These civilizations are traditionally extolled as “the dawn of history.” There are good reasons to celebrate their accomplishments, for our own civilization is based on theirs. But the evidence is loaded, as is the very word civilization. All the writings and monuments and most of the artifacts left by these ancient civilizations were created by or for their elites. The historians who have described them, and the readers of their works, are also members of literate elites. For them and for us, civilization represents a great advance over the lives of the hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers who preceded them.
Why, if civilization represented such an advance, did it remain restricted to a few regions and not spread to the rest of the world for many centuries? This question is usually asked about the indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, and Australia. The same question can be asked about the Greeks and other Europeans, who resisted the attractions of civilization for 2,000 years after the beginnings of Egyptian civilization. Were they somehow “retarded”?
In fact, quite the contrary is true. The ancestors of today’s Europeans were Neolithic farmers who lived in Anatolia some 10,000 years ago. As their food supply increased, so did their numbers, and some of them began to migrate, seeking fertile rain-watered lands. Wherever they settled, their numbers soon exceeded those of the indigenous foragers. Long after civilizations had emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, these early farmers were still finding new lands to farm. They deliberately avoided becoming civilized as long as possible. Not until the first millennium bce did the inhabitants of Greece and Italy occupy all the arable land and fi nd themselves in the same predicament that had led the peoples of the Middle East to adopt civilization. Only then did they submit to the discipline of taxes, laws, and religious or political authorities.
Thus, the technologies that characterize the early civilizations represented a great advance in the power of human beings over nature but also in the ability of a small elite to impose their rule on large numbers of their fellow humans.
Early Technologies: Towards a More Complicated Life World
