Pre-history to History – Civilisations and Empires

A long time ago…

The time at which the history of humanity emerges from Pre-History is around 5500 years ago, it was around this time that the first Civilisations began to appear. For hundreds of thousands of years before this, modern humans probably lived in small family orientated hunter gatherer groups. Hundreds, indeed thousands, of generations lived a foraging lifestyle that changed little. These small groups lived most of the time isolated from each other, following animal herds, fishing and gathering food from surrounding vegetation. Archaeological evidence has started to give us an increasingly informed idea of the pattern of life that humanity led during all that time, a period that covers the great majority of our existence. Indeed, the period of known human history goes back only as far as about 3500 BC, when, at last, writings start to give us documented details of individual human lives. In the entirety of human existence, this last period of documented history, covering a few thousand years, is only yesterday in the overall scheme of things.

Gathering Peoples

Evidence from various archaeological digs of human activity some ten to twenty thousand years ago are starting to reveal that hunter gatherer groups, at certain times of the year, converged together for what were probably important religious occasions. Such meetings for special occasions seem to have started at least 20,000 years ago as the hunter gatherer tribes became more sophisticated in their hunting techniques. The exact reasons for these meetings can only be assumed or guessed at from the kinds of food, stone structures and other findings that have been discovered. The evidence suggests these were probably celebratory meetings due to the level of feasting during such occasions. Possible reasons for the gatherings could be solstices or marriages, or to appease the gods. Maybe also hunting boundaries were agreed, where stone markers were used to set boundaries.

Over time these gatherings became increasingly fixed, and grew in size. Excavations of sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey have led to the conclusion that eventually some of these gatherings became large enough for groups of people to remain at gathering places, if not all year round, then for at least part of the year, to prepare for such major gatherings in advance. Such settled groups seem to have started growing wild cereal crops for the purposes of making alcohol and bread, food necessary for such gatherings.

The number of sites that have been found across then Levant where small communities had settled temporarily is growing. A few sites even show settlements in use for longer than a year before the tribe moved on. One such site in the Levant is dated to about 20,000 ago showing that for many thousands of years before permanent farming communities settled for good, people were settled for part of the year, even growing wild cereal crops. The rest of the year these communities spent hunting. It may have been at such temporary sites settlement that that wild sheep or goats were held in captivity in readiness for feasting at large gatherings, possibly resulting in them eventually becoming domesticated. This was possibly the forerunner to the family groups settling to grow crops on a more permanent basis. Once the idea of growing and storing of crops, and holding captive animals became more common, the possibilities this presented would have become apparent.

Settling in one place

Since early humans evolved, over two million years ago before modern humans evolved, life had revolved around hunting and gathering to survive. Most hunter gatherers were nomadic, that is, to find food required peoples to be constantly mobile. When modern humans evolved over two hundred thousand years ago, this was the kind of life that they probably adapted to, hunting animals, fishing and gathering food from vegetation. Eventually they migrated from Africa, spreading over continents in the constant search for food. As the climate began to warm after 20,000BC, land in the middle east became increasingly fertile and the numbers of modern humans able to roam these lands increased. An area of land in this region is known today as the ‘Fertile Crescent’, which included the bridge between north Africa and the middle east. At one end of this crescent is Göbekli Tepe in modern day Turkey. This fertile land swept east in a crescent shape all the way down through modern day Iraq to the Persian Gulf, and to the west down to Egypt, even encompassing Cyprus at its widest period. It was in this crescent that some ten thousand years ago a people began planting crops and remaining in one place.

The process of changing from nomadic hunter gatherer to farmer probably happened over a long period with people initially living in one place for part of the year and hunting the rest of the time. Nomadic life has its limitations, it is usually a subsistence living and depends on food being constantly available in immediate surroundings. Building up wealth and property was not possible in such life styles, and women could bring up only one child at a time, so family size was limited making population growth very slow. However, this lifestyle became more problematical when population sizes did grow, competition for food with other roaming groups of people became more likely, and made worse in times of drought. By necessity hunter gatherer tribes could not have numbered more than one hundred people. Moving with migratory herds of dear or wild sheep would have been essential for many groups. This would make meetings of hunter gatherer tribes a special occasion, preparations in advance would have become necessary if these meetings involved large numbers of tribes, to ensure there was enough food to go around. Yet where human populations were low and food in plentiful supply, the hunter gatherer lifestyle certainly had its advantages: they would be well fed and the work effort in acquiring food less intensive leaving time for leisure.

