the initial motive for the development of writing in mesopotamia was for

Chapter Study Guide Questions

As you read both the following essay and the text chapter designed to accompany it, be sure to pay special attention to the following ID and Larger Study topics. They are your guide to which topics, from this Chapter, will be covered on the 1st Section's objective exam. These study terms and topics will be highlighted and/or repeated as they appear below. The Section objective exam be aimed at seeing how well you understand the below topics covered both in this essay and the accompanying text chapter.

ID Study Terms

Irrigation
Sargon of Akkad
Hammurabi's law code
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Pyramids
Heiroglyphics
Osiris
The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Larger Study Topics

Understand both similarities and differences in  the geographic context of Earliest Sumerian and Egyptian civilization. In what ways were they similar and different, with  what significance?

Understand the major dynamics and stages of emerging states, rulers and empires in Mesopotamia, from the era of earliest Sumerian city-states through Hammurabi's Babylonian empire.

Understand both the basic dynamics (both continuing and evolving) of  Pharaoh rule in Egypt over the Old and Middle Kingdom eras. What original powers and roles emerged why, and evolved how and why?

Although much more limited than our sources for Egypt or Mesopotamia, archeological evidence tells us a number of things about early Indus River valley civilization. What are they: physical structure of cities? Writing and metals? Trade? Fate? What kinds of things don't we know about, that we do have some knowledge of for Egypt and Mesopotamia?

Chapter 2 Map Locations: Be sure to understand the location of all of the following geographic locations. All will be included on the Section 1 Map Exercise to be completed before the end of Section 1 work.

Tigris River
Euphrates River
Persian Gulf
Ur (city)
Babylon (city)
Mediterranean Sea
Nile River
Sinai Peninsula
Sahara Desert
first cataract
Nubian Desert
Indus River
Ganges River
Area of Sind (see Harappa map below)
Himalaya Mountains
Hindu Kush Mountains
Harappa (city)
Mohenjo-daro (city)

Introduction

We have now reached what has often been the beginning of traditional-style history: "historic" times, meaning those times for which we have written records. Since written records were one of the main characteristics of almost - but not quite - all early civilizations, this means we have also reached the times in which earliest civilizations emerged.

Scholars believe that complex early civilization first appeared in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian river valleys of the Middle East by about 3000 BCE, and in the Indus Valley of western India soon thereafter. Civilization is believed to have appeared first in the city states of Sumer, along the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in the southern part of the lands we will be calling Mesopotamia. Other early civilizations then very soon crystalized along first the Nile and only a little later along the Indus. Egyptian and Indus are believed to have been very near to, but not yet fully crystallized as civilizations when very general knowledge of the fact of Sumerian developments pushed them into developing their own independent version of civilized complexities. Thus Egyptian and Indus civilizations were invented independently by the peoples of those lands. Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Indus civilizations are each called a "cradle civilization" meaning it was not borrowed from anywhere else, but developed independently in its own "cradle lands.". (As we will see in subsequent chapters, China and both MesoAmerica and Peru also developed cradle civilizations somewhat later.)

Areas occupied by the earliest independently-emerging Eastern Hemisphere civilizations

One of the things all historians find fascinating - and I hope that you will too, at least a little - is the endless game of comparing and contrasting these earliest civilizations, asking in what ways they are similar, and in what ways different.

Guideline Characteristics of Civilization

Clearly all early civilizations must share some common characteristics, since they are all classified as part of the same, new catagory of "civilization." So, what do historians mean by civilization? Let's start by making it clear that "civilization" doesn't mean "nice" or "good." Most basically, the term began by referring to the ways of people in cities, which were significantly different than those of people living even in more advanced farming towns. Of course this statement sparks the natural question: in what way different? The classic answer is a list of characteristics usually true of civilizations, although several important civilizations have managed to flourish without one or more of them. Keep it in mind as a behind-the-scenes organizing list of characteristics to think about for each civilization, noticing both similarities and differences.

• Cities (or ritual centers): at least administrative centers drawing on the agricultural surpluses, labor, obedience of significant populations connected to the urban centers
• A political system based on settled territory not kinship and able to compel obedience: Both of these points are important. Civilization's complexities seem to have needed more labor and surplus, more reliably supplied, than was likely to happen over long enough periods of time, than kinship-size groups could provide, and that people who could walk away were willing to give.
• Occupational specialization: reflecting sufficient agricultural surplus to support significant amounts of the population not farming, and so building specialized knowledge, inventing things, creating trade-worthy objects, etc.
• Class divisions/social hierarchy: some members of the population live much better than others, have higher status, can compel obedience. Be sure to think both in terms of socio-economic class and gender status.
• Monumental architecture: these reflect advanced engineering knowledge, elites' ability to organize huge amounts of labor, and some very organized belief system [note: not every civilization does this equally].
• The ability to keep permanent records (usually writing), count, keep calendars: Note that at least one major civilization [the Incas] had no writing; also some would define as civilized (as opposed to being high Neolithic) some sub-Saharan African city-states that choose not to use writing. But overall the ability to write and figure has been crucial to most complex societies.
• Long distance trade: Is usually very important to the formation of sufficient surplusses to support the kind of elites able to compel and sustain continued expansion of new knowledge, skills, etc. Often spurred by need for crucial metals or items seen as necessary for correct worship of gods.
• Major advances in science and the arts: Military and religious interests usually dominate early advances (writing to keep track of temple and the warrior property and taxes; engineering and calendars for better irrigation and understanding the agricultural cycle, etc.).
• Hard-edged metal tools and weapons

Broad Geographic Context:  Optional Interactive Map to Visit

Try visiting the Bentley & Ziegler interactive map of Early Societies in Southwest Asia & North Africa, (http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/history/world/bentley/stud_olc/chap02intmap.htm#). Once you are at this page, click on the Map 2 link, and the interactive map should appear in a new box on your screen (note: the box may pop up behind the screen in use - if you don't see the map box, check the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to see if there is a button marked "Map 2". If there is, just click on it.) Once in the Interactive map, put checks in the various white boxes to the left of the screen - features designated by each box should appear in the map as they are checked.  To see new features clearly, you may need to uncheck some other boxes. (For example, the first and last boxes - Major River Valleys and Arable Land work well together,  but do best when nothing else is selected.) As an introduction to what we'll be covering, just keep clicking until you feel you've explored the various things portrayed. Then later, once you've read about something like the Hyksos invasion of Egypt or the Hittites, you may want to come back to this link, and click again as a review.

Mesopotamia: Sumerian beginnings and subsequent evolutions, c. 3500-1500 BCE

Geographic Context:

The following study topic reflects material covered in both the Mesopotamia and Egypt sections of this essay, and in the text.

Understand both similarities and differences in  the geographic context of Earliest Sumerian and Egyptian civilization. In what ways were they similar and different, with what impact and significance on Sumerian and Egyptian state size, relations with outsiders, and religious ideas?

Mesopotamia is often translated "the lands between" the two rivers of the Euphrates (the one closer to Europe) and the Tigris (the one closer to Asia). To keep the two rivers straight,  a good memory device is the "Eu"s of Europe and Euphrates are next to each other, with the Tigris then the river further away from Europe, more towards Asia). Actually, Mesopotamia is the land between and on both sides of those two rivers, with earliest complex civilization emerging first about 3100 BCE along the most southern reaches of the rivers, which became the lands known as Sumer. (On the map below, it is the area circled in bright yellow.) Over about the next 2000 years complex civilization then spread north to include the lands of the middle reaches of the rivers (lands called first Akkad and then later known by the name of its great city, Babylon) and eventually Assyria, in the more northern reaches especially of the Tigris River. For a variety of reasons, the center of political control of the whole Mesopotamian region also spread north, especially to Babylon at the center, but also eventually for a while to Assyria, further north (about where the name "Tigris" appears on the map below).

