Comparisons between the leg and pelvic bones of humans and near relatives such as chimpanzees and gorillas illustrate how human skeletons evolved to accommodate upright walking. Paleontologists have found those skeletal traits in African fossils dating as far back as five million years. Archaeologists also report human ancestors using stone tools as long as two million years ago and using fire for a million years. These attributes, along with graves indicating people were deliberately burying their for hundreds of thousands of years indicate a long history of high level of reasoning.
Right along with language and reasoning, human curiosity and imagination was also growing. At the dawning of their rationality, humans found themselves born into an already mature world. They had no way of knowing all that had come before them during Earth's four and a half billion years of change and development. They didn't know their past or what the future might hold. The world was full of phenomena they didn’t understand; phenomena that begged explanation. And how could so many questions be left unanswered?
Ancient people questioned the reason for rain, and the cause of lightning and thunder. They wondered at the nature of air, how it could be invisible yet vital to life itself, and how it could even be dangerously powerful at times. People observed the raging battles between fire and water, curious whence each derived its special power. They marveled at the explosive force of volcanoes unleashing the destructive might of the underworld; and they were captivated by even less exotic occurrences like the eerie thrill of strange sounds in the night. But more than wondering how, people wondered why; being absolutely fascinated by mysterious motives that might be at the root of all that was manifest around them.
Suspense of that which stalked them from the sinister black shadows held their attention. Fierce monsters lurked behind their backs and ducked around corners, growing more gruesome and frightening with the passage of time. And people were always scared of that perpetual stalker, the inevitable, grim, lonesome fate called death. The inglorious, rotting end; that thief of futures and robber of memories sent shivers down spines and raised hackles with frustration. Ancient people sought answers to the unanswerable; seeking power over the reaper. Just as it’s still felt today, something must be done, they figured, to live forever. Amidst the hope and anxiety, a powerful force was evolving inside people; the potent magic of imagination.
Men applied their creative process to seeing the invisible and finding those answers that couldn’t be found; attempting to explain such things as aging and disease. Through the power of wishful thinking they hoped to combat ailments like blindness in old age that stole away sight and left victims mere shells of their former selves. And they were desperate to understand mysterious, invisible diseases that crippled and caused excruciating pain. But, of course, death was the most unfair of all. It stole all that they had built, all that they had worked for; wiping away a lifetime as though it never even happened, as though every hard earned moment was for naught. It imposed a terrible fear; and dread, and grief of mourning.
Lacking even a basic understanding of the complex physical processes of nature and life, people turned to their imaginations for salvation. Imagination and their own experience were the weapons with which they tried to fight uncertainty and the cause of those mysterious things that caused them pain. The despair and desire to overcome misfortune and death were so great that mankind was vulnerable to false hope and unfounded speculations of anyone claiming special knowledge. Predictably, they drew on the experience of their own lives and social interactions to put a human face, or at the least, a human conscious on the mysteries around them. In fantasy, they imagined things out to get them; they believed themselves to be the target of willful harm during bad times, the recipient of intentional blessings during good, and always the center of the universe. Natural processes were distorted into supernatural phenomena.
Eventually, everything many weren’t smart enough to understand became the work of magical beings, until a spirit or god was behind every event and action, and lurking behind every tree and under every stone. But the more things didn't go their way, the more they became obsessed with placating their invented gods to curry favor and avoid vengeful wrath. Most regrettably, their weakness for false hope aided their drive toward tyranny, hostility and villainy; and far away from objective inquiry.
Along the way, humans continued to migrate after animals they preyed upon until finally beginning to settle down in permanent or quasi-permanent villages about 10,000 years ago around the Fertile Crescent, in the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa near the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf. The domestication of animals and grain crops helped liberate people from perpetual travel in search of food. Even though crop failure and other factors such as disease outbreaks and weather extremes repeatedly displaced settled societies, the trend of continual habitation persisted. With less time spent traveling, hunting and seeking shelter, people were able to devote more time to improving their farming practices and standards of living. Permanent villages attracted more and more people, allowing them to share knowledge and collaborate on work projects. Famine was far from defeated, but storage of grain and keeping of animals allowed for a more consistent food supply, so time that would otherwise be concerned with securing the next meal could be applied to other tasks.