Increased Populations

As human populations grew and the available food for all would have become less plentiful, then in time many roaming tribes would have found it more advantages to spend time growing food to supplement their lifestyle and ensure they had some food reserve. If the planting of crops was combined with domesticating migratory animals, then the need to roam at all would be removed. Leaders of tribes would have found that taking ownership of the land that their tribes inhabited brought the opportunity to hoard wealth and accumulate luxury items, as well as real estate. Personal wealth could be built to levels that, in a roaming lifestyle, was not possible. Food could be grown to support larger numbers of people in a tribe, women could bring up more than one child at a time. Leaders of larger tribes would have found that, not only could they have more opportunities for personal wealth, but also more power. As the land filled with more farming communities, the opportunities and space for a roaming nomadic lifestyles would have become scarcer as the land was divided into tribal territories. Further to that, the accumulation of wealth would be further increased through trading with other neighboring settled tribes, creating lucrative trading networks. There would probably have been little wish to give this up once established. Thus, settlements became increasingly permanent.

City State

Compared with a nomadic life; where tribes following animal trails wandered the open stretches of land over long distances, and food could often be plentiful and found with relative ease; Farming or life in an urban city, on the other hand, would most likely seem to be a life of drudgery and endless toil for most. Such a life often led to aches and pains; back pain and arthritic pains caused by constant wear and tear through crouching and digging, these pains were more common in crowded cramped conditions. Life in crowded urban communities was often shorter due to more transmissions of disease, often made worse by living in damp and dirty crowded conditions. And yet, after tens of thousands of years of nomadic life, communities turned permanently to farming and city life leading to urban living. More people turned to farming despite the mundane and endless toils that most people in such communities were subject to; therefore, the advantages of such living, once established, must have been worth this price.

It became preferable to live in denser communities, to become a stake holder in the land. With a permanent house or dwelling, a plot to grow food and livestock to provide wool, milk and foodstuffs. Where trading routes were formed more communities would live closer together, especially if it became a main crossroad to even more distant communities. Where greater food surpluses could be produced, and access to raw materials was in plentiful supply, smaller family groups would find greater advantage forming larger communities making possible the manufacture of greater and more sophisticated tools. Larger communities were better able to defend themselves against hostile neighbors and provided better opportunities for individuals to accumulate wealth. It was probably in this way that the first large settlements formed.     

Archaeological digs have now found settlements in the fertile crescent that had grown in size much earlier than previously thought. A proto-city called Çatalhöyük in modern day Turkey was discovered to be occupied as early as 9000 years ago, and so believed to have been founded earlier than 7000 BC. Before its discovery it had been thought the earliest civilisations emerged no earlier than around 5500 BC, when the Sumer civilisation begins to emerge in Mesopotamia. At this time the Sumerians began to form large communities from related tribes – calling the land they occupied the ‘Country of the Noble Lords’. Here they drained marshes for crops and set up industries such as weaving, metal working, leatherworking, pottery and masonry.

Sometime after 4000 BC the first cities in Sumer appear, the first possibly being Eridu, on the coast of the Persian Gulf. It is possible this was formed from three separate communities, One a farming community living in mud brick houses, another being a nomadic tribe that lived in (black) tents and followed herds of goats and sheep, and the third a fishing community that lived in weed huts in the marshlands – these may have been the sumerian’s original ancestors. These three groups of people seemed to have merged into a single community and eventually went on to build an independent city state. The Sumer lands eventually covered much of Mesopotamia and by 3000 BC there were numerous city states. This was a long and thriving civilisation.

Akkadia – The First Empire

The rise of the Sumerian civilisation saw the building of numerous city states across Mesopotamia, each identified by its own protective deity: Eridu, Larsa, Lagash, Umma, Kish, Adab, Shurrupak, Ur, Uruk and so on. Surprisingly many of these city states were built within sight of each other. Boundary stones were used to separate lands between each city but over time, there would have been increasing competition for dwindling resources. This could have been the reason for the border conflict between two cities, Lagash and Umma. Lagash was known as a slaving city, getting much of its trade by sending out slaving missions to raid communities in surrounding hills and mountains; those they captured they sold in their surrounding region. Armies from the two cities met in an open field of battle and Lagash was victorious, the army from Umma was almost annihilated as they fled the battle in defeat according a surviving account on a carving that tells of battle.

