HUMANS ALSO REACHED the islands of the Pacific Ocean. The earliest settlers in Oceania almost surely were seagoing farmers and traders from the islands off southeastern Asia. These people were used to moving in simple canoes or rafts from one inhabited island to another and trading pigs, pots, and yams. Then they moved to far-off, unpopulated islands, far to the east of the islands that they knew. First they went to Melanesia, the “Black Islands” northeast of Australia, and later to Micronesia, the “Little Islands” north of Melanesia. Much later still they showed up in the “Many Islands” of distant Polynesia, which are scattered in the mid-Pacific.
No one knows just why these islanders left their homes and sailed across the ocean to such far-off places. (New Zealand, Easter Island, and the Hawaiian Islands are 1,000 to 1,800 miles from the nearest inhabited land.) Some have guessed that they were fleeing from their home islands, where people were dying of hunger, or slaughtering each other in their wars. Some experts tell us these were skillful seamen, who could sail for hundreds of miles, guided only by the sun, the stars, and the trend of the ocean swells until they reached a coral or lava island they had somehow heard of.
In fact, however, there is a simpler but likely explanation for the voyages. It appears again and again in the writings of European travelers who visited Pacific islands in modern times. These travelers often heard of islanders who had been sailing in familiar waters when storms arose and blew their sailing canoes far out to sea. Ocean currents then carried them for hundreds of miles to another island. In 1696, for example, families sailing between two islands in the north Pacific were blown away by a storm. After seventy days they reached the Philippines, 1,000 miles away. Most likely many islands were occupied by people blown out to sea by storms, and lucky enough to land on far-off islands.
Seven men and women on a raft were blown away from the island of Mangareva in southern Polynesia. With great good luck, they landed on the lonely isle of Rapa, 600 miles to the southwest. The Rapans urged them to stay, but the Mangarevans decided to return home. They believed incorrectly that their island lay to the southeast, so they waited for a wind from the northwest, and then pushed off. What a terrible mistake! South of Rapa lies nothing but Antarctica.
WHEN THE PACIFIC ISLANDS had been reached, human beings had filled the earth.
Chapter 2
We gather by the rivers.
LONG AFTER WE had spread around the earth, humans still survived by hunting and by eating seeds and berries, insects, seaweed, lizards, eggs, and roots.
But about ten thousand years ago we began to make a basic change in the human way of life.
Imagine that a band of humans comes upon a flock of wild sheep. They kill and eat a sheep or two, but the animals are more than they can eat so they stalk the flock for weeks. From time to time they kill whatever sheep they need for food, mostly those that can’t keep up.
One day the hunters find a valley, open only at one end, where they can hold the sheep. To take this step means settling down, for a while at least. Along the valley’s open end they raise their tents or build some huts. Now the hunters are turning into herders. They can treat the sheep as their reserve, something to fall back on when they can’t find other game. They train their dogs to herd the sheep.
As they cull and eat unwanted sheep, they slowly breed a species with more useful traits. The one-time skinny beasts evolve until they’re fat, with thicker coats of wool. As the herders catch and pen other beasts, these too evolve in useful ways. Cows, which had been dangerous when living in the wild, grow docile, and they keep on giving milk even when their calves are weaned. Lean and agile boars turn into fat, nutritious pigs.
Of course, the herders we’re discussing don’t subsist on meat alone. All of them, but especially the women, gather other kinds of food. Most important are the grains — the barley, maize (or corn), and rice, and wheat — that grow untended on the plains and in the swamps around them. Harvesting these grains is easy: if you tap the stems the seeds will tumble in your basket.
They (probably the women) realize that the grains are seeds. So in a year when food is hard to find they scratch the soil and scatter seeds upon it, hoping they will have more cereal grasses. It’s true that digging up the earth with sticks and planting seeds is much more work than simply gathering the foods that nature offers. But when they reap a harvest they have more grain to eat or to save for winter.
Now that they are planting crops, they have another reason (in addition to their herds) to stay in place. After all, it makes no sense to clear the fields and use them for only a year. So they build themselves some bigger huts, with space to store their tools and seeds. Around the huts they build a fence and then a wall to keep the cattle in and bandits out.
And that is roughly how farming and village life began. It didn’t happen that a solitary genius thought up farming, and that news about this great invention raced around the earth. Humans must have made the shift to farming in something like the manner we described above. Little groups of people, bit by bit, scarcely thinking what they did, changed the way they dealt with animals and plants. (Incidentally, this change coincides with the beginning of what is called the “New Stone Age,” when humans made finer tools from stones by polishing or grinding them.)
Farming took the place of food gathering, almost everywhere on earth, in a mere ten thousand years. That rapid widespread change almost demands a one-size-fits-all global explanation. Here is one: Perhaps at a certain moment humans faced a problem of supply. A worldwide drought might have forced people everywhere to seek new ways to get more food. Such an explanation is appealing, but historians have found no proof of such a drought.