Base Map source: Frank Smitha maps at http://fsmitha.com/maps.html#h1

The Nature of Mesopotamia's Rivers and Location: There are a number of things about Mesopotamia that shaped the civilization that grew up there. First, it is a major river valley. Most earliest civilizations grew up around river valleys, because river valleys offered the water and fertilizing silt that a) made possible large-scale irrigated agriculture which then b) produced the reliable food surpluses that supported c) the size of populations that then had to be d) organized in complex, inequal ways to sustain and protect the irrigation [back to a)] on which they all depended. The crux here is that if it was easy to get and keep food, shelter, etc, most people wouldn't submit to the demands and limits early complex civilization tended to put on them, such as working very long hours in fields, only to give up perhaps half of what one grew to non-farming elites.

Next, Mesopotamia's rivers were what might be called "mean" rivers (at least as compared to the Nile, which we'll talk about next). Their floods were frequent, violent, sudden and unpredictable, often leading to changes in river channels which at best tore up dykes and canals, and often left whole systems of them stranded (as the new course took a different route). Irrigation (a Study Term)  and other things involved with water control systems were absolutely crucial, since the land around the rivers received almost no rain for most of the growing season, and so depended on irrigation. At the same time some fertile areas were also swampy, and so had to be drained. (Thus irrigation means more than just getting water to dry areas; it is the whole complex process of controlling water, as needed.)  On top of that, the floods usually came at a bad time in Mesopotamia's agricultural cycle, just about when young crops were coming up in the fields and vulnerable. In this context the farming peoples of Sumer had to work hard and cooperate (or submit), since for many of them it was either farm irrigated lands or starve.

Finally, the location of the area also offered its settled peoples difficulties.  Although the area has several ranges of medium-size mountains off to the northwest and north east, basically Sumer - and really all of Mesopotamia - was open to invasion on several sides. Nomads especially came in from the east and the northeast, trampling fields, looting centers, killing and enslaving. So Mesopotamians had to organize not only to be able to grow things, but also to protect the cultivated lands and surpluses this organization created.

Not surprisingly, given all of this, the Mesopotamians generally tended to have a pretty pessimistic view of nature, and the gods they believed were embodiments of natural forces. We'll talk more about them in a little while, but basically the Mesopotamian gods were seen as childish, unpredictable, dangerous, and needing always to be placated by the priests believed able to handle them at least somewhat.

Mesopotamia in Eras of City-States and Empires: Rule and Society

In Mesopotamia, the story of evolving political forms is one of real struggle, but also for that very reason, of the development of many crucial new technologies in some way related to effective rule.  Your study question for this larger topic is:

Understand the major dynamics and stages of emerging states, rulers and empires in Mesopotamia, from the era of earliest Sumerian city-states through Hammurabi's Babylonian empire.

Sumerian City States: the Cradles of Earliest Civilization.  The very first peoples and area to have reached the complexity that historians call Civilization,. were the city-state peoples of southern Mesopotamia. They had done this by about 3100 BCE, and they then developed civilization within the city-state form for the next 7 centuries or so. They did so in a number of separate, independent city states, all existing at the same time, often in violent competition with each other.

We will often run into city-states as important elements of early civilization, but nowhere have they been more important or enduring than in the eastern Mediterranean lands. Your text helpfully defines city-states as "independent ancient urban centers and the agricultureal territories they controlled." City-states often appear as the first effective complex political organizations because they are of a managable size, and so a good "starter" political form. If they persist, they usually also in some way reflect the geography of an area. In the case of Mesopotamia, what they reflected was the history and reality of the irrigation on which earliest civilizations depended. Sumerian cities' fields - and thus their population and their wealth -  were all sustained by a number of branched canals, all coming off of  the rivers, and were probably the original shared interest that brought together the community that formed the first cores of city-states. Together a core citadel and temple, together with their expanding areas of irrigated fields developed the complexities necessary to sustain its interconnections. Thus just naturally separate cities emerged spaced along both of the area's great rivers.

City-states did not easily expand beyond that one city size probably mostly because of the limits of technology at that time. Very slow transportation (by cart) and army marching time meant that there was a limit to the area from which a city could draw crops as taxes or to which it could get, in a timely fashion, to defend/dominate its lands. Since city-states all drew on the same river water, they also often warred with each other (a new massive irrigation project might alter river flow and levels, thus making downsteam canals work less well), which of course also hurt their abilities to cooperate together against outside invaders. The limited city-state size meant that rule was quite personal, with individual kings able to exercise much of their authority in person, without having to delegate it for long periods of time without supervision. Thus many of the most successful habits and institutions of earliest Mesopotamian civilization grew up around the city-state form.

Who Ruled the City-States ? Probably the first elites were priests, who may well have been early "engineers" who first figured out irrigation , which they might then have presented as coming from the gods, who they best represented or understood. By about 3100 BCE the priests were building temples on prime, central lands within growing cities.  These lands and cities then needed defending, from either other cities or hungry nomads. And thus grew up a second elite group, the warriors. In this time period these were men who fought on foot, using bronze weapons. Eventually (by sometime in the 3-2000 BCE era) the top city-state warrior became what we now call a king, and he and his warrior followers became the slightly greater of Sumeria's two top elite classes (the other still being the priests). One such ruler was Gudea, whose statue (seen on a museum website) shows the appropriate grave power his position demanded.

Military power was crucial both to hold back nomad attackers from outside and to protect each city-state's complex of canals and fields from attacks from competing neighboring cities. Competition with other nearby city-states probably helped keep city-state warriors from trying eliminate all other competing elites within each city. Simply put, kings needed all possible elite contributions to keep their states competitive.  Kings certainly were careful to cooperate with and support temples and priests, since they supplied the scribes who kept rulers' records as well as spoke for the gods.  Kings also were careful to protect the interests of each city's long-distance traders. Kings understood that traders were crucial contributors to their cities' overall wealth, and the source of the material comforts the kings enjoyed so much. Also traders brought back the tin and copper (neither of which were much available in Mesopotamia) needed to produce the bronze weapons the kings needed for battle. Perhaps kings also instinctively saw the benefit of a third elite, to play off against any particularly ambitious priests.

The power of such kings is described very well in the Epic of Gilgamesh story, which we will discuss more fully later under Mesopotamian culture. In it one can read about how important the king (Gilgamesh) was in terms of organizing the walls and warrior forces crucial to the city's defence and stable life. Your text's story of the Babylonian New Year's Festival rituals (believed to continue patterns established in early Sumerian times) makes clear that kings's power did not usually extend to replacing gods; their authority was still based in part on the priests' willingness to declare them the favored earthly representative of those gods. At the same time, they continued to want priestly support, and apparently were quite willing to participate in  what your text describes as a brief yearly ritual humiliation which made clear that they were subject to the god's wishes.

The Emergence of Empires. Despite the real factors against larger-than-city-state size, eventually other factors emerged or grew stronger which together supported the appearance of empires. Certainly all along kings had tried to conquer each other, and this competition among cities had always wasted resources and weakened Sumer's (and later the whole of Mesopotamia's) total ability to defend itself against outside invaders. After about a thousand years, the growing success of civilization meant more total wealth, more varieties of elites (more on that soon, under "society"), more technology, more complexity out of which a very good and lucky ruler had more ways in which he might fashion dominance. Also by about 2400 BCE the original Sumerian cradlelands of civilization appear to have been weakening, quite possibly as their fields grew less fertile, again quite possibly because of increased concentrations of salt built up over centuries of evaporating irrigated water.In all of this the difficulty connected with empire-building  was probably less less initial conquest (athough certainly not easy), but rather figuring out a way to keep control of large amounts of land once it was conquered.

