Kenneth Harl - Orientation and Introduction to the Ancient World

so when we recruited speakers I had the task of recruiting half the speakers for the Institute and we had a few criteria one of which was content knowledge we carved up the ancient world the Middle East North Africa and the different topics and we said who is an expert on this topic let me have a filter it but as you know not every expert is always a great communicator a great educator so let me said okay who's also a good teacher and so this got narrower and narrower and then I put the first talk I not only had those two criteria I needed someone to start us off with a bang so this is quite challenging but I think we have very strongly succeeded I'm very excited about our first speaker today for Sir Kenneth Horrell I'm gonna introduce him so first Horrell is a professor of classical and Byzantine history at Tulane University in New Orleans where he teaches on a variety of topics Greek and Roman history Byzantine history Crusader history one of the reasons we picked him in particular was he teaches just about everything in fact he has recently completed a course who's heard of the teaching company I see a few hands I think it's possible from my own private research that Professor Carl is the most widely published teacher of the teaching company with 11 courses done so far and if you've never heard of the teaching company it's basically a remarkable service they basically record professors they call the best college lecturers in the country they scout out they look for highly rated teachers they record courses and 30 minute segments you can listen to one to drive to work and presto Carlson just about everything which means that he's a great person to think about how the ancient world fits into the world history more broadly now who's the world history teacher so I saw a lot of hands go up to continue he's also an extraordinary teacher he is one the student body Teaching Award nine times which I thought was pretty remarkable as well as well as baler of the universities nationwide Award for great teachers so we have a great professor amongst us he's also an archaeological work in Turkey he's an expert in numismatic coins he works a lot on his new book coming out on Rome and her irani info so he works not just in the greco-roman world we often think about is sort of located in the Italian you know the the peninsula there are the in Greece but also in Iran and Turkey and I just wanna plug a few of his teaching company courses origins of great ancient civilization barbarian empires of the steppes Roman the barbarians great ancient civilizations of Asia Minor please join me in welcoming a wonderful first speaker is in here and then you can clip it right up here that's how we usually do it okay I'm a trainable primate I've done this many times with the teaching company yeah that out of the way in my pocket okay well I think Sam Ross for that very kind introduction it was so kind I don't even recognize myself from the description and I hope that I can give you an introduction to the ancient world which will be useful to you I will be here until I guess the seventh I then have to leave at noon please feel free to follow up with questions and talk to me I have not been able to cover all of the civilizations particularly the later ones east of the Euphrates as I like to call them but I'm open to any kind of questions on the ancient or the medieval world and if you have concerns about something like stew sanon in Persia or ku sean's which I won't cover in this lecture feel free to bring those up with me and I'll be able to give you bibliography and suggestions what I'm doing today is a orientation of the ancient world as its traditionally taught in American colleges and universities I've taught a course many years called ancient near-eastern Greece and I'm not sure how everyone is familiar with it but what I want to do is orient you on how to understand the ancient world and perhaps integrated into world history or other types of courses you might be giving so think of this and myself as a useful resource a disposable resource which you can make use of in organizing ancient history it's a kind of daunting task most of my colleagues now are quite the modernist anything before 1900 is vaguely ancient in their mind and when they asked me to teach the ancient world they have very little understanding of what the amount of time and space is but to give you an orientation now research has has really pushed back the Neolithic period to at least around 9,000 10,000 BC when you get serious domestication of animals and the most impressive sight gobekli tepe shows the earliest monumental architecture and we've often called that now the a ceramic Neolithic that is the beginning of farming and domestication of animals and this occurs in the Middle East which I prefer to call the Near East but it's become the Middle East since 1945 that's another story and it's actually occurred in the in the area where my wife was born and grew up and I often suspect that my wife has DNA that goes back to these early farmers and monumental builders it then moves into the Neolithic period Chateau huic which means fork Hill and Turkish one of the best documented early farming communities calculate thick refers again to the introduction of copper comes from the greek call costs and lifts thoughts together and that represents another stage and then you go into the Bronze Age which sees the developments of a three major river valley civilizations urban literate civilizations which many of you may be familiar with I'll talk a bit about Egypt's umar and Melua or the indus valley this leads to the development of a great Bronze Age order from 1500 to about 1220 BC an imperial order there's been a good deal of scholarship on the communication among the great powers at the time in the Near East that would include Egypt the Chi sites of Babylon the Mitanni especially the Hittite Empire near and dear to me in Asia Minor and the early Mycenaean or keying kingdoms of Greece this represented the pinnacle of developments going all the way back to the a ceramic period where increasing sophistication and agriculture development of trade development of literacy and cities are able to sustain these great imperial orders this order collapses there's still a lot of speculation why various