This is thought to be one of the first organised battles between two civilised states in history. With victory Lagash brutally subjugated the city of Umma and extracted from them heavy dues by installing a military leadership over the city. Lagash went on to conquer other city states after this first victory and could be said to have established the first Empire. This was a harsh empire and with in a short time the subjugated cities rose in rebellion against Lagash. The conflict and unrest weakened the Sumerian civilisation, and meanwhile, elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent other civilisations had been growing. They too had united as other tribal groups began to coalesce into larger groups capable of building civilisations.

One such civilisation were a people to the north of Sumer that grew around a city state called Akkad, hence this civilisation was called Akkadia. Sometime around 2230 BC the Akkadians conquered the Sumer city states, destroying their defences one at a time, and all but destroying Lagash. These came under the rule of a single Akkadian leader who took the name Sargon (Legitimate or true king – the story of his early life is almost identical to that of the biblical Moses). The enforced unification of Sumer and Akkadia formed the first empire where one separate civilisation had conquered another – perhaps this, then, is the first true empire. They sent out large organised military expeditions and went on to conquere and take control of the Levant and much of Anatolia, thus controlling a sizable area of land. Akkadia, through the same process as previously followed by Lagash, extracted its wealth through military rule, subjugation and enslavement of the conquered populations.

Empire of civilisations

This tells us that empires come to rely on slaves to build their walls, temples and other great buildings, to serve in their armies, serve a domestics to their masters or to be sold for profit. After a century of Akkadian rule the empire was eventually ruined by a sustained attack of nomadic hordes from the north, and after a period of chaos the Sumerians regained control of their cities again and for a while there was a new Sumerian Empire. This period was also to be fairly short because two thousand years of continuous irrigation using salty water from the two rivers, the Tigres and the Euphrates, eventually led the land had become too salted to grow sufficient food for all the cities. This further weakened the Sumerian city-states and encouraged more nomads from the north to invade Sumer. The prolonged nomadic attacks and deepening famine eventually forced the Sumerians to abandon their cities thus ending the Sumerian civilisation. The people of Sumer were eventually assimilated into the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires and sumer was only kept alive as a language of religion, much as Latin is today.   

Where there is one Empire…

Akkadia was the first of many empires over the following millennia, and ever since its formation powerful kings of city states, and later kingdoms, set out to conquer neighbouring peoples. Thus, there would be empires continuously from the rise of the Akkadian empire right through to the latter part of the twentieth century AD. Stronger civilisations, kingdoms and countries were destined always to set out to conquer their weaker neighbours.

Over five thousand years the idea of empire would become the goal of kings and emperors and it would be seen as the correct means of building a powerful civilisation. Indeed, civilisation would be seen as an expression of imperial power. This process continued relentlessly, allowing the conquerors to grow wealthy and powerful, while the conquered were often, initially at least, oppressed, exploited and even enslaved. However, empires could also provide new opportunities and even the spread of ideas between different groups or nations of people, especially if an empire was long lived. In time, over many centuries, conqueror and conquered became assimilated as happened with the Chinese empire.

In other empires this was sometime enforced, as in the case of indigenous agrarian populations by more advanced empires. Throughout the rest of the world it was often due to empire building that many conquered peoples were thrown together and forced to become part of a greater society; In later empires greater societies eventually became unified into countries we recognise today. It was hoped by the empire builders that these different peoples would take to identifying themselves as a single nation of people. This however takes a long time, folk memory can last centuries. In more recent empires the effect of border changes and formation of new artificial borders defined by imperial boundaries still cause conflicts to this day. However it was often through this process that ideas from different parts of the world could come together. These would eventually lead to greater technological advances and over time helped to build even larger conquering empires.

In this way civilisation and empire building seemed to march across the world hand in hand. Eventually this process came to span the globe, bringing peoples into contact with even the remotest parts of the globe; And yet, for all the apparent achievements of empire, in the aftermath of the second world war, for the first time since the Akkadian empire had first made its appearance, empires all but vanished.

Imperial Legacy?

Today humanity is experiencing an altogether different world to that which, just a few generations earlier, would have been completely alien to every previous generation that had gone before it. Today’s world is essentially the product of the past five or six thousand years of growing civilisations and conquering empires, it was an imperial age – where empire was seen by great leaders and strong nations as the ultimate goal of humanity and thus a symbol of advancement, achievement and of greatness. The last and ultimately most powerful and influential empire to emerge from this long and seemingly endless chain of empires considered itself to be the greatest and most successful power that had ever existed. Spanning the globe, the British empire enabled Britain to break through the agrarian barrier that had limited the size and strength of all earlier empires. Its empire successfully commercialised the making of wealth, so much so that full industrialisation followed, something that had never happened before.

