Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  Bronze is strong and durable, but the copper and tin which were needed to make it were not available in such convenient quantities and locations as to provide man with the best material for industry and war. Sooner or later iron had to come; and it is one of the anomalies of history that, being so abundant, it did not appear at least as early as copper and bronze. Men may have begun the art by making weapons out of meteoric iron as the Mound-Builders seem to have done, and as some primitive peoples do to this day; then, perhaps, they melted it from the ore by fire, and hammered it into wrought iron. Fragments of apparently meteoric iron have been found in predynastic Egyptian tombs; and Babylonian inscriptions mention iron as a costly rarity in Hammurabi’s capital (2100 B.C.). An iron foundry perhaps four thousand years old has been discovered in Northern Rhodesia; mining in South Africa is no modern invention. The oldest wrought iron known is a group of knives found at Gerar, in Palestine, and dated by Petrie about 1350 B.C. A century later the metal appears in Egypt, in the reign of the great Rameses II; still another century and it is found in the Ægean. In Western Europe it turns up first at Hallstatt, Austria, ca. 900 B.C., and in the La Tène industry in Switzerland ca. 500 B.C. It entered India with Alexander, America with Columbus, Oceania with Cook.59 In this leisurely way, century by century, iron has gone about its rough conquest of the earth.

  2. Writing

  Its possible ceramic origins—The “Mediterranean Signary”—Hieroglyphics—Alphabets

  But by far the most important step in the passage to civilization was writing. Bits of pottery from neolithic remains show, in some cases, painted lines which several students have interpreted as signs.60 This is doubtful enough; but it is possible that writing, in the broad sense of graphic symbols of specific thoughts, began with marks impressed by nails or fingers upon the still soft clay to adorn or identify pottery. In the earliest Sumerian hieroglyphics the pictograph for bird bears a suggestive resemblance to the bird decorations on the oldest pottery at Susa, in Elam; and the earliest pictograph for grain is taken directly from the geometrical grain-decoration of Susan and Sumerian vases. The linear script of Sumeria, on its first appearance (ca. 3600 B.C.), is apparently an abbreviated form of the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon the primitive pottery of lower Mesopotamia and Elam.60a Writing, like painting and sculpture, is probably in its origin a ceramic art; it began as a form of etching and drawing, and the same clay that gave vases to the potter, figures to the sculptor and bricks to the builder, supplied writing materials to the scribe. From such a beginning to the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia would be an intelligible and logical development.

  The oldest graphic symbols known to us are those found by Flinders Petrie on shards, vases and stones discovered in the prehistoric tombs of Egypt, Spain and the Near East, to which, with his usual generosity, he attributes an age of seven thousand years. This “Mediterranean Signary” numbered some three hundred signs; most of them were the same in all localities, indicating commercial bonds from one end of the Mediterranean to the other as far back as 5000 B.C. They were not pictures but chiefly mercantile symbols—marks of property, quantity, or other business memoranda; the berated bourgeoisie may take consolation in the thought that literature originated in bills of lading. The signs were not letters, since they represented entire words or ideas; but many of them were astonishingly like letters of the “Phoenician” alphabet. Petrie concludes that “a wide body of signs had been gradually brought into use in primitive times for various purposes. These were interchanged by trade, and spread from land to land, . . . until a couple of dozen signs triumphed and became common property to a group of trading communities, while the local survivals of other forms were gradually extinguished in isolated seclusion.”61 That this signary was the source of the alphabet is an interesting theory, which Professor Petrie has the distinction of holding alone.62

  Whatever may have been the development of these early commercial symbols, there grew up alongside them a form of writing which was a branch of drawing and painting, and conveyed connected thought by pictures. Rocks near Lake Superior still bear remains of the crude pictures with which the American Indians proudly narrated for posterity, or more probably for their associates, the story of their crossing the mighty lake.63 A similar evolution of drawing into writing seems to have taken place throughout the Mediterranean world at the end of the Neolithic Age. Certainly by 3600 B.C., and probably long before that, Elam, Sumeria and Egypt had developed a system of thought-pictures, called hieroglyphics because practised chiefly by the priests.64 A similar system appeared in Crete ca. 2500 B.C. We shall see later how these hieroglyphics, representing thoughts, were, by the corruption of use, schematized and conventionalized into syllabaries—i.e., collections of signs indicating syllables; and how at last signs were used to indicate not the whole syllable but its initial sound, and therefore became letters. Such alphabetic writing probably dates back to 3000 B.C. in Egypt; in Crete it appears ca. 1600 B.C.65 The Phoenicians did not create the alphabet, they marketed it; taking it apparently from Egypt and Crete,66 they imported it piecemeal to Tyre, Sidon and Byblos, and exported it to every city on the Mediterranean; they were the middlemen, not the producers, of the alphabet. By the time of Homer the Greeks were taking over this Phoenician—or the allied Aramaic—alphabet, and were calling it by the Semitic names of the first two letters (Alpha, Beta; Hebrew Aleph, Beth).67

  Writing seems to be a product and convenience of commerce; here again culture may see how much it owes to trade. When the priests devised a system of pictures with which to write their magical, ceremonial and medical formulas, the secular and clerical strains in history, usually in conflict, merged for a moment to produce the greatest human invention since the coming of speech. The development of writing almost created civilization by providing a means for the recording and transmission of knowledge, the accumulation of science, the growth of literature, and the spread of peace and order among varied but communicating tribes brought by one language under a single state. The earliest appearance of writing marks that ever-receding point at which history begins.