City-state rule was rather like a family business - say a store. All the patterns of "how to do it" called for one owner (or ruler), plus a relatively small number of employees (or elites) to run everything.. An empire would be like that original family "ma and pa" corner store growing to have dozens of branches, and having to figure out how to find, empower and decide how much to trust managers, develop standardized practices, etc.

Sargon of Akkad ,  c. 2350 BCE, was a king of the central Mesopotamian region city-state of Akkad. He is famous in history as the first to create a lasting (about 120 years) empire that ruled all the irrigated lands of Mesopotamia. See the map below for one idea of the total extent ruled; note that some maps suggest a.slightly smaller area, but not much.  While not totally successful in developing a "middle management" system of imperial rule, Sargon and his dynasty did make a start developing the kind of bureaucracy which could rule an area significantly larger than a city-state. The key to doing this was creating a system capable of ruling an area greater than that possible for one man.

Sargon tore down the walls of defeated cities, appointed governors, developed regional garrisons of his own soldiers, and to support those far-flung soldiers not quartered in his own household, gave them pieces of land from which they would get the income to support themselves. At least in the beginning, both governors and soldiers held their jobs and land only as long as they served the king well.  In order to have more uniform bureaucratic rule by a number of men in a number of places, Sargon instituting uniform weights, measures and the like, helping to ensure that taxes, pay and penalties were uniform across all Akkadian-ruled lands. Take a look at the very famous head at least traditionally believed to be Sargon; it really does project a sense of very great ruling authority.

Image used with permission of Frank Smitha; source = http://fsmitha.com/maps.html

While his family's dynasty eventually lost control about 2200 BCE (allowing a last era of Sumerian city-state independence), the system clearly worked well enough to outlast Sargon by many generations. Sargon thus did something much more important than jsut winning power by military force. He then built up institutions by which "middle manager" regional representatives could rule areas in his name. Standard measures meant more even tax collection and pay for underlings, but also helped bring additional economic development. Economic development meant the prosperity to support and justify expanded royal institutions, and motivate more elites to throw in their lot with imperial service.

Side note: this is something we will see happen often in history. Peripheral peoples (ie peoples on the edge, or periphery, of a more settled, advanced area) eventually learn the a core area's technology, but keep their own border military strength. Thus peoples like the Akkadians first learn from an area's "old guard," then take over control of their core area, including its more advanced level of civilization. Sometimes they simply merge into the larger stream of that civilization (that is, in essence, what happened in Mesopotamia), sometimes they quickly weaken and are themselves replaced as rulers; once in a while they form a new synthesis that actually takes civilization to a new level.

Hammurabi's Babylonian Empire and Laws: What Sargon started to do, Hammurabi and the Babylonians took somewhat further. Hammurabi was the king of Babylon (a central Mesopotamian state to the north of Akkad) who in 1792 BCE conquered all of Sumer and united it with Babylon to create an expanded Babylonian Empire. Babylonians were Amorites, a peripheral non-Sumerian people, who originally settled on the northern fringe of core Sumerian civilization. Once his great infantry armies had won control over all the lands of Mesopotamia, Hammurabi set about the huge task of figuring out how to rule them permanently. Hammurabi (like Sargon and others) appointed governors, built garrisons, gave land grants, etc, all in service of an empire that then lasted a little longer than the of Akkadian (Babylonian Empire = 1792 to c. 1600 BCE).  What Hammurabi is most famous for is the new kind of unifying "technology" that he used make his multi-layered kind of rule work better. What he did was commission a written law code, based in good part on established Sumerian precedent, but at least in theory administered not just by the instincts of each judge or administrator, but according to one absolute, uniform set of laws, put into writing and then inscribed on a number of pieces of stone, etc, and scattered across the empire.

This law code can be called a significant new  "technology" of rule for a number of reasons. One significance lies with its value to imperial rule - especially with its formal, written-on-stone, unchangable form, it helped standardize just how Hammurabi's subordinates should go about doing the job of ruling that he had delegated to them. It told them what counted as crimes, how serious they were, and what punishments should be meted out. It also told all Mesopotamians the same thing - if the elites knew how to they were supposed to rule, the ruled got a better sense of the rules under which they were living. This was probably a major relief after years of chaos and then conquest, in which there may have been no limits on elites' power, and no rights at all for ordinary people. Thus Hammurabi restrained his subordinate elites, and gave society as a whole some sense of stability and order (a very valuable thing for a ruler to do). An additional motive might have been the new problem of ruling areas and peoples with different traditions. Perhaps Sumerian and Babylonian judges, when their lands were separate, had needed no written laws, because each held court in societies where all knew and agreed on rules and consequences. But if Hammurabi was to appoint varieties of men to rule over varieties of different cultures as welcome representatives of good government, he first had to establish one clear, shared, unmistakable standard of right and wrong.

This brings us to the question of where the laws came from, and what they tell us about overall Mesopotamian values and socio-economic realities. Hammurabi issued the laws saying they were the result of a command to him from Babylon's top god (Marduk). This mythical event is portrayed at the top of steles (stone columns), one copy of which is now in Paris's Louvre Museum. These were erected around Mesopotamia at Hammurabi's order, each containing a full copy of the law code plus a portrayal of its divine origins (and the ruler's very impressive divine connections!). . Thus we see a continuing Mesopotamian-style partnership between palace and temple, in which the gods are used by kings to bolster their own deeds and power. This reflects the continuity of basic Mesopotamian patterns despite the area's new top authorities. But there was also change, as a Babylonian god (Marduk) was placed at the top of the list of gods, replacing earlier Sumerian ones. The nature of the laws also tells us a good deal about the realities of the Mesopotamian world under new Babylonian rule. First, most of the laws  were based on long-established Sumerian court decisions - reflecting the reality that once-peripheral Babylon adopted complex Sumerian civilization, rather than ignoring or trying to destroy it. At the same time, the Babylonians also added their own slant and values to the mix, including (as your text notes) an increased tilt towards "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" physical punishments (where the materialistic Sumerians tended more towards fines).

Finally, Hammurabi's law code tells us a good deal about both 2nd millennium Mesopotamian society and its most basic values. The code is almost overwhelmingly concerned with business, property, and the kind of stability and order in which they flourish. This is clearly not a society just of warriors and priests, indifferent to commercial concerns. In the early years of Sumer perhaps merchants were just the hirelings of elite priests and warriors, providing them with necessary metals and other raw materials as well as desired luxuries. But by the time of Hammurabi increasing numbers were independent businessmen, and - although still behind warriors and priests in status - many of them were becoming a third elite group within Mesopotamian society.

Social status was a very important and complex thing in Mesopotamia. Your text tells you that Hammurabi's code shows us that there were three legal catagories, named most simply as the free, the semi-free, and slaves (see text for greater detail). Each of these had different standing before the law, and were punished/protected differently for doing the same things. Thus we are told:

• If a man has put out the eye of a free man, they shall put out his eye
• If he breaks the bone of a [free] man, they shall break his bone
• If he puts out the eye of a villain (semi-free man) or breaks the bone of a villain, he shall pay one maneh of silver
• If he puts out the eye of a [free] man's slave or breaks the bone of a [free] man's slave, he shall pay half his price

While in 21st century terms this may seem shocking (all men are clearly not equal before the law), at the time it must have reflected unquestioned reality. Surpluses were relatively small, there wasn't enough "good life" for everyone to have it; people weren't equal even in theory. But if even harm to a slave had to be paid for (admittedly to the slave's owner) this would be some protection for that slave; since harming him/her wouldn't be for free no matter how important someone was.

