A Global History of the Ancient World

Asia, Europe, and Africa before Islam

Eivind Heldaas Seland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000435979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Ancient history has traditionally focused on Greece and Rome. This book takes a global approach to the distant past, following the development of human societies across the globe from the last Ice Age, 11, 700 years ago, to the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE.

The only book of its kind, A Global History of the Ancient World provides succinct narratives of the first Asian, African and European civilizations and their importance for later history without foregoing the key topics of conventional textbooks. Thematic overviews give truly global perspectives on connections, disconnections and parallel developments shaping the ancient world.

Written for students of history, classics and related disciplines, the book will appeal to anyone interested in widening their view of early history.

1 Great changes

Until c. 4000 BCE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003142263-2

About 100,000 years ago, a woman was sitting at the mouth of a big cave overlooking the shores of the Indian Ocean, in what is today South Africa. The cave provided shelter from rain, wind, and predators. In the sea there were shellfish, fish and marine mammals. The surrounding areas were rich in animals that could be hunted and plants that could be gathered. In the time that was not used to find food, tools and weapons were made of bone and stone. In this, the people of the Blombos Cave – as the place is called today – did not differ much from those who lived in many other places in Africa and Eurasia at the same time, but the unknown woman, or it might have been a man, also spent time drawing a pattern of lines into a piece of red ocher. We will never know the thoughts of the artist, but this is the oldest example we have of people visualizing a world of imagination, and thus revealing that they had the ability for what we call abstract thinking and symbolic behavior. The finds from Blombos indicate that the people who lived there in the period c. 100,000–70,000 years ago decorated themselves, exchanged goods with other groups, and made well-prepared tools that seem to have held aesthetic value to them in addition to their practical use.¹

Biologists divide life by family, genus and species. We belong to the family Homnidae. So do the great apes. About 2.5 million years ago, the genus Homo, humans, diverged from other hominids. Over a long period of time, various species of humans evolved. The oldest traces of our species, Homo sapiens (“the wise human”), have been found in Africa and may be up to 350,000 years old.² These people resembled us in most ways, but from their skulls it seems that the brain capacity might have been somewhat smaller than ours. C. 100,000 years ago, by the time people lived in the Blombos cave, this difference had disappeared, and there were humans living in Africa who fully reflected us anatomically. These people mastered an advanced and varied technology that enabled them to utilize their environment in a much broader way than previous human species had managed. Small groups moved out of the African continent via the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt or across the Red Sea from present-day Eritrea to Arabia. During parts of this period, the climate in Arabia and North Africa was more humid, and the areas that are today desert were rich hunting grounds. This movement happened not as targeted or conscious migrations, but as an effect of people gradually expanding into new areas. The findings from Blombos and other places in Africa and the Near East show that there were also gradual cognitive changes. Approximately 50,000 years ago there lived people who buried their dead, who produced sophisticated and standardized tools from a variety of materials, who built shelters to protect themselves from harsh weather and who decorated their bodies and their surroundings.³ This gives us reason to believe that humans by this time, and due to a gradual process over perhaps 100,000 years, had developed language and a capacity for abstract thinking and cooperation on a par with us.⁴ These were modern humans in an evolutionary sense.

In archaeological chronology, this period of human prehistory is called the early Stone Age, or Paleolithic period. With advanced tool-technology, well-developed language and ability to collaborate and make plans, Homo sapiens spread rapidly. Hunting for now extinct large mammals, so-called megafauna, seems to have played an important role, and the development of warm clothing made it possible to move into areas that had previously been inaccessible. The dog was probably also domesticated at this time. Searching for later analogies that can help us understand how these people lived, American native populations and the Inuit population of the Arctic with their sophisticated material cultures are better models than the cavemen represented in comics and cartoons. Modern humans evolved in Africa, and early Stone Age people had dark skin, including the first inhabitants of Northern Europe.⁵ Presumably, modern Homo sapiens drove off other species, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, as they entered new areas, but genetic studies also reveal that the different species of humans interbred to some extent.⁶ C. 45,000 years ago, most of Europe, Asia and Australia had been populated by modern Homo sapiens. At this time the polar ice caps were much larger than today, and as a result the sea level was up to 130 meters lower.⁷ This made it possible to cross dry-shod to present-day Japan and some of the islands in Southeast Asia, while the first settlers in Australia must have possessed technology that enabled them to cross open water. Between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, hunters from Siberia migrated into present-day Alaska across the now long flooded tundra landscape we call Beringia. These groups gradually spread south along the coast. The oldest known traces of human remains from the Americas south of Alaska are c. 13,000 years old, and in the course of a few thousand years both American continents were populated.⁸ This process, with an initially small population from the African continent expanding across the rest of the world, is in a sense the first global process in human history.

