Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The Bronze Age reached its peak around 1400 BC. It was a time when iron was scarce and valuable. Tutankhamun reigned for only a very few years as a pharaoh in Egypt, and died about 1350 BC, but his tomb, famously discovered and excavated by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922, contained–besides vast quantities of gold, jewels and fabulous ornaments–a dagger, headrest and bracelet all made of iron.71 There were also some very small models of tools, barely an inch long, also made of iron. In all cases this was smelted iron, not meteoric.

  The earliest iron instruments date from, roughly, 5000 BC, in northern Iraq, Iran and Egypt. But only one of these was smelted, the others being fashioned from meteoric iron. Another early instrument comes from Ur and dates to the early part of the third millennium BC. However, it seems likely that when iron was produced as early as this it had not been recognised as a new metal, or even as a metal at all.72 Iron needs higher temperatures than copper (1100°–1150°) in order to be separated from its ore, and it needs a larger furnace, so that the particles of iron can drop away from the smelting zone and accumulate below, collecting into a lump usually called a ‘bloom’.73 Such a procedure seems to have first been developed and practised within the territory of the Hittite confederacy. The Hittites established a state in central Turkey and northern Syria, 1450–1200 BC, where for a while they successfully challenged the Assyrians and Egyptians.74 According to Theodore Wertime, the first deliberately smelted iron seems to have been produced when bronze products had reached perfection and where copper, lead and iron ores were in abundance: northern Anatolia along the shores of the Black Sea.75 In other words, the success of bronze, the rarity of tin and the abundance of iron induced the Hittites to experiment. The technique appears to have been a closely-guarded secret for several hundred years, with the craftsmen keeping the vital details within their families and charging a very high price for their wares. To begin with it was looked upon as a truly precious metal, more valuable than gold according to ancient records; only ornaments were made of it and the secrets of iron were probably not known outside the Hittite sphere of influence before 1400 BC.76 (It is likely that the iron dagger found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb had been made under Hittite supervision.) By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, the Hittite confederation had encountered troubled times and, by 1200 BC, the cat was out of the bag, and full knowledge of iron-making spread to other parts of Asia.77 The Iron Age truly dates from when the metal ceased to be precious.78

  Besides its other attractions, iron smelting was less complicated than copper production. Provided there were bellows sufficiently strong to provide a current of air, a single-tier furnace was enough, as compared with the elaborate two-tier, kiln-type furnace which was needed for copper ore to be reduced in crucibles. Furnaces of quite simple design were used during the first thousand years of iron smelting–therefore, once the secret was out, almost anyone could make iron, though naturally smelting tended to be conducted where the ores could easily be mined and where charcoal was readily available. Like tin, iron differs from copper and gold in never being found free in nature, except as the very rare meteorites that fall to earth. Like copper, none of its ores were found in the great river valleys, but in many nearby areas they were to be found in abundance. The most important mining and smelting enterprises of the later years of the second millennium were established in the neighbourhood of the Taurus and Caucasian mountains, and in Armenia.

  The crucial process in iron production–carburisation, by which iron is converted into steel–was probably developed in the two centuries after 1200 BC on the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean. To carburise iron, it is heated ‘in intimate contact’ with charcoal for a long period, a discovery that must have been accidental (uncarburised iron is not as strong as bronze).79 Mount Adir in north Israel is one site of early carburised iron, Taanach and Hazorea in Palestine are others.80 In the Odyssey, Homer shows some awareness that the quenching of carburised iron also enhances its hardness.

  Given its versatility, hardness, and low cost, one might have thought that the new metal would be rapidly adopted. Bowl-shaped ingots were certainly being traded in the late Bronze Age.81 Nevertheless, the earliest collection of iron tools that has been found in Egypt dates only from about 700 BC, a millennium and a half after its use by the Hittites.82 In Works and Days, Hesiod refers to the men of his own era as a ‘race of iron’.83

  Metallurgy was quite sophisticated from early on. Welding, nails and rivets were early inventions, in use from 3000 BC. Gold plating began as early as the third millennium, soon followed by the lost-wax technique, for making bronze sculptures.84 In terms of ideas, three uses to which metals were put seem to have been most profound. These were the dagger, as was mentioned earlier, the mirror, and coins. Mirrors were particularly popular among the Chinese, and the Romans excelled at making them, finding that an alloy of 23–28 per cent tin, 5–7 per cent lead, and the rest copper, served best. Reflections were later considered to be linked to man’s soul.85

  Money does not occur in nature, says the historian Jack Weatherford. Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French writer, put it another way: ‘I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.’ The first forms of money were commodity money, ranging from salt to tobacco, coconuts to rice, reindeer to buffaloes. The English word ‘salary’ derives from the Latin salarius, meaning ‘of salt’. (Roman soldiers were perhaps paid in salt, to flavour their otherwise bland food.86) The as, a Roman coin, represented the value of one hundredth of a cow. The English word ‘cattle’ is derived from the same Latin root as the word ‘capital’. As early as the third millennium BC, however, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia began using ingots of precious metals in exchange for goods. The ingots, of gold or silver and of uniform weight, were called minas or shekels or talents.87