Over the next few thousand years the future really started to take shape. Time savings and production multiplying factors, along with the growing pyramid of human knowledge, and new thought foci helped people of the permanent settlements to drastically increase the rate of invention. By 7,000 BC people were beginning to work copper ore in Anatolia. And by 6,000 BC the pottery and wool textile trades were being practiced in Catalhoyuk in what is today Turkey. Catalhoyuk was a large, advanced village for it’s time, with decorations such as murals and bull horns adorning walls that might not seem out of place in some modern homes. The architecture did have at least one feature that seems odd to today’s sensibilities, that is, most of the single-room dwellings had no windows or doors. They were earthen structures constructed abutting one another, and the only passageway was a hole in the ceiling accessed via a ladder.
It was an unfortunate truth then, as it is now, that success breeds envy and invites attack. Jericho, the most famous of the early towns, and argued by some to be the oldest continuously populated town in the world, was walled for protection from invaders, as were many contemporary cities. For almost as long as people have been building cities, they’ve been building walls as protection from invasion. On a more positive note, however, agricultural settlements were established in the river valleys of what is today Egypt and Iraq by 5,000 BC with crops even being irrigated to increase yield and stabilize the food supply. Life was showing signs of relaxed normalcy, with decorated pottery and other housewares becoming popular in Egypt during the period. And by the 5th millennium BC the march of progress was picking up speed with many significant inventions including bronze casting; and introduction of the plow, the wheel and the sail, and even more importantly, improvement of language with the introduction of writing systems in Sumer and Egypt. The Sumerians even developed printing cylinders used to mass produce impressions in clay tablets.
Toward the end of the millennium a ruler sometimes referred to as King Menes overran his competitors and united Egypt. Somewhat owing to isolation by water, hills and desert Egypt forms a logical political unit around the lower Nile Valley, and with a few notable interruptions Egypt was governed from that point forward as a unified nation for about 3,000 years. Today ancient Egypt lives on in memory as the richest, most lavish, and most interesting civilization of the time, and perhaps of all time. Kings were absolute rulers of Egypt and eventually came to be known as pharaohs. And that position was usually inherited, though lines of inheritance were frequently broken. Successions of kings of the same family were known as dynasties. One of those kings, the last ruler of the Sixth Dynasty, Pepi II, is reported to have reigned longer than any other monarch in history, 94 years, from the age of 6 to his death at the age of 100. Pharaohs were revered as living gods and commanded enormous allegiance from their subjects; collecting vast royal treasuries, and having elaborate public works constructed in their honor. Some of those astounding construction projects are considered among the most significant of all time, including such magnificent works as the Great Sphinx and pyramid complex at Giza.
Not every large construction project was an astounding success, however. About the time of pyramid construction on the Giza Plateau, the Egyptians built the world’s first large man-made dam, across the Wadi Al-Garawi river. But, the dam was made of rubble overlain with stone, and the middle of the dam was quickly washed away, as it wasn’t protected from the tremendous erosive force of the flowing water. Khufu’s Great Pyramid, on the other hand, completed about 2560 BC, is truly a building marvel; massive, precise and enduring. At more than 4500 years old, it remains one of the great construction feats of all time, and along with similar Egyptian work, was unparalleled during the period, predating the Coliseum in Rome by 2500 years.
Each side of the square stone base is about 755 ft. long, and the massive stone structure currently stands about 455 ft. tall. The pyramid was a little wider before the outer casing stone, that had previously been loosened by an earthquake, was removed to be used in other construction projects in the 14th century CE. The pyramid would have also been about 25 ft taller when the enormous capstone, which is also now missing, was in place. Either way, with or without a capstone, the pyramid was the tallest building in the world for about 4,000 years, though the similarly impressive nearby Pyramid of Khafre is slightly higher owing to the fact it resides on higher ground.
As enormous tomb monuments, the Great Pyramids are but a few examples of preoccupation with death and religion in Egyptian culture. They were not, after all, great houses for this life, as would be more practical, instead they were created as houses for an afterlife that never came. Art and public monuments predominately reflected religious purpose. Prior to written history, Egyptians buried their dead in fetal positions facing west where the sun traveled to the land of the dead after passing the land of the living, though little else is known about religious beliefs prior to the advent of writing.
Over the centuries people of a united Egypt developed a large group of deities with a great variety of traditions. Gods were invented in different towns and cities independently, and evolved to suit the particular hierarchies and needs of the different areas they were introduced. Obviously, as father of the country and living divinity, the roles of the gods as established by the king, or pharaoh, took precedence, but didn’t entirely replace local perceptions. Furthermore, perceptions varied greatly from king to king, and were heavily influenced by the balance of power among the cities.
