later Roman Empire 196
The Western Mediterranean, circa A.D. 500 209
Boxes
Doing History: Chronology 3
*Art and Society: Warfare in Early Mesopotamia 22
The Written Record: Hammurabi's Code 25
Doing History: The Rosetta Stone 27
Doing History: The Canon 47
The Written Record: The Young Women of Sappho's Chorus 69
*Art and Society: Sculpting the Body in Classical Greece 85

Doing History: Literature and Literacy 93
Vll
viii The Ancient Mediterranean World
*A Closer Look: The Agora 96
Art and Society: The Family on Athenian Funerary Monuments 99

The Written Record: An Athenian Family 101
*Art and Society: Sculpture and the City in the Hellenistic World 114
Doing History: A Note on Roman Names 119
The Written Record: A Triumphal Parade 131
*Art and Society: Aristocratic Portraits 135

*Doing History: The Houses of Pompeii 136
*Art and Society: Trajan's Forum 154
The Written Record: The Army in Peacetime 157
The Written Record: A Senator's Gifts to His Hometown 161

*The Written Record: Asclepius' Miracles 186
The Written Record: Pliny and the Christians 193

The Written Record: The Huns 212
*Art and Society: Empress Theodora 215
Chronological Tables
Historical Periods of Bronze Age Mesopotamia 17
Egyptian Historical Periods 30

Important Dates and Periods in Greek History 56
Important Dates in Early Roman History 120

Roman Emperors, 31 B.C. to A.D. 238 150
Important Dates in the Late Antique Period 187
*Box contains illustrations.

Preface
The Value of History
History is a series of arguments to be debated, not a body of data to be

recorded or a set of facts to be memorized. Thus controversy in historical
interpretation-over what an event actually means, over what really hap-
pened at an occurrence called "an event," over how best to generalize about
the event-is at the heart of its value. Of course history teaches us about our-
selves. Of course it teaches us to understand and to entertain a proper respect
for our collective past. Of course it transmits to us specific skills-how to ask
questions, how to seek out answers, how to think logically, cogently, lucidly,
purposefully. Of course it is, or ought to be, a pleasure. But we also discover
something fundamental about a people in what they choose to argue over in
their past. When a society suppresses portions of its past record, that society
(or its leadership) tells us something about itself. When a society seeks to alter
how the record is presented, well-proven facts notwithstanding, we learn
how history can be distorted to political ends.
Who controls history, and how it is written, controls the past, and who con-
trols the past controls the present. Those who would close off historical con-
troversy with the argument either that we know all that we need to know
about a subject, or that what we know is so irrefutably correct that anyone
who attacks the conventional wisdom about the subject must have destruc-
tive purposes in mind, are in the end intent upon destroying the very value
of history itself-that value being that history teaches us to argue produc-
tively with each other.
Obviously, then, history is a social necessity. It gives us our identity. It helps
us to find our bearings in an ever more complex present, providing us with a
navigator's chart by which we may to some degree orient ourselves. When
we ask who we are, and how it is that we are so, we learn skepticism and
acquire the beginnings of critical judgment. Along with a sense of narrative,
history also provides us with tools for explanation and analysis. It helps us to
find the particular example, to see the uniqueness in a past age or past event,
while also helping us to see how the particular and the unique contribute to
the general. History thus shows us humanity at work and play, in society,
changing through time. By letting us experience other lifestyles, history
shows us the values of both subjectivity and objectivity-those twin condi-
ix
X The Ancient Mediterranean World
tions of our individual view of the world in which we live, conditions

between which we constantly, and usually almost without knowing it, move.
Thus, history is both a form of truth and a matter of opinion, and the close
study of history should help us to distinguish between the two. It is impor-
tant to make such distinctions, for as Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, "It is not truth
but opinion that can travel the world without a passport." Far too often what
we read, see, and hear and believe to be the truth-in our newspapers, on our
television sets, from our friends-is opinion, not fact.
History is an activity. That activity asks specific questions as a means of
arriving at general questions. A textbook such as this is concerned over-
whelmingly with general questions, even though at times it must ask specific
questions or present specific facts as a means of stalking the general. The
great philosopher Karl Jaspers once remarked, "Who I am and where I
belong, I first learned to know from the mirror of history." It is this mirror that
any honest book must reflect.
To speak of "civilization" (of which this book is a history) is at once to
plunge into controversy, so that our very first words illustrate why some peo-
ple are so fearful of the study of history. To speak of "Western civilization" is
even more restrictive, too limited in the eyes of some historians. Yet if we are
to understand history as a process, we must approach it through a sense of
place: our continuity, our standards, our process. Still, we must recognize an
inherent bias in such a term as "Western civilization," indeed two inherent
biases: first, that we know what it means to be "civilized" and have attained
that stature; and second, that the West as a whole is a single unitary civiliza-
tion. This second bias is made plain when we recognize that most scholars and
virtually all college courses refer not to "Eastern civilization" but to "the civ-
ilizations of the East"- a terminology that suggests that while the West is a
unity, the East is not. These are conventional phrases, buried in Western per-
ception of reality, just as our common geographical references show a West-
ern bias. The Near East or the Far East are, after all, "near" or "far" only in ref-
erence to a geographical location focused on western Europe. The Japanese do
not refer to London as being in the far West, or Los Angeles as being in the far
East, although both references would be correct if they saw the world as
though they stood at its center. Although this text will accept these conven-
tional phrases, precisely because they are traditionally embedded in our West-
ern languages, one of the uses of history-and of the writing of a book such as
this one-is to alert us to the biases buried in our language, even when neces-
sity requires that we continue to use its conventional forms of shorthand.
But if we are to speak of civilization, we must have, at the outset, some def-
inition of what we mean by "being civilized." Hundreds of books have been
written on this subject. The average person often means only that others, the
"noncivilized," speak a different language and practice alien customs. The
Chinese customarily referred to all foreigners as barbarians, and the ancient
Greeks spoke of those who could not communicate in Greek as bar-bar-those
who do not speak our tongue. Yet today the ability to communicate in more
than one language is one hallmark of a "civilized" person. Thus definitions
Preface xi
of civilization, at least as used by those who think little about the meaning of
their words, obviously change.
For our purposes, however, we must have a somewhat more exacting def-
inition of the term, since it guides and shapes any book that attempts to cover
the entire sweep of Western history. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians,
and others may reasonably differ as to whether, for example, there is a sepa-
rate American civilization that stands apart from, say, a British or Italian civ-
ilization, or whether these civilizations are simply particular variants on one
larger entity, with only that larger entity-the West--entitled to be called "a
civilization." Such an argument is of no major importance here, although it is
instructive that it should occur. Rather, what is needed is a definition suffi-
ciently clear to be used throughout the narrative and analysis to follow. This
working definition, therefore, will hold that "civilization" involves the pres-
ence of several (although not necessarily all) of the following conditions
within a society or group of interdependent societies:
1. There will be some form of government by which people administer

to their political needs and responsibilities.
2. There will be some development of urban society, that is, of city life, so
that the culture is not nomadic, dispersed, and thus unable to leave
significant and surviving physical remnants of its presence.
3. Human beings will have become toolmakers, able through the use of
metals to transform, however modestly, their physical environment,
and thus their social and economic environment as well.
4. Some degree of specialization of function will have begun, usually at
the workplace, so that pride, place, and purpose work together as
cohesive elements in the society.
5. Social classes will have emerged, whether antagonistic to or sustain-
ing of one another.
6. A form of literacy will have developed, so that group may communi-
cate with group and, more important, generation with generation in
writing.
7. There will be a concept of leisure time-that life is not solely for the
workplace, or for the assigned class function or specialization-so
that, for example, art may develop beyond (although not excluding)
mere decoration and sports beyond mere competition.
8. There will be a concept of a higher being, although not necessarily
through organized religion, by which a people may take themselves
outside themselves to explain events and find purpose.
9. There will be a concept of time, by which the society links itself to a
past and to the presumption of a future.
10. There will have developed a faculty for criticism. This faculty need not
be the rationalism of the West, or intuition, or any specific religious or
political mechanism, but it must exist, so that the society may contem-
plate change from within, rather than awaiting attack (and possible
destruction) from without.
xii The Ancient Mediterranean World
A common Western bias is to measure "progress" through technological

change and to suggest that societies that show (at least until quite recently in
historical time) little dramatic technological change are not civilized. In truth,
neither a written record nor dramatic technological changes are essential to
being civilized, although both are no doubt present in societies we would call
civilized. Perhaps, as we study history, we ought to remember all three of the
elements inherent in historical action as recorded by the English critic John
Ruskin: "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the
book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art."
The issue here is not whether we "learn from the past." Most often we do
not, at least at the simple-minded level; we do not, as a nation, decide upon
a course of action in diplomacy, for example, simply because a somewhat
similar course in the past worked. We are wise enough to know that circum-
stances alter cases and that new knowledge brings new duties. Of course
individuals "learn from the past"; the victim of a mugging takes precautions
in the future. To dignify such an experience as "a lesson of history," however,
is to turn mere individual growth from child into adult into history when, at
most, such growth is a personal experience in biography.
We also sometimes learn the "wrong lessons" from history. Virtually any-
one who wishes to argue passionately for a specific course of future action can
find a lesson from the past that will convince the gullible that history repeats
itself and therefore that the past is a map to the future. No serious historian
argues this, however. General patterns may, and sometimes do, repeat them-
selves, but specific chains of events do not. Unlike those subjects that operate
at the very highest level of generalization (political science, theology, science),
history simply does not believe in ironclad laws. But history is not solely a
series of unrelated events. There are general patterns, clusters of causes, inter-
mediate levels of generalization that prove true. Thus, history works at a level
uncomfortable to many: above the specific, below the absolute.
If complex problems never present themselves twice in the same or even in
recognizably similar form-if, to borrow a frequent image from the military
world, generals always prepare for the last war instead of the next one-then
does the study of history offer society any help in solving its problems? The
answer surely is yes-but only in a limited way. History offers a rich collec-
tion of clinical reports on human behavior in various situations-individual
and collective, political, economic, military, social, cultural-that tell us in
detail how the human race has conducted its affairs and that suggest ways of
handling similar problems in the present. President Harry S. Truman's secre-
tary of state, a former chief of staff, General George Marshall, once remarked
that nobody could think about the problems of the 1950s who had not
reflected upon the fall of Athens in the fifth century B.c. He was referring to
the extraordinary history of the war between Athens and Sparta written just
after it was over by Thucydides, an Athenian who fought in the war. There
were no nuclear weapons, no telecommunications, no guns or gunpowder in
the fifth century B.c., and the logistics of war were altogether primitive, yet
twenty-three hundred years later one of the most distinguished leaders of
Preface xiii
American military and political affairs found Thucydides indispensable to

his thinking.
History, then, can only approximate the range of human behavior, with
some indication of its extremes and averages. It can, although not perfectly,
show how and within what limits human behavior changes. This last point is
especially important for the social scientist, the economist, the sociologist, the
executive, the journalist, or the diplomat. History provides materials that
even an inspiring leader-a prophet, a reformer, a politician-would do well
to master before seeking to lead us into new ways. For it can tell us something
about what human material can and cannot stand, just as science and tech-
nology can tell engineers what stresses metals can tolerate. History can pro-
vide an awareness of the depth of time and space that should check the opti-
mism and the overconfidence of the reformer. For example, we may wish to
protect the environment in which we live- to eliminate acid rain, to cleanse
our rivers, to protect our wildlife, to preserve our majestic natural scenery.
History may show us that most peoples have failed to do so and may provide
us with some guidance on how to avoid the mistakes of the past. But history
will also show that there are substantial differences of public and private
opinion over how best to protect our environment, that there are many peo-
ple who do not believe such protection is necessary, or that there are people
who accept the need for protection but are equally convinced that lower lev-
els of protection must be traded off for higher levels of productivity from our
natural resources. History can provide the setting by which we may under-
stand differing opinions, but recourse to history will not get the legislation
passed, make the angry happy, or make the future clean and safe. History
will not define river pollution, although it can provide us with statistics from
the past for comparative measurement. The definition will arise from the pol-
itics of today and our judgments about tomorrow. History is for the long and
at times for the intermediate run, but seldom for the short run.
So if we are willing to accept a "relevance" that is more difficult to see at
first than the immediate applicability of science and more remote than direct
action, we will have to admit that history is "relevant." It may not actually
build the highway or clear the slum, but it can give enormous help to those
who wish to do so. And failure to take it into account may lead to failure in
the sphere of action.
But history is also fun, at least for those who enjoy giving their curiosity
free reign. Whether it is historical gossip we prefer (how many lovers did
Catherine the Great of Russia actually take in a given year, and how much
political influence did their activity in the imperial bedroom give them?), the
details of historical investigation (how does it happen that the actual treas-
ures found in a buried Viking ship correspond to those described in an
Anglo-Saxon poetic account of a ship-burial?), more complex questions of
cause-and-effect (how influential have the writings of revolutionary intellec-
tuals been upon the course of actual revolutions?), the relationships between
politics and economics (how far does the rise and decline of Spanish power
in modern times depend upon the supply of gold and silver from New World
xiv The Ancient Mediterranean World
colonies?), or cultural problems (why did western Europe choose to revive

classical Greek and Roman art and literature instead of turning to some alto-
gether new experiment?), those who enjoy history will read almost greedily
to discover what they want to know. Having discovered it, they may want to
know how we know what we have learned and may want to tum to those
sources closest in time to the persons and questions concerned-to the origi-
nal words of the participants. To read about Socrates, Columbus, or Churchill
is fun; to read their own words, to visit with them as it were, is even more so.
To see them in context is important; to see how we have taken their thoughts
and woven them to purposes of our own is at least equally important. Read-
ers will find the path across the mine-studded fields of history helped just a
little by extracts from these voices- voices of the past but also of the present.
They can also be helped by chronologies, bibliographies, pictures, maps-
devices through which historians share their sense of fun and immediacy
with a reader.
In the end, to know the past is to know ourselves-not entirely, not
enough, but a little better. History can help us to achieve some grace and ele-
gance of action, some cogency and completion of thought, some harmony
and tolerance in human relationships. Most of all, history can give us a sense
of excitement, a personal zest for watching and perhaps participating in the
events around us that will, one day, be history too.
History is a narrative, a story; history is concerned foremost with major
themes, even as it recognizes the significance of many fascinating digres-
sions. Because history is largely about how and why people behave as they
do, it is also about patterns of thought and belief. Ultimately, history is about
what people believe to be true. To this extent, virtually all history is intellec-
tual history, for the perceived meaning of a specific treaty, battle, or scientific
discovery lies in what those involved in it and those who came after thought
was most significant about it. History makes it clear that we may die, as we
may live, as a result of what someone believed to be quite true in the rela-
tively remote past.
We cannot each be our own historian. In everyday life we may reconstruct
our personal past, acting as detectives for our motivations and attitudes. But
formal history is a much more rigorous study. History may give us some very
small capacity to predict the future. More certainly, it should help us arrange
the causes for given events into meaningful patterns. History also should
help us to be tolerant of the historical views of others, even as it helps to
shape our own convictions. History must help us sort out the important from
the less important, the relevant from the irrelevant, so that we do not fall prey
to those who propose simple-minded solutions to vastly complex human
problems. We must not yield to the temptation to blame one group or indi-
vidual for our problems, and yet we must not fail to defend our convictions
with vigor.
To recognize, indeed to celebrate, the value of all civilizations is essential
to the civilized life itself. To understand that we see all civilizations through
the prism of our specific historical past-for which we feel affection, in which
Preface XV
we may feel comfortable and secure, and by which we interpret all else that
we encounter- is simply to recognize that we too are the products of history.
That is why we must study history and ask our own questions in our own
way. For if we ask no questions of our past, there may be no questions to ask
of our future.
Robin W. Winks
Acknowledgments
Susan Mattern-Parkes wishes to thank the book's editors, Peter Coveney and
Linda Harris, and anonymous readers for the Press for their invaluable con-
tributions. In particular, the suggestions of Michael Gaddis of Syracuse Uni-
versity have resulted in major improvements to the text. I would also like to
thank my husband, Adam Parkes, for his thoughtful comments and unflag-
ging support. The book's remaining faults are, of course, entirely my own.
ONE
The First Civilizations
What Is History?
Muses who live on Olympus, tell me now
who were the leaders and commanders of the Greeks,
For you, being goddesses, were there, and know all;
but we have heard only the rumor, and know nothing.
(Homer, Iliad, 2.484-487)
As the Greek poet Homer sang the story of the Trojan war 2,800 years ago, he
saw himself as a messenger-the conduit of a tradition. His poem was not
something he created himself; in his view, divine inspiration offered him and
all poets a window on the past. He told of the things that were important to
himself and his audience: war, feud, and violent combat; heroes and their
genealogies; victory and death. His Iliad, the inspiration for the first prose his-
tories in Greek, played a large part in defining what it meant to be Greek for
more than a thousand years.
What is history? A simple answer to this question might be: the study of the
past. But of which past? Should we write,like Homer, about wars and kings?
Or should we focus on anonymous groups of ordinary people (women, farm-
ers, soldiers)? Should history tell of revolutions, assassinations, and con-
quests? Or should it describe everyday realities? Can history be about ideas,
and if so, which ones-political ideas, such as concepts of citizenship? Or
social ideas, such as marriage?
Our choice, like Homer's, will depend on our own interests and on the
interests of the audience we hope to reach. Both of these will reflect the needs
and values of our culture. Homer's Iliad described the legendary, first Greek
national venture-the Trojan war-in a poem that took shape as the Greeks
were beginning to develop a sense of themselves as a people. This was one of
the functions of his work. Other histories serve different purposes; the way
they present the past, and how they choose to present it, will depend on what
the historian is trying to accomplish.
In the West, the most influential works that established history as a disci-
pline were written by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C. The word "history"
takes its origin from the Greek writer Herodotus, who used the word historia,
1
2 The Ancient Mediterranean World
which meant "inquiry," to describe his study of the recent war between the
Greeks and Persians. The root meaning of "history," then, refers to a
method-to the investigation of the past. Once the historian has decided
which aspects of the past to study, how does he or she go about reconstruct-
ing them?
One way is to read histories produced by other scholars, whether modern
or ancient. But the authors of these works have already gathered and inter-
preted the evidence of the past to suit their own purposes. They may not tell
us what we want to know, if our interests are different. For this reason, the real
work of ancient historians is to locate and interpret the kind of raw evidence
from antiquity that will shed light on the problems they want to investigate.
This means, first of all, looking beyond histories to other kinds of written
works. For example, dramas and novels-which often focus on love, mar-
riage, and the family-can illuminate aspects of everyday life that no histor-
ical source can reveal. Texts are not the only sources available to the historian,
however. Archaeological excavations of houses and settlements can show us
where and how people lived, what they ate, and how they made a living.
Countless other types of evidence survive from antiquity: inscriptions on
tombstones; shopping lists, receipts, and personal letters written on broken
potsherds or on papyrus (an ancient form of paper); legal codes regulating
everything from homicide to taxes to the inheritance of property; monuments
celebrating imperial victories; medical texts describing symptoms of disease
and ancient forms of therapy. This book offers a basic narrative outline of
ancient history and a guide to some features of ancient culture and society-
but doing history, rather than just reading about it, means using primary
sources* like those just described to reach original conclusions.
The Origins of Civilization