Equally, men and women were not seen as fully equal. Civilization, with its very heavy plowing (unlike hoeing, very hard to do when pregnant or caring for an infant) and increasingly important warfare, more and more favored men in its growing public realms. The first area of life this affected seems to have been marriage and the family, where a woman's chastity was seen as very important to the men of her family, who didn't want her free to consort with any outside men. Thus a daughter and wife would/could be punished for sexual freedoms still open to men. (In essence, free men, whether married or not, were allowed to have sexual relations with any woman not related to another free man.)  At the same time, however, even married women were left some rights against arbitrary mistreatment by their husbands, and if not married (and thus expected to be fully engaged in caring for her husband's interest and household) could still carry out public business in many circumstances. Women could also own property and act for themselves seeking divorce and other legal actions. In sum, they were legal adults, but ones expected to behave differently than men in terms of marriage and the family. Since marriage was the chief occupation open to respectable women, this was a serious inequality, but it is still worth noting the many areas in which women still had rights and choices. According to the Code:

• If the wife of a free man has been caught while lying [ie having sex] with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the water [ie almost sure drowning]. If the husband of the woman wishes to spare his wife, then the king in turn may spare his subject.
• If a free man's wife was accused by her husband, but she was not caught while lying with another man, she shall make affirmation by a god and return to her house [ie, she can't be thrown out by her husband just on his accusation]
• If a woman so hated her husband that she has declared, "You may not have me," her record shall be investigated at her city council, and if she was careful and not at fault, even though her husband has been going out and disparaging her greatly, that woman, without incurring any blame at all, may take her dowry and go off to her father's house [ie take the property she brought to the marriage - the dowry - and leave her husband with no stain on her character].
• If she was not careful, but was a gadabout, thus neglecting he house (and) humiliating her husband, they shall throw that woman into the water.

To sum it all up: Hammurabi's Code is both a significant step forward in the technology of imperial rule (a formal, written law code) and a window onto the values and realities of evolving Mesopotamian civilization.

Mesopotamian Culture and Beliefs

Technology and Science.Writing was first developed around 3300 BCE in Sumer, probably by early priests to help them keep track of temple property. Perhaps it began with symbols indented into clay markers, sent along to record how many (say) bushels of grain started out in a cart carrying taxes from a far field to a city temple. Pictures of objects eventually were simplified into standardized symbols, and eventually other symbols were developed to stand for ideas and sounds. These symbols were made on moist clay tablets by first reeds and then reed-shaped metal rods. Since the resulting marks were wedge-shaped, the modern name this writing is " cuneiform ," which means "wedge-shaped." Go see an example of early cuneiform.

Significance: Writing was crucial to earliest developing civilization in Mesopotamia. It allowed priestly, warrior, and eventually merchant elites to be much more efficient in keeping track of taxes and property. It helped accumulate and pass on specialized knowledge, and helped long-distance relationships develop and flourish. It produced a new occupational group, the scribes, who served in temples, palaces and businesses. Since scribal training was long and difficult, most Mesopotamians remained illiterate, expecting the specialist scribes to keep records for them. But over time literacy increased at least somewhat, as did the variety of things recorded (see Gilgamesh below)

Other Technologies and Knowledge. Once irrigation, priests, warriors, and emerging crafts and long-distance trade got the ball rolling, the Sumerians and later Mesopotamians were inspired to develop many new and improved technologies. They developed/improved wheeled carts drawn by draft animals (crucial for transporting bulky loads of grain and other foods from distant fields into the city center); also better boats to carry trade goods on the water. They greatly improved their bronze metal-making skills, as well as their pottery, etc. They not only wrote, they also developed numbers and mathematics, and with them developed sophisticated calendars and also the ability to calculate all sorts of things. From them we inherit the tendency to divide things into units 12, 60, and 360. Even today we divide the day into two sets of twelve hours; the minute and hour into units of sixty, and circles are measured in three hundred sixty degrees. Engineers used mathematics both to develop very complex irrigation systems and to build the first very large public structures, ziggurats . These were the earliest form of "monumental architecture," which you will remember is one of the things associated with emerging civilization. Go see a good photo of one of the better preserved still-existing ziggurats, the Ziggurat of Ur-Nammu, and/or a drawing of what such a ziggurat would have looked like when it was new.

Ziggurats were stepped mounds (or towers) built of sun-dried mud bricks. They were built of bricks, not stone, because Mesopotamia had very little stone, but lots of clay and hot sun to dry it. These mounds were topped with temples in which priests carried on ceremonies. Such a pyramid shape is the earliest and most stable form in which to construct very large buildings. Many scholars believe that for the Sumerians the mound shape symbolized mountains, which were believed to concentrate the natural potency of the earth. Some of the largest ziggurats housed important complexes on each level, with the ground level serving as a market center and storage area for the taxes, which took up a lot os space because they were paid in kind. The second level would be apartments and meeting rooms for temple and perhaps city officials, and the third floor might house either the chief priest, or even the royal family in earlier centuries before separate royal palaces. These complex structures probably both impressed and intimidated the populations on whose labor and taxes the temple and city officials depended.

Religious Beliefs. As was mentioned earlier, Sumarians and other early Mesopotamians worshiped many gods (polytheism). These gods are sometimes referred to as "childish gods" because Mesopotamians assumed their gods to be interested only in themselves, having no interest in helping humankind, or desire for humans to behave "well" (meaning ethically and morally) towards each other. Because of the gods' powers especially for destruction, humans felt that they must always try to figure out how to win the gods' fleeting goodwill (or at least avoid their determined ill will). Priests were the specialists expected to try to understand the gods, carrying out sacrifices and other ceremonies in their honor within the temples built to worship them. Overall (as said before) the religion was a fairly gloomy one, assuming powerful and destructive gods who humans had to humor and placate, often without success. On top of this, there was also very little hope for an afterlife; eternal life was assumed to belong to the gods alone.

Gilgamesh. This sense of the gods and of the limits of human life is very powerfully revealed in The Epic of Gilgamesh , the great early Mesopotamian story quoted from at the beginning of Chapter 2 of your textbook. The story centers on Gilgamesh, whose adventures became the core of a whole changing array of popular stories, added later but attributed to him. These stories apparently remained spoken, as part of Sumerian folk tradition, until around 2000-1800 BCE when Babylonians decided to write the great Gilgamesh stories down in their own languages (about the same time they were also writing law codes). Note that we thus see the ever-expanding role of writing, once used just to keep tax records etc, but eventually capable of conveying the most complex story of human fears, hopes and beliefs.

According to your text, who was Gilgamesh, and what various characteristics did he have that  both bothered and were needed by his people?  To expand the story told in your text, his people beseached the gods to make Gilgamesh kinder to them. The gods happened to hear this, and happened to feel like intervening (again, the sense is that they gods might just as easily have enjoyed watching Gilgamesh mistreat his people). But they did decide to do something, and so - as you have been told - they sent a wildman, Enkidu, to be a match for Gilgamesh, and thus teach him some humility.

Again consult your text for exactly how Enkidu was recruited to join civilization, and what this story shows about the era's own definition of civilized living. Enkidu and Gilgamesh clash, but soon become fast friends as each recognizes the other as his sole equal, among men, in strength and bravery. They then go on various adventures, during which Enkidu annoys a goddess (note the childish, dangerous god theme again), which leads to Enkidu's death as she insists on his punishment for annoying her.. Gilgamesh is heartbroken, especially when he hears from Enkidu's spirit that for even the greatest hero (Enkidu), what afterlife there is for humans, is like ashes. Gilgamesh then sets out to discover the secret of eternal life, which is known by the man (Utnapishtim) who survived a great flood and so was turned into a god (who would never die). He seeks out Utnapishtim, gets from him help on how to discover the source of that secret, discovers the secret briefly, but then (as is inevitable) loses it.

Along the way of these adventures Gilgamesh receives advice that sums up much of the Sumerians and later Mesopotamian's overall world view, which was basically pessimistic (about the nature of the gods and the slim hopes for afterlife), yet also in some ways joyous. Siduri, the wise, kind goddess of wine, says to him

Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace, for this too is the lot of man.

