At the dawn of history....

Yes, so I got all excited when reading this book History of the Ancient World(v1) by Susan Wise Bauer, which explores what is known from the earliest recordings of history. By history, she means historical records, as opposed to speculation, however sound, that is based solely upon the layout of ruins. So she means lists of kings, codes of law, recordings of battles and catastrophes and epic tales. Her historical description, then, begins around 4500 BC, with the Sumerians, Egyptians, Indians of the Indus Valley and the early Chinese cultures. The vast majority of early writings were inventories and records of trade, with increasingly sophisticated levels of abstraction over a brief period of time. So I've followed these regions over the course of 2 millenia (or 200 pages), and now we're getting into some other cultures, like the Minoans. The Sumerians were lost to the Akkadians, who subsequently lost to a coalition of the Elamites and Babylonians. Upper and Lower Egypt was united into the first Dynasty (Old Kingdom), fell into civil war, was reunited in the Middle Kingdom, was dissolved again by war and drought (and the Hyksos from the East). The Longshans were absorbed into the Xia Dynasty, which was undone by corruption and replaced by the Tang.

I just finished the journey of Abraham into Canaan, and the rise of King Minos. It's been a really interesting read. She has a very engaging style, and covers a lot of ground in a short while. This is pretty much what I was looking for, as I wanted a starting point that gave a decent overview with timelines. Clearly, though, you can't just take one person's word on something as important and emotionally charged as history. I'm definitely going to go back and explore some of these areas in more detail. In particular, the story of the Sumerians, and how no one ever managed to fully unite their territory (which is only 5 major cities on a plain that is bordered by river on all sides). It's interesting to consider the state of a "kingdom" that is one city in size where the city council has to approve the actions of the king. The famous king and warrior Gilgamesh wanted to war against a neighboring city, but the council wouldn't support him, so he didn't get enough manpower to do the job. He went ahead anyway and failed. Then he failed again. Finally, near the end of his reign, he swept in on the heels of a rival's attack and took the city. Within 200 years, the first epic retellings of his life began to emerge, painting him as a godlike man.

The reason I'm going on about this is that I was really struck by the level of sophistication of these distant people. 5500 years isn't a lot of time, evolutionarily, but I guess I had the conceit that our sense of society and culture was an evolving thing. After all, we advanced Americans just recently decided, nobly, to NOT engage in slavery. You only have to go back a few hundred years to find large societies that performed human sacrifice to appease the gods. How crass is that? But if culture/society is an evolving organism, how can one explain away the beauty of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has all of the elements of the tragic epic that one normally associates with biblical stories, or the poems of Homer and Virgil, or the epic Beowulf. I would really like to explore other oral to written accounts from the earliest days.

I'm going to move quickly over a couple of unrelated items that struck me in my reading, so as not to make this an epic itself.

-What balls it took to engage in trade in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, especially since they probably cleaved to the coastline where possible. What a risky exercise in trial and error! I'd like to look into what a 3500 BC trade ship looked like.

-Every early civilization except Egypt had a Great Flood account, most of which happen around the same time, coinciding with increased global temperatures. In every case, the world is profoundly changed after the flood (more wicked or worldly, kings are no longer semi-divine, etc.).

-I was always puzzled as a kid by the story of Cain and Abel. As an adult, I can see that they could be analogous to different peoples warring for religious reasons, but the point seems to be that God chooses one over the other, and that's that. It's about obedience, just like the Adam and Eve story, Abraham and Isaac, and so on. But an earlier account from the Sumerians shed light on this story for me:
Bureaucracy, writes Bauer, arose because someone had to make sure that the various elements of society would cooperate to survive in the inhospitable environment of the so-called Fertile Crescent. This required strong leadership, which led to kingship and city building. So the people who had committed to the settled, agrarian life of the city-centered civilization found themselves at odds with the nomadic hunter-gatherers, who were also herdsmen. In an early tale "The Wooing of Inanna", a character named Dumuzi is a shepherd and a king, and he vies for the hand of the goddess Inanna (Ishtar), daughter of Marduk. She rejects him, saying,
"The shepherd! I will not marry the shepherd!
His clothes are coarse, his wool is rough,
I will marry the farmer.
The farmer grows flax for my clothes,
The farmer grows barley for my table."
Class warfare, old school. Dumuzi later offers her fresh milk with cream, and she offers that he "plow her damp field", so he must have done something right. As it turns out, the nomads and farmers worked out a mutually beneficial arrangement. The fifth king in the Sumerian king list was named Dumuzi. But clearly, as writing was an advance brought about by the necessity of "civilized" existence within a city-based community, the city mice got to record the tales of gods preferring them over the country mice...er, or something like that. Actually, the gods ended up pleased with the shepherds on both counts. So maybe the city mice had jungle fever or something.

/dork alert over/