Most people realize that the Western world as we know it is a recent phe-
nomenon. Just one hundred years ago, our great-grandparents lived without
the technological and scientific advances that define the modern lifestyle: con-
veniences such as the automobile, the telephone, and indoor plumbing, or the
vaccines and antibiotic medicines that make life much safer than it once was.
But we may not realize that civilization itself-such innovations as agricul-
ture, writing, weaving, and permanent architecture-is a recent development.
Anatomically modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) lived on earth for at least
*A primary source is the evidence that the historian uses to prove a conclusion-for
example, the comedies of Aristophanes, written in the fifth century B.C., are a pri-
mary source for ancient Athenian politics. A secondary source is another scholar's
study of the material, such as modem books and articles about Aristophanes or
ancient Athens. Some sources can be either primary or secondary: Edward Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, would be a secondary source
for a study of the Roman Empire, but a primary source for a study of Gibbon.
The First Civilizations 3
,---- - --- - ---il Doing History J~------------,
CHRONOLOGY
Chronology means "the study of time." Chronology has always been a part of
the task of history. The earliest histories produced in Western culture-the
Hebrew Bible and the historical works of classical Greece- sought to assign
dates to the events they described. The Greeks used several methods, including
lists of Athenian officials and of victors in the Olympic games and the reigns of
the kings of Sparta. The Jewish historians of the Bible were so careful to indi-
cate the number of years lived by all the important figures in its complex
genealogical system that it is possible (with a few complications) to calculate
the exact age of the earth as represented in Jewish mythology. The Jewish cal-
endar still dates events from the traditional first year of creation, 3761 B.c.
Other cultures developed their own chronological systems. For example, the
traditional Chinese calendar counts years in cycles of sixty, each associated
with a different animal; the years are numbered sequentially from 2637 B.C.,
when the calendar was invented. The Muslim calendar dates all events from the
hijra- the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in A.D. 622.
The Western world dates events from the traditional year of Christ's birth, a
method that became widespread in Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries.
The terms B.c. (before Christ) and A.D. (anna domini, "in the year of the lord")
refer to this system. Western chronology uses a 365-day calendar based on the
one devised by Julius Caesar in the first century B.c., but other traditions use
different calendars with shorter or longer years, so that tables or mathematical
calculations (or a simple computer program) are usually needed to convert
dates from one system to another.
Sometimes, historians substitute the terms " c.E." and "s.c.E."-"common
era" and ''before the common era"-for B.C . and A.D. in order to avoid the
appearance of privileging a Christian, European chronological method . How-
ever, since these terms may create the misleading impression that dating events
by Christ's birth is a practice "common" to other traditions, they have been
avoided here.
100,000 years before building the first cities five thousand years ago . In a sense,
civilization as a way of life is still in the experimental phase. We do not know
whether it will be as successful in the long run as the hunting-and-gathering
existence that sustained our ancestors for most of human history.
The period before the widespread use of metals, when most tools were
made of stone, is called the Stone Age. It is divided into two main periods, the
Paleolithic or "old stone" age, which begins with the earliest artifacts*, and
•An artifact is an object produced by human manufacture or modified by humans.

the Neolithic or "new stone" age, which begins with the invention of agri-
culture. These terms refer to technical innovations (stone tools, farming)
rather than to absolute dates. Both the Paleolithic and the Neolithic began
and ended at different times in different places. The earliest known stone
tools have been recovered from Ethiopia; they were produced by a hominid*
called homo habilis and date to about 2.5 million years ago. In the Mediter-
ranean region, the earliest Paleolithic sites (in Israel, Morocco, and Spain)
date to about 1 million years ago; the tools at these sites were produced by
populations of homo erectus, a hominid that evolved later than homo habilis.
The Neolithic period began as early as eleven thousand years ago in the Near
East but did not reach other areas of the Mediterranean region until much
later.
The Archaeological Record

No written records survive to tell historians about the Stone Age, since writ-
ing did not appear anywhere in the Mediterranean region before about 3300
BC.t When studying early societies without writing, we must rely on artifacts
(of stone, metal, or other durable material) and the skeletons of humans and
animals for information. Archaeological excavation- digging into the
ground to unearth bones, artifacts, and the remains of dwellings-can give
us deep insight into life at a specific site. Survey archaeology, which looks at
remains that survive on the surface of the ground over a wide area, gives a
better idea of general settlement patterns. Scientists can examine seeds and
pollen samples from archaeological sites to learn about the climate, natural
environment, and food sources of ancient peoples; bones can reveal clues to
their owners' diet and activities and the diseases that affected them during
their lives.
In recent years, new techniques have been developed to help date the
remains unearthed by archaeologists, although more traditional methods
remain important. Analysis of an excavated site's stratigraphy-the layers in
which the finds were deposited-helps archaeologists to determine the rela-
tive age of finds, since more recent layers are normally closer to the surface of
the ground. Other techniques can help assign absolute, rather than relative,
dates to finds. Some of the most important are radiocarbon dating, which can
be used on organic matter (such as bones) and is reliable to about forty thou-
sand years ago; and, after the invention of pottery, the changing styles of pot-
tery fragments found in association with other artifacts.
Other methods developed in the last few decades have greatly aided the
study of artifacts too old for reliable radiocarbon dating and are especially
important for the Stone Age. Electron spin resonance dating can be used on
tooth enamel and some other crystalline materials and can date fossils several
*A hominid is a creature closely related to modern humans.

tThe long period of the human past before writing was invented is sometimes called
"prehistory."
millions of years old. Thermoluminescence dating can be used on any artifact

that was heated to high temperatures when it was made or, for example, when
a site was destroyed by fire. But all dating techniques have important limita-
tions and problems; our image of ancient societies, especially those without
writing, is revised frequently as new discoveries are made and old finds are
reexamined and assigned new dates.
Even for periods with a substantial written record, such as the imperial
Roman period, archaeology is a valuable source of information. It can tell us
more about the lives of ordinary people than literary sources, which usually
are produced by the upper classes and reflect their point of view. But it is
important to remember that even cultures with few archaeological remains
were not necessarily simple and unsophisticated. Materials such as wood
and textiles do not survive well in the archaeological record; more impor-
tantly, the rich oral culture of myth and ritual that characterizes preliterate
societies often does not survive in any form.
The First Modern Humans

In the Paleolithic era, the most important feature of the climate was a series
of glaciations, or "ice ages," during which world temperatures declined and
sea levels dropped as ice covered much of the world's surface. The last of
these ice ages ended about ten thousand years ago; we do not yet know
whether another will succeed it, although this seems likely.
About 100,000 years ago, anatomically modem humans begin to appear in
the archaeological record. Scholars debate whether they arose in one place
only or evolved separately in several locations. A controversial but widely
accepted theory sometimes called the "Out of Africa" hypothesis holds that
the common female ancestor of all humans today lived in Africa about
150,000 years ago. (This theory is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis,
which examines the DNA of microorganisms that live inside us all and are
inherited only from our mothers.) In this scenario, anatomically modem
humans evolved in Africa and spread from there to Asia and Europe, where
they replaced the earlier hominids they encountered.
Some of the earliest traces of homo sapiens sapiens have been found in the
Mediterranean region; remains from two sites in Israel are 100,000 years old.
Another species of humans-homo sapiens Neanderthalensis, or "Neanderthal
man,"-had inhabited Europe for more than 200,000 years and arrived in the
Near East at about the same time as modern humans. These two species coex-
isted for a long time, but by about thirty thousand years ago all the Nean-
derthals had disappeared. The reasons for this are unknown but may be
related to technological advances among populations of modem humans.
Toward the end of the Paleolithic, about forty thousand years ago, these
humans began to manufacture finer and more efficient tools and weapons, to
live or travel in social groups of a hundred or more, and to produce music,
paintings, and art objects. The most spectacular remains from the later
Paleolithic are the cave paintings found in France and Spain. The earliest of
these, from the Chauvet Cave in southern France, are at least thirty thousand
This Paleolithic painting from the caves of Lascaux in France dates to about 15,000 B.C.
While animals are portrayed with vivid grace and realism in cave paintings, humans are
depicted more schematically, like the bird-headed stick figure (perhaps a shaman) in this
scene. Hunting is an important theme in many cave paintings; the bison in this picture has
been wounded by a spear. (Art Resource, N Y)
years old. (Surviving paintings are located deep inside the caves, sometimes
in nearly inaccessible spots, but anthropologists believe Paleolithic humans
also produced art in the open air, which has not been preserved.)
But the innovation that paved the way for civilization was an economic
one that did not occur until much later. Throughout the Paleolithic period,
hominids and humans subsisted on wild foods-that is, they hunted or scav-
enged for meat, they fished, and they collected plants and shellfish. In the
Neolithic period, humans started to produce their own food by farming and
raising domesticated animals. Over time, this development had important
consequences for every aspect of human life. But the Neolithic revolution did
not occur anywhere until about eleven thousand years ago. For 90 percent of
its history, our species hunted and gathered wild foods for subsistence.
The Beginnings of Agriculture

Why did some human populations begin to farm? Many scholars point to the
environmental conditions at the end of the last ice age, between thirteen
thousand and ten thousand years ago. This period, called the Mesolithic or
"middle stone" age, was one of climatic instability that required humans to
adapt to environmental changes. As sea levels rose and many species became
extinct, some humans broadened the range of plants and animals on which
they relied for food. For example, some exploited fish, shellfish, and marine
mammals (even whales) much more intensively; others focused on specific
kinds of food that were especially abundant. The remains of permanent
houses, cemeteries, and shellfish middens (enormous piles of shells) suggest
that many populations began to lead a more sedentary life.
In the Neolithic, perhaps as a result of these changes, some species of
plants and animals became domesticated. Humans selected the individuals
with the most desirable traits-grain stalks with bigger seeds, sheep with
thicker wool, and so on-and bred from them to produce more plants and
animals with the same traits.
As humans domesticated their food sources, they also took steps to nurture
and protect them: sowing seeds by hand rather than letting them scatter nat-
urally, plowing and irrigating to help them grow, fencing in animals to pro-
tect them from predators or keep them from running away. They changed
subsistence strategies from foraging to agriculture.
The earliest evidence of agriculture comes from the Near East, especially
the so-called fertile crescent.* Here, some grains, legumes, and animals were
domesticated as long as eleven thousand years ago (about 9000 B.c.). In
Europe, farming is attested in parts of Greece and Bulgaria beginning about
5500 B.c.; but it did not reach western Europe until later.
We do not know exactly why humans first began to domesticate and culti-
vate wild foods. Perhaps, humans who had become settled in one area did
not want to migrate as the climate warmed; instead of moving to where their
preferred sources of food were more abundant, they sought to increase the
availability of these foods in their own area. Another possibility is that mor-
tality decreased in some communities as they became more settled, leading
to population explosions that caused people to look for ways of increasing
the food supply. Some agricultural techniques may have developed gradu-
ally over a long period of time, as people intervened more and more in the
*The fertile crescent is that part of the Near East in which agriculture is possible,
with or without the aid of irrigation; it is not especially "fertile" when compared to
many other areas of the world, but only when compared to the very arid desert
regions of the Near East. The arms of the crescent are the Levant (the Mediterranean
Sea's eastern coastline) and Mesopotamia (the area between the two rivers Tigris
and Euphrates, in modern Iraq); the two arms meet in what is now southern Turkey.
See map, p. 14.
In Mesopotamia, writing developed from a system of accounting by clay tokens that was
widespread in the Neolithic Near East. This clay envelope and tokens from Susa, in Iran,
date to about 3300 B.C. (Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY)
wild environment, for example, by corralling the animals they hunted or

weeding out plants they did not like. When crises occurred, they responded
by exploiting these techniques more intensively.
Over time, agriculture resulted in important changes in the way people
lived. As a result of a diet richer in grain they probably accumulated more
body fat, which increased fertility in women and led to larger, denser popu-
lations. In an agricultural economy it is easier to acquire and store a surplus
beyond what is necessary for survival; this allowed some people to control
more resources than others-to become rich-and these economic inequali-
ties led to social inequalities and more complicated social systems. Surpluses
could also be used to support members of the community-craftsmen, musi-
cians, or priests, for example-who did not need to spend all their time farm-
ing or foraging for subsistence; thus agricultural societies tended to become
more culturally sophisticated. A large surplus might support a labor force for
a major project, such as an irrigation system or a monument. Such projects
imply not only economic resources but also leadership-some individuals
began to assert authority over others in the community.
One of the most important innovations of the Neolithic period was a new
way of recording information. Agriculturalists needed a way to keep track of
the goods they stored, especially as society became more stratified and elites
collected goods from others to redistribute to their families and dependents.