All right, perhaps the cause of change was not inadequate supply but rising demand: a sudden, global population increase, with so many mouths to feed that people everywhere were forced to drop the easy life of gathering food and learn to do the harder, more productive, work of farmers. This may have taken place, but evidence of such a population rise is hard — and probably impossible — to find.
In short, why farming appeared at almost the same time throughout much of the world remains a mystery.
Archaeologists have uncovered places where one can follow the transition from food gathering to farming. One such place is Jericho, an oasis near Jerusalem that lies more than 800 feet below the level of the sea. From the beginning, each generation in Jericho left behind a layer of earth and trash. Eventually the layers formed a mound that rises seventy feet above the plain. The lowest layers show that in the beginning wandering hunters used to camp at Jericho beside a spring. They hunted gazelles and camped in flimsy huts or tents and put up a shrine, perhaps devoted to the spring.
Later people slowly settled down and started farming. The early farmers raised wheat and barley and probably kept goats; later ones had dogs to help them tend their flocks. They took about a thousand years to carry through their farming revolution. By that time two or three thousand people lived here in a crowded village. They dwelt in small round mud-brick huts, but they built a massive wall around their village and a tower ten yards high. They were prosperous enough to have to fear the hunter-bandits in the nearby hills and desert.
THE INTRIGUING ICEMAN lived amid the snowy Alps in Europe, far from sun-baked Jericho. But like those people by the desert spring, he too was a creature of that moment when we humans turned from gathering to farming. He reappeared a dozen years ago when tourists walking in a mountain pass in Italy found his body, which a glacier had covered until then. His body was intact, and partly mummified by dehydration.
We will never know the reason he was in that mountain pass. He may have been hunting or tending sheep or, as we’ll see, he may have climbed up there to fight. He was in his middle forties — pretty old for those hard times — but trim and fit except for some arthritis and worms in his intestines. He wore a coat of skins and on top of that a cape of woven grass. On his head he wore a fur cap, and on his feet leather shoes that he had stuffed with
grass for warmth. Someone had cut his hair evenly to a length of three and a half inches. He carried all kinds of things — too many to list here — but among them were a rucksack, an axe with a copper blade, a bow and arrows, a flint dagger, two mushrooms, a sloe berry, and a tassel with a marble bead.
The Iceman lived when humans where he lived were settling down, beginning to farm, and learning the use of metals. In his stomach were bits of goat meat and cultivated wheat, the kind that farmers sow and later harvest. So apparently he lived where people farmed. If we consider when he lived, his axe’s copper blade was a triumph of technology. Only recently had humans mastered the tricky task of roasting copper ore over a fire, and pouring molten metal in a mold.
On his body were charcoal tattoos that someone had pricked in his skin in places he could not have reached. He had lines on his lower spine, a cross behind his left knee, and stripes on his right ankle. Perhaps they tell us that the Iceman was a chief or wise man. But they may have been a therapy for pain, a kind of acupuncture.
If we don’t know why the Iceman went where he was found, we do know how he died. The berry in his pack informs us that the month was August or September. He ate a meal, the last he ever had. Then someone shot an arrow into his left shoulder. He crawled into a natural basin in the rocks that was twice as deep as he was tall, and there he bled to death. His body froze. Snow covered his corpse before an animal could find it, and a glacier inched across the basin that he lay in. For more than fifty centuries he lay in peace in his frigid refuge underneath the glacier.
Two tourists found the Iceman when the glacier had melted just enough to expose his head and shoulders. Immediately, he became an international sensation. Scientists refroze his partially thawed body, and began to study it. Several women volunteered to bear his child, but that is still beyond the reach of science.
AND NOW, WITH trumpets fanfarading and a roll of drums, we turn to when we humans started to collect in “civilizations.” By the word civilization we mean a place where people live in villages and towns, work at many trades, obey a government, worship a god or gods, and read and write. Of course humans didn’t become “civilized” at some specific moment.
However, the place where this happened first was probably the south of what is now Iraq. The reader needs to visualize this place. In western Asia the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow side by side for 750 miles from Turkey’s lower edge through Iraq to the Persian Gulf. (See the map on p. 16.) The region’s older name is Mesopotamia, which in Greek means “Land Between the Rivers.” In their lower courses the rivers flow through level farmland, deserts, swamps, and marshes to the Gulf. The country is so flat that, as they say, if you step on a phone book you get a view.
Between 4500 and 4000 B.C., a farming people living in this lower part of Mesopotamia stood upon the brink of civilization. They drained some marshes so that they could farm them, and they dressed in woolen cloth and leather, made their pots from clay, and built their huts with bricks they made from mud.
After a millennium had passed another people came and occupied this place, probably absorbing the natives. Their skeletons and later paintings show that they were short with sturdy bones. Their neighbors farther up the rivers later called them the “Sumerians” and their region Sumer, but they called themselves “the dark-headed” and they knew their country as “the Land.”
Water, precious water, shaped their lives. At first they may have lived among the marshes. A Sumerian myth relates that in primeval times a god laid reeds on the face of the waters and, by pouring mud on the reeds, made the floor of a hut. To this day the people who live here in the swamps dwell in huts of reeds whose floors of reeds ooze mud at every step. Most of the Sumerians we’re concerned with didn’t live in marshes, but they did reside along the rivers.