  3. Lost Civilizations

  Polynesia—“Atlantis”

  In approaching now the history of civilized nations we must note that not only shall we be selecting a mere fraction of each culture for our study, but we shall be describing perhaps a minority of the civilizations that have probably existed on the earth. We cannot entirely ignore the legends, current throughout history, of civilizations once great and cultured, destroyed by some catastrophe of nature or war, and leaving not a wrack behind; our recent exhuming of the civilizations of Crete, Sumeria and Yucatan indicates how true such tales may be.

  The Pacific contains the ruins of at least one of these lost civilizations. The gigantic statuary of Easter Island, the Polynesian tradition of powerful nations and heroic warriors once ennobling Samoa and Tahiti, the artistic ability and poetic sensitivity of their present inhabitants, indicate a glory departed, a people not rising to civilization but fallen from a high estate. And in the Atlantic, from Iceland to the South Pole, the raised central bed of the oceans* lends some support to the legend so fascinatingly transmitted to us by Plato,68 of a civilization that once flourished on an island continent between Europe and Asia, and was suddenly lost when a geological convulsion swallowed that continent into the sea. Schliemann, the resurrector of Troy, believed that Atlantis had served as a mediating link between the cultures of Europe and Yucatan, and that Egyptian civilization had been brought from Atlantis.69 Perhaps America itself was Atlantis, and some pre-Mayan culture may have been in touch with Africa and Europe in neolithic times. Possibly every discovery is a rediscovery.

  Certainly it is probable, as Aristotle thought, that many civilizations came, made great inventions and luxuries, were destroyed, and lapsed from human memory. History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved. We console ourselves with the thought that as the individual memory must forget
the greater part of experience in order to be sane, so the race has preserved in its heritage only the most vivid and impressive-or is it only the best-recorded?—of its cultural experiments. Even if that racial heritage were but one tenth as rich as it is, no one could possibly absorb it all. We shall find the story full enough.

  4. Cradles of Civilization

  Central Asia—Anau—Lines of Dispersion

  It is fitting that this chapter of unanswerable questions should end with the query, “Where did civilization begin?”—which is also unanswerable. If we may trust the geologists, who deal with prehistoric mists as airy as any metaphysics, the arid regions of central Asia were once moist and temperate, nourished with great lakes and abundant streams.70 The recession of the last ice wave slowly dried up this area, until the rainfall was insufficient to support towns and states. City after city was abandoned as men fled west and east, north and south, in search of water; half buried in the desert lie ruined cities like Bactra, which must have held a teeming population within its twenty-two miles of circumference. As late as 1868 some 80,000 inhabitants of western Turkestan were forced to migrate because their district was being inundated by the moving sand.71 There are many who believe that these now dying regions saw the first substantial development of that vague complex of order and provision, manners and morals, comfort and culture, which constitutes civilization.72

  In 1907 Pumpelly unearthed at Anau, in southern Turkestan, pottery and other remains of a culture which he has ascribed to 9000 B.C., with a possible exaggeration of four thousand years.73 Here we find the cultivation of wheat, barley and millet, the use of copper, the domestication of animals, and the ornamentation of pottery in styles so conventionalized as to suggest an artistic background and tradition of many centuries.74 Apparently the culture of Turkestan was already very old in 5000 B.C. Perhaps it had historians who delved into its past in a vain search for the origins of civilization, and philosophers who eloquently mourned the degeneration of a dying race.

  From this center, if we may imagine where we cannot know, a people driven by a rainless sky and betrayed by a desiccated earth migrated in three directions, bringing their arts and civilization with them. The arts, if not the race, reached eastward to China, Manchuria and North America; southward to northern India; westward to Elam, Sumeria, Egypt, even to Italy and Spain.75 At Susa, in ancient Elam (modern Persia), remains have been found so similar in type to those at Anau that the re-creative imagination is almost justified in presuming cultural communication between Susa and Anau at the dawn of civilization (ca. 4000 B.C.).76 A like kinship of early arts and products suggests a like relationship and continuity between prehistoric Mesopotamia and Egypt.