Archaeologists at numerous sites throughout the Near East have discovered
small clay tokens, often in simple geometric shapes, that were used to signify
quantities of grain and livestock and, later, manufactured goods and abstract
economic units such as a day's work. Later, these tokens would evolve into
the first system of writing.
The Neolithic revolution did not happen all at once. Agriculture and for-
aging are not mutually exclusive ways of living, and for a while people prac-
ticed both. And while farming began in the Near East about 9000 B.c., it did
not reach Britain until 4000 B.c.; a few small populations of foragers remain
even today. But compared to the Paleolithic period, social, economic, cul-
tural, and technological changes have taken place at an astounding rate since
the invention of agriculture. This may have been the most important event in
the history of our species.
The shift to agriculture should not necessarily be viewed as simple
"progress." As we have noted, social inequality is part and parcel of the com-
plexity that resulted from Neolithic innovations. There is also good evidence
that agriculture made life harder in many ways. For example, it requires
much more work than hunting and gathering. Studies of Neolithic human
skeletons also show that agricultural societies were more vulnerable to infec-
tious disease, no doubt because they tended to have denser, more settled
populations than hunters and gatherers. Archaeologists have also found
more evidence of malnutrition in these populations, perhaps because of their
dependence on a single crop which might fail. As a result, life expectancy was
shorter in early agricultural societies than it was for foragers .*
A New Complexity: Some Neolithic Sites

Jericho. A number of early Neolithic sites in the Near East, dating from
about 7000 B.c. to 5000 B.C., show the first signs of more social and cultural
complexity. One of these sites is Jericho in Israel, later made famous in the
biblical book of Joshua. Here a stone perimeter wall, ten feet thick and twelve
feet high, with a tower twenty-six feet high, was constructed around 8000 B.c.
It enclosed an area of about ten acres, with a population of perhaps two thou-
sand people. This is the earliest known example of public architecture (build-
ings used by the whole community instead of by individual families) and the
earliest large group labor project.
(:atalhoyiik. <;atalhoyi.ik is one of the largest and most famous of several

early Neolithic sites in Turkey and Syria. It covers about thirty-two acres and
w as a substantial settlement by 6300 B.c.; archaeologists estimate that the
population of the village may have been between five thousand and ten thou-
sand at its maximum. Nearby, the Hasan Dag volcano produced an abundant
*See Mark Nathan Cohen and J. Armelagos, "Paleopathology at the Origins of Agri-
culture: Editors' Summation," in Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, Orlando,
FL: Academic Press, 1984, pp. 585-601.
The circular tower inside the walls of Jericho is 26 feet high and dates to about 8000 B.C.
(Scala/Art Resource, NY)
supply of obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock that is both beautiful and well-
suited for making sharp tools and weapons. It was a rare commodity traded
throughout the Near East, and it is probably this economic advantage that
accounts for the early settlement and large size of <;atalhoyiik.
This site provides a good example of a population that relied both on wild
and domestic foods for subsistence: While the remains of cultivated grains
have been found at <;atalhoyiik, studies of the villagers' teeth show that wild
legumes and roots formed the main part of their diet. They also tended
domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats.
The village consisted of a conglomeration of mud brick houses sharing
adjoining walls. The houses were all about the same size (about sixteen-by-
sixteen feet) and had the same plan: one large room with a smaller, adjoining
room perhaps used for storage. The villagers entered the houses through
holes in the roof.
There is no conclusive evidence of public buildings or of districts serving
specific functions (such as a religious or administrative center). While it was
The mud brick houses of (:atalhoyuk were built in agglomerations with adjoining walls; open
spaces served as pens for domesticated animals. (The (:atalhoyuk Project)
once thought that some buildings were religious shrines, archaeologists now
question this identification. The village seems to have been formed mainly or
entirely of private houses and open spaces where animals were kept. Some
houses contained more sophisticated architectural features (such as pillars,
m oldings, or wall paintings) and more artifacts than others, indicating that
the population was socially and economically stratified (that is, some fami-
lies had higher socioeconomic status than others). Some of the artifacts, such
as polished obsidian mirrors, must have been made by specialized craftsmen.
But in general <;atalhoyuk lacks the more structured organization of space
and of society that later characterized the first cities.
The people of <::atalhoyiik buried the bones of the dead beneath the floors
of their houses, where skeletons of all types-men, women, children, and
infants-have been found . Because people of all ages were buried in the same
way, which is unusual in premodern societies, we are able to get an idea of
the village's demography-the statistical makeup of its population. The
average age at death was thirty-four for adult men, thirty for adult women.
Each woman had about four children, of whom nearly half died before adult-
hood. A few people lived beyond the age of sixty. Many of the villagers suf-
fered from anemia (low red blood count), caused by malnutrition or disease.
<::atalhoyiik has produced a wealth of artifacts, including dozens of vari-
eties of flint or obsidian tools and weapons, polished obsidian mirrors, fine
bone objects such as needles and hairpins, and pottery. Art objects include
statuettes of men, women, and animals; some of the female statuettes may
depict goddesses. Among the most interesting and unusual remains are the
Stonehenge, on the Salisbury Plain in southern England, is the most famous and spectacular
of over a thousand stone circles that survive from Neolithic Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.
(Pho to by Susan P. Mattern-Parkes)
paintings that decorate some interior walls. They depict a range of themes
from simple geometric patterns and handprints, to scenes of hunting or reli-
gious festivals, to a landscape with a town in the foreground and an erupting
volcano in the background. A few portray headless corpses-perhaps the
bodies of criminals-being devoured by vultures.
Stonehenge. Stonehenge in southern England is an example of a very dif-

ferent type of Neolithic site; in its way, it is no less complex than Jericho or
C::atalhoyi.ik. It is one of the largest and best-preserved of over a thousand
Neolithic stone circles in the British Isles and Brittany (northwestern France).
Four thousand years ago, the builders of this monument moved sixty enor-
mous sandstone blocks, each weighing between twenty and fifty tons, a dis-
tance of eighteen and a half miles from their source-no simple feat even
today-and stood half of them upright in a circle nearly one hundred feet in
diameter. They then raised the remaining thirty blocks sixteen feet off the
ground and rested them horizontally on top of the uprights. Inside the circle,
more megaliths (literally, "large rocks") were erected to form a pattern radi-
ating outward from the center, where a single sandstone block once stood.
Although only about half of these megaliths remain today, they still make an
awesome impression on the observer.
The Stonehenge monument is not only large; it was also constructed with
a great deal of precision. For instance, the horizontal blocks (called "lintels")
of the outer ring were carved in a subtle curve so that they would make a per-
fect circle when joined together, and the plane they form is almost exactly
level, although the ground slopes slightly. The builders adapted woodwork-
ing techniques to create a secure, exact fit between the stone lintels and the
uprights.
Why would the people of Neolithic Britain invest so much time and labor
in this megalithic monument? Some features of Stonehenge suggest that it
had a ritual significance having to do with death and time. The finished stone
ring was oriented toward the midsummer sunrise; other, earlier parts of the
monument were aligned to the northernmost and southernmost risings of the
moon in midwinter, which oscillate on an eighteen-and-one-half-year cycle
and would have required prolonged astronomical observations. A ring of
fifty-six pits contained cremated human remains. Whatever its ritual func-
tion, the monument probably also served to lend cohesive focus to the com-
munity, as an organized labor project and a gathering-place for festivals .
The Iceman. One of the most spectacular Neolithic finds is the "Iceman,"
discovered by hikers in the Austrian Alps in 1991. He is technically called
"Similaun man" after the glacier in which he was encased, which preserved
not only his body but also the clothes he was wearing and the equipment he
w as carrying. He died about 3300 B.C., probably of exposure; he had been
injured recently and his ribs had been broken. An earlier rib fracture had
healed; the Iceman's bones also show evidence of periods of malnutrition or
serious illness. Tattoos on his legs and torso may have been a kind of medical
treatment (like acupuncture). His clothes were made of several types of ani-
mal skin; he carried a backpack, a hip pack, and about twenty items, includ-
ing a small copper axe (the earliest evidence for copper in this area), a six-foot
w ooden bow, a quiver of arrows (but only two had flint tips), a flint knife, a
type of medicinal fungus, and a fungus that was useful for starting fires.
Scholars have debated about his social status and what he was doing on the
m ountain. Possibly he was a shepherd-a dangerous and isolated job in any
time period-who met with an accident or bad weather.
The First Civilizations: The Eastern Mediterranean

in the Bronze Age
Archaeologists use the word civilization to describe societies with certain fea-
tures, especially a stratified and hereditary social system (one is born into a
specific social class); government, including taxation, fixed laws, and orga-
nized labor; division of labor and craft specialization (instead of working pri-
m arily as farmers, some individuals achieve high levels of skill as sculptors,
metalworkers, and so on); record-keeping and some form of writing; and
m onumental architecture (such as the pyramids of Egypt or the ziggurats of
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The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age

_ 1esopotamia). Compared to earlier Neolithic cultures, civilizations were

.arger, more densely populated, and more centralized.
At the root of the word "civilization" is the Latin word for "city." It is in
cities that we find most of the characteristics mentioned in the preceding
_ aragraph. But every city had to be supported by the agricultural surplus of
- e countryside. In the ancient economy, this meant that most people were
mrmers. They worked on land they owned themselves, or land that was
wned by urban aristocrats or by the state; the surplus they generated was
sent to the cities as taxes or rent.
Ylost of our evidence for life in the ancient world, however, comes from the
cities. Rural sites are usually small and scattered and thus difficult to find,
and literature was produced by urban elites. It is important to remember this
_ias in the evidence when studying ancient civilizations.
The Bronze Age

.-\round 3500 B.c., copper began to be used widely instead of stone for tools
and weapons. (In some places, copper was used much earlier; for example, it
appears at c;:atalhoyuk beginning around 5500 B.c.) By 2500 B.c. most Mediter-
ranean populations had switched to bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Since
:he mid-nineteenth century, scholars have used the term "Bronze Age" to refer
.o the period when bronze was the primary material used to make weapons
and tools. The beginning of this period roughly corresponds with the rise of
the first civilizations. It lasted until about 1200 B.c., when an era of destruction
threw much of the Mediterranean world into a dark age. Afterward, around
1000 B.C ., iron-which is more common than copper or tin and harder and
m ore durable when carburized (a complicated process of repeatedly heating
o high temperatures)-became the material of choice for weapons and metal
ools. Although the classification of ancient societies according to this aspect
of their technology now seems arbitrary, the term "Bronze Age" remains a
convenient way of indicating the earliest period of civilization up to the
estructive events of 1200 to 1100 B.C.
Mesopotamian Civilization
''Mesopotamia" means "the land between the rivers"- in this case, the rivers
Tigris and Euphrates that flow through modern Iraq to the Persian Gulf.
Throughout the Bronze Age, the center of Mesopotamian civilization lay in
the southern part of this area. It is hard to determine how far it extended at
any time. Kings captured and lost cities in wars that are barely known to us;
some sites have not been excavated well enough to determine their cultural
orientation. In general, sites in the south have been better excavated and have
p roduced more documentary evidence than northern sites, so scholarly
attention tends to focus on them.
Civilization did not arise in southern Mesopotamia because it was an
unusually fertile area. In fact, the climate was (and remains) hot and dry;
trees were scarce, and until oil became important in the modern economy the
land was poor in natural resources. Farming was only possible with the aid
of irrigation. The communal organization required to dig the canals that
brought water from the rivers to the countryside partly accounts for the early
growth of cities in Mesopotamia.
The Written Sources. Mesopotamia was the first civilization to develop

writing. Their system is called cuneiform because scribes used a sharpened
reed to impress shapes like a wedge (cuneus in Latin) into clay tablets.
Because clay is very durable, especially when baked hard (for example in a
fire), many thousands of these tablets survive.
Cuneiform writing evolved from the system of tokens used for accounting
throughout the Neolithic Near East. As central institutions-temples and
palaces-began to collect goods as taxes, the need for sophisticated account-
ing practices grew. Mesopotamian scribes found it more efficient to draw pic-
tures of the tokens on clay tablets than to manufacture and store the tokens
themselves. The earliest written documents recorded quantities of goods, but
cuneiform writing quickly developed the complexity necessary to record a
wide range of material, including literary works. Gradually it evolved from
a pictographic system of signs representing concepts into a mostly phonetic
system-a set of symbols that represented the sound combinations (such as
mu, na, or sum) of the language it was recording. The ancient Mesopotamians
called the language of the earliest cuneiform tablets "Sumerian," and schol-
ars refer to the writers of the language as "Sumerians."
Sumerian is not related to any known living or ancient language. Scholars
can read it because, although people apparently ceased speaking in Sumerian
around 2000 B.c., it was taught in schools as a classical language (like Latin
today) until the first century B.C. Dictionaries, vocabularies, and bilingual
texts were produced to teach Sumerian to speakers of Akkadian, the other
major language spoken in early Mesopotamia, which used the same writing
system. Akkadian is a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew.
Because scholars can read Akkadian, they have been able to reconstruct
the Sumerian language using the bilingual texts and study aids written in
Akkadian.
Although until about 2300 B.C . documents were written in Sumerian only,
speakers of Sumerian and Akkadian seem to have lived side by side since
the early third millenium B.C., and some early kings of Mesopotamian cities
had Akkadian names. For this reason it is impossible to separate Sumerian
from Akkadian civilization.
A huge variety of cuneiform documents survive. Writing originated as a
way to keep track of goods and labor, and tens of thousands of such records
have been discovered. Legal documents, court records, business records, offi-
cial and private correspondence, hymns and incantations, and great literary
texts, such as the famous epic of Gilgamesh, also survive in large numbers.
Cuneiform documents shed light on many aspects of early Mesopotamian
life that are much more difficult to trace in other ancient societies. Marriage,
slavery, and household organization; property and inheritance; wages,
prices, and taxes; food and farming; and other aspects of the Mesopotamian
economy and society are all well-represented in cuneiform texts. In fact, it is
easier to reconstruct the social and economic history of early Mesopotamia
than its political history, which is confusing and obscure.
HISTORICAL PERIODS OF BRONZE AGE MESOPOTAMIA

