Points of Interest (Chapter Three)

It’s pretty cool and significant that the two waves of civilization are the waves that involved a lot of philosophical and religious thought that are still predominate today. If that isn’t significance, I don’t know what is.

It’s strange to see so many huge technological advances swept under the rug because they were not the two biggest advances of human history. Sure the discovery of gunpowder and silk making are above modest achievements. Life without the trading on the Silk Road or war on that level have huge implications historically. I understand we are doing an overview, but surely those are a bit bigger than being lumped into one sentence.

It’s always fascinating to see early bureaucracies in action and remember in other classes insisting that bureaucracies came much later. Or maybe people just forgot the secret of them, like cement. Romans were the first people to use cement in buildings and this art was lost until the Renaissance. Kinda gives hope that while there is still a lot humans do not know, there’s a chance to discover or rediscover it. Knowledge may not be lost forever.

I can’t help but notice that classical Greece seems to have a lot in common with Mesopotamia. Small city-states clashing with one another despite a similar language and religion. Also, very focused on males. I like that they would put aside their differences for the Olympics but that didn’t do much to lessen tensions or further diplomacy. Some things never change.

I love that it’s the winner of the war between Greece and Persia that actually changes, not the loser. Persia, despite losing a war, just keeps chugging along. Meanwhile, Greece goes super nationalistic and changes everything. Then there’s a civil war and they get conquered. But by being conquered and part of a greater empire, their culture is spread.

Capital Punishment and the Afterlife (CH. 2 DOCS)

The Epic of Gilgamesh skirts around the subject of a life after death. The two people Gilgamesh speaks to in order to find out about the afterlife don’t give him a straight answer on what it will be like. Instead, they both focus on telling Gilgamesh to live the life he has been given by the gods. His mortality is mentioned repeatedly so that it is palpable and is described so it seems like the natural way of things. Nothing lasts forever. Life should be no exception. Gilgamesh is encouraged to live life to the fullest and stop worrying about death. It will get him nowhere.

In contrast, the afterlife depicted by the Egyptians is very sunny and pleasant. The deceased are welcomed home by the gods as long lost family members. Then, in the Negative Confession, this bright hope of an afterlife is extended to the rest of the population. The royals are considered god-like, so it makes sense for them to be greeted and honored in the afterlife with the gods. The only reason this blessing is extended to the common peoples is if they prove that they are good people, that they have not committed any crimes. In a way, they can become god-like by being virtuous in their lives. For the Egyptians, life is about preparing for the beauty of the afterlife, for the Mesopotamians, life is about living to the fullest.

Hammurabi’s Code relies heavily on capital punishment. Most of the offenses listed end in death for the first offense. Those that do not, tend to involve mutilation or heavy fines. It clearly favors the upper classes and males. This is a very blunt form of justice that works with the idea that life isn’t fair and the strong can legally kill the weak.

Ch. 2 reading thoughts

I like that the book is doing more than the usual Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization history. It mentions one in South America coming into itself around the same time and it is going to discuss 7 independently formed civilizations, even if there is a lot more to learn about them as opposed to arguing everything happened around the Mediterranean and spread after that.

It's interesting to see how regimented and exact people of the Saraswati river civilization are, how hard the Indus river valley people were on the land and how even the earliest of Chinese societies was so bent on monarchy. These are all different ways people came up with on how to live.

Fascinating that the earliest cities seemed to be so well thought out and built so regimented when most of the cities in western civilization are characterized as haphazard growths with little to no planning.

It's hard to agree that the Agricultural Revolution and the creation of civilization is what led to inequality when those were both undertakings by humans. Wouldn't that mean that our tendency to classify and divide is naturally inherent? As thought it is just part of the way we try to understand the world around us, by dividing it up into bite-sized pieces.

A little ironic for the author to list out all the reasons civilization is bad when without it, we would be unable to read his work and he'd be unable to write it. I sense a lot of negatives, a sort of necessary evil of civilizations.

I'm counting this as a bright side. Murders decreased as state violence predominated. People did not kill each other for personal reasons as much as they had before the agricultural revolution.

I agree that their use of religion was basically for justification, and it's not like it hasn't been used that way since, but something has to be used to explain things and we haven't hit the scientific revolution yet or the Greeks and their philosophy, so religion and its mystical stories are the only ways to explain the world. I don't know if it is quite as self-serving as the author paints it. If religion only served as justification for the building of hierarchal societies, wouldn't those returning to nature outgrow it? Or perhaps those who champion democracy and a republic? It seems as though putting religion in a box diminishes its importance to the overall culture. And that doesn't sound historically accurate.

The Indus river valley and the Olmec languages of pictures are the only ones that are very easy to read even now.

