In or close to this 6th century B.C. a number of religious geniuses appeared in the ancient world. Karl Jaspers has called this an "axial age"[45]. It was the period of Confucius and perhaps Lao-tz in China, of Gautama, the Buddha in India, of Zoraster in Iran, Pythagoras in Greece and of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, Deutero-lsaiah (Isaiah 40 to 59). There was a movement towards a belief in a single spiritual reality, and the Greeks were searching for a single principle to explain the material world. One result of this was the development of monotheism.
Back to Africa: 700 to 601 B.C.
As the century opened Egypt was again attempting expansion into Asia under native rulers and a punitive expedition was sent south to sack the Kushite Napota (591 B.C.) forcing the movement of this Kushite capital south to Meroe. Another view, however, is that the Kushite rulers simply elected to move their capital 300 miles south because wood for smelting iron ore was becoming scarcer and the land was being overgrazed. At any rate, Meroe then became a major iron center. Kush had a mixed Caucasian and Negro population and thereafter remained independent of the various Egyptian rulers. The nation owed its prosperity to trade in ivory, ebony, gum, hides, ostrich plumes, iron and slaves, all of which were carried either down the Nile to Egypt or across the Red Sea to Arabia and Mesopotamia. They also had great herds of cattle and adequate agriculture[46].
Egypt maintained close commercial relations with both the Greeks and Lydians. In the latter part of the century, the Egyptians were pushed back out of the Asiatic mainland again by the rampaging Persians, and by 525 B.C. half of Egypt itself had been conquered by the Persian Cambyses, son of Cyrus. After Cambyses committed suicide in 521 B.C., Darius continued to rule most of this area. (Ref. 175, 8, 68, 28)
By this time Carthage had developed an empire of its own, with settlements in western Sicily and Sardinia and with contacts in Spain and along the African coast. In 520 B.C. Admiral Hanno landed 30,000 settlers from 60 vessels at the mouth of the Rio de Oro in what is now Western Sahara. The colony lasted about fifty years. (Ref. 222) Herodotus says that Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa in 600 B.C., starting in the Red Sea and going clockwise. Himilco, sailing from Carthage, touched the shore of Ireland and found it a fertile land. All of this exploration and expansion brought some troubles closer to home. Although they had previously been trading partners, the competition between the Etruscan Caere and Carthage now became so acute that conflict became inevitable. Malchus, of Carthage, consolidated the Punic position in western Sicily and then tried to do the same in Sardinia, although the native Sardinian states fought back viciously and they were soon helped by the maritime Phocaean Greeks. Caere threw in its lot with Carthage on this occasion. Herodotus, writing in the next century, said that the Phocaeans[47] won but in so doing lost forty ships and had another twenty severely damaged. They returned to Alalia, got their women and children and resettled in Rhegum in south Italy, leaving Corsica also to the Carthaginians and Caeritans. In 509 B.C. Carthage signed a treaty with the rising Rome, defining respective spheres of influence. (Ref. 84)
Barry Fell (Ref. 65) infers that after the Persian conquest of Egypt and the rise of the Greek and Roman empires, the eastern Mediterranean was closed to Carthaginian shipping, so Carthage retaliated by closing the straits of Gibralter to all European vessels. Then under the guise of supposed Spanish and north African trade, they exploited North American silver, copper, hides and furs, bringing them back for the manufacture of bronze and the marketing of the furs. He feels that this secrecy is the reason Roman annals have no mention of the trans-Atlantic voyages. To date no one has come forth with any direct confirmation of this hypothesis.
That part of Africa south of the Sahara and the Abyssinian massif was one of the five great remaining reservoirs of savage or barbarian life. The other four areas were the monsoon forests of Southeast Asia with the islands of Indonesia, the steppe and forest zones of northern Eurasia, Australia and finally the Americas. (Ref. 139)
Back to The Far East: 700 to 601 B.C.