Before ca. 3000 B.C. Predynastic
300Q-ca. 2300 B.c. Early Dynastic
2300-2200 B.C. Akkadian
ca. 2100-2000 B.C. Ur III Dynasty
ca. 2000-1595 B.C. Old Babylonian (or Amorite)
1595-ca. 1450 B.c. Dark Age
ca. 1450-1155 B.C. Kassites
The City. The city lay at the heart of Mesopotamian culture and politics.
Kings created empires by conquering cities, and, in boasting of the extent of
their territory, they listed the cities under their rule. Cities were supposed to
have been founded by the gods, and unlike some other societies, the
Mesopotamians did not idealize the agrarian lifestyle but contrasted city life
with the poverty and barbarism of the desert. At its height in the period of
Sargon (ca. 2300 B.c.), the largest Mesopotamian city-Uruk-contained per-
haps sixty thousand people and was the most populous city in the world.
The city was a central theme of the most famous literary text of ancient
Mesopotamia: the epic of Gilgamesh, which survives in fragments dating
back to the Old Babylonian period (and in a complete version dating to the
seventh century B.c.). The hero is the king of Uruk, and the poem begins with
a passage in praise of the great city's walls. The first episode of the story is the
"civilization" of Enkidu, a wild man from the desert, whom Gilgamesh sub-
dues and introduces to the pleasures of sexual intercourse, beer, and bread.
Gilgamesh's relationship with the elders and people of Uruk and his devel-
opment into a responsible king are also important themes of the epic.
The earliest cities arose in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia. Around
5000 B.c. farmers began building canals to carry water from the Euphrates
River to the otherwise dry, sterile soil of the surrounding countryside. Irriga-
tion created the possibility of an agricultural surplus; the canals also made
trade and communications easier, which allowed resources to become con-
centrated in urban centers. By 3000 B.c., Uruk was already a large site cover-
ing an area of 247 acres. A temple constructed on a massive forty-foot plat-
fo rm at this time indicates that a central administration was collecting goods
as taxes and using them to fund public buildings. The same administration
w as using writing to keep records of the resources it managed.
The city was defined spatially and symbolically by its defensive walls.
Some city walls were several meters thick; some had massive, monumental
The ziggurat of the god Enlil at Nippur, southwest of modern Baghdad, dominates the hori-
zon. Continually occupied from about 5000 B.C. to A .D. 800, Nippur was mainly a religious
center. A long series of kings funded the construction of sacred buildings like this one to help
legitimize their rule. (The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)
citadels and gates; and some were surrounded by moats. The practical func-
tion of the walls was to protect the people of the city and its environs in time
of war. Cities could be captured by siege- the enemy might starve the inhab-
itants by preventing the influx of supplies or assault the gates with battering-
rams or construct wooden scaffolds or ramps to climb over the walls.
Aside from the walls, the most prominent public building in any city was
the temple. Temples were built on high platforms in the city center; by 2000
B.c., they had developed into striking, pyramidal ziggurats, which were vis-
ible in the landscape for a long distance and dominated the city's "skyline."
The temples were the focus of economic power in the Mesopotamian city.
They funded and controlled irrigation canals and owned large quantities of
land, flocks, and herds in the countryside; they manufactured textiles, wood,
metal, and stone products; and they employed thousands of public workers,
both male and female. The temples, then, controlled a large part of the agri-
cultural surplus generated in the countryside; one of their main functions
was to collect and redistribute that surplus.
Temples were also the center of religious authority in Mesopotamian civi-
lization; no evidence remains of local village shrines or of the nature-cults of
springs and hilltops that were ubiquitous elsewhere in the ancient Mediter-
ranean world. All temples were in the city, and religious worship apparently
centered on them. Each temple was associated with one or more gods or god-
desses, whose cult-statues it housed. The clothing, jewelry, and precious
items dedicated to the deity over the years were also stored in the temple. The
proper interpretation of omens was one of the most important functions of
the temple staff; experts in divination predicted the future by interpreting
dreams, by observing the internal organs of slaughtered animals, by astrol-
ogy, and by numerous other techniques. Scribes generated long, systematic
lists of possible omens and their meanings and produced other types of reli-
gious literature, such as hymns to the gods. Temple staff included priests and
priestesses, singers of hymns and incantations, diviners, and a host of sup-
port personnel from barbers to doormen. Some temple officials, including
priestesses and some of the scribes, were women.
Gradually, a center of political and economic authority separate from the
temple developed in Mesopotamian cities: the palace, the home of the king.
The kings served as military leaders, paid for public works such as temples
and irrigation canals, heard legal appeals, and represented the city in various
religious rituals. Next to the temple, the palace was the largest building in the
Yiesopotamian city. The palace at Mari on the middle Euphrates had more
than 250 rooms and housed hundreds of people, including the king's family
and household staff. But the king was not the only source of secular author-
ity in the city. The most important form of citizen government was the assem-
bly of citizens that heard cases and resolved a wide range of everyday dis-
putes on issues such as divorce or murder. Many texts also refer to a group
called the "elders" who formed a council of more restricted membership.
Like the temples, kings owned a great deal of land, employed a substantial
number of people as household staff and laborers, and collected taxes and
rents. Between these two institutions-the temple and the king-a large part
of the Mesopotamian economy was "redistributive" in nature; that is, a cen-
tral authority collected and distributed resources, for example, to pay for
. ublic buildings or warfare or to feed its own staff. This is different from a
market economy, which is governed by the principles of supply and demand;
ut some parts of the Mesopotamian economy probably functioned in this
,·ay. Coinage had not yet been invented, but silver bullion was used as a
::nedium of exchange or for accounting purposes (it is easier to trade com-
modities if the value of each can be expressed in silver). The Code of Ham-
::nurabi specifies fines payable in quantities of silver (seep. 25).
Dynasties and Empires. The political history of Mesopotamia is a compli-

cated story of conquests and upheavals-at times power in a whole region
~·as consolidated under a dynasty of rulers (although it is often difficult to
ell exactly which cities were subject to their rule), and at other times power
·as fragmented among the individual cities. The city-each with its own
?atron god, temple, and king-was always the true focus of Mesopotamian
. litics. Even in times when a monarch exercised leadership over many
.::ities, each city still had its own king or governor and remained the basic
inistrative unit; when the central government collapsed, political power
devolved onto the cities' leaders. This perhaps explains why Mesopotamian
culture remained relatively stable, evolving slowly over many centuries
despite frequent and dramatic changes in the region's political situation.
While the general population must have fought and suffered in the wars of
conquest upon which many of the Mesopotamian empires were founded, the
long-term effects of these changes are more difficult to measure.
The main source for the earliest political history of Mesopotamia is the
"Sumerian King List," which was composed in Akkadian around 1800 B.c.; it
lists kings and the lengths of their reigns, beginning with the legendary rulers
of the remote past. The document makes an interesting division between
mythic and historical time: the earliest kings had unnaturally long reigns (for
example, of 28,800 or 36,000 years); but these gradually become more realis-
tic as the list gets closer to the time of compilation. The most important event
punctuating the list is a flood that separates the earliest dynasty from the
next-other Mesopotamian texts also refer to the myth of a great flood, which
destroyed all but a remnant of the population. (Similar stories existed in
Hebrew and Greek mythology, which were perhaps influenced by the
Mesopotamian legend.)
The list's premise is that at any given time, one city and its rulers exercised
leadership over the others. It seems likely that the authors of the document
were simplifying the situation, but it is difficult to arrive at any more concrete
idea of the political history of early Mesopotamia than the one it offers. In
general, it seems that about thirty cities in southern Mesopotamia competed
with one another for dominance.
The first king successfully to unite many Mesopotamian cities under one
central government was Sargon, an Akkadian, whose reign dates to about
2300 B.c. In inscriptions that were copied and preserved by later generations,
and in the legends that grew up around him, Sargon was remembered as a
great conqueror. He founded a new capital, Akkad, whose location is uncer-
tain today. He destroyed the walls of some of the most powerful cities and
installed his own people as governors there and took other steps to create
political unity under his rule; he appointed his daughter Enheduanna as high
priestess of two important cults in the key cities of Ur and Uruk (some of the
beautiful hymns she wrote survive).
Sargon's empire lasted until about 2100 B.c. before dissolving, perhaps as
a result of tribal incursions from the north. Briefly, a Sumerian dynasty from
Ur, today known as the "Ur III dynasty," reunited much of the territory once
ruled by Sargon. During this period, a massive government bureaucracy gen-
erated enormous quantities of administrative records. The Ur III kings also
standardized weights and measures and developed a communications sys-
tem of messengers and way stations. They promulgated the first legal code,
which assessed fines for acts of violence and bodily injury, and they con-
structed the first ziggurats, monumental temples built in a stepped pyramid
design.
Beginning around 2000 B.c. the Ur III dynasty gradually disintegrated and
the political focus of Mesopotamia reverted once again to the cities. By 1760
Hammurabi, ruler of the city of Babylon, had once again united southern
Mesopotamia under a single government. Today Hammurabi is most famous
for his legal code (seep. 25). His dynasty lasted for about 150 years, and this
era is called the Old Babylonian or Amorite period.
In 1595, Babylon was sacked by Hittites and the empire founded by Ham-
murabi collapsed. After a "dark age" of about a hundred years, the next peo-
ple to rule over southern Mesopotamia were the Kassites, who captured
Babylon and reestablished its hegemony over the other cities. Not much is
known about the Kassites except that they were foreigners, perhaps from the
Zagros mountains; too little was written in Kassite to allow firm conclusions
about their language, but it was not a Semitic language like Akkadian. They
succeeded in ruling for longer than any other Mesopotamian dynasty-
about three hundred years. The Kassites called their kingdom "Babylonia";
they were the first Mesopotamian dynasty to imagine their empire as a geo-
graphic territory rather than a group of cities. They seem to have adapted to
Mesopotamian culture instead of changing it; Akkadian and Sumerian
remained the kingdom's written languages, and the Kassite kings supported
traditional Mesopotamian cults and restored important public buildings. It is
not clear whether their Mesopotamian subjects perceived the later Kassites as
a dynasty of foreign rulers, or simply as "Babylonians."
Society and Family. Slavery existed in every society discussed in this book,
but it took many forms and was different in each. In fact, since it was such a
diverse institution and since there is no one test that all scholars agree on to
determine what qualifies as "slavery," there is controversy about whether
some groups of people (such as the mushkenu discussed later in this section)
should be considered slaves or not. Slaves that are bought and sold and
treated mainly as property are often called chattel slaves by scholars today,
but this was not the only type of slavery that existed. For example, certain
kinds of slaves might be inherited or sold with an estate, but not independ-
ently (scholars sometimes call these "serfs"), and people enslaved to their
creditors for defaulting on a debt, or women bought as concubines, might be
treated differently than other kinds of slaves. In some societies the emanci-
pation (freeing) of slaves was commonplace, or slaves might own property in
a restricted sense or intermarry with free people; in others, the boundary
between slavery and freedom was more difficult to cross.
Finally, slavery was not equally important in all ancient societies. In some,
including classical Athens and Roman Italy, a substantial part of the popula-
tion was enslaved; many or most households had domestic slaves, who per-
formed crucial functions such as raising children; and slaves played a large
role in the economy, for example, as an agricultural labor force. In other soci-
eties, slaves were relatively rare.
Slaves in ancient Mesopotamia might be owned by the king, the temple, or
a wealthy private citizen. Most privately owned slaves in Mesopotamia were
domestic servants. Slaves were distinguished from the free population by
armbands, special haircuts, and distinctive names. They could be bought,
Art and Society
WARFARE IN EARLY MESOPOTAMIA
The Vulture Stele from Lagash. (Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ Art
Resource, NY)
The "Vulture stele" (a stele is an upright stone slab) from the city of Lagash,
dated to 2450 B.c., preserves an illustrated narrative of a war between Lagash
and the city of Umma, about thirty miles to the northwest along the Tigris.
Infantrymen wield axes, adzes, and spears; one group carries shields and
stands in a tight formation similar to the Greek hoplite "phalanx" (seep. 63).
In one scene the king rides in a four-wheeled chariot at the head of the army; in
another, he leads them on foot into battle. All the soldiers wear pointed helmets,
perhaps made of leather. Other texts refer to contingents of "hunters," perhaps
wielding nets.
At its largest, an army raised by a great king like Hammurabi might number
about ten thousand. Little evidence survives to indicate who the soldiers
were- for example, whether they were ordinary citizens or paid professionals.
Hammurabi's code suggests that in his time, the state leased some land to indi-
viduals on the condition that they serve when drafted. In practice people often
hired substitutes, and this eventually became legal.
inherited, and sold; but the Code of Harnrnurabi allows them to marry free
women and in this way to have children of free status. Slaves either inherited
their status from their parents, were prisoners of war, or were bought from
slave traders dealing abroad. Children were also sold into slavery by their
parents; most likely these were mainly poor parents who could not afford to
feed them. People enslaved when they defaulted on debts would be freed
when their loan was worked off; other types of slaves might be freed by their
masters.
A large part of the population worked for the temples and the palaces.
They formed a legally separate class of people-in the Code of Hammurabi
they are called mushkenu (see box, p. 25); earlier sources refer to public labor-
ers called gurush (for male workers) and geme (for females). The temple of
Lagash around 2000 B.C. employed more than six thousand woolworkers,
mostly women and children, but the temples also employed laborers and
craftsmen of many other kinds, including farmers to work the land that they
owned. Temple workers were paid mostly in food and in commodities such
as wool. Some scholars have argued that they were essentially slaves owned
by the state, which provided them with rations rather than wages. Others
have seen state service as a sort of labor tax to which some of the population
was subject, working part of the year for the state, and part for themselves. In
any case, it is clear that much of the Mesopotamian labor force was controlled
by the state; but what percentage of the population was involved, and how
much control over their economic activities the state exercised, is debatable.
Mesopotamian houses were made of mud brick or plaster with adjoining
walls, and often with a central courtyard. Rooms were small, and these court-
yards may have been the centers of domestic life. Most city households were
composed of monogamous, nuclear families-a married couple and their
unmarried children-and some had domestic slaves. Marriage involved an
exchange of property between the families of the bride and groom; fathers
were expected to provide a dowry to support the daughter during the mar-
riage, and husbands also paid a bride-price to their new fathers-in-law.
Divorce could be initiated by the husband, especially on the grounds of adul-
tery or childlessness, but not by the wife. Polygamy was legal in some cir-
cumstances, although not extensively practiced, and kings sometimes had
many wives. Husbands might also have slave concubines, whose children
could inherit their property in some situations; for example, childless wives
might protect themselves from divorce by supplying the husband with a
slave concubine to produce heirs. (This practice is also well attested in the
Hebrew Bible; seep. 51.)
Traditionally, property was divided among male children on their father's
death. Women were not prevented by law from owning property; daughters
occasionally inherited, and wives could also inherit property from their hus-
bands. In the Old Babylonian period, a custom arose whereby some women
from wealthy families were dedicated to the service of the gods and remained
unmarried, supported by a donation from their families; they were called
naditu. In some cities they lived in segregated communities with other
women. This prevented the family's wealth from being divided among too
many heirs and also created a class of independently wealthy and economi-
cally powerful women. They controlled the property donated by their fami-
lies, for example, by lending it at interest or leaving it to heirs of their
choice-often, a younger woman from the same community. Legal docu-
ments upholding their right to do this against the objections of their brothers
survive.
There is some controversy over family structure in ancient Mesopotamia.
Did married couples and their children live independently, or did brothers
and their wives remain in the same household with their parents? Overall, it
seems that smaller, simpler families were the rule in the cities, but the situa-
tion in the villages may have been different. Some documents suggest that
land in the countryside was owned jointly by the males of a family- the con-
sent of many, related owners was necessary to sell it. Communal ownership
of land could prevent property from being divided into miniscule plots over
many generations and probably increased the importance of the complex
family in the Mesopotamian countryside.
Science and Mathematics. Some of the most influential intellectual achieve-

ments of the ancient Mesopotamians were in the areas of astronomy and
mathematics. In both of these disciplines they strongly influenced the Greeks,
and through them later Mediterranean civilization.
The Mesopotamian system of numerals dates back as early as writing itself
and, like writing, had its origins in the accounts kept by temple scribes. While
much of the evidence for advanced mathematical thinking dates to the Old
Babylonian period, these texts may represent a tradition with much older
roots. Tables of multiples, squares, square and cube roots, exponents, and
other mathematical relationships between numbers survive, where the num-
bers have been calculated to a high degree of accuracy. Problem books show
that the Mesopotamians managed complicated algebraic expressions with
many unknowns; they also investigated problems of plane (two-dimensional)
and solid (three-dimensional) geometry.
While many of the Mesopotamians' achievements in astronomy date to the
centuries between 1100 and 400 B.c., their origins are traceable to the Old
Babylonian period. Around 1700 B.c., they began to produce lists of signs in
The Written Record
HAMMURABI' S CODE
One of the best sources for the social history of Mesopotamia is the law code of
King Hammurabi. This was inscribed on a stone stele discovered at Susa, where it
had been carried off as plunder by tribal raiders in the thirteenth century B.c.
Beneath a sculpted relief showing Hammurabi receiving tokens of kingship from
the sun god Shamash, a long inscription details his regulations on a wide variety
of subjects, from the price of renting a donkey to witchcraft and homicide.
Some questions to consider while reading the following selection are: (a) To
what distinct legal or social categories of people does the code refer? (b) What is
the status of women in the code? (c) What do you think is the purpose of this part
of the code?
(196) If a man has knocked out the eye of another man, his eye shall be
knocked out.
(197) If he has broken the limb of a man, his limb shall be broken.
(198) If he has knocked out the eye of a commoner (mushkenu) or has broken
the limb of a commoner, he shall pay one mina [about five pounds] of silver.
(199) If he has knocked out the eye of a man's slave or broken the limb of a
man's slave, he shall pay half his value.
(200) If a man has knocked out the tooth of a man that is his equal, his tooth
shall be knocked out.
(201) If he has knocked out the tooth of a commoner, he shall pay one-third
of a mina of silver ...
(206) If a man has struck another in a quarrel, and caused him a permanent
injury, that man shall swear, "I struck him without malice," and shall pay the
doctor.
(207) If he has died of his blows, [the man] shall swear [similarly], and pay
one-half of a mina of silver; or,
(208) If [the deceased] was a commoner, he shall pay one-third of a mina of
silver.
(209) If a man has struck a man's daughter, and has caused her to miscarry,
he shall pay ten shekels of silver [about three ounces] for her miscarriage.
(210) If that woman dies, his daughter shall be killed.
(211) If it is the daughter of a commoner that has miscarried through his
blows, he shall pay five shekels of silver.
(212) If that woman dies, he shall pay half a mina of silver.
(213) If he has struck a man's slave-girl and caused her to miscarry, he shall
pay two shekels of silver.
(214) If that slave-girl dies, he shall pay one-third of a mina of silver.
Adapted from C. H. W. Jones, Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts, and Letters, Edin-
burgh: T. & T. Clark, 1904.
the heavenly bodies (stars, sun, moon, planets) and in the weather and of the
events predicted by these phenomena. By 500 B.c. they had developed the
ability to tabulate periodic celestial occurrences, such as the progression of
one of the planets, rising and setting at a different point in the sky each day
and returning eventually to its original position. Without developing a the-
ory of the motion of the heavenly bodies, they nevertheless used mathemat-
ics to calculate the changes in their position over time; by these calculations
or by continual observation, they were able to predict events such as eclipses.
This tradition of astronomical observation and calculation arose from the
Mesopotamians' interest in divination from omens.
In both mathematics and astronomy, the Mesopotamians avoided the
highly theoretical approach that later characterized the Greeks; much of the
surviving evidence takes the form of lists and tables. While these could only
have been constructed with a sophisticated understanding of some theoreti-
cal principles, the Mesopotamians chose to focus not on expounding these
principles, but on the results they generated. Attempts to explain this
approach as a product of a rigid, hierarchical social system are speculative and
unconvincing, but it remains a distinctive feature of Mesopotamian science.
Egypt in the Bronze Age