explanations why this order breaks up I'll talk about in a bit more detail in the substance of the lecture and this represents a major break of the Bronze Age and there are many scholars who study the Bronze Age or the origins of civilization and then there's a lot of scholars who study the post Bronze Age we often call it Iron Age when iron comes into general use and alphabetic writing and that is usually dated somewhere around 1900 BC and that sees the development of the classical civilizations in which I was originally trained that would include Hellenic and Greek eventually the Roman Empire and then the breakup of the Roman Empire which is in a way the summation of these civilizations in another major break so you have these two breaks one at the end of the Bronze Age one in the 5th and 6th centuries which sees the Roman cultural order evolved into what is essentially Western Europe Eastern Europe centered on the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople and then an Islamic civilization which is on the southern shores of North out of the Metro a nian North Africa and the eastern provinces of the Roman world in Iran and so you get this division of civilizations which still obtains today the the only major change in that new order that emerges in the 7th and 8th century is that Spain eventually goes back Christian what becomes turkey goes Islamic and that's a major change of the 14th and 15th century which is a little outside the scope of this talk in looking at the origins of Bronze Age civilization there has been exciting work done primarily by American scholars who are in apologists and training and a crazy group of people they are really quite remarkable scholars who have been excavating in what is now eastern Turkey they have pushed back the dates of the domestication of animals and plants considerably they have undermined a very common argument that would have been made say post-1945 that there was a Neolithic Revolution that is the population got to a point where it had to invent farming or it would starve and actually that that notion was pioneered by scholars writing in the 40s and 50s has essentially been discarded and what you see is a much more gradual evolution in experimentation with animals and as Michael Rosenberg who was one of the fellows working out there has demonstrated the first animal probably domesticated for food was the pig Michael always loves to point that out there was articles run in the New York Times nice Jewish boy determines Pig first animal on the menu we loves handing these out and he as well as a whole group of teams have been working out here the origins of metallurgy the movement to the first ceramics and the most spectacular sight which had been anticipated that was recovered about four or five years ago and made it on the tourist trade is gobekli tepe which is a stunning site in southeastern Turkey which is the first monumental architecture in the world this is the excavation as it looks several years ago I have not been back since the disturbances in southeastern Turkey that fighting between the Kurds and the Turkish army and I shudder to think what's going on in Turkey right now my my wife is there with her family visiting and it is a clearly a sanctuary built by people who had pooled their labour together to set up these great monoliths and the reconstruction of it is it looks eerily similar to Stonehenge in some ways except it's about anyone familiar with Stone Age it's well over 6,000 years earlier you have a draw most running in here a set of monoliths with marvellous carvings the upper levels and when you're at the site you can actually stand up and look in clearly this is for ceremonies you'd have to ascend in ladders to perform whatever is going on and the site is also with some distance from any water source as far as we can tell and so this represents an enormous pooling of resources by people who are in the early stages of domesticating animals in plants and are still largely what we would call hunter-gatherers there are several other sites that we suspect had similar architecture unfortunately one of them was washed away by the Ataturk Euphrates dam project other while others are under underway but this is in exactly the area where wheat was first domesticated the week the I corn strand which is the ancestor of domestic week in in the world today here are some of the examples of the carvings that have come down to us again with flint tools and it represents the first stage on the way up in the Middle East leading to cities the next site is some four thousand years later and that evolves to a site known as Chateau Hajek here it is from an aerial photography there's two excavations one here the original excavation in the 1960s done by the Jimmy Mellaart who is one of the most talented archaeologists in Turkey at the time and has often been hailed as the British equivalent of Schliemann and that has more to do not only with his geniuses and archaeologists but some of his controversial activities afterwards the new excavations are at this end being directed by Ian Cotter and together what they have shown is a site that has evolved into a permanent settlement where the balance has shifted from they're still hunting and gathering and fishing going on but it has shifted decidedly towards agriculture as your prime food resource there's also an incredible industry going on in making tools this is a reconstruction of what the city the villages houses must have looked like and you've now shifted to sites with hundreds of residents and certain specializations of labour it also shows this is a very controversial wall painting it also shows what we think is the first depiction of a city consciously we there there's a lot of debate what this represents this is today in the Museum of Anatolia civilizations it's a fresco from one of the houses but it seems to represent the pattern of cities here which I showed you in the isometric reconstruction in the lower level and in the back is hassan da which is the great mountain volcanic mountain which has fertilized the plain it clearly is also the source of the Obsidian which is turned into tools and weapons and traded across the Near East and this is in a series of transactions where group a trades with B B then takes it and trades it to C and they can travel great distances it doesn't mean the