  The transition from proto-money to coins proper took place in Lydia, in what is now Turkey, some time between 640 and 630 BC. The very first coins were made of electrum, a naturally-occurring mixture of gold and silver, and they were about the size of a thumb nail, and almost as thick as a thumb, like a small ingot. They were stamped with a lion’s head, to ensure their authenticity, and the stamping had the effect of flattening them, making them more like the coins that we use today.88 Whether the first coins were used exactly as we use money now is open to doubt. The first coins would have been so valuable they could never have been anything like ‘change’. The main breakthrough, to commodification, probably came with the introduction of bimetallic coinages, gold and silver and/or copper. This may have been introduced in the third or second centuries BC, when they were used to pay people in Greece who had been selected for political office by ballot (see Chapter 6).

  But the eventual change in life that the invention of money brought about was momentous. It was in a Lydian city, Sardis, that the first retail market was introduced, when anyone could come to the market and sell, for money, whatever they had. In the archaeological record the oldest traded material is obsidian, a very fine, jet-black and shiny volcanic glass, which was mined at a single source in southern Turkey but was found all over the Middle East, where its transparent, reflective, super-cutting properties made it magical and much sought after.89 But all sorts of new activities were sparked by the invention of money. At Sardis, for instance, the first known brothels were built, and gambling was also born.90 More fundamentally, the advent of money enabled people to break out from their kin group. Money became the link between people, creating a nexus that had not been possible under the barter system. In the same way, money weakened traditional ties and that, in time, had profound political implications. Work and human labour became a commodity, with a coin-related value attached, and therefore time too could be measured in the same way.

  In Greece, near to Lydia, and therefore quickly influenced by this new development, money encouraged the democratisation of politics. Under Solon, the old privileges were abolished and eligibility for public office became based
on (landed) wealth.91 Democracy arose in cities with market economies and strong currencies. Furthermore, the wealth generated by such commerce allowed for greater leisure time, out of which the Greek elite built its pre-eminence in philosophy, sport, the arts, in politics itself. Counting had existed before money, but the emergence of the market, and a money economy, encouraged rational and logical thinking, in particular the Greek advances in mathematics that we shall be exploring in a later chapter. The German economic historian Georg Simmel observed in his book The Philosophy of Money, ‘the idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy’.92 He added, ‘those professional classes whose productivity lies outside the economy proper have emerged only in the money economy–those concerned with specific intellectual activity such as teachers and literary people, artists, physicians, scholars and state officials’. This is overstating the case somewhat (teachers and doctors existed before money), but the point has validity.

  Money also vastly promoted international trade. This, more than anything, helped the spread of ideas around the globe. After Sardis, the great urban centres of the world were as likely to be market towns as places of worship, or the homes of kings.

  4

  Cities of Wisdom

  To Chapter 4 Notes and References

  In 1927 the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig at Ur of Chaldea (Chaldea is an alternative name for Babylon). Ur, the home of Abraham according to the Bible, had first been identified in 1854–1855 but it was Woolley’s sensational excavations that revealed its wider importance in mankind’s history. Among his discoveries was the unearthing of the so-called mosaic standard of Ur, which featured a cluster of chariots, showing that it was the Sumerians (inhabiting what is now the southernmost reaches of Iraq from c. 3400 BC), who may well have conceived the wheel and introduced this device into warfare. Woolley also discovered a practice that royalty in Babylon was not buried alone. Alongside the king and queen, in one chamber, lay a company of soldiers (copper helmets and spears were found next to their bones) and in another chamber were the skeletons of nine ladies of the court, still wearing their elaborate headdresses. Now these were very grisly practices, and quite important enough in themselves, for what they revealed about ancient beliefs. But what particularly attracted Woolley’s attention was that no text had ever hinted at this collective burial. He therefore drew the conclusion that the interment had taken place before writing had been invented to record the event.

  According to the historian H. W. F. Saggs, ‘No invention has been more important for human progress than writing’, and Petr Charvát has called it ‘the invention of inventions’.1 So here we have another major idea, to put alongside farming as ‘the greatest ever’. In fact, more important, more fundamental even than writing in the history of progress, is that happy coincidence that the Sumerians also invented the chariot. For once you start making a list of the ‘firsts’ achieved by this formidable people, it is difficult to know where to stop. For example, in 1946 the American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer began to publish his translations of Sumerian clay tablets and in doing so he identified no fewer than twenty-seven ‘historical firsts’ discovered or achieved or recorded by the early Iraqis. Among them were the first schools, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first clocks, the first arch, the first legal code, the first library, the first farmer’s almanac, and the first bicameral congress. The Sumerians were the first to use gardens to provide shade, they recorded the first proverbs and fables, they had the first epic literature and the first love songs. The reason for this remarkable burst of creativity is not hard to find: civilisation, as we now call it, occurred only after early man had begun to live in cities. Cities were far more competitive, experimental environments than anything that had gone before. The city is the cradle of culture, the birthplace of nearly all our most cherished ideas.