Although these people resembled us physically as well as mentally, they lived lives that were very different from what the vast majority of people today experience. In the Amazon jungle in South America and a few places in Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa, there are or were until recently still small groups that live with predominantly Stone Age technology. Studies of such groups, together with archaeological finds, may inform us about life in prehistoric times.⁹ This is controversial, because it presupposes that human behavior is determined by biology and material conditions, because all modern societies have been influenced by the world around them, and because such groups today have been forced into marginal areas whereas their historical counterparts also had access to more resource-rich environments.¹⁰ But since most prehistoric groups have left little documentation apart from traces of their camps and tools, there are few good alternatives.

Everyone in the Paleolithic period lived as hunter-gatherers. Subsistence was based on hunting, fishing, scavenging, eating insects, mollusks, shellfish and edible plants, mushrooms and roots. The opportunities for storing, transporting and conserving food were limited, although not nonexistent. People often had to move over large distances in order to obtain food. That does not mean that they were on a perpetual trek, but that they moved between seasonal settlements. In such societies, everyone participated in the work of providing for the group. The smallest of these groups could perhaps consist of a single family, but more commonly a few dozen members. In some areas, with access to particularly rich resources for example of fish, nuts or seafood, it would be possible for hundreds of individuals to live permanently in village-like settlements.¹¹ In all likelihood, people would maintain social ties with nearby groups, which would occasionally meet in order to celebrate and settle common matters as well as to exchange goods and marriage partners.¹²

Archaeological finds of exceptionally rich burials have dispelled old notions of hunter-gatherer societies necessarily being egalitarian. Sources of wealth and power might have included the abilities individuals and families demonstrated in ensuring the larger group’s prosperity as well as in ritual contexts.¹³ Conflicts between groups living close to each other were also widespread, and violence was a fairly common cause of death, especially among men.¹⁴ Women and children risked being captured and had to follow the new group. Members of the group who could no longer contribute due to age or illness were sometimes left behind, committed suicide by leaving the group or were killed. This also happened to unwanted or disabled children. For people that were regularly on the move, such customs served to ensure the continued survival of the larger group.¹⁵

The emergence of agriculture

In the 1920s, archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe characterized what he dubbed the “Neolithic Revolution” as the most important change in human existence up until the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The Neolithic” means the “new”, that is “recent” Stone Age. The process that Childe was concerned with was the transition from lives as hunter-gatherers to that of farmers and livestock keepers.¹⁶ The Neolithic Revolution, a process that played out over centuries and millennia, would lay the foundations for multiplying the population, enable more people to live permanently in one place and to form villages and towns. Although the majority still had to participate in the work of obtaining food, it was now possible for some people to spend their time on religion, war, politics, trade or crafts instead. It became easier to collect and store resources over time, and to pass them on from generation to generation. In this way, the development of agriculture would in time also lead to increased differences between people.

The first agriculture gradually emerged about 12,000 years ago in the area we call the Fertile Crescent. This area forms a crescent on the map from northern Iraq through northern Syria and southern Turkey, and south again through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. Here, summers are hot and dry, the winters relatively cool and humid. The annual rainfall exceeds 200 millimeters, which is the absolute minimum for cereal plants to grow without extra watering. In the Fertile Crescent, both cereals and other important food plants such as varieties of beans, peas and lentils were found in the wild. The climate here was such that these plants were genetically programmed to grow in winter, while the seeds would survive the hot and dry summer on the ground. For the seeds to survive the drought period, they were relatively large and therefore well suited for food, something that people in the area had known to make use of for several thousand years before they started the targeted cultivation of these plants.¹⁷

Over time, some of these plants wer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Ancient history and global history
• 1. Great changes: Until c. 4000 BCE
• 2. Making sense of past societies
• 3. Metals and the first complex societies: Until c. 1200 BCE
• 4. Early Iron Age crisis and recovery: C. 1200–800 BCE
• 5. City-states and empires in the Iron Age: C. 800–335 BCE
• 6. City-states and collective government
• 7. The empires strike back: 335 BCE–200 CE
• 8. Crisis, consolidation and collapse: 200–651 CE
• Conclusion: A global history of the ancient world
• Bibliography
• Index