At least four creator gods, and likely many more, flourished in Egypt through the ages; Amon-Ra, Atum, Khnum, and Ptah. Amon-Ra was himself a compilation of the fertility god, or god of invisible power, Amon, with the sun god Ra. In addition there were many creation stories including a god-bearing lotus and a divine egg from which the gods descended. In total there were too many combinations of gods and their roles and relations to keep track of, but one of the most important gods was Osiris, with one tradition relating how he was killed by his brother Seth. When his loving wife Isis found him, she beseeched other gods to bring him back to life. When the other gods did intervene Osiris was resurrected, becoming the important and powerful god of afterlife in the process.
For various reasons, a disemboweled, desiccated body was considered better than dried bones, or no body at all, so mummification came to traditionally be considered essential to the afterlife. And even the practice of placing worldly goods with the bodies of the deceased predated written records. Those worldly goods might include anything believed to help the dead in the afterlife, ranging from treasure to more practical items like cookware and furniture. The practice of placing treasures with the bodies of dead kings lead to the risky but potentially lucrative business of grave-robbing, but well concealed tombs and tomb entrances also made possible the recovery of fantastic archaeological treasures in modern times like that of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
After the Old Kingdom, Egypt entered a state of decline known as the First Intermediate Period from 2200 – 2060 BC. It was Mentuhotep, king of Thebes, that reunited Egypt in 2060 BC, thus beginning the Middle Kingdom; a period of stability often referred to as the “golden age” by later Egyptians. During this time Egypt also flexed a little muscle outside its borders by annexing Lower Nubia to the south, and marching northeast through Palestine and into Syria, bringing the Egyptians into closer contact with the prosperous culture of Mesopotamia.
About the time of great pyramid building in Egypt, Uruk, in what is now Iraq, was ruled by king Gilgamesh (27th century BC). Gilgamesh is a name best known from the later Sumerian tale the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the story, Gilgamesh faced challenges from the gods with his friend Enkidu, a former god-turned-man, similar to the later Greek Heracles (Hercules). One challenge for Gilgamesh was a great flood. The flood story in Gilgamesh was, however, a copy of an even earlier flood story in the Epic of Atrahasis.
The Gilgamesh author or authors, or oral storytellers as the case may have been, copied the Atrahasis flood story verbatim with some minor exceptions inserted for dramatic affect. The earlier story was that of a devastating river flood, a common concern on the Mesopotamian flood plain where sudden mountain snow melt brought surging floods with little warning. But the Gilgamesh author sought to awe his audience by changing the river flood into an incredible flood of the whole world. In so doing he demonstrated how elaborate myths evolve, growing more bold and unusual with the passage of time.
The Epic of Atrahasis explained the birth, or creation, of the gods and the creation of humans to aid the gods. In a now familiar story later passed down by numerous Mesopotamian cultural traditions such as Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the gods became dissatisfied with the humans they created and cursed them with plagues; finally bringing about a great flood to punish the humans.
Uruk was a local kingdom along the Euphrates river in an area that was actually only later called Mesopotamia by the Greeks, meaning land between the rivers. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, like the Nile in Egypt, provided water and fertile ground in an arid land, so permanent settlement in Mesopotamia was concentrated near the rivers. Mesopotamian agriculture came to rely on irrigation, which required the cooperation of large groups of people to dig canals and manage the flow of water. By 3,000 BC a society known as the Sumerians had established a number of walled cities, including Ur, Uruk, Umma, Lagash and Eridu. The cities and surrounding territory that comprised Sumerian city-states occasionally waged war with each other but remained largely independent for centuries until Lugalzagesi, the king of Umma, conquered his rivals and unified Sumer.
Lugalzagesi’s military success was ended in the 23rd or 24th century BC, however, by Sargon of Akkad. The Akkadians were Semitic-speaking people that lived just north of Sumer. Sargon expanded on Lugalzagesi’s success and came to rule all of Mesopotamia and much of present day Syria toward the Mediterranean Sea. A tale of Sargon’s birth will sound familiar to those acquainted with the story of Moses in the Bible, as Sargon was also said to have been placed in a basket and set adrift in a river for adoption.
The Akkadian Empire that Sargon founded fell after little more than a century, and Nammu of Ur consolidated control of a large part of Mesopotamia. The dynasty he established developed some of the first broad codes of laws. Those law systems were copied and modified through the ages, even as rulers and dynasties came and went. The most famous of that series of law codes was that of Hammurabi, a Babylonian king that inherited a kingdom of a handful of cities in the 18th century BC. Hammurabi began a series of conquests, perhaps spurred by conflict with the kingdom of Elam located east of Mesopotamia, just inside present day Iran. Hammurabi’s considerable military and political victories expanded his Babylonian empire to near the extent of Sargon’s Akkadian empire.