Although China was nominally still under the Chou Dynasty actually it was essentially in a feudalistic age called the Spring and Autumn period. A unique institution of this period was the hegemon (pa) which was rule by a yearly conference of dukes from the three powerful statelets, offsetting the ineffectiveness of the Chou king. From 600 B.C. on the peasants made real progress in farming the flood plain of the Yellow River, by shifting from millet to rice. Vast diking, draining, canalization and engineering control was necessary to create an unbroken carpet of rice paddies. The amount of labor involved in all this is almost unbelievable. Rice, originally a dry land crop, still requires good oxygenation of its roots and the waters of the paddies cannot become stagnant but must be regularly circulated, necessitating constant attendance to pumps and various hydraulic systems. Farther south the Yangste Valley could not be farmed satisfactorily at that time, even though the river was much less wild and geologically less difficult, because the warmer, wetter climate allowed a great variety of parasites. Malaria may have been one of the worst, along with dengue fever and schistosomiasis, which has been definitely identified in a later, second century corpse. (Ref. 101, 140, 259)
This was the age of Lao-Tzu, the greatest of the pre-Confucius philosophers. His identity is disputed, but at least the Taoist philosophy became prominent with "Tao" meaning "The Way". Basically this was a way of thinking or refusing to think, for in the view of Taoists thought is a superficial affair, good only for argument and more harmful than beneficial to life. The Way is to be found by rejecting the intellect and all its errors and leading a modest life of retirement, rusticity and quiet contemplation of nature. Knowledge is not a virtue but on the contrary, rascals have increased since education spread. The worst conceivable government, in this philosophy, would be by philosophers themselves, as they botch every natural process with theory. Silence is the beginning of wisdom. Disregard of the Tao led to illness, not so much as punishment for sin as the inevitable result of acting against natural laws. Toaist philosophy became the religion of a considerable sized minority of the Chinese from this century down to our own time. Confucius, of the impoverished but noble K'ung family, was born in 551 B.C. and it is said that he had some contact with and learned from the Old Master, Lao-Tze. His teaching will be discussed under this same heading in the next chapter. The standard of living in China at that time was probably higher than in the contemporary Greece of Solon. (Ref. 46, 260)
The Jomon Culture hunting and fishing society of Japan continued through this century.
The Neolithic societies of Korea continued as in the previous centuries.
The people who now occupy southeast Asia began at about this time to leave their ancestral homes in southern China and Tibet and start their migrations southward, displacing or absorbing the aborigines of the area.
Back to America: 700 to 601 B.C.
There was no real change in the human condition in North America at this time. The Arctic Small Tool tradition is usually divided into two stages with what has been called the Dorset Stage emerging at about 600 B.C. This was an harpoon based hunting culture extending all across the far north.
The Adena Woodlland Culture thrived in the east and the middle west of the United States and the influence of the Adena burial customs, religion and art can be identified over a large area, including Chesapeake Bay and New York state. In the 1880s Professor Cyrus Thomas surveyed over 2,000 mound sites and collected over 4,000 specimens of this and the later Hopewell Culture. The San Pedro phase of the Cochise Culture continued in the southwest. (Ref. 189, 215)
In the Olmec center at La Venta a clay pyramid 103 feet high was erected and surrounded by four colossal stone heads. At Monte Alban, Mexico, one can still see rows of carvings with Olmec features. At Tikal, Quatemala, pottery has been found dating to 600 B.C. similar to south American pottery of the same date, suggesting that trade existed between the two areas. About 500 B.C., however, the Olmec people seem to have collapsed and disappeared, perhaps passing on their knowledge to the Mayas who began to occupy some of the same territory. Archeological finds establish a human presence in Vera Cruz as early as 5,600 B.C. and this may have been from ancient times a thorough-fare for migration of Huastec and Olmecs along the coastal plain. (Ref. 176, 155, 236)
The zero point of the Mayan calendar corresponds to our 3,113 B.C. and brings up the interesting questions as to the ultimate origin of those peoples and how they were able to triumph over the jungle to establish a type of civilization. The most likely hypothesis is that they were agriculturalists originally and that they moved in from adjacent river-estuarine lowlands. The bulk of archaeological data points to an original incursion of the lowlands during the first half of this 1st millennium B.C., but the earliest ceramics from Tikal and UJaxactun date to about 600 B.C. There may have been two stages in the development of the Maya society, with the first stage characterized by the dissemination of riverine settlements from the tropical Lowlands of the Pacific and Gulf Coasts in the general area of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the second stage occurring when Pre-classic groups abandoned the rivers and moved into the interior. This later stage appears to be linked to the beginnings of Mayan civilization. The change to the interior habitat involved many problems not the least of which was the obtaining of drinking water. The solution to this problem was apparently found in the construction of artificial reservoirs in impermeable clays. Fed by artificially constructed drainage systems they allowed for the storage of millions of gallons of water. For carbohydrates, the relatively small crops of maize that could be raised with the slash and burn method, was supplemented by the ramon, a tree of the fig family which produces dense carbohydrate seeds in tremendously large quantities. Storage places for these seeds have also been found. Now shut off from river proteins, deer hunting was of importance, a fact confirmed from the examination of hidden contents from Tikal. As the Pulestons (Ref. 261) have pointed out, the necessity of organizing labor to construct the large public reservoirs may well have been a catalyst for the development of social stratification and the developing concept of a state; and the utilization of the ramon would have allowed stable settlements with the release of much male labor for use in various other channels.