  We cannot be sure which of these cultures came first, and it does not much matter; they were in essence of one family and one type. If we violate honored precedents here and place Elam and Sumeria before Egypt, it is from no vainglory of unconventional innovation, but rather because the age of these Asiatic civilizations, compared with those of Africa and Europe, grows as our knowledge of them deepens. As the spades of archeology, after a century of victorious inquiry along the Nile, pass across Suez into Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia, it becomes more probable with every year of accumulating research that it was the rich delta of Mesopotamia’s rivers that saw the earliest known scenes in the historic drama of civilization.

  BOOK ONE

  THE NEAR EAST

  “At that time the gods called me, Hammurabi, the servant whose deeds are pleasing, . . . . who helped his people in time of need, who brought about plenty and abundance, . . . . to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, . . . . to enlighten the land and further the welfare of the people.”

  Code of Hammurabi, Prologue.

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF NEAR EASTERN HISTORY*

  B.C.

  EGYPT

  18000:

  Nile Paleolithic Culture

  10000:

  Nile Neolithic Culture

  5000:

  Nile Bronze Culture

  4241:

  Egyptian Calendar appears (?)

  4000:

  Badarian Culture

  3500-2631:

  A. THE OLD KINGDOM

  3500-3100:

  I-III Dynasties

  3100-2965:

  IV Dynasty: the Pyramids

  3098-3075:

  Khufu (“Cheops” of Herodotus)

  3067-3011:

  Khafre (“Chephren”)

  3011-2988:

  Menkaure (“Mycerinus”)

  2965-2631:

  V-VI Dynasties

  2738-2644:

  Pepi II (longest reign known)

  2631-2212:

  The Feudal Age

  2375-1800:

  B. THE MIDDLE KINGDOM

  2212-2000:

  XII Dynasty

  2212-2192:

  Amenemhet I

  2192-2157:

  Senusret (“Sesostris”) I

  2099-2061:

  Senusret III

  2061-2013:

  Amenemhet III

  1800-1600:

  The Hyksos Domination

  1580-1100:

  C. THE EMPIRE

  1580-1322:

  XVIII Dynasty

  1545-1514:

  Thutmose I

  1514-1501:

  Thutmose II

  1501-1479:

  Queen Hatshepsut

  1479-1447:

  Thutmose III

  1412-1376:

  Amenhotep III

  1400-1360:

  Age of the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence; Revolt of Western Asia against Egypt

  1380-1362:

  Amenhotep IV (Ikhnaton)

  1360-1350:

  Tutenkhamon

  1346-1210:

  XIX Dynasty

  1346-1322:

  Harmhab

  1321-1300:

  Seti I

  1300-1233:

  Rameses II

  1233-1223:

  Merneptah

  1214-1210:

  Seti II

  1205-1100:

  XX Dynasty: the Ramessid Kings

  1204-1172:

  Rameses III

  1100-947:

  XXI Dynasty: the Libyan Kings

  B.C.

  WESTERN ASIA

  40000:

  Paleolithic Culture in Palestine

  9000:

  Bronze Culture in Turkestan

  4500:

  Civilization in Susa and Kish

  3800:

  Civilization in Crete

  3638:

  III Dynasty of Kish

  3600:

  Civilization in Sumeria

  3200:

  Dynasty of Akshak in Sumeria

  3100:

  Ur-nina, first (?) King of Lagash

  3089:

  IV Dynasty of Kish

  2903:

  King Urukagina reforms Lagash

  2897:

  Lugal-zaggisi conquers Lagash

  2872-2817:

  Sargon I unites Sumeria & Akkad

  2795-2739:

  Naram-sin, King of Sumeria & Akkad

  2600:

  Gudea King of Lagash

  2474-2398:

  Golden Age of Ur; 1st code of laws

  2357:

  Sack of Ur by the Elamites

  2169-1926:

  I Babylonian Dynasty

  2123-2081:

  Hammurabi King of Babylon

  2117-2094:

  Hammurabi conquers Sumeria & Elam

  1926-1703:

  II Babylonian Dynasty

  1900:

  Hittite Civilization appears

  1800:

  Civilization in Palestine

  1746-1169:

  Kassite Domination in Babylonia

  1716:

  Rise of Assyria under Shamshi-Adad II

  1650-1220:

  Jewish Bondage in Egypt (?)

  1600-1360:
/>   Egyptian Domination of Palestine & Syria

  1550:

  The Civilization of Mitanni

  1461:

  Burra-Buriash I King of Babylonia

  1276:

  Shalmaneser I unifies Assyria

  1200:

  Conquest of Canaan by the Jews

  1115-1102:

  Tiglath-Pileser I extends Assyria

  1025-1010:

  Saul King of the Jews

  1010-974:

  David King of the Jews

  1000-600:

  Golden Age of Phoenicia & Syria

  974-937:

  Solomon King of the Jews