The Gift of the Nile. The Greek historian Hecataeus, writing in the late sixth
century B.c., described Egypt as "the gift of the river." In antiquity, the Nile
river was always the heart of the Egyptian economy. Every year in the sum-
mer, the river would flood, leaving a strip of fertile, black soil behind when it
subsided. The cultivation of the Nile floodplain produced the agricultural
surplus that sustained an extremely complex and distinctive civilization from
a very early date. Beyond the banks of the Nile, however, the Egyptian desert
is habitable only by nomads-it cannot sustain settled agricultural life.
Throughout antiquity, the vast majority of the land's inhabitants lived within
a few miles of the river. Each year the Egyptians anxiously anticipated the
flood, and from an early period governments measured and recorded its
depth for tax purposes. A scanty flood would mean disaster, famine, and
death.
The Nile not only provided Egypt with food, but it was also highly navi-
gable as far as Aswan, where the "First Cataract" (a rocky, unnavigable
stretch) formed the original boundary of the Egyptian kingdom. The river
was like a highway with the potential to connect the communities on its
banks. Perhaps for this reason, Egypt was unified under a single government
much earlier than any other Mediterranean civilization.
The Written Sources. The first Egyptian texts date to the same time as
Egypt's political unification, about 3100 B.c. The earliest form of Egyptian
writing, hieroglyphs ("sacred engravings"), combined pictographic and
phonetic symbols; these symbols are · beautiful and elaborate, and hiero-
glyphic script was mainly used for inscriptions on temples and monuments.
Doing History
THE RosETTA STONE
In 1799, one of Napoleon's officers in Egypt discovered a large piece of black

basalt with a text chiseled into its surface in three scripts: Greek, hieroglyphs,
and demotic. Eventually, the "Rosetta stone" proved to be the key that allowed
modem scholars to read hieroglyphs. At first, they could read only the Greek.
It was only two decades after the stone's discovery that French scholar Jean-
Fran~ois Champollion, realizing that both demotic and hieroglyphic were
partly pictographic and partly phonetic scripts, was able to decipher both.
Using their knowledge of Coptic, scholars were then able to read and under-
stand the ancient Egyptian language.
Shortly after the first hieroglyphic writing appeared, the Egyptians devel-
oped another script that scholars call hieratic; it could be written more
quickly and was useful for documents. Around 700 B.C., a new script-called
demotic-was invented that better represented the Egyptian language as it
was spoken at that time. Finally, in the third century A.D., Christian Egyptians
began writing in Coptic, which used a modified Greek alphabet. Coptic,
which is a direct descendant of the earliest Egyptian language, is still used as
a liturgical (ceremonial) language in the Egyptian Christian church.
Writing was ubiquitous in ancient Egypt; in the Bronze Age as later, writ-
ing seems more pervasive here than in other parts of the ancient world. Tem-
ples and monuments were inscribed with lengthy texts in hieroglyphs; art
objects were often inscribed as well. Documents and literary texts were writ-
ten on papyrus, a reed that was processed to produce thin sheets; the sheets
were often joined together into long strips that, when rolled up, formed the
ancient book. In the dry Egyptian climate, papyrus can be preserved for thou-
sands of years. A cheaper, more plentiful and durable source of writing mate-
rial was broken pottery-called ostraka in Greek (modem scholars also use
this term). But most of the papyri and ostraka that have been found in Egypt
date to the Hellenistic and Roman periods; most of the written evidence for
Bronze Age Egypt comes from inscriptions on stone. For this reason, we do
not have the same wealth of evidence about everyday life from Egypt as we
do for Bronze Age Mesopotamia; we have more formal documents such as
religious texts, funerary inscriptions, and royal decrees, giving us a different
picture of its civilization.
While archaeology is a crucial source for Bronze Age Egypt, there is an
important problem with this evidence: The ancient Egyptian cities lie under-
neath modem ones, and this severely limits the amount of excavation and
surface survey that is possible. The surviving archaeological evidence is
weighted toward tombs, since these were normally located in the desert, out-
The Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza in Egypt were constructed by the kings of the Fourth
Dynasty in the 2500s B.C. The oldest pyramid in the complex, the tomb of Khufu, is also the
largest. The Sphinx was carved from a rock outcropping; its face is perhaps a portrait of king
Khafre, who reigned shortly after Khufu. (Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY)
side settled areas. For this reason, we know a great deal about Egyptian bur-
ial practices and beliefs about death, which can lead to a distorted perception
of the Egyptians as a culture preoccupied with death. But the aspects of
Egyptian civilization for which we have the most evidence are only part of
the whole picture.
The Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. Egyptian political history centers on
the figure of the king, sometimes called the "pharaoh" (pr-aa in Egyptian, a
word first attested in New Kingdom times). The king was a figure central to
Egyptian culture in many ways. The Egyptians themselves perceived their
national history in terms of a series of kings, whom they eventually grouped
into thirty successive "dynasties." Lists of pharaohs were an important type
of document, and several of these survive and form the basis for the modem
understanding of Egyptian chronology. The pharaohs symbolized the unified
kingdom of Egypt; their headdress, for example, combined elements tradi-
tionally associated with both parts of the country. They were believed to be
the incarnation of the hawk-god Horus and sons of the sun-god Re. They
were, in theory, all-powerful, subject only to the idea of ma'at-order and jus-
tice. They were, also in theory, the owners of all the land in Egypt (although
individual ownership is attested in practice). The pyramids were their tombs.
Before unification, Egypt was divided into two sections. Lower Egypt was
the area around the Nile Delta- the triangular region (shaped like the Greek
letter delta, L'l) where the Nile divides into many mouths before emptying
into the Mediterranean Sea. Upper Egypt stretched south of the delta about
750 miles to the First Cataract. The Egyptians believed that Upper and Lower
Egypt were first unified into a single kingdom in 3100 B.c. by king Menes.
This partly legendary figure is also credited with founding the new king-
dom's capital, the city of Memphis, and with bringing civilization and the
rule of law to Egypt. The period that followed, from 2686 down to the year
2181 B.C. (these are traditional dates), is now called the "Old Kingdom." Not
much written evidence remains for this remote and mysterious era of Egyp-
tian history, but it was in this period that Egypt's most astounding monu-
ments, the first pyramids, were built.
At Giza, near Cairo, a complex of three pyramids and the Great Sphinx-
an immense stone sculpture of a creature with a lion's body and a man's
head-forms one of the world's most renowned and impressive sights. They
were built in the first two centuries of the Old Kingdom. The largest of the
pyramids-the Great Pyramid-was one of the traditional seven wonders of
the ancient world, and the only one that survives today. King Khufu (also
known as Cheops, his name in Greek sources) constructed it, his own tomb,
in the twenty-sixth century B.c. It is 479 feet high and built entirely of dressed
stone-an estimated total of 2.3 million blocks was required. It occupied
about 100,000 workers, probably for several decades. Originally filled with
treasure, it was plundered in antiquity- as were all the other pyramids-so
that only the king's granite sarcophagus remained. But the structure itself is
eloquent testimony to the power and image of the ruler, who was buried
inside it and worshipped there after his death.
The Old Kingdom dissolved under circumstances that are poorly under-
stood; it seems that the governors of some local districts (called nomes)
became powerful enough to challenge the established ruling dynasty. It is
also possible that the increasing power of the priests of the sun-god, Re,
helped to weaken the monarchy. After two centuries of political chaos called
the First Intermediate period (traditionally dating from 2181 to 1991 B.c.),
Egypt was reunited under the kings of the eleventh dynasty, who ushered in
a period of vast building projects, expanded bureaucracy, and literary pro-
ductivity. This was the classical era of ancient Egyptian literature, when gen-
res and texts were developed that remained important in Egyptian culture
through the New Kingdom and afterward.
The Middle Kingdom dissolved in another interval of political upheaval,
the Second Intermediate period, during which Egypt was ruled for about a
century by a dynasty of foreigners called the Hyksos. Tradition dated their
expulsion and the beginning of the New Kingdom to 1567 B.c. The New
Kingdom was a period of imperialist expansion southward into Nubia and
northward into Syria and the Levant. In the fifteenth century, King Thutmose
III led a series of fourteen military campaigns that extended Egypt's rule to
the Euphrates river.
The New Kingdom was also a period of great monumental architecture,
especially temples. The largest and most renowned of these is the Temple of
Amen at Karnak, built in honor of the local god Amen, who in this period was
worshipped together with the sun-god Re as Amen-Re. This temple was
extended and renovated over a long period by a series of New Kingdom
pharaohs, whose deeds were inscribed in hieroglyphs on its walls and pillars.
EGYPTIAN HISTORICAL PERIODS

3100-2686 B.C. Early Dynastic
2686-2181 B.C. Old Kingdom
2181-1991 B.C. First Intermediate
1991-1786 B.C. Middle Kingdom
1786-1567 B.C. Second Intermediate
1567-1085 B.C. New Kingdom
Dates given here are traditional but not necessarily correct; they trace back to the
history composed in Greek by the Egyptian scholar Manetho in the third century
B.C.
Society and Family. Slaves may have been rare in Egypt until the New
Kingdom, when military conquests created an abundant supply of prisoners.
As in Mesopotamia, slaves might be owned by the king, by the temples, or by
private individuals; they might be bought, sold, inherited, and rented out.
But they had some limited legal and economic rights: They could hold prop-
erty and bequeath it to their heirs, and some slaves married women of free
status.
As in Mesopotamia, much of the land in ancient Egypt was owned by the
king and by the temples, and a large part (perhaps a majority) of the popula-
tion worked directly for them. At one site in western Thebes dating to the
New Kingdom, called Deir el-Medina, a village that housed the workers who
built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings provides a wealth of evidence
about its inhabitants. Because its population worked on the desert's edge, in
areas that were later abandoned, this settlement is well preserved and has
even produced a large number of documents on papyrus and on ostraka. The
population, at its height, was about twelve hundred. The workers were
divided into two crews, each inhabiting one half of the village, who worked
in shifts. Records of many private economic transactions-bartering with
goods or silver bullion, which was used as money-and legal documents
describing everyday crimes and disputes show that the state that employed
them did not dominate all aspects of their lives.
View of Deir el-Medina from the east. The workmen who lived here built the royal tombs in
the Valley of the Kings, near Thebes. The walled village is to the right of the picture; on the
left is the village's cemetery. (Photo by Tom Van Eynde)
The prominence of writing in this village inhabited only by workmen, their