The Gilgamesh story thus tells us a number of things about Mesopotamian civilization. It tells us that they were not only literate, but eventually used writing to record human emotions in a way that reaches across four millennia to touch those of us living today. It tells us that their greatest heros were heros for very manly things; human achievements that were traditionally male are at least most valued in the Gilgamesh story. It shows us religious beliefs that today seem very pessimistic, with childish gods that can't be counted on to show any constancy or concern about human needs, and no human hope for a desirable afterlife (if Enkidu and Gilgamesh could not hope for anything, how could ordinary humans?).You will note here a sub-story line very similar to that of Noah and the Flood; many scholars believe the Biblical story was based on sources from which the Gilgamesh saga came also. Finally you may note the rather limited roles played by women.

We've now gone through the highlights of earliest civilization as started in the southern Mesopotamian area of Sumer, and evolved there and eventually throughout the whole area.  Let us now turn to the 2nd great starter civilization to emerge, noticing both the ways in which it was similar and different.

Egyptian Civilization c. 3100-1500 BCE

Egypt (like Mesopotamia) emerged in a river valley: the Nile. Most students find it useful to get clear how each both compare and contrast to Mesopotamia, so we'll be sure to step back regularly and talk about both similarities and differences.

Introduction

Egyptians seem first to have moved beyond high Neolithic farming settlements just a few hundred years after the Mesopotamians first did the same thing. Most scholars guess that word of the benefits of greater complexity probably was brought to the Nile by travelling traders. Various Egyptians then set out, independently, to try to figure out for themselves how to accomplish the advanced irrigation, writing, etc about which they were hearing.  If you look closely at your text's timelines and chronologies, you  will see that it shows Egypt's Early Dynastic era (of first complex irrigation and cities) beginning about 3100 BCE perhaps 100 years before Sumer's. But Sumerian city-states soon flourished (producing writing, etc) while Egypt really didn't hit its full-civilization stride until the Old Kingdom era, which your text puts as beginning in 2575 BCE (all these dates are approximate).  Again, the city-state form was one that developed very, very quickly. But once Egypt got going, it soon built its own distinctive brand of very successful complex civilization.

Geographic Context: Egypt as the "Gift of the Nile"

Map of Egypt and Nubia (Sudan) Areas

Egypt is often called the "gift of the Nile" with the term "gift" emphasizing both how lucky the Egyptians were in the behavior and location of their particular river, and how much their civilization was shaped by the Nile's especially fortunate characteristics. The Nile is, compared rivers, a relatively kind and cooperative river. Up to the first cataract (note it, slightly washed by red, in the above map) the Nile is navigable (can be travelled on). The Nile flows north from the relatively higher lands of Upper Egypt to those of Lower Egypt, with the current helping those rowing south. The winds almost always blow south, allowing use of sails when travelling against the current. Thus travel on the Nile is relatively easy until the dividing line of the first cataract (which is also usually the dividing line between Egypt and Nubia, also known as the Sudan). Troops and taxes could both easily be moved the full extent of the river, making central control much easier even over a long, thin area

The Nile: Like the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians had to depend on river irrigation to let them produce sufficent crop surpluses to support their complex civilization. The Nile travelled through desert lands in which almost no rain fell. Thus without irrigation farming would be impossible, and without farming, there would have been no basis for civilized life. But compared to Mesopotamia's rivers, the timing and nature of Nile floods was very kindly. They came regularly every September, lasting through November or so. Mostly "Inundation," as it was known, was relatively gentle, with the river rising steadily to approximately the same level of flood. The river spread out in a vast sheet of water for perhaps 1/2 mile on either side of the river, leaving ridges of silt which the Egyptians turned into storage basins for water to be used later in the growing season, when the moisture within flooded fields had all evaporated.

Overall the flood waters both moistened and fertilized the river's bordering fields naturally - and then went away naturally, requiring much less engineering than the irrigating and drainage canals of Mesopotamia, which often had to work against gravity. Of course sometimes the Nile floods were too much or too little, washing away holding basins or not leaving enough water, but generally the Nile floods were dependable and "just right." Its floods also came at the right time in the Egyptian growing cycle, which was hot enough that December planting, when the floods receded, was just right. So where Mesopotamians had to fight their rivers to control dangerous flooding, the Egyptians built their farming-based civilization to fit the generosity of their river.

Surrounding location: Finally, Egypt was lucky in the Nile's overall location within a whole ring of protective barriers against outside invasion. In an age when invaders still came from the land not the sea, Egypt was sheltered by both the Mediterranean and the Red Seas to the north and east. The immense Sahara Desert to the west was also a formidable barrier. There were thus really only two possible corridors for serious invasion, one more serious than the other. Intruders might come up the Nile from Nubia, but in most circumstances this was unlikely. Altogether six cataracts made the southern Nile more a barrier than a highway for invaders, plus the lush forest lands to the south tended to make it less likely that their inhabitants would have to submit to the kind of controlling organization needed to produce the large, disciplined populations needed to form invading armies. This left only the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt's northeast as a likely corridor of invasion. True, the Sinai is a desert, but it is a small one which disciplined armies could cross, and it is near to settled, organized lands from which such forces might come (Mesopotamia and neighboring areas).

Summed up: Egyptians were overall distinctly luckier in their river valley than were Mesopotamians. Most of the time nature smiled on them with a river whose floods sustained rather than threatened them, and which served as a highway connecting a stable, central form of government. At the same time that they were connected internally, they were also mostly protected externally, by barriers that almost completely stopped nomad invasion, and greatly limited the possibility of organized armies intruding. In this situation Egypt's rulers more easily built and kept central power over the whole area, and Egypt's religion generally was more optimistic in its view of nature and the gods (see below for more on both of these topics)

Egyptian and Mesopotamian Geography compared: At this point you should have a clear idea of how to answer the Study Topic  first posed in the Mesopotamia part of this essay.

Understand both similarities and differences in  the geographic context of Earliest Sumerian and Egyptian civilization. In what ways were they similar and different, with  what significance?

Egyptian Historic Eras: A few words on them

Chapter 2 covers the story of developing Egyptian civilization through what is known as the Middle Kingdom era, that is, from about 3100 to about the 1600s BCE. Overall, the golden age of early Egyptian Civilization runs from the beginning of the Old Kingdom era (2575 BCE) to the end of the New Kingdom period (1070 BCE), with the foundations of the civilization seen as emerging from about 3100 to the 2500s BCE. Your text chooses to look at the later era New Kingdom developments in Chapter 3, so we will do the same (looking at them in the Chapter 3 Essay). This makes sense, since Chapter 2 is basically about the development of the full pattern of earliest civilization, and by the Middle Kingdom all crucial aspects of Egyptian rule and society were quite well established.

A note on terms: Old, Middle, and New Kingdom are traditional, long-established period names that historians just keep on using. They basically apply to the three great, long periods of Egyptian stability and prosperity, which were separated by two much shorter periods of breakdown and (between the Middle and New Kingdoms) invasion. In contrast to Mesopotamia, in which new peoples took over and amended (somewhat) the culture and style of rule (struggling to move from city-state to empire rule),  in all three great periods Egypt was ruled by Egyptians who continued the most basic patterns of Pharaoh rule, religion, and patterns of life (although expanding them in many ways, as we will see)

Pharaoh Rule in Egypt: Centralized Civilization under a "living god"

Here keep in mind the following study topic:

Understand both the basic dynamics (both continuing and evolving) of  Pharaoh rule in Egypt over the Old and Middle Kingdom eras. What original powers and roles emerged why, and evolved how and why?