The big problem I have with this unrelenting critique of civilization is how ostentatious the author paints the social hierarchy. These rulers probably didn't live much longer than the common people and they were just as liable to disease as others. It undercuts the humanity running through civilization, which has to be there since we are the only ones who do it. The author makes it sound like civilization turned elites into inhuman war lords and lower classes into subhuman victims.

It's interesting how historians are reluctant to speak of what affect the environment had on humans but then is able to explain most of the culture by specifically using the geography of the land. Kinda sounds like defeating your own argument to me.

Is it fair to categorize Sumer as a single unit, when they seem to be competing states? It seems like every city-state was out for itself, which doesn't sound like the best unit with which to build a civilization. It sounds like Mesopotamia was grouped together because they were all close by and subject to each other's environments. Which seems awfully based on geography, but I digress.

Nisa and the San Response

            I thought Nisa’s story of her people, the San, was very interesting. I think her way of life is very simple compared to the way we live or the way the agricultural societies neighboring her live. Nisa states that when she was younger, she had no idea about an outside world, but clearly she had contact since then, given she immediately says: “We are not village people. I have no goats. I have no cattle” (Shostak). While, she knows about an outside world, she still chooses to live with her people. It sounds like she may have some negative opinions about those who live in a village, which is probably due to ethnocentrism, the belief that her group has a better culture than any other, something that nearly everyone who identifies with an ethnic group believes about their people, so that’s not surprising.

The San have liberal attitudes towards sex and marriage. Despite marrying multiple times, Nisa still had lovers beyond her husbands and they had lovers as well. She likens them to what they bring her: “One many gives you only one kind of food to eat. But when you have lovers…one comes with meat, another with money, another with beads” (Shostak). While people today argue that we have very liberal ideas about sex and very loose ones about marriage, but within our culture, people tend to disapprove of cheating on a spouse, while in the San culture, that’s perfectly acceptable and involves gift-giving as part of the exchange. Lovers seem to serve a purpose within the culture, where cheating may not in ours, part of the reason it is viewed negatively.

 

Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa: The Life and Words of an !Kung Woman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. 41, 69, 87-89, 153-55, 166, 210-11, 226-27, 271, 299, 301-2, 316-17. Print.

Chapter 1

Interesting that the author says the other human species died out rather than we outcompeted them and drove them to extinction, which would be more accurate biologically.

Following the warming of the planet, nomadic people began settling because there was more flora and fauna to scavenge from. This led to a rise of societies and their ills: inequality and agriculture.

Change to agriculture is the second turning point for humanity. Agriculture to Industrial Revolution is a phase. Fair enough, the migration into cities didn’t take place until after there were jobs at to be had at plants, most people lived off the land as farmers until that point.

Of course cities couldn’t form until after agriculture, there wouldn’t be enough people to populate even ancient cities without the advent of agriculture.

Paleolithic and Neolithic time periods are divided by the advent of agriculture. People had already migrated out of Africa by the time the Neolithic period rolled around and each group discovered planting on its own.

Actually most historians until very recently didn’t think Africa had any history to speak of so no research was done to discover it.

Why would humans go to Australian before Europe if they are coming up through the Middle East? Was it just too cold up there at that point? It seems like a lot of work to make a boat rather than walk in a different direction.

Seems like the author is engaging in hubris in mentioning yet again that we are the only large animal that populates every climate type on earth. He is also using niche in a biological sense improperly. If we were part of every biological niche that would mean we would be considered producers, consumers, detrivores, predator and prey regularly. We are not.

I would certainly hope clothing would come into being during the Ice Age, especially in Russia, or our ancestors would have a very difficult if not impossible task of living in places up north.

They probably temporarily abandoned their nomadic tendencies when the weather refused to let them move forward and they had to hunker down somewhere. They had to get out of the cold at some point, or they would die from exposure.

I like that the land bridge get its nickname but the kelp highway doesn’t. I would think the fact that our ancestors made boats would get more attention in this chapter. The amount of time and supplies it would take involves a lot of teamwork and craftiness within the group and even more to get it to go anywhere so people survive the trip. Much more impressive that walking over ice, however cold it is.

Yes extinction tends to create new species that fit into the niches of those that died.

Interesting that no one decided to populate Antarctica. If they were willing to live up North, why not down at the South Pole?

Funny that people are trying to understand ancient art and acknowledge that they will run into the same problems as looking at art from today. It is subjective and one has to wonder how much they expect their guesses to help in understanding the distant past.

Mutual dependence in the animal world is not as bad a thing as the textbook paints it. It’s perfectly fine to have a symbiotic mutualistic relationship with domesticated plants and animals as far as the species involved are concerned. For everything else it might leave something to be desired.

I thought the Fertile Crescent referred to Mesopotamia not southwest Asia. I guess they can both be called that. No I was right. When did the Middle East become Southwest Asia? Who calls it Southwest Asia? I have never heard of it referred to as that. Ever.

Figs were the first domesticated crop? Interesting.