families, and one or two of their immediate supervisors is especially striking.
The names of the inhabitants were written on the doors of their houses and
sometimes on columns inside the houses and on the benches of the village's
cult-buildings. Scribes kept daily records of the work done by the villagers;
court records, business records, and a wide variety of other documents-
including school texts-also survive. The inhabitants of this village, or many
of them at least, were literate.
As in Mesopotamia, the state paid public laborers like those at Deir el-
Medina mainly in food, and some scholars see them as serfs or slaves receiv-
ing rations rather than wages. Even those Egyptians who did not work full-
time for the state were sometimes required to provide labor for specific
projects (this type of forced labor is sometimes called corvee labor); the
wealthy could hire substitutes. It is clear that in both Egypt and Mesopotamia
the state, represented by the kings and the temples, controlled a large part of
the economy.
More is known about the royal family than about ordinary families in
Bronze Age Egypt. Kings normally had several wives, but only one "Great
Royal Wife"; the king's throne would pass to her children. Kings often mar-
ried their sisters or other close female relatives, but most scholars agree that
this was not normal practice in the general population at this time.
Most of the evidence for ordinary households and families comes from
Deir el-Medina and dates to the New Kingdom; we do not know how well it
applies to other times and places. In this village, most houses had a small
reception room with an altar, the focus for a domestic cult; there was also a
central room with a bench for social occasions, and one or more living rooms
in the back. There were no courtyards, but the inhabitants used the roof as liv-
ing space also. Monogamous nuclear families-a husband, wife, and their
children-were typical. Polygamy was legal in ancient Egypt, but is only
scantily attested at Deir el-Medina and may have been unusual. Divorce and
remarriage were common for both men and women.
It was the Egyptian custom to divide property equally among all of a per-
son's children at his or her death, a tradition that persisted at least through
Roman times. This contrasts strikingly with the situation in other ancient
Mediterranean societies, where sons inherited all or most of their parents'
property. As a result, it was not unusual for women in Egypt to own land,
slaves, and other property and to pursue a wide variety of economic activi-
ties. It seems, however, that men still owned or controlled most of the eco-
nomic resources. At Deir el-Medina, women were involved in about 18 per-
cent of the financial transactions of which records survive, and other
evidence indicates that only about one in ten landowners was a woman.*
Warfare and Weapons. Because the desert cut them off from other peoples
and protected them from military aggression, the Egyptians did not fight as
many wars as other ancient civilizations did, at least until the Second Inter-
mediate Period, when they were conquered by the Hyksos. After the enemies
were expelled, the kings of the New Kingdom embarked on a series of impe-
rialist campaigns that expanded Egypt's borders north and east to the
Euphrates river and south into Nubia. The king was Egypt's military chief,
and he led the army himself.
The Egyptians were conservative about weapons technology, retaining
stone and copper weapons after other civilizations had switched to bronze.
From the Hyksos, however, they adopted the chariot, the composite bow, and
the curved sword used by other Near Eastern peoples. In sieges, they used
scaling ladders and battering-rams.
The Egyptians employed some foreign mercenaries-professional sol-
diers-from an early date. But the early Egyptian army was mainly composed
of peasants who were drafted as the need arose. In the New Kingdom, the
kings created a professional, standing army, partly drafted from the popula-
tion and partly formed of volunteers and foreign mercenaries. At times, up to
10 percent of the eligible male population might be under arms. Soldiers
received a share of the spoils of war; some received land for their service.
The Gods, Death, and the Afterlife. The aspect of Egyptian culture for
which the most abundant evidence survives is their treatment of death. This
is for two reasons: First, tombs were normally located in the desert, and thus
have escaped being built over; and second, the Egyptians buried their dead
with great care, in tombs of stone decorated with inscriptions and paintings
and filled with art objects.
At first, only kings were thought to have immortal spirits, but in the Mid-
dle Kingdom immortality became "democratized"--everyone could expect
an afterlife in the land ruled by Osiris, king of the dead. The Egyptians
believed that life continued after death in much the same way as before.
Tombs were decorated with paintings and carvings of people making food
*Gay Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993, pp. 131, 135.
and providing other services for the dead person's spirit or ka. They were
filled with clothes, food, jewelry, and other things that the ka might need after
death. But the body as well as the spirit continued to be important after
death. Dead bodies were carefully embalmed and wrapped in linen strips
("mummified") and placed inside two nested coffins; the inner and, later, the
outer coffin was shaped like a mummy and decorated to look human, with a
face, hair, and jewelry painted on. Texts painted or inscribed on the tomb's
walls and on the coffin ensured a smooth passage to the afterlife with the cor-
rect prayers and incantations. In the New Kingdom, some of these texts tell
how the deceased would appear before Osiris and proclaim his or her inno-
cence of crimes on earth: "I have not done evil to men. I have not ill-treated
animals. I have not blasphemed the gods," and so on. The jackal-god Anubis
then weighed the person's heart to test the truth of this self-defense, which
vould determine the deceased's fate in the afterlife.
In the Old Kingdom, only kings and nobles had elaborate tombs, but in the
~ddle and New Kingdoms, everyone who could afford to build and equip
a tomb seems to have done so-even ordinary people such as the workmen
of Deir el-Medina. The poor who could not afford tombs or mummification
the complete procedure took seventy days and required a team of profes-
ional embalmers) were buried in shallow graves in the desert, where the hot,
dry sand often preserved their bodies naturally from decay.
Besides tombs, the largest and best-preserved Egyptian monuments are
emples. Even in the Greco-Roman period, travelers were impressed by their
~at size and antiquity. In the fifth century B.c., the Greek historian
Herodotus, learning that Egyptian cults and temples were far older than any-
thing in the Greek world, believed and wrote that all the Greek gods had
orne from Egypt.
The Egyptian pantheon of gods is often described as syncretistic-it pre-
served many local traditions, and no set of gods dominated the others to cre-
ate a single, national religion. For example, in a tradition arising in Heliopo-
. , the original creator-god was A tum, who produced his progeny by spitting
and vomiting, but the creator-god of Memphis was Ptah, who made the uni-
,·erse with thought and speech. Both were important gods worshipped all
over Egypt.
Some gods were worshipped in vast temples with powerful priesthoods
and were patronized by the kings and associated with them; others had more
.imited geographic range. Evidence from Deir el-Medina shows a rich vari-
ety of religious practices in the village. Although the villagers worshipped
the state cult of Amen-Re, the most important gods were the major deities of
• earby Thebes, such as Hathor, the cow-goddess of love, fertility, and the
esert. The villagers also worshipped the deified king Amenophis, who gave
oracles; and a nature-cult of Mereseger, the spirit of a local mountain peak
rtrayed as a woman with a snake's head. In their homes, they worshipped
ousehold deities like the ugly, bowlegged dwarf Bes, who presided at mar-
riages and other festive occasions, or his wife Taweret, who helped with
childbirth and was portrayed as a pregnant hippopotamus.
From an early date, the Egyptian kings were believed to be the sons of the
sun-god Re; the priesthood of Re had already become powerful in the Old
Kingdom. Other gods became associated with Re and were worshipped
together with him as a single deity: Atum, the creator-god of Heliopolis; and
in the New Kingdom, Amen of Thebes. In the fourteenth century B.C., king
Amenhotep IV (also known as "Akhenaten") abolished the worship of all
other gods, especially Amen, and promoted the cult of a single deity, the
Aten. The Aten was also the sun-but instead of being depicted as part-
human, part-animal, like other Egyptian gods, he was represented as an
abstract figure of the sun's radiant disk. Akhenaten's attempt to replace the
worship of Egypt's ancient, traditional gods with the cult of a single, univer-
sal god of light was short-lived; at his death, the cult dissolved.
The Canaanites
Some of the earliest evidence of agriculture comes from the Levant, and sev-
eral important Neolithic sites-such as Jericho, discussed earlier-developed
there. As early as 3000 B.C. this region had cities with fortification walls, tem-
ples, long-range trade networks, craft specialization, and town planning.
Palace archives discovered in the 1970s reveal that the city of Ebla in Syria
flourished in the twenty-fourth century B.C. and dominated a wide surround-
ing territory; they are written in Sumerian and in a local Semitic language.
Urban sites in the Levant were mostly abandoned around 2300 B.c. but
revived early in the next millenium, when sites in the region also became
more culturally homogeneous. Later, the Israelites who composed the
Hebrew Bible would refer to the peoples they displaced as "Canaanites," and
since this word is also attested in Bronze Age sources, scholars call the peo-
ples of the southern Levant in the second millenium B.C. Canaanites. The city
of Ugarit on the Syrian coast flourished in the fourteenth and thirteenth cen-
turies B.c.; there, a palace and a large archive of cuneiform tablets in anum-
ber of Near Eastern languages have been found. Ugarit is often considered
the largest and best-preserved Canaanite site, but its population was diverse
and it is questionable whether its culture can properly be described as
Canaanite.
It was probably the Canaanites who developed the first alphabet-a writ-
ing system that was easier to use than other scripts because each letter repre-
sented a single sound, not a syllable or a whole word. The earliest known
examples date to the nineteenth century B.c. and appear on inscriptions from
Egypt, but the language they record is Semitic and they may have been the
work of Canaanite workers or slaves. Ugaritic scribes used a different alpha-
bet, possibly influenced by the one attested in Egypt.
Most Canaanite cities were destroyed in war by the Egyptians in the six-
teenth century B.c., and many were depopulated again in the destructive
events that ended the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean (see later in
this chapter). But a group of maritime cities on the coast of Lebanon (includ-
ing the famous cities of Sidon and Tyre) continued to flourish for centuries;
scholars usually call these people the Phoenicians, their name in ancient
Greek sources. They were adventurous sailors, traded widely with the
Greeks and other eastern Mediterranean peoples, and founded colonies
around the Mediterranean world, including the famous city of Carthage in
modern Tunisia. The Phoenicians used a version of the Canaanite alphabet;
the Greeks acquired it from them in the eighth century B.c., and the Latin
alphabet used to represent the English language today ultimately derives
from it.
The Hittites
Before the twentieth century, scholars mainly knew of the Hittites from ref-
erences to them in the Hebrew Bible. But in A . D. 1906-1908, excavations of the
ancient city of Hattusas in northeast Turkey (modern Bogzakoy) brought to
light about twenty-five thousand clay tablets, in several languages. One of
the languages, written in two different scripts (a cuneiform script and a hiero-
glyphic script), was eventually identified as the language of the Hittites. It
proved to be an Indo-European language: That is, it was related to ancient
Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit; most modern European languages and some
modern Near Eastern languages, such as Persian and Hindi, belong to this
family. Because of this, Hittite could be deciphered and read.
The Hittite kingdom emerged shortly after 1700 B.c.; its capital was Hat-
tusas. By about 1600 the Hittites had unified much of Asia Minor under their
control. After a period of crisis in the fifteenth century B.C., their empire
expanded again in the fourteenth century to include nearly all of Asia Minor,
as well as northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia.
At first, the Hittite monarchy was not very strong; assassinations and civil
wars happened frequently. Eventually, however, a stable principle of succes-
sion was established, and in the fourteenth century the king was addressed
as "My Sun" by his subjects and deified after his death. While queens never
ruled as sole monarchs, they were unusually powerful in the Hittite king-
dom; the queen did not lose her authority at the death of her husband, but
continued to hold the title of queen until her own death.
Early in the twentieth century, some scholars influenced by ideas of racial
superiority theorized that their Indo-European ancestry allowed the Hittites
to conquer and dominate "inferior" indigenous peoples. Even after this
hypothesis was discredited, scholars agreed until recently that the Hittites
ruled as an ethnically distinct caste of Indo-Europeans over a native,
non-Indo-European population. But the evidence for this interpretation is
shaky. Hittite religion and mythology borrowed from other cultures; the
royal family was, through marriage and adoption, ethnically mixed, and it is
likely that the same was true of the rest of the Hittite ruling class. While Hit-
tite was the official written language of the kingdom's administration, the
tablets recovered from Hattusas are written in many different languages. It is
not clear that the distinction between rulers and subjects was an ethnic one,
or what in fact the basis for this distinction was.
In antiquity as today, the Hittites were renowned as great warriors. They

were especially famous for their association with a type of chariot warfare
which begins to appear in the Mediterranean region some time before 1600
B.c. The Hittites were among the first to use the new light, two-wheeled,
horse-drawn chariots, designed for speed, that revolutionized warfare at this
time; by 1200 B.C. the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Mycenaean Greeks
were all using chariots to some extent. Previously, horses had not been used
in battle, but chariots could outflank and outrun an infantry force. Chariot
contingents were usually small, as the equipment involved was expensive
and the horses required a great deal of training, but when manned with
spearmen or archers, even a small force could be very effective. Sometimes,
some or all of the expense of equipping the chariotry was shouldered by the
king; in other societies, nobles supplied their own equipment. In either case,
chariot warfare may have tended to create a social structure where power
was centered on an elite group-either of professional soldiers close to the
king or of aristocrats with substantial economic resources. The Hittite
infantry probably outnumbered the chariotry by a wide margin, but the sur-
viving sources do not emphasize its role in battle.
The Hittites fought every year in the spring and summer. They preferred
pitched battles, where their chariotry could be most effective; they also
besieged cities, although we know little about their techniques. Around Hat-
tusas and other important cities, they constructed massive fortification walls
of stone filled with rubble.
Around 1500 B.C., the kingdoms of the Near East began to communicate
with one another and to influence one another more than previously. Military
expansion was one reason for this. The Hittites invaded Mesopotamia and
sacked Babylon around 1600 B.c., and beginning in the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury, after the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Egyptians campaigned in Syria
and the Levant. In these wars they conquered the Canaanites and came into
direct conflict with the Hittites. But this was a time of alliance and diplomacy
as well as war. From the first half of the fourteenth century B.c., clay tablets
from el-Amama in Egypt and from the Hittite capital Hattusas show regular
diplomatic contact between the three great kingdoms of Babylonia, Egypt,
and the Hittites. The tablets are written in Akkadian, the intemational diplo-
matic language.
Conflict between the Egyptians and the Hittites reached a climax around
1280 B.c. in the reign of the pharaoh Ramesses II: Accounts of the great battle
of Kadesh in Syria, as well as the treaty that the two kingdoms concluded
afterward, survive in Egyptian temple inscriptions and on clay tablets from
Hattusas. After this, the Egyptians and Hittites became allies, and a Hittite
princess married Ramesses II.
The Aegean
In the Bronze Age, two distinct civilizations arose in what was later the Greek
homeland of the Greek peninsula and the Aegean islands. The earlier of the
:" ·o was centered on Crete and today is called "Minoan" after the mythical
.!Cing Minos of Knossos. The other civilization, which arose on the mainland,
.:5 called "Mycenaean" after the city of Mycenae, legendary home of king
Agamemnon, which is one of the best-preserved and most impressive Bronze
.-\ ae sites.
To the Greeks of later eras, the Bronze Age was an age of heroic kings and
' 'arriors who were taller, stronger, better-looking, and wealthier than the
men of their own times. It was an age when monsters and half-gods roamed
the earth and adventurers traveled to its outer limits, performing deeds of
spectacular courage; when kings fought one another in agonizing wars and
ogether sailed against Troy in northern Asia Minor, which they destroyed
after a ten-year siege. Stories of Bronze Age heroes formed the content of
Greek mythology, and these myths were the subjects of epic poetry, of
tragedies, of sculpture on temples, and of paintings on vases .
.VIinoan Civilization. In 1899 Sir Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist,

began excavations on Crete and discovered a civilization that seemed differ-
ent from the Bronze Age culture of mainland Greece; it was he who gave the
name "Minoan" to the people he discovered. The Minoans remain mysteri-
ous in many ways because the two writing systems they used ("Cretan hiero-
glyphic" and a script called Linear A) cannot be read today. While scholars
are sure that the language they spoke was not Greek, it is unclear to what, if
any, known language family it belonged. Also, writing does not seem to have
been as important in Minoan and Mycenaean civilization as it was in ancient
Egypt or Mesopotamia. Only a relatively small number of texts in Linear A
survive, and these are mostly short inscriptions on seal stones and clay
tablets.
The Minoans arrived on Crete around 7000 B.c.; only a few early sites-
simple farming villages or cave dwellings-are known. Around 3500 B.c., the
population of the island increased dramatically; metalworking and pottery
appear in the archaeological record, and some sites, such as Knossos, grew
into substantial settlements. These changes may reflect the arrival of a new
wave of settlers, but it is also possible that they happened spontaneously
within the indigenous population.
Around 2000 B.C., the Minoans began to build complex structures that
archaeologists have labeled "palaces." Writing appears for the first time, to
record inventories of goods stored in the palaces. In this period, Knossos
grew to a city with a population of perhaps twelve thousand. The early
palaces were all destroyed around 1700 B.C., probably by earthquake, and lit-
tle is known about them. The civilization that Arthur Evans excavated and
that is best known to us today dates to the centuries between 1700 and ca.
1470 B.c., from the rebuilding of the great palaces to an unknown disaster that
left a layer of destruction in the archaeological record.
The palaces constructed at Knossos and a few other sites on Crete were
complex, sprawling structures with workrooms, courtyards, ceremonial
chambers, and storage facilities, indicating that they served a wide range of
A fresco from the Minoan palace at Knossos, dating to about 1500 B.C., portrays athletes
apparently vaulting a bull. This type of ritual or entertainment perhaps took place in the spa-
cious courtyards that are found in all the Minoan palaces. (Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY)
functions. Each palace contained a large, rectangular central courtyard and

another courtyard on the western side of the complex-both were probably
used as assembly-places for ritual, entertainment, or perhaps political
purposes.
The palaces' large number of storage rooms indicates that they collected
and redistributed products from the surrounding countryside. Their work-
shops produced fine art objects such as ritual vases of carved stone, plaques
and figurines decorated with the glazing technique known as "faience," del-
icately carved seal-stones that were worn as jewelry or magical amulets, and
a huge variety of fine pottery. Artists also decorated palace walls with vivid
frescoes depicting myths, gods, religious rituals, and scenes from nature.
Some illustrate bull-leaping events which may have been an important type
of ceremony or entertainment.
Nature-cults, especially sanctuaries on mountain peaks, were prominent in
early Minoan religion. Here the Minoans dedicated clay figurines of people
and animals, and also representations of limbs and parts of the body, proba-
bly as tokens of thanks for healing. Later, after 1700 B.c., the focus of religious
ritual seems to have shifted to the palaces. The palace at Knossos is especially
rich in religious decoration, architecture, and artifacts and may have func-
tioned as a cult-center or even as a temple (although this impression may
result from a tendency of archaeologists, since Arthur Evans, to find religious
significance in potentially ordinary features of the palace). Here, some suites
have been interpreted as sites for "epiphany rituals," in which a deity was
invited to take possession of a person or object in the room. "Ritual baths"
have been identified in other rooms. Images or models of bull horns and
ouble-headed axes, found at Knossos and at other Minoan sites, have also
een interpreted as religious symbols.
Most large towns were on or near the coast, and the Minoans traded widely
y sea. The towns lack military architecture (such as fortification walls), and
!n contrast with other Bronze Age Mediterranean societies, war is not a major
theme in Minoan art. But the Minoans were later legendary for their naval
-upremacy, and it is likely that they maintained a fleet of warships. Minoan
frescoes have been found on the ancient island of Thera (now called San-
orini), and traces of Minoan culture have surfaced on some other Aegean
· lands (these sites are sometimes called Minoan "colonies"), showing that
rllis civilization was not confined to Crete but, after 1700 B.c., began to spread
around the Aegean world.
Around 1470 B.c., many Minoan sites were destroyed by fire. The palace at
Knossos continued to function for some time, but texts from the last phase at
Knossos are written in a new script- Linear B, a writing system that origi-
nated on mainland Greece. The language recorded in these documents is
Greek, not Minoan. It is possible that the destruction of 1470 was caused by
an invasion of Mycenaean Greeks, who conquered Crete and ruled it from its
p rincipal city. The date at which the Knossos palace was finally destroyed
remains controversial, but could have been as late as 1250 or 1200-if so, the
fall of Knossos may have taken place as part of a more general pattern of
destruction in the eastern Mediterranean at that time .
.\.fycenaean Civilization: The First Greeks. Between about 1700 and 1100
B.C., a separate Bronze Age civilization flourished on the Greek peninsula.
ntil the late nineteenth century, this civilization- like that of the Minoans-
w as known only through the mythology that later developed around it, and
no one was sure whether these stories preserved the memory of a real society
or not. But in the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist, iden-
tified and excavated several Bronze Age sites that were later renowned in
Greek mythology. One of these was Mycenae, the legendary home of king
Agamemnon, leader of the Trojan expedition. It was Schliemann who named
the civilization he discovered "Mycenaean," after this city.
Schliemann not only excavated Bronze Age cities on mainland Greece but
also, using Homer as his guide, found and excavated Troy. Later excavations
discovered Mycenaean pottery at Troy- showing that this city did have con-
tact with Mycenaean Greece-and evidence that it had been destroyed in war
around 1250 B.C. It is possible that Homer's epics and other Greek traditions
about the Trojan war preserved the memory of a real event, just as they pre-
serve the names of Greek cities that were important in the Bronze Age.
Writing from Bronze Age Greece survives, mainly on clay tablets but also
p ainted on storage jars, in a script called Linear B. In 1952, a young English
scholar named Michael Ventris proved that the language recorded in Linear
B was Greek; in this sense, the Mycenaeans were the first Greeks. Writing,
h owever, was used in a very restricted way. The clay tablets survive in much
smaller quantities than those produced in ancient Mesopotamia; they contain
administrative records, mostly inventories of goods in storage and tax