  In the classical definition, civilisation consists of three or more of the following: cities, writing, the specialisation of occupations, monumental architecture, the formation of capital.2 But this, while not wrong, ignores the underlying principle. Sometime in the late fourth millennium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience for the new conditions required men and women to cooperate in ways they never had before. It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together–writing, law, bureaucracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures.

  According to research published in the autumn of 2004, the first urban sites were Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar in northern Mesopotamia, on the Iraq–Syria border, dated to just before 4000 BC. They had rows of brick ovens for preparing food on an industrial scale and numerous ‘seal stamps’ used to keep track of goods and to ‘lock’ doors. But they were relatively small–Hamoukar was twelve hectares–and the first cities proper emerged further south in Mesopotamia about 3400 BC. These sites included Eridu, Uruk, Ur, Umma, Lagash and Shuruppak (more or less in that order). By the end of the third millennium BC, 90 per cent of southern Mesopotamia was living in urban areas.3 These cities were very large: Uruk, for example, had a population of 50,000. Why did they develop and what was the experience like? Several reasons have been put forward for the development of cities, the most obvious of which is security. But this argument can no longer be supported, and for three reasons. In the first place, there are some large ancient cities–notably in West Africa (such as in Mali)–that never developed walls. Second, even in the Middle East, where city walls were sometimes vast and very elaborate, the walls came after the initial settlement. At Uruk, for example, the city had been largely formed around 3200 BC, but the walls were not built until roughly 2900 BC. (On the other hand, Uru means a walled area.4) Finally, there is a much more convincing explanation, with a great deal of empirical support.

  What appears to have happened is that, in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, in Mesopotamia, there was a slight but noticeable change of climate, leading to cooler and dryer average conditions. Until that point, agriculture had flourished between the Tigris and the Euphrates for thousands of years. Because of these rivers, the area was relatively secure and irrigation was well developed.5 ‘The climatic changes documented for the middle of the fourth millennium seem, within a space of two to three hundred years, to have stemmed the floods that regularly covered large tracts of land and to have drained such large areas that in a relatively short period of time, large parts of Babylonia became attractive for new permanent settlements.’6 Excavations show that, associated with this climate variation, there was a sudden change in settlement pattern, from very scattered and fairly small individual settlements to dense settlements of a much larger kind never seen before.7 These geographical conditions appear to have favoured the development of communal irrigation systems–systems that were not elaborate, not at that stage, but which nonetheless brought about marked improvements in the yield of barley (which now evolved from the two-row to the six-row mutant), and at the same time taught people the advantages of co-operation. In other words, it was the particular climatic conditions of Mesopotamia–where irrigation could markedly improve crop yields and where there was enough water available (but in the wrong place) to allow this development fairly easily and obviously. The crucial point was that though the land was now habitable, there was still so much water available that nearly every arable plot had easy and direct access to it. ‘This fact…must have produced a “paradise”, with multiple, high-yield harvests each year.’8 An added factor was that the southern alluvial plains of Mesopotamia were lacking in other commodities, such as timber, stone, minerals and metals. The food surplus of this ‘paradise’ could be traded for these commodities, making for a dense network of contacts, and provided conditions for the development of specialist wor
kers in the cities themselves. This may have been a factor leading to the diverse populations that were such a feature of early city life, going beyond simple kin groups. This was an exciting advance: for the first time people could become involved in activities not directly linked with food production. Yet this development would have raised anxiety levels: citizens had to rely on others, not their kin, for essentials. This underlying anxiety may well explain the vast, unprecedented schemes and projects which fostered a community spirit–monumental, labour-intensive architectural undertakings. For these same reasons, religion may well have become more important in cities than in previous configurations.

  The first city is generally held to have been Eridu, a site just over a hundred miles inland from the Persian Gulf and now called Aby Shahrein. Its actual location was unique, in that it occupied a transitional zone between sea and land. It was near an alluvial plain and close to marshes, which meant that it could easily benefit from three ecological systems–the alluvium, the desert and the marshes, and so profit from three different modes of subsistence: farming, nomadic pastoralism, and fishing.9 But there was also a religious reason for Eridu. The city was located on a small hill ringed by a depression, in which subterranean water collected. This surrounding area was never less than a swamp and in the rainy season formed a sizeable lake.10 It was thus a configuration that conformed neatly to Mesopotamian ideas of the Cosmos, which pictured the earth as a disc surrounded by a huge body of water. In mirroring this configuration, Eridu became a sacred spot. Petr Charvát says that Eridu was believed to contain the source of all wisdom and that it was the seat of the god of knowledge. He says the ‘first intelligible universal religion seems to have been born’ in Eridu, in which worship involved the use of a triad of colours in the local pottery. Earthly existence was affirmed by the use of red, death by the use of black, and eternal life (and purity) through white.11