In theory, and often pretty much in fact, the Pharaoh was the all-powerful ruler of Egypt. Where Sumer was divided among many independent city-states, and centralized rule represented a challenge even to even the most successful later Mesopotamian imperial conquerors, almost from the beginning civilized Egypt was unified (by tradition, in about 3100 BCE by Menes - or Narmer) under the authority of god-king Pharaohs. Basically geography made it fairly easy for a line of men to call themselves rulers of all Egypt, where in Sumer they would have had to settle for "just" being kings of one of a number of city-states.

Probably the greatness of this achievement, plus the fact that they didn't face kingly competitors, let the early rulers actually call themselves gods, not just chief godly servants. The basic belief said that, one the moment of becoming Pharaoh, a man became a living god, the son of the sun god (originally Re) representing Egyptians to the gods, and keeping Egypt in tune with the forces of nature and those gods. The Pharaoh did this by maintaining Ma'at (Truth; universal order). Especially at first, in the Old Kingdom era  the Pharaoh's government really did dominate everything major. In good part this was thanks to Egypt's geography of rapid river travel communication and sheltering natural barriers against intrusion.

Again in theory, the Pharaohs owned all the land, and in fact, thanks to relatively quick travel time on the Nile, they could appoint mid-level representatives to administer temples and fields, and require all major elites' regular attendence at the royal court, thus keeping dominance over them. Thanks to natural barriers, little to no standing (permanent) army was needed in the Old Kingdom era; when fighting was necessary, the elites at the pharaoh's court were expected to be able to fight (something like a volunteer fire department today in which everyone just stops what s/he is doing and goes and puts out the fire). In some senses early Egypt was like one very long, thin, large city-state, with one ruler who personally dominated all the top elite priests and warriors. In good part because Egypt lacked very few natural resources, so traded mostly for desired (as opposed to absolutely needed) goods, trade (and traders) were never as important in Egypt as they became in Mesopotamia.

It was in the formative Old Kingdom period of greatest Pharaoh domination that Egypt built what remains its best known form of monumental architecture, the pyramids . Go see a photograph the first really monumental pyramid, the famous Step Pyramid of Zoser.  In it, the basic stepped foundation of the pyramid shape is still clearly visible. Then go look at of two of the most famous pyramids of all, which are part of the Great Pyramids at Giza, (note the Sphynx is also visible). Note the basic shape stays the same, but is refined not only by becoming bigger, but also with smoother sides.

The basic shape is the same as that of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, but not its function.  Mesopotamia's ziggurats were topped by busy temples serving the living interests of the whole city (ie, keeping the gods from being any more destructive than was inevitable); inside they usually stored surpluses, could be places of refuge, and housed temple priests and administrative offices. In contrast, Egypt's pyramids were tombs to keep safe the bodies of dead pharaohs, in order that their spirits, in the first crucial years after their death, would have a safe place to return, as they negotiated the journey to the afterlife, where they were expected to continue to look out for Egypt's interests.

Like the ziggurats, the pyramids show that the ruling elites of their eras controlled massive resources (labor and goods). As your book explains, the technology of the pyramids was really quite simple; what is most impressive is the massive amount of human labor that went to built what were in fact immense tombs for a few dead kings. They were (many scholars believe) literally jumping off points for the dead ruler's soul, plus safe repositories for his body during period of its journey through the afterlife. Rulers and their priests justified these great construction jobs with the theory that the dead pharaohs could continue to help living Egyptians only if they safely travelled through the underworld to the realms of afterlife. During this period Egyptians seem to have believed that an afterlife was possible for only the pharaohs plus perhaps a few favored companions also buried in their (or neighboring smaller) pyramids

The work was done during Innundation, when no work in the fields was possible, and most peasants were probably delighted to have a job that earned them food and maybe a little pay. During this time the stones needed for construction could be floated over flood waters to get relatively close to the pyramids' construction grounds But such construction was still only possible during the few centuries (c. 2600s-2500s BCE) in which pharaohs did not yet have to share the country's surplus with very large numbers of elites or with the masses of the population as a whole. Probably the custom also ended because the pyramids were so visible, and tomb robbers kept breaking into them, stealing the goods left to accompany the royal corpses in the afterlife, and often trampling even those corpses. For whatever combination of reasons, later pharaohs therefore started instead building hidden tombs, in the (usually forlorn) hope of their own bodies avoiding similar fates.

Middle Kingdom Changes: limited but important. The immense pharaoh's government power that built the pyramids continued, in an only somewhat more limited form, for well more than another thousand years of Egyptian greatness. Probably this power continued in part because so many more people shared in its exercise and benefits. By the end of the Old Kingdom era, subordinate elites were growing more powerful, with far-flung regional landholdings and status that later O.K. pharaohs couldn't take away. By the time the land fragmented, the elites had already established regional courts in which they continued the essence of Egyptian civilization despite the fall of the royal center. Priests and temples also survived by building temples that served more and more Egyptians, and by re-interpreting ideas of the afterlife to say that it might be possible for all Egyptians - if they managed to carry out lesser versions of the early royal death rituals (more on this later). About one hundred and fifty years after Old Kingdom Egyptian centralized rule fragmented, a new unifying dynasty put all of Egypt back together, restoring the whole structure of god-king central rule. But now the priests and temples served all Egyptians (in, of course, lesser and greater ways), and elite families served at court with at least some regional stability and roots of their own behind them. Yet this was not just a time in which the old warrior and priestly elites shared (some) more of the pharaoh's power. It was also a time of greater social mobility, in which the best ordinary man might rise to become a great scribe, priest, warrior, or member of the royal bureaucracy, and in which merchants and lesser regional elites lived better and had something of a middle status.

Egyptian Society

The result for Middle Kingdom Egypt was a vibrant society of many elites, some active at the royal court and others of importance in their own region. These elites came from land owning families (however much the land was theoretically the pharaoh's, but the M. K. period elite families had controlled land for many centuries, and were at least difficult to dislodge if they behaved themselves), priests, merchants and skilled professional scribes and craftsmen. Most Egyptians were of course not elites, but rather ordinary farmers (working their own land) and landless peasants, with rights to live on elite-controlled land, but obligations to the land's masters. While slavery existed, most were free.

Women, while not fully equal, overall remained better off in Egypt than in evolving Mesopotamia, where their rights were already significantly limited by the time of Hammurabi, and would become much more limited later. As with (almost) all civilizations, Egypt's public sphere (of royal rule, the battlefield, long-distance trade) belonged almost completely to men - and it was in those places that new power developed, and new ideas brewed. But especially as compared to other early civilizations, Egyptian women did very well, losing relatively few absolute legal rights, and maintaining that position throughout the period (while most early civilizations saw women's rights increasingly limited as time went on). Egyptian women kept most of their legal rights even in marriage: they could craft special marriage contracts guaranteeing almost any special rights (as vs. Hammurabi's Code's "one size fits all" limitations on married women). Generally married, like single, women could not only own but actively control property, as well as leaving to heirs of their own choice. There were also relatively more paid occupations still open to them in the public sphere, including as priestesses and even occasionally as scribes. Royal women definitely had real status within the royal family; a number were important when young boys inherited the throne, and about five actually ruled, one as a female pharaoh (Hatshepsut).  Women of all levels continued to appear in public, rather than being increasingly expected - if elite - to stay within the private sphere of their own men's household.  Scholars have a number of guesses about why Egyptian women lost less power, status and autonomy. Some suggest that the greater power of the pharaoh meant less absolute elite family control of property and status, and thus less motive to control the women of their families. Others emphasize Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt's relative lack of warfare and standing armies; military dominance usually sparks increased emphasis on things male.