Two Early Civilizations
Sumer lay in lower Mesopotamia, between two rivers. Egypt (then as now) stretched along the Nile.
The early farmers learned to dig canals so that when the rivers flooded they could first divert the water to the fields and later drain it off (so as to prevent salt from accumulating in the soil). Slowly they enlarged the network of canals in order to bring water to farmland farther from the rivers. Villages grew up and then developed into towns.
The soil was fertile, and with irrigation yielded barley, wheat, sesame, and dates. Farmers who had surpluses to sell might buy their neighbors’ plots and thus become rich landlords. Meanwhile other Sumerians became merchants. Using donkey carts they carried barley, oil of sesame, dried fish, and cloth to the people in the mountains east of Sumer. They returned with things that Sumer lacked: precious metals, copper, cedar boards, and building stone for temples. Merchants sailed to other towns along the rivers using boats they made from reeds and skins. In this way, the growing towns became acquainted, and they built a common civilization.
Solitary peasants couldn’t plan canals and dig them and keep them clear of silt. They needed chiefs to run the digging and to drive away the bandits from the desert. So in all the larger towns a chief emerged. He was called a “big man,” and he had tax collectors, judges, and supervisors of canals. The merchants and the well-off landlords sometimes gave the big man their advice, but peasants, laborers, and slaves hadn’t any say at all. According to a Sumerian maxim, “The poor do not have power.”
Women, on the other hand, didn’t fare so badly in this early civilization. Legally, they had more rights than women had in many other places for at least five thousand years. They could own a house or land, take part in businesses, and testify in trials.
However, women mostly did what women usually have done. One task of course was having babies. If a married woman failed to have them then her husband was entitled, under law, to take a second wife. The other “woman’s work” was weaving, gardening, and cooking. In a Sumerian myth, the creator god Enki puts gods, that is, males, in charge of fishing, plowing, digging canals, making bricks, and building. But he puts goddesses in charge of reaping grain and vegetables and weaving cloth, which the teller of the myth calls “woman’s work.” This is not to say that all the women did all they should. In a Sumerian joke a husband says, “My wife is at the shrine, my mother is down by the river, and here I am dying of hunger!”
Gods and goddesses helped to shape the look of Sumer’s towns. Sumerians worshipped hundreds of them, and they had to please them all. In every town the “big man” was also the religious leader, and he and his priests would invariably build a tower on a lofty terrace. The bigger towers, known as ziggurats, looked like pyramids of boxes, each box being smaller than the one below it. Atop the highest was a shrine. On the level plains of Sumer one could see a ziggurat shimmering in the heat from miles away. A ziggurat figures in the Bible as the tower “with its top in the heavens” that the presumptuous Babylonians (not far from Sumer) tried to build until God took offense.
As the years went by the merchants and the bureaucrats discovered that they had to deal with ever-growing quantities of stuff: bricks for ziggurats, salaries for copper workers, dates and barley to be fed to slaves. They couldn’t store such quantities of data in their heads. In about 3200 B.C., their scribes (or secretaries) solved this problem. With their hands they patted tablets out of what lay all around them, sodden clay, and in the clay they scratched their records of their bosses’ dealings. They invented symbols representing donkeys, chisels, male or female slaves, jugs of beer, and so on.
Then the scribes found ways to write new words by joining symbols. In the diagram opposite, an upside-down triangle with a short line from the center to the bottom represents a vulva. It signified a woman. Three semicircles, two below and one above, meant “mountain.” Sumer got its slave women from the mountains to the east, so if a scribe combined these symbols, the triangle and the semicircles, the result meant “slave woman.”
How writing arose in Sumer
The scribes incised the symbols using what was just about as common as the clay they wrote on: the reeds that
grew in marshes. If you cut a reed not straight but at an angle and push it into clay, it makes a wedge-shaped mark, a slender triangle. After a while the scribes reduced the symbols, which had been recognizable sketches of things, to abstract sets of wedge shapes that the scribes could write faster but looked nothing like the things they stood for. (The diagram above shows how this happened.) Now the scribes could write with dazzling speed. A saying ran, “A scribe whose hand moves as fast as his mouth, that’s a scribe for you.”
The scribes became aware that many words had different meanings but sounded the same. Because of this they could often use one group of wedge shapes to represent two things. For example, ha meant “fish” and also “may.” So they could use the same wedge shapes that meant “fish” to express “may.” Sumerian writing now became a mixture of sets of shapes that stood for things and sets of shapes that stood for sounds.
At first, the scribes spent all their time recording business deals and inventories. But then Sumerians discovered other things that one could do with written words. A “big man” had his scribes record his boasts about his victories in war on his buildings. Priests had scribes write down hymns. Wealthy fathers dictated letters telling sons to mind their manners. Scholar-scribes recorded ancient myths that up to then had passed only from memory to memory, as well as brand-new poems of love and death and victory in war. Sumerians had learned to multiply their memories and magnify their minds.
The Human Story Page 2