Like most early civilization, all of Mesopotamia was dominated by religion. Ignorance in the ways of the world begat institutions of superstition. Priests were very influential in society, and placation of the many gods was a large part of everyday life. And not quite the same, but similar to Egyptian belief, kings were professed to derive their authority from the gods and were representatives of the gods on Earth. As in Egypt, various gods held sway from city to city and ruler to ruler. Hammurabi, like others before him, tore down some gods and elevated others. In particular, he retired En-Lil and replaced him with his son Marduk, the favored king of Babylon, tearing down a temple to En-Lil and dispatching his priests in the process. By expanding Marduk’s domain, Babylon became the religious center of the empire.
One reason why the world remembers Hammurabi’s now famous legal code, is because it was written in stone. It was carved into a large beautiful polished stone called a stele. Being written in stone for prominent display lent a sense of consistency and certainty to the law. However, while having laws written in stone did discourage arbitrary rulings and punishments to some degree, there was seeming contradiction among some of the laws and not surprisingly, many were unjustly harsh.
As for his part, Hammurabi believed all of the praise and exaltation that was heaped upon him. A fascinating trait of human psychology is the tendency to feel special, like the chosen one, whether a person’s status is king or servant. People have a penchant for believing that they’re here for a higher purpose and that they’ll certainly bear witness to unprecedented achievement, such as the final triumph of good over evil. That inherent bias and inability to understand another’s perceptions is a standard handicap of the human race. Individual comprehension and appreciation of the truth is severely limited in individual perception.
Those lacking the maturity and wisdom to extract their emotions from decision making and look at the larger picture as uninterested observers are prone to delusion. Every man, from the mightiest king to the most humble slave, is apt to believe what he’s told, because that forms a large part of the experience which shapes his beliefs. The top of his code stele shows Hammurabi receiving the laws from the sun god Shamash. The inscribed preface to the laws states that he was chosen by the gods and called by Anu and Bel to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, and sent by Marduk to rule over the land. Fulfiller of the prediction of Hallab; mighty son of Sin-muballit; the royal scion of eternity; the mighty monarch, the sun of Babylon, whose rays shed light over the land of Sumer and Akkad; the king, obeyed by the four quarters of the square, flat world; Beloved of Ninni, was he. The preface, as well as the epilogue, is a lengthy tribute to Hammurabi’s great deeds, wisdom and close relationship with the gods.
The reader may question how ancient people could be so gullible as to believe a king was divine, or in direct communication with the gods. But in all this time, has mankind really matured mentally? After all, we still refuse to accept that all the gods, spirits, ghosts and demons are just figments of our juvenile imaginations. And could it be that ancient kings and pharaohs actually believed they were divine? What kind of idiot could possibly believe he was part god? we might ask. That... will be a question to ponder as some among us converse with god.
As it was, Sumerian and later Mesopotamian cultures, exposed, as all early civilizations were, to extremes of weather such as droughts, floods and sandstorms, were obsessed with learning the intentions of their gods through divination. Killing animals such as sheep and examining their organs was one method employed to see the future, while other seeings, such as deciphering patterns of smoke or oil in water, caused no inherent harm. Dream interpretation was another way to gain mystical insight. The crowning achievement of the divining arts however, measured by continued popularity, may well have been astrology. Horoscopes based on heavenly influence, as determined by star positions, are still widely used even today, even if faith of efficacy has diminished by some degree.
Divine judgment was employed by the second of Hammurabi’s laws, along with the deterrent effect of severe consequence. Clearly advantage under this law would be with strong swimmers, as it reads:
If anyone bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.
The 247 laws on the stele give valuable insight into the priorities of Babylonia almost 4,000 years ago. Orderly society was much more valued than individual lives, as indicated by the exhaustive list of capital crimes. Stealing and receiving stolen or lost property; buying from a son or slave of another man without witness or contract; harboring a runaway slave; owning a tavern in which conspirators met but weren’t delivered to the court; improperly constructing a house which falls in and kills the owner; stealing the minor son of another; not paying a mercenary that took one’s place in the army; and convincing a barber to cut the sign of a slave on a slave not to be sold were all acts for which the prescribed punishment was death. Another deadly transgression for the lesser sex as ancient men deemed them was nothing more than entering a tavern. If a “sister of god” opened or entered a tavern, she was to be burned.