Egyptian Knowledge, Beliefs and Culture

Writing: Like the Sumerians, the Egyptians invented their own system of writing (called hieroglyphics). They, too, started with pictures which became more and more standardized as symbols, and then added other symbols for sounds and concepts. It is quite likely that they were did so having heard that the Sumerians had already done something of the sort, but since all of their symbols are different, it is fairly clear that they at most borrowed the idea that it was possible, rather than the system of writing itself. The priests of the era taught that this writing was literally a gift of the gods, intended to allow communication with them. As with Sumer, almost certainly priests were the first users of writing, but scribes soon also served rulers, merchants, and eventually increasing (although always small) numbers of literate Egyptians. Egyptians used ink on papyrus for their permanent records, which certainly were therefore lighter and more easily stored than Mesopotamia's clay tablets (of course, they were also more easily destroyed). In general, hieroglyphic writing worked almost exactly the same way in Egyptian civilization as did cuneiform in Mesopotamia. Some scholars point out that we have less epic literature from Egypt than was produced in Mesopotamia (with Gilgamesh being an outstanding example), but there is no real agreement on what this means. Perhaps literature was lost, perhaps life in a kinder land meant more enjoyment of the here-and-now and less poetry about human misery.

Source for above copyright-free image of
hieroglyphics: ClipArtGallery, at
http://www.clipartgallery.com/arts_entertainment/fineart/fine_art.html

Just for fun: The above hieroglyphics are somewhat bogus, but fun. The are the course instructor's name (Sara Tucker) created by an online computer program that assigned an hieroglyph symbol to each letter of our modern alphabet. While the website that generated this image no longer exists, another one has appeared. If you want to see what your own name looks like, go to Online Hieroglyphics Translator - http://www.quizland.com/hiero.mv - and key your request in.

Knowledge: Like Mesopotamians, Egyptians also developed a numbering system, and reliable calendar, the basics of engineering and metal-smithing, etc.

Beliefs: Like Mesopotamians, Egyptians believed in many gods. Unlike Mesopotamians, Egyptians seem to have worshipped fairly kindly gods, and - by the Middle Kingdom - believed in the possibility of a good afterlife. Rebirth and life after death is a central part of the Osiris story, as is the pattern of Egyptian god-kingship. Your book tells you that, according to ancient Egyptian belief, Osiris was a god who once ruled Egypt. He was killed by his jealous brother Seth (or Set), who eventually cut up his body and scattered the pieces across the land. These pieces were each discovered and brought together by Osiris's loving sister and wife Isis. The pieces were mummified, and then Isis turned into a kite-bird, and with her wings fanned life back into Osiris. Go see an image of Isis, with her life-restoring wings/arms outspread. Later Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, got vengence on Seth. Osiris was made god of the Underworld (we'll go into this more below, when we get to the Book of the Dead). There he judged the souls of the dead (by Old Kingdom Egyptian beliefs, perhaps only dead pharaohs made it to his judgement, and thus the chance for a good afterlife). Some legends say Horus then ruled Egypt for quite a while, before becoming a god of the sky.  Pharaohs were seen as playing the Horus role, as living-god sons of the more senior gods.

A good many different things of significance can be seen in this story. Pretty clearly all of this is a death and rebirth story, reflecting the earthly cycles of the seasons and of harvest, flood, and new harvest. In its later versions, with Osiris judging the souls of all sorts of Egyptians, it definitely offers a more optimistic vision of the afterlife than does the Sumerian Gilgamesh story. While having male gods at its center, it also shows a female, Isis, playing a crucial, active role - it is she who both gathers the fragments of Osiris and fans life back into them.

Finally it also gives one mythical basis for the great Egyptian belief in mummification . In essence, Egyptians believed that after death the body had to be preserved, in order to give a safe refuge for the dead person's soul, which might be floating around for quite a while after death. As mentioned above, originally the idea may have been that only pharaohs and a few friends could achieve an afterlife among the gods, but by the Middle Kingdom priests and temples assured ordinary Egyptians that, with proper mummification, rituals, and attention from descendants, all could hope to achieve survival after death. There therefore grew up a huge business, centered around the priests and the temples, for preserving bodies correctly. Your text describes the process in some limited detail. It has been suggested that Egyptian medicine was probably better than that of most early civilizations, thanks to the anatomical knowledge priests gained while preparing so many bodies for mummification. While poor Egyptians could hope for only the cheapest mummification, if that, still the expansion of the practice is one clear example of how Egyptian tradition did change significantly underneath the surface of its great continuing patterns. Kings, priests and commoners were now all united within one great belief system from which all could hope to benefit - and of course priests had also assured themselves permanent importance and employment by whoever could afford their services to the dead.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is without doubt the most famous window we have onto Egypt's fully-developed religious beliefs. There actually was no one "book," rather that is the name given to the collection of many papyrus scrolls found in sarcophagi (something like coffins) and tombs. Most seem to have been created perhaps toward the end of the Middle Kingdom or during the subsequent New Kingdom era of c. 1500-1000 BCE.  They have been called "cheat sheets" and "AAA trip guides" for the dead in their journey through the underground and to the afterlife. These were provided by priests (for a fee) to accompany the dead as they voyaged through the complex and dangerous world of many gods. Some of the problems the dead were believed to face had to do with Egyptian "childish gods." Thus in order to pass through one hall of many gods, dead souls needed to be able to identify and call by name each god. But eventually successful souls reached another sort of test, one that no "cheat sheet" could help. If they got that far, all had to appear before Osiris, as Judge of the Underworld, and have their hearts weighed for good and bad deeds. Go see this event illustrated in the Book of the Dead Judgement Page at the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art website. If the heart weighed more than a feather, the dead were fed to crocodiles, and perished for all eternity. From this part of the Book, we see that Egyptian gods were no longer believed to be entirely childish or uninterested in humankind. The nature of what counted for good and bad deeds is especially interesting. Certainly they included showing due respect to gods (and their priests), but mostly they had to do with good human behavior towards each other. Thus good deeds included refraining from harming or cheating other persons, and also in carrying out ones obligations to family and friends. Egyptian religious beliefs and practices clearly changed from the early days when only pharaohs could hope for eternal life, and all of Egypt's resources went toward the tombs of a very few men.

Indus River Valley Civilization, c. 2900-1800 BCE

This segment is much shorter than that for either Egypt or Mesopotamia, because we know much less about the vanished - and for a while "lost" in terms of our knowledge of it - earliest civilization of India. Yet it appeared almost as early as the two great Middle Eastern civilizations, and for a while perhaps reached about the same heights. Thus your study topic says:

Although much more limited than our sources for Egypt or Mesopotamia, archeological evidence tells us a number of things about early Indus River valley civilization. What are they: physical structure of cities? Writing and metals? Trade? Fate? What kinds of things don't we know about, that we do have some knowledge of for Egypt and Mesopotamia?

The question is put this way because what we do now know about the Indus (or Harappan) civilization is almost completely based on archeological excavations of the area. Specific memory that the civilization ever existed was lost until 19th-century re-discoveries, and although writing from that era has been discovered, scholars are not yet able to decipher it.

Geographic Context

Indus River civilization formed, not surprisingly given its name, along the seven rivers in the area of what is now the Indus River system.  (As your text explains, all the rivers involved have since shifted course at least some, and several have dried up completely, including the once-very important Hakra River.)  As in Egypt, probably advanced neolithic farming and herding peoples had contacts with Mesopotamian seaborne traders, and so learned something about the advantages of more complex ways of life from the earliest Sumerians. Increasingly scholars date the Indus civilization's appearance  from about 2600 BCE (it was once put a good deal later; some scholars would put it somewhatt earlier, although almost all would put its emergence just slightly later than Egypt's)..