The Chavin civilization continued in Peru throughout this century but then about 500 B.C. their cities were rather suddenly abandoned[48]. Some writers say that Paracas developed its own individual type of pottery in the south at this time, but Engel (Ref. 62) does not date Paracas I until another 300 years. Marvin Allison (Ref. 3) has found multiple mummies from various Peruvian and Chilean coastal burials, some dating to 600 B.C., with tuberculosis, especially of the bones and joints and he believes this must have been a common disease of the western coast. The first known densely populated centers on the north coast of South America date from 600 B.C. to 150 B.C. and have been called the "Salinar phase" by archaeologists. (Ref. 255)
In the light of Barry Fells 's hypotheses concerning possible European and Middle East voyagers to the new world in ancient times, it is of interest that a stone inscription in Phoenician script was allegedly discovered in Parahyba Province, Brazil, in 1886 and a translation published in 1939 indicated that it had been written by Canaanites of Sidon who had left the Red Sea area in 536 B.C. (the 19th year of the reign of Hiram) with ten ships, sailing along the coast of Africa for two years, under the orders of Necho, pharoah of Egypt. The writers note that they became separated from their flagship and were carried far away and landed on this unknown (Brazilian) coast. When first put forth this finding and translation was declared a forgery, but more recently it has been accepted as genuine by many authorities. (Ref. 176) The south Atlantic ocean currents coming from the African Cape could easily result in this drift. Ornate ceramics decorated with animal and bird figures were characteristic of the Brazilian Barrancoid tradition of this and many adjacent centuries (Ref. 255)
Back to Central and Northern Asia: 700 to 601 B.C.
There was probably very little change from the situation described in the last century. The Tagar culture people continued in the north, the early Mongoloids in the northeast, and the proliferating Iranian tribes, especially the Sakas and the eastern Medes, in the south.
The Vedic Culture began to decay or at least to stagnate, so that Darius I of Persia had little trouble in seizing Gandhara from the disunited Aryans, and the entire area soon became divided into many small states. Darius' advance into the Indus Valley marked the introduction of coinage, iron working[49] and writing into Pakistan. Although powerful and extensive kingdoms developed in the Ganges Valley at that time, they always remained unstable and were never consolidated into an enduring whole, as in China, and one reason was the heavy micro-parasitism characteristic of the warm, wet Ganges climate. This heavy infestation and infection must have reduced individual vigor and capacity for physical labor, and is probably one reason that Indian empires were fragile and subject to easy conquest by invaders from the north, until the invaders themselves became infested. The transcendentalism that became characteristic of the Indian religions accorded well with the circumstances of poverty-stricken, disease ridden peasants. In Toynbee's (Ref. 220) terminology, it was a "time of troubles" and as usual in such situations, new philosophies and religions began to appear to save man or lift him out of the drudgery of his life. By this time, the caste system was well established at least in northern India. Benares, at the gentle four mile curve of the Ganges, was already the goal of thousands of Hindus who went there to bathe and drink its water and to beseech the favor of some god. (Ref. 136, 140, 37, 220)
Gautama Buddha, scion of the aristocratic Gautama clan living at the foot of the Himalayas, was born in 563 B.C. He left his family and after an initial withdrawal period with self mortification, he returned to the active world to teach his ideas of ethics. He did not write, but talked, a man of strong will, authoritative and proud, but of gentle manner and speech and of infinite benevolence. His idea of Nirvana was complete annihilation. Later, a legend of divine birth appeared among Buddha's followers, but he, himself, claimed no divine origin and in fact was in essence an atheist, worshiping no god, having no ritual and interested only in ethics.
In the middle of this century there also appeared another religion founded by Mahavira and called "Jains". Mahavira taught that the road to release from the tragedy of life was to be found through ascetic penances and complete "ahimsa". The latter means abstinence from injury to any living thing. Gandhi was later strongly influenced by this sect. Neither Buddhism nor Jainism accepted the caste system, which was Hindu in origin, and both were opposed to violence and to any animal slaughter. The Jains even had to be careful in eating any fruit or vegetable, as it might contain an insect which might be a human soul in re-in- carnation. Finally, the only animal protein food in India was an occasional chicken or, on the coast, fish and seafood.
Aryan invaders from north India arrived in Sri Lanka in this or the preceding century and the present day majority Sinhalese ( seven out of ten Sri Lankans) claim descent from them. They are Buddhists and theirs is the official language of the island. (Ref. 136, 211)
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