Even being the son or daughter of one who transgressed the law could result in capital punishment. If a poorly constructed house caused the death of the owner’s son, it wasn’t the builder who was to be put to death, but his son. Similarly, if a free-born woman was struck and killed, the daughter of the person that struck her was to be executed. And if a free-born prisoner of debt died from maltreatment, the son of the merchant was to be killed. Of course, the adolescent mind is preoccupied with sex, and adultery was just one of multiple sex-related capital sex offenses. If a man’s wife was surprised with another man, both were to be tied and thrown into the water. But in that case the husband could pardon his wife, and if the man was one of the king’s slaves the king could pardon the slave. While adulterers were being drowned in the river however, incestial relations were punishable by burning.
Even as harsh as archaic law was, it was equally discriminatory. Women were purchased as wives from their fathers and had little right to hold property; even being treated as property themselves, commonly being sold into slavery to satisfy a debt. But more discriminatory than laws of gender were those of class. A classic law declared that whosoever put out another man’s eye, his eye was also to be put out. However, if the injured party was a freed man, i.e. former slave, the punishment was one gold mina. And if the injured party was a slave of another man, the penalty was one-half the slave’s value.
Other trades people, in addition to homebuilders, were also held to high, even unreasonable, standards. Not only was the man who convinced the barber to cut the sign of a slave on slaves not to be sold, without the masters’ consent, to be put to death, the barber was to have his hands cut off. Physicians, also, were subject to having their hands hewn off for accidental death or eye loss during surgery. And for their part, children were expected to treat their elders with respect, as consequences were very high should they forget their place. Life might continue for a boy that struck his father, but it would be a hard life; one of contempt, regret, and despair. For, if he didn’t succumb to the infection and shock of having his hands cut off for striking his father, who was certainly free to strike him, he’d be forever disadvantaged and challenged to the point of regretting his own birth.
The sons of paramours or prostitutes received even more unwanted attention in the code. Should one deny his adoptive father or mother by saying “you are not my father or you are not my mother,” his tongue was to be cut out. And should the son of a paramour or prostitute desire his father’s house, and desert his adoptive father and adoptive mother, and go to his father’s house, then should his eye be put out.
Although the punishments were often severe, the code did afford some protections for victims and for the accused. Defendants were allowed to call witnesses on their behalf. And Judges shown to be in error in a written judgment, were to pay twelve times the fine ordered in the case, and forbidden to judge in the future. In cases where robbers weren’t caught, he who was robbed could claim under oath how much was lost and the community would compensate for the stolen goods. There were also other instances of community insurance for losses of similar nature. And all of these strict laws provided significant incentive for the community to maintain order and harmony.
Such a wealth of written, or even oral, tradition has been lost from the prosperous civilization that once inhabited the island of Crete near Greece in the Mediterranean Sea. The lost culture is referred to today as Minoan from the legendary king Minos of later Greek literature. The Minoans were non-Greek speaking people that settled on Crete as early as 2,000 BC. Theirs was a prosperous culture with considerable wealth that was apparently the result of extensive trading activities. Minoans constructed elaborate palaces replete with bathrooms. But the Minoans disappeared from history about 1450 BC for unknown reasons, though one possible cause would be conquest by the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece.
Indo-Europeans had settled in Greece by 2,000 BC and the culture of the Mycenaean Greeks flourished from about 1600 to 1100 BC. The mountainous terrain of Greece contributed to growth of isolated cities, though the Greek city-states, or poleis, may have organized themselves into confederacies at times to provide for common defense and other shared objectives. One of the more powerful cities of ancient Greece, and the namesake of the Mycenaean period was Mycenae, located on the southern peninsula of Peloponnesus. Trade and military conquest helped bring wealth to the Mycenaeans, trading throughout the Mediterranean. They also conquered foreign lands and brought back slaves from overseas. But it’s unknown how much fact, if any, may have been buried in the later celebrated story by the famous writer Homer of the capture of Troy in Asia Minor by the Greeks under King Agamemnon. Equally mysterious is the cause of Mycenaean decline, as the writings and public works of affluence faded away with the start of what’s been called the Greek Dark Ages.
Back in Egypt, the Middle Kingdom fell into disarray. Near the beginning of the 18th century BC a group of Semitic-speaking people called the Hyksos migrated into the Nile delta. They brought with them new technology such as composite bows believed to have originated as far away as Central Asia, the horse drawn chariot, heavy swords, and bronze working skills. The Hyksos came to dominate Egypt with their superior technology, but after the Egyptians absorbed that technology they used their superior numbers to defeat and expel the Hyksos. It was Ahmose I that reunited Egypt and established the New Kingdom that lasted from 1575 to 1086 BC. And Thutmose