records. No known Linear B text records a religious ritual, a legal proceeding,
or a work of literature. While these documents shed light on the Mycenaean
economy, they do not tell us about other aspects of Bronze Age culture. Thus
even though scholars can understand the language of the Mycenaeans, in
some ways they remain as mysterious as the Minoans.
The first Greek speakers arrived some time before 2000 B.C., probably trav-
eling from the northeast. Traces of an earlier, different culture survive in the
archaeological record, and in some geographic place names on the Greek
peninsula, suggesting that the Mycenaeans were newcomers who intermin-
gled with a preexisting population. How they became the culturally domi-
nant people on the Greek mainland is unclear; scholars today tend to argue
that they arrived gradually in small bands or tribes rather than in a single,
conquering wave.
At Mycenae, Schliemann excavated a group of burials called "Grave Circle
A," which later became his most famous discovery. Dating to about 1700 B.c.,
these burials are the earliest remains of the complex, sophisticated civiliza-
tion that flourished and died at the site over the next six hundred years.
Grave Circle A contained the bodies of nineteen individuals, including two
children, buried in deep shafts dug into the bedrock beneath what later
became the Mycenaean citadel. Buried with the bodies were artifacts of
astounding beauty and value: delicate gold jewelry, ornaments, and vessels,
elaborately carved swords and daggers; and Schliemann's most renowned
finds, three gold masks, of which he named one the "Mask of Agamemnon."
Many artifacts were made of materials-such as lapis lazuli, ivory, and
amber-that were imported from all over the Mediterranean world and
beyond.
The remains unearthed at Grave Circle A (and at another nearby group of
shaft graves that was discovered later and labeled Grave Circle B) show that
as early as 1700 B.C. Mycenaen culture was "civilized." Society was sharply
stratified-some families had amassed enormous wealth. Trade contacts
were wide, and skilled craftsmen were producing luxury items of great
sophistication.
Around 1500 B.C. the Mycenaeans began to use "tholos tombs" for their
aristocratic burials. These were round underground chambers cut into
bedrock; the interior was lined with worked stone, and a long runway called
a dramas led to the tomb's entrance. Some of these, such as the so-called 'Trea-
sury of Atreus'* near Mycenae, are massive in size. The dramas to the Treasury
of Atreus is 118 feet long and the larger of the two lintels over the doorway
weighs over one hundred tons; inside, stone blocks line a chamber over forty
feet high. The tholos tombs were once filled with valuable objects, but they
were all plundered in antiquity and none of their treasure has survived intact.
Smaller tholos tombs, and simpler chamber tombs cut into bedrock, housed
*In mythology, Atreus was Agamemnon's father.

the remains of people lower on the social scale. Burials of infants and children
are rare; they must have been buried in ways that are not easy to detect
archaeologically, or possibly were not buried at all but exposed.
Some of the most impressive remains of the Mycenaean period-the mas-
sive walls and elaborate palaces of Mycenae and other Bronze Age cities-
date to late in the era, from 1400 to 1200 B.c. The Mycenaean palaces were
smaller, simpler, and different in layout and architectural detail from the
buildings also called "palaces" on Minoan Crete, but like the Minoan palaces,
they dominated the economy of the surrounding countryside. Linear B
tablets from Pylos show that the palace there collected commodities such as
wool, oil, and livestock from a wide territory; some places mentioned may
have been fifty miles away or more. This palace, which is the best preserved
of all the Mycenaean palaces, contained a large courtyard and rectangular
megaron (a room with a hearth and four interior columns, possibly used as a
throne room), which was once elaborately decorated; also storerooms full of
storage jars and pantries housing a huge quantity of pots and drinking jars;
an archive, where Linear B tablets were stored; and other rooms that appear
to be bathrooms and living quarters. Workshops where artisans repaired
chariots and manufactured armor, bricks, weapons, luxury items, pottery,
and other goods were also incorporated into the palace.
Mycenaean palaces were often constructed on high ground, either for social
reasons (to symbolize the higher status of the ruling class) or for military rea-
sons (to make the site more defensible). Toward the end of the Mycenaean
period, some of the largest cities constructed massive fortification walls up to
twenty-five feet thick, made of huge, unworked boulders (called "Cyclopean"
architecture because the vast, crude stones recall mythical giants like Homer's
Cyclops). They also used large ashlar blocks (stone worked into rectangular
slabs).
The Collapse of Bronze Age Civilization

Around 1200 B.C., disaster struck the eastern Mediterranean world. In Asia
Minor, Greece, Crete, Syria, and the Levant, layers of destruction punctuate
the archaeological record of most important sites, as cities were sacked and
burnt. Some places were reoccupied on a smaller scale; others were aban-
doned.
Scholars are uncertain what happened. From Egypt, a temple inscription
describes how the pharaoh Ramesses III (ruled 1198-1166 B.c.) defeated a
"conspiracy of islands" that had already destroyed the Hittites and a number
of other nations; modern scholars have dubbed the list of peoples that fol-
lows the sea peoples. A desperate letter from the king of Ugarit, dating to
about the same time, appeals for help against an assault by sea. In Greece, the
fortification walls constructed at a growing number of sites toward the end
of the Mycenaean period, and the water supply systems that were built at
Mycenae, Pylos, and other cities at that time, may indicate an increasing mil-
itary threat. It is likely that tribal migrations bringing displaced peoples-the
The Lion Gate of Mycenae, monumental entrance to the fortified citadel of the city. The wall
around the gate is constructed of ashlar blocks. The lintel over the gate weighs 18 tons.
(Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY)
"sea peoples"-into conflict with the Near East's long-established civiliza-

tions partly explain the destructive events of circa 1200 B.C. However, this
theory does not explain all the evidence, nor does it explain what caused the
migrations. Some scholars argue that a prolonged drought led to violence
and plundering, the abandonment of settled land, and the destruction of
some cities; others see a long-term decline rather than an sudden one, the
result of disrupted trade networks. Another line of reasoning looks to mili-
tary technology, arguing that new infantry weapons made chariot warfare
obsolete and led to the downfall of military systems that were based on it.
Whatever the explanation, crucial changes took place at this time. Hittite
civilization and the civilization of the Mycenaean Greeks essentially came to
an end; both areas were plunged into a long dark age. Egypt repelled the
This relieffrom the Assyrian city of Nimrud dates to about 730 B.C. The Assyrians assault a
city with archers and a battering ram and scale its walls with ladders. The bottom of the
relief shows the brutal slaughter of the captured city's inhabitants. (The British Museum )
invaders of circa 1200, but by 1100 B.c. the kingdom entered into a long period
of crisis and disunity (the Third Intermediate Period) lasting over five hun-
dred years, until Egypt was finally conquered and reunified by the Persians.
While Mesopotamia, like Egypt, was spared the direct consequences of the
crisis of 1200 B.C., this area also suffered a period of instability. In 1155, the
Kassite dynasty collapsed after half a century of conflict with the Assyrians.
After the fall of the Kassites, Babylonia endured more foreign invasions, from
the Assyrians and other enemies, until eventually the kingdom was absorbed
by the Assyrians.
The Assyrians' capital was Assur, on the northern Tigris. They were an
aggressive and militaristic people adept at military engineering, sieges, and
the use of cavalry and notorious for the brutality with which they suppressed
revolts. They sometimes annihilated whole cities in slaughters they depicted
on relief sculpture in gruesome detail or deported native populations in mas-
sive numbers after a conquest. They ruled Mesopotamia until the late sev-
enth century B.c., when a revolt reestablished the kingdom of Babylonia
under king Nabopollassar and his more famous son, king Nebuchadnezzar,
who renovated the city of Babylon in spectacular style. In his reign, the "Pro-
cessional Way"- a major street leading to Babylon's Ishtar Gate-was lined
with the vivid blue glazed bricks and golden lions now visible in the Perga-
mon Museum in Berlin; the gate itself was embellished with bulls and drag-
ons. Nebuchadnezzar also constructed the lost "Hanging Gardens of Baby-
lon," one of the ancient world's seven wonders. He is best known today,
however, for conquering Jerusalem in 597 B.c., and destroying the city and
deporting its inhabitants in 587-the Babylonian exile, which shaped so

much of early Hebrew literature. Babylonia was finally conquered in 539 by
the Persian monarch Cyrus the Great, who restored the Jewish captives to
their homeland.
By 500 B.c. the entire Near and Middle East, from Asia Minor, Syria, and
Egypt all the way to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, was subject to the
immense empire of the Persians. Their history will be reviewed in more detail
in the next chapter.
Israel and Judah

Unlike the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians, the early Israelites did not build
great cities or impressive monuments or rule over a large territory, nor were
they one of the first peoples to become "civilized." But their cultural influ-
ence on Western civilization was more profound than that of any other soci-
ety except the Greeks. This is partly because of an extraordinary body of writ-
ings, the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). The books
of the Bible relate the history, ancestry, mythology, and laws of a people called
Israel. Most of all, they tell the story of Israel's relationship with its god, Yah-
weh, from his bargain or "covenant" with Abraham, the ancestor of all
Israelites, through the vicissitudes of Israel's history. The Bible explains his-
tory in terms of this relationship-especially, disasters result from Yahweh's
anger at Israel's failure to uphold the covenant and obey his laws. While we
have little sense of how the ancient Mesopotamians or Egyptians defined
themselves as a people, the Bible provides a fundamental understanding of
what it meant to be an Israelite. It helped to sustain a strong sense of cultural
cohesion among a relatively small and, at times, widely scattered or aggres-
sively persecuted ethnic group over thousands of years.
Myth and History

The origins of the Western historical tradition-in the Hebrew Bible and in
the works of the first Greek historians-bring scholars face-to-face with the
problem of distinguishing "myth" from "history" and even of deciding on a
definition of those two terms. Defining the difference as one between fiction
(myth) and fact (history) is too simplistic. History is by nature an interpreta-
tion of reality, not a direct reflection of it, and while the tradition of objectiv-
ity-of providing an unbiased view of past events-has been important in
historical writing since antiquity, true objectivity is impossible. Everything
from the decision about what aspects of the past to study, to the nuances of
how the information is presented, reflects the historian's response to the
needs of his or her society-the audience for the text. These needs might
include support for a system of moral values, justification of a class structure,
or the creation of a sense of cultural or ethnic identity-a sense that the his-
tory being written is "our" history. In this way, history serves many of the
same functions as myth. Stories of gods and heroes, the deeds of famous
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Israel and Judah in the Iron Age
cestors, their genealogies, their visits to various places-all of these ele-

- ents of mythology have important cultural purposes even if they do not
_ ~ ect a literal truth. Both history and myth should be read as reflections of
:. e society that produced them as well as guides to the past that they record.
Vhile the difference between history and myth is not simply that between
and fiction, it is in some ways reasonable to make another distinction:
veen oral and written sources. Myths may sometimes be written down,
_ :.1 they have another, independent life as oral traditions-stories passed
- \Vn through generations. Oral traditions are much more fluid than written
es because there is no single, authoritative text that fixes the "correct" ver-
::- n of the story. They change quickly over time, and thus tend to reflect the
- ntext in which the story is being told as well as preserving some memory
:earlier eras. Different social groups or people in different geographic areas
=my tell different versions of the story; usually several, contradictory ver-
:- ns of a myth exist at the same time.
'History" normally refers to a written text. An author has collected and
anized the available material-some might be oral, and some might be
4
ocumentary-and created a fixed version of it that does not change very
Cich over time (although some changes are introduced whenever the text is
. ied, and somewhat different versions of a text may circulate). Usually, his-
torians try to create a coherent, consistent story, although they do not always
succeed in this effort. The story that the historian produces will depend on
his or her views, assumptions, and methods of collecting evidence-which,
in turn, will mainly reflect the influence of the culture in which the historian
lives. Once written down, however, the text is frozen and mostly impervious
to the influence of later cultural changes- although every generation (and
every individual) will read the text in a different way, the text itself does not
change and thus provides a more reliable reflection of the past than oral
tradition.
The Hebrew Bible

In a sense, the Hebrew Bible-at least, the parts that tell the story of Israel's
origins and of the kingdom founded by Samuel and destroyed by Neb-
uchadnezzar- is the Western world's first history; unlike later histories,
however, it was not written by a single author in a short period. The canon of
the Hebrew Bible took shape over a long time; the latest work in it (Daniel)
was written in the second century B.c. (on the "canon" see the box on p. 47).
What were the first books to be written, when were they composed, and what
preexisting sources did their authors use? Unfortunately, none of these ques-
tions is easy to answer. The first five books of the Bible, called the Torah (the
"law"; also called the Pentateuch), which contains a narrative of early
Israelite history and an exposition of the law that Israel received through
Moses, is the section whose composition has been studied most extensively.
Jewish tradition attributed all five books to the hero Moses, but even in antiq-
uity scholars questioned whether he could have written some of the material
they contain. From the late eighteenth century until recent times, many
scholars have accepted the "documentary hypothesis," which identifies four
narrative strands, each composed by a different author at a different time.
Two (called JandE, for the different names-Yahweh/Jehovah or Elohim-
that they used for God) told a mythical-historical narrative from the creation
of the universe to Moses' death; two others (called 0 for "Deuteronomical"
and P for Priestly) provided the legal and genealogical material. But most
scholars today agree that this hypothesis is too simplistic. Each strand relied
on sources that pre-dated their composition, and inconsistencies within each
strand indicate that they may have been the work of several authors, not one.
Epic poems and songs, genealogies, and legal traditions that were mostly
transmitted orally all gradually evolved into a written text.
It is extremely difficult to date any part of the Torah. Some of its source
material may have originated as early as 1200 B.c., but it did not take shape
as a cohesive text until much later. Most of the narrative of Israel's early his-
tory seems to have coalesced by 600 B.c., and the legal part-approximately
half-of the Torah had taken shape by 400 B.c., but some changes were added
even later. The result is a very complex document that fitted the social and
cultural needs of the people who produced it, but also preserved some mem-
ory of earlier times. Because it took so long to form and was the work of a
Doing History
THE CANON
Canon literally means "a rule" and sometimes refers to body of works (or cor-
pus, which means "body" in Latin) that are transmitted together and consid-
ered authoritative in some way. The formation of a canon is a selective process;
usually other, similar works-or different versions of the same works-<eircu-
lated at the time that the canon was being formed, but were excluded from the
corpus. At some point, for reasons that are not always well understood, the
canon closes-no new works are admitted. The Hebrew Bible (sometimes
called the "Tanakh" in Judaism), the Christian Old Testament (which contains
a slightly different list of books or order of books), and the New Testament are
all canons of this type; besides these, another good example of a canon from
antiquity is the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of Greek medical works dating
to the classical period (seep. 92).
Because the essential feature of canonical works is authority, groups can dis-
agree over what belongs in or out, sometimes even after the canon has closed-
one group will accept one canon and another will favor a different one. For
example, the Septuagint-a version of the Bible in Greek, used by the Jews of
Alexandria in Egypt-<eontains books not found in the Hebrew Tanakh. Protes-
tant Christians refer to these books as the apocrypha or "hidden" books (the
word "apocrypha" also has a more general meaning, denoting any Jewish and
Christian writings that were excluded from the canon). Catholics include most
of these books in the canonical Old Testament, but refer to them as "deutero-
canonical," literally, the "second canon."
In a looser sense, the word "canon" can refer to any authoritative tradition in
literature, art, or music, or any other cultural product. For example, people
often refer to the canon of authors that shapes education in English literature-
the list of "classic" authors such as Shakespeare, Austen, and Joyce. Ideas about
what belongs in or out of the canon may vary among groups or even among
individuals-but the concept of some kind of canon, some list of works that
everyone should know or study, is important in most societies.
For a good discussion of canons, see Shaye D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah,
Philadelphia: Weshninster Press, 1987, chapter 6.
w hole culture rather than any single individual, the Torah retains some of the
repetitions and inconsistencies that characterize oral, rather than written,
sources.
Early Israel
The Torah begins with the story of Yahweh's creation of the world and the
expulsion of its first humans, Adam and Eve, from a primeval paradise for
disobeying his commands. It goes on to tell of his anger at the decadence and
corruption of later generations, and the resulting flood that annihilated all
but a remnant of the human population. The Torah then narrates the wan-
derings of the patriarch Abraham, ancestor of all Israelites, who was born in
the great Mesopotamian city of Ur and migrated to Canaan, and the story of
his descendants, including his grandson Jacob (also called Israel), whose
twelve children became the ancestors of Israel's twelve tribes. During a
period of drought and famine, Jacob's family migrated to Egypt, where their
descendants were oppressed by the Egyptian kings. Finally, a hero named
Moses led the Israelites out of captivity and back to the Holy Land. On the
way, in the Sinai desert, Yahweh communicated through him the details of
Israelite law that the Torah relates.
The Torah dates Abraham's departure from Ur to the twenty-first century
B.C. and the Exodus ("journey out") from Egypt to the mid-fifteenth century,
but as yet no independent evidence for the existence of Israel at that time has
been found. It is not clear whether the sojourn in Egypt is a historical reality.
Perhaps more important than this unanswerable question is the recurring
theme of exile that shapes the Hebrew Bible-the exile from paradise, the
exile in Egypt, and, finally, the exile in Babylonia, when some Jews were
deported after the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.c.
Archaeology suggests that new settlements began to arise in the previously
sparsely populated highlands of the southwestern Levant at the close of the
Bronze Age-about 1250 B.c. By collecting water in cisterns plastered with
asphalt and by terracing the hillsides (that is, cutting into them to produce
stepped levels of flat ground), the settlers were able to farm this inhospitable
land; they also kept herds of sheep and goats. It is not clear where the settlers
came from: They may have been farmers from the surrounding lowlands
who expanded their agricultural territory into the hill country; or semi-
nomadic herdsmen who were already living in the hills may have changed
their way of life, creating sedentary villages and beginning to farm the land;
or they may have been newcomers to the region, as the biblical tradition sug-
gests. Whatever their origins, archaeologists believe that these settlers were
the early Israelites. It is at about this time (around 1200 B.c.) that Israel is first
attested in a written source apart from the Bible-an Egyptian inscription
lists Israel along with Canaan and other peoples of the Levant conquered by
the pharaoh Merneptah.
The Monarchy and the Babylonian Exile