Although industrialisation created a lot of disturbance and upheaval, the result was that it increasingly freed the people from being tied to the land. Instead the people went into ever more trades and skills requiring higher education, thus raising education levels, expectations and demands of an entire people. This was made increasingly possible with a legal system which represented the rights and freedoms an ever-larger proportion of the population.

Modern Society

Thus, for the first time in history, a majority of a people were entirely freed from a subsistence living by industry, and freed from tyranny by its legal system and provided the population the opportunity of a stake and a say in its future, where more people had increased wealth. Ideas of shared wealth and personal freedoms spread amongst the population wholesale – concepts that previously would have been impossible in largely uneducated populations tied to the land. Such was the size of this last empire, and such was the speed that commerce spread industrialisation throughout its land, that other empires, civilisations and countries were influenced and compelled to try and follow, such that within a surprisingly short time, the globe became interconnected through new methods of transport and rapidly developing technological advancements. Other nations were equally influenced to demand these same liberations from subsistence, wants and tyrannies, with the same opportunities for wealth making. So much so that all kinds of new ideologies sprang up all around the world. Some led to greater freedoms for peoples, others led to greater oppression and even great destruction was unleashed across the world as industrialisation became increasingly global.

At its height, the nation at the heart of this last great empire were a people that came to demand education amongst the masses, the liberation through its laws and ideology, increased personal wealth amongst all peoples. With the spread of mass communication, beginning with the electric telegraph, bringing interconnection across the globe. The British empire came to believe it was on a civilising mission. With such a small imperial centre governing such a vast periphery, this last empire became one maintained part by charade and part by consent of those being governed. And indeed, educating its own people of ideas of personal freedoms and wealth, these ideas could only spread in an increasingly interconnected world, until the idea of empire itself became intolerable, and thus, despite imperialism once being considered the main instrument for creating advanced civilisation, the traditional ideal of empire became unfashionable and considered the root cause of oppression across the globe, mostly, it seems, by those peoples who had benefited most from it.

Globalised People

The last old empire that had emerged from the age of empire has, after spreading its influence across the globe with it concepts of industrialisation and political ideologies, now all but vanished within our lifetime. In its wake, the world has increasingly shrunk with increased rapidity as all humanity became interconnected. With industry now global across all the world’s nations, technology has spread with such an increased rapidity that it would have seemed unimaginable a generation ago. So completely interconnected has world now become that anyone anywhere in the world can now speak with almost anyone else no matter where they are almost instantly, and access information about almost anything from anywhere, purchase anything from anywhere in the globe, all with personal hand held devices; owned by most people in a world now populated by billions. – thus, we are all now potentially permanently linked.

So today we live in a very new age for humanity, a world far removed from that our modern human ancestors had first emerged into all those hundreds of thousands of years ago. Now all the different peoples of the world have been brought together, in a way that once only old empires could do.

Last of the old empires

Could old style empires of conquest emerge again. With the last main colony of the old British Empire acquiring independence in 1997, the last of the old empires are gone. All the newer empires that emerged in the 20^th century, built more on ideology than trade and conquest, including the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s New Rome, had already disappeared by 1990. Indeed, the latter two that emerged in the 20^th century two lasted less than ten years, so violent had they been that the conquered people they governed readily turned against them. These had been far more murderous than the earlier empires, making war on peoples and intending to wipe out those populations that did not conform ideas of race, or newly enforced ideologies. In an increasingly economised, and democratic, world, could an old-style empire come into existence again. One nation that could build an old-style empire is the United States; but, as shown during the Iraqi conflict, public opinion quickly turns against any form of armed intervention if it lasts more than eighteen months. And why conquer neighboring countries for raw materials when it is far cheaper to acquire them through internationalised forms of trade?  

New Empires?

But there may well still be an empire in our midst, a new type of empire. If all the people of the world are already interconnected by technology, a technology that already governs the way most of us live our lives, so much so that without it we feel lost – we are in fact disconnected. This must be an empire, one controlled by a few global mass communication companies?

But let us not forget the reason old empires rose, and fell. Competition for resources, power status, and let’s not forget ideology or religion. Such a world as ours requires resources the world over, not least the commodities and resources from the African continent. In a world that continues to shrink, competition for increasingly scarce resources continues to grow. As new economic powers emerge, much of the world today looks at China… and wonders.