Two great city excavation sites are the source of much of our present knowledge of this civilization. The larger of the two is Mohenjo-daro, located on the Indus itself, somewhat north of the area of river plain known as Sind. (Note that Sind is shown on the above map - it is not shown on the Chapter 3 map in your text.) The smaller of the two great city sites is Harappa, located about 400 miles upstream, on a major tributary river. The entire river system is at the western edge of the Indian sub-continent. Although open to outside contact, especially by sea, the Indian subcontinent is also significantly separated from the Middle East and the rest of Asia by a whole range of physical barriers. These include several very high mountain ranges to the north and west, patches of desert to the west, jungle to the east, and a great extent of seacoast. The greatest of the mountain barriers is the Himalaya Mountains, which  across the top of whole length of the Ganges River, and across the northern end of the Indus River system. To the northwest, the Hindu Kush is the greatest of the other mountains that block entrance to India along all but a few western routes. This left India mostly open to travellers coming either by sea, through a few western mountain passes, or from the west across the southern reaches of the Indus (the area of Sind).

Indus Civilization

Today scholars believe that the Indus peoples came to form their civilization in much the same way that first the Mesopotamian and then the Egyptian peoples did. Local Indus-area communities organized to build large irrigation works, and from these came the surpluses, the specialists, the hierarchies, etc that supported the city populations while they concentrated full-time on new specialized occupations that produced the complexity that we call civilization.

What we know of them comes first from their cities that scholars have excavated. We know that they built using bricks - sun-dried for above-ground work, but longer lasting, more expensive kiln-dried ones for foundation work. Their two great cities were laid out on very similar, very orderly grid patterns, and contained covered drainpipes it is believed to carry away sewage. Significant numbers of their residential houses were several stories high, with individual drainage systems connecting to the city sewers. At the center of Mohenjo-daro there was a large building containing a large tank or pools, with waterproof linings and pipes capable of filling them with water.  (Go see a good a photograph of this Great Bath archeological site.)

Clearly water was not only important for Indus farming, but also in some way for life within its cities. The cities also had walls, presumably for defense against possible attacks by some kind of outsiders. Most scholars point out that there must have been some strong organizing leadership to produce such uniform, labor-intensive city-wide brick construction, but they do not know under what kind of authority or elites, or whether they persuaded or compelled obedience. We do know that the bronze spearpoints found were very fragile and likely to crumble after one use. We also know that the Indus peoples were very good metalworkers, had access to quite good amounts of metal ore, and were able to vary their exact proportions of bronze alloy to fit specific needs, Thus some scholars speculate that spearpoints may have been seen as not needing to be used again and again. This would suggest a society not dominated by warriors engaged in frequent, serious combat. If this was so, it seems natural to wonder if perhaps Indus area priests retained a greater share of power than those in city-state Mesopotatmia. So far, we simply don't know. This reality is accurately reflected in the Priest-King name usually given to the statue, found at Mohenjo-daro, of what certainly seems to be an elite man of some sort.

So what else do we know, at least a little more dependably? From objects found in excavations at not only Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, but also many other smaller sites, scholars have found definite evidence of an advanced level of civilization. Numbers of seals and tablets show that Indus peoples had writing, although so far it has not been deciphered. These seals were probably used to produce individual "signatures," for whatever business a person might do. Excavations also turn up excellent pottery and many pieces of decorative metalwork. Goods from Mesopotamia also show that the Indus people engaged in trade with peoples to their west. At their height, the Indus peoples' irrigated fields were clearly able to produce surpluses that supported large numbers of skilled specialist craftsmen and traders.

One interesting characteristic, in which they differed from Egypt and Mesopotamia, is that people living in outlying towns and even villages seem to have had about the same high level of possessions as those available to people in the central cities. This included even objects made of valuable bronze. While in most other early civilizations bronze was used only for elite peoples' weapons and religious vessels, fairly ordinary Indus peoples seem to have had access to bronze tools. Thus, the benefits of civilization seem to have been more evenly and broadly distributed in the Indus area.

Clearly, then, there are a great many kinds of things we do know - somewhat - about Egypt and Mesopotamia that we don't know about the Indus peoples. We don't how they actually were organized, what exactly they believed, or what their society was like. We don't have a Book of the Dead, or a Gilgamesh saga, or a Hammurabi's law code to teach us about these things. We also don't know how later Indian civilization and society related to them, so we can't be at all sure of any interpretation using later culture's behaviors (in contrast to your text's use of later Babylonian New Year's festivals to look also at earliest Mesopotamian kingship). We have the bare bones of bricks and seals and toys and jewelry, but not words to tell the stories of the peoples themselves.

The Fate of Indus Civilizations

Scholars debate exactly what happened to the great cities of the Indus Valley. Once most scholars assumed that these cities fell to Aryan nomads who, sometime around 1500 BCE, came into India from the northwest and then spread across the Indian plain, conquering great cities as they went. Today more and more scholars are revising these ideas, and instead think that complex Indus city life had already declined catastrophically by the time the Aryans arrived. They also have a number of guesses as to what went wrong within the Indus world. Some think earthquakes changed sea and/or river levels, leading repeated flooding of the cities and disruption of irrigation canals. Supporting evidence comes from excavations of the major cities which show successive rebuildings of city public spaces, with each succeeding rebuilding done less well (as though the whole community was increasingly unable to cope with the costs of repeated reconstruction). Recent studies of the vanished Harka River are particularly convincing in their suggestion of the devastation caused as one of the two main sources for irrigated agriculture literally dried up.  Other scholars look more to the agriculture on which the cities depended. They suspect that (as in Sumer) centuries of irrigation led to salt buildup in the soils, and so declining crop yields. Quite possibly the Indus region had the very bad luck to suffer all 3 of these afflictions, all within the space of the same few centuries.

As a result, eventually the farming areas didn't have much surplus to send to the surviving cities. If those cities had gotten past surpluses through voluntary trade rather than compulsion (troops coming and taking crops), then the cities might have been unable to sustain their large, specialized populations in those conditions. If they took them with troops, overall disruption might have left them too weak (or too engaged in fighting each other) to compell further donations from people themselves able to grow less surplus anyway. Perhaps increasing numbers of city dwellers preferred to return to farming rather than struggle to get scarce surpluses in trade for crafts now seen as un-needed luxuries. As city populations  and city complexities declined,  the need for writing and specialties declined, and a fatal downward spiral continued.

In this circumstance, the Aryan nomads that did indeed cross into India through what is now Afghanistan may have been more witnesses to the end of the tragedy than the cause of it. On the other hand, almost certainly the Aryans did attack greatly-weakened cities, and trample perhaps partly-abandoned irrigation works. Their culture seems to have been sufficiently crude that they ignored or destroyed, rather than tried to acquire, the dying remnants of a literate, complex city way of life. And so formal memory of the full complexity of Indus civilization was lost, leaving India to develop a second "cradle" civilization on the joint foundation of Indus farming village and intruding Aryan nomad culture. But that is a later story.

Recommended Online Resources
If you are interested in learning more about any of the following topics, you will find a good deal more information at the linked web sites. NOTE that none of this is required, but rather supplied for your further interest.

Mesopotamia:

Gilgamesh:

• Storytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh (http://eawc.evansville.edu/essays/brown.htm)
• Gilgamesh Summary (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/MESO/MESO.HTM)

Hammurabi: Law Code (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/MESO/CODE.HTM)
Ancient Tablets, Ancient Graves: Accessing Women's Lives in Mesopotamia: http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/lesson2.html.

Egyptian p yramids :

• The Pyramids of Ancient Egypt  (http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/pyramids.htm)
• Nova Pyramids Website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/

Indus Civilization:

The Ancient Indus Valley, (http://www.harappa.com/indus/1.html) especially Around the Indus in 90 Slides

the initial motive for the development of writing in mesopotamia was for

Source: https://www.washburn.edu/cas/history/stucker/Chapter%20Essays/100Ch02EssayRev04.html

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