The Bible dates the first, famous kings of Israel-Samuel, David, and
Solomon-to the late 1000s and early 900s B.c . and relates how they
expanded the new kingdom's boundaries all the way to the Euphrates in the
east and the Red Sea in the south. Jerusalem became Israel's capital city, and
Solomon especially is supposed to have undertaken major construction proj-
ects there-a wall around the city, a palace, and the Temple that became the
center of Jewish ritual. According to the Bible, the united kingdom of Israel
split in two in the late tenth century: The northern part of the population
ented the burden of providing labor for Solomon's building projects and
seceded to form the separate kingdom of Israel around 925 B.c. David's
~escendants continued to rule in the south, now called Judah.
The Bible relates how the two kingdoms fought intermittently until Israel
·as destroyed in 722 B.C. by the Assyrians, who incorporated its territory into
ir empire and deported many of its inhabitants. Judah remained inde-
dent until it in turn was conquered by the Babylonian king Nebuchad-
- zzar in 597. Ten years later, he destroyed Solomon's temple and deported
e of Judah's population to Mesopotamia, where they remained until the
ian king Cyrus conquered the area and allowed them to return in 538.
-:. · episode is sometimes called the "Babylonian captivity" or "Babylonian
The history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah is told in the books of the
le that are sometimes called the "historical" books: Joshua, Judges,
uet and Kings. As with the Torah, modern historians approach this evi-
~ence with some caution and debate how literally it should be construed .
.: m e argue that archaeological evidence of impressive walls, palaces, and
= numental gates at some settlements supports the tradition of a great king-
• m of Israel under Solomon and David. Other scholars interpret this evi-
~t!Ilce differently or challenge its dating and point out that archaeological
r.empts to locate Solomon's building projects in Jerusalem or to confirm that
- w as an important city in the tenth century have met with little success.
~- ese scholars question whether the unified kingdom of Israel ever existed
"' d characterize the history of united Israel as a legend of a golden age. In
:. · view, there had always been two kingdoms; the northern region became
, populous, multiethnic kingdom with impressive cities and a developed
::ate in the ninth century B.C., while Judah remained a rural and pastoral hin-
" rland. But after the fall of Israel to the Assyrians in the late eighth century,
• d ah entered a period of politicat economic, and cultural development.
ause the Bible took shape in Judah during this period and reflects the
. :ews and ambitions-including territorial ambitions-of its kings and peo-
=- e, it portrays Israel as a corrupt, idolatrous splinter state and Judah as the
::iginal heart and capital of an earlier, greater kingdom of Israel.
ociety and Family

- iety in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah was more rural than in
_ fesopotamia or Egypt. There is archaeological evidence for cities and a cen-
::::alized state (although the dating and details of the area's political evolution
a..'"e open to debate) and for the centralized collection or production of grain
.a:r d olive oil in some cities. Nevertheless, the state did not control as much of
e economy as it did in the great Bronze Age civilizations; the agricultural
..ousehold remained the basic economic unit. Houses were typically two-
:•ory structures with three or four ground-floor rooms; the lower level was
used to shelter livestock and store produce, while the family lived upstairs.
~e self-sufficient, multi-functional design of Israelite houses suggests that
each household produced most of the food needed to sustain it and would
sell or trade any surplus.
Some houses were bigger and some were smaller-indicating some social
differentiation-but the range of sizes is relatively limited and there is no evi-
dence of large, many-roomed mansions except for a few royal residences. It
seems that wealth was more evenly distributed in Israel than in some other
ancient societies. Poverty, however, always threatened the typical agricul-
tural family- one or two bad seasons might force a father to sell his children
or himself into slavery or to hand over his property to a creditor. In theory,
the Torah protected these people by dictating that land must revert to its orig-
inal owner every fifty years in the "jubilee" year.
For the social structure of the Israelite family we mostly depend on the
evidence from the Hebrew Bible, but because of the complicated and ill-
understood nature of its composition, it is difficult to know how accurately it
reflects reality. The household imagined in the Hebrew Bible is composed of
a father, his sons, his sons' wives, their children, their domestic slaves, and
their livestock; authority centers on the "patriarch"- the male head of the
household. Archaeological evidence from houses is difficult to interpret and
could be consistent with complex, multi-generational families where the sons
remained in the household after marriage or with "nuclear" families that
tended to contain only one married couple, with their children, servants, and
animals.
In the Bible, husbands pay a bride-price when they marry, which goes to
the bride's father, not to her. Biblical example allowed polygamy, which was
still practiced in the Roman period, and divorce could be initiated by the hus-
band, but probably not by the wife. Women might marry very young- in the
Bible, girls marry in their early teens. Marriages were arranged by the par-
ents, and brides may have had little voice in the choice of their partners. Tra-
ditional roles for women were indoor, household activities such as cooking
or weaving, although the Bible also portrays women tending flocks and help-
ing with work in the fields. While women probably exercised some power in
the household- despite the traditional primacy of the patriarch- their role in
public life was less prominent. Women could not, for example, be priests,
although the Bible mentions a few female prophets, judges, and queens.
Sons normally inherited from their fathers, with the eldest son receiving the
largest share, but younger sons and daughters also received a share. If a father
had no son, his daughter could inherit the entire estate but she was required
to marry within the father's kinship group. Widows could inherit from their
husbands, but the law did not guarantee this, and in the Torah widows and
orphans are especially vulnerable, requiring charity and protection.
Slavery is well attested in the Bible, although it is difficult to tell how per-
vasive it really was. The Torah recognizes two separate categories of slaves:
those of foreign origin and Hebrews enslaved by poverty or debt. In theory,
Hebrews could not be enslaved permanently but had to be released every sev-
enth year. Slaves were perceived as a part of the household rather than sim-
ply as property or sources of labor; for example, the law required that male
_laves be circumcised like their masters and that slaves rest on the Sabbath like
er members of the household. As in Mesopotamia, masters sometimes
adopted their children by slave concubines as heirs (the case of Jacob, whose
. ,·elve sons included four by slave concubines, is the most famous).
Religion and Law

:lu-oughout the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh demands that Israel worship no other
"00 but him. This is part of his covenant with Abraham and his descendants.
However, the Bible also tells of episodes where the Israelites lapsed and did
·orship other gods, such as Baal, a local deity. Archaeology confirms that
~ahweh was worshipped together with other gods (especially his consort,
_ herah) and that domestic or "popular" cults survived throughout the
?ffiod of the monarchy. (The memory of a domestic cult is preserved in the
s ory of Rachel from Genesis, who steals her father's "household gods"-
- aphim-when she runs away with Jacob.) This pluralism was the more nor-
::tal pattern in antiquity, and it is not clear when the Israelites began to asso-
.::iate themselves with a single deity. In the Bible as it eventually took shape,
owever, monotheism-the worship of a single god-is a fundamental part
£Israel's identity; they were the chosen people of Yahweh, the creator of the
verse.
Yahweh's cult centered on the Temple in Jerusalem, traditionally con-
srructed by Solomon in the tenth century B.c. and reconstructed in the fifth
;:entury after the Babylonians destroyed it. Priests of the Jerusalem temple
=aditionally descended from Aaron, Moses' brother, and belonged to the
:::ibe of Levi. In the legal sections of the Torah, they are responsible for carry-
- out rituals, celebrating festivals, and, most of all, administering the sacred
.aws that bound Israel to Yahweh. Many of the Torah's laws regulate the
· ·ays in which Israelites can be alienated from, and reintegrated into, the
.::ommunity: For example, a long section of Leviticus classifies certain foods
· uch as pork) and bodily fluids (especially blood and semen) as "unclean,"
" d those who have contact with them must be purified before they can
ume their place in society. People and things disfigured by blotchy affec-
ons (such as skin disease-leprosy was endemic to ancient Palestine-or
::tildew) are also classed as "unclean." These taboos separate the pure from
~ e impure just as Yahweh's chosen people are separated from the others
around them (d. Lev. 20:25-26). Abiding by the law became one of the main
ts of Jewish identity.
Since the legal sections of the Torah probably evolved later than the narra-
. ve parts, it is not clear when the laws took shape-possibly not until the sixth
r fifth century B.c., perhaps in response to the destruction of the Temple and
· e deportation of a part of Judah's population. This catastrophe may have
_ rompted the exiles to seek new ways of identifying themselves as a people-
and to seek this sense of identity partly in sacred law.
One final feature of Israelite religion besides the worship of Yahweh, the
- emple, and the law deserves discussion here. The period of the monarchy,
exile, and restoration was also the age of prophets. Prophets were indepen-
dent, charismatic figures who were often powerful voices of social and reli-
gious reform. They were visionaries who believed they were personally
called by Yahweh to remedy the evils of their times. They tended to take the
side of the poor and oppressed against that of the rich, the kings, and the
priests, whom they perceived as hopelessly corrupt. They insisted that
Israel's past disasters resulted from the wrongdoing of its people and warned
that Yahweh would abandon or punish them for continued offenses. The
prophets predicted that Israel would be rewarded for repentance and reform
with victory, peace, and prosperity. With their focus on the history and des-
tiny of Israel as a people, and on its relationship to Yahweh, they, like the
priests, helped to create a sense of ethnic cohesion.
At no time in antiquity or since have the Jews been a homogeneous peo-
ple-there were social and cultural divisions among them, a point we shall
return to when we discuss Second Temple Judaism (p. 108). But the Biblical
tradition offered the possibility of perceiving oneself not as a member of a
specific family, clan, tribe, class, or sect, but as an Israelite or a Jew. This sense
of ethnic identity does not occur spontaneously or naturally; it must be con-
structed, and the Bible offers fascinating evidence for how this construction
might take place.
SUMMARY
Around 3000 B.c., the rise of civilization in parts of the Near East revolution-
ized human history. Before that date, humans had for a long period-the
Paleolithic age-lived in small nomadic groups, hunting and gathering for
subsistence. Then in about 9000 B.C., agriculture was invented in the Near
East and eventually spread to Europe, as humans domesticated both plants
and animals and began to live in permanent settlements. Agriculture allowed
for the accumulation of an economic surplus-humans were able to produce
more food than was needed for mere survival; eventually, that surplus
became the foundation of civilization.
The Mesopotamians and the Egyptians were the first to develop civiliza-
tions. They built large cities with crowded, dense populations and impres-
sive public buildings. They developed writing and used it for accounting,
works of literature, edicts and decrees, and a wide variety of other purposes;
many of these documents survive today and shed light on all aspects of
ancient society, from the deeds of kings to the lives of ordinary workers. A
central administration-either king or temple-owned much of the land, col-
lected taxes, and controlled the labor of large parts of the population. The
state used these resources to fund the construction of great monuments and
other major public works, to wage wars of conquest, to pay specialized crafts-
men to produce luxury items, and to worship the gods with festivals, rituals,
and dedications.
In the Aegean, civilization arose somewhat later than in the Near East.
Mycenaean civilization developed on mainland Greece, while Crete and
some Aegean islands were the homeland of Minoan civilization. While they
were culturally distinct and used different languages, both Mycenaean and
Minoan civilizations centered on palaces that collected resources from the
surrounding countryside. In antiquity, these civilizations were remembered
in Greek myths about the "age of heroes."
Around 1200 B.c., an era of crisis and widespread destruction affected
much of the eastern Mediterranean; both Mycenaean and Minoan civilization
were destroyed, and Egypt and Mesopotamia were weakened in more indi-
rect ways. In the era that followed, the new kingdoms of Israel and Judah
formed and were conquered and temporarily absorbed by Mesopotamian
empires. Oral traditions about Israel's early history later evolved into the
Hebrew Bible.

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The Ancient

New York Oxford

Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Maps, Boxes, and Chronological Tables vii

1. THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS 1

3. THE ROMANS AND THEIR EMPIRE 118

Government and Society in the Early Republic 123

Suggested Readings 219

Italy in the Republican Period 124

The Western Mediterranean, circa A.D. 500 209

*Art and Society: Sculpting the Body in Classical Greece 85

*A Closer Look: The Agora 96

Art and Society: The Family on Athenian Funerary Monuments 99

*Art and Society: Aristocratic Portraits 135

The Written Record: A Senator's Gifts to His Hometown 161

The Written Record: Pliny and the Christians 193

Egyptian Historical Periods 30

Important Dates in Early Roman History 120

*Box contains illustrations.

History is a series of arguments to be debated, not a body of data to be

tions of our individual view of the world in which we live, conditions

1. There will be some form of government by which people administer

A common Western bias is to measure "progress" through technological

American military and political affairs found Thucydides indispensable to

colonies?), or cultural problems (why did western Europe choose to revive

The First Civilizations

The Origins of Civilization

,---- - --- - ---il Doing History J~------------,

•An artifact is an object produced by human manufacture or modified by humans.

The Archaeological Record

*A hominid is a creature closely related to modern humans.

millions of years old. Thermoluminescence dating can be used on any artifact

The First Modern Humans

The Beginnings of Agriculture

wild environment, for example, by corralling the animals they hunted or

collected goods from others to redistribute to their families and dependents.

A New Complexity: Some Neolithic Sites

(:atalhoyiik. <;atalhoyi.ik is one of the largest and most famous of several

Stonehenge. Stonehenge in southern England is an example of a very dif-

The First Civilizations: The Eastern Mediterranean

f~ > \..... ...\~->.;.1 ( )

The Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age

_ 1esopotamia). Compared to earlier Neolithic cultures, civilizations were

The Bronze Age

The Written Sources. Mesopotamia was the first civilization to develop

HISTORICAL PERIODS OF BRONZE AGE MESOPOTAMIA

Dynasties and Empires. The political history of Mesopotamia is a compli-

Art and Society

WARFARE IN EARLY MESOPOTAMIA

Science and Mathematics. Some of the most influential intellectual achieve-

The Written Record

Egypt in the Bronze Age

THE RosETTA STONE

In 1799, one of Napoleon's officers in Egypt discovered a large piece of black

EGYPTIAN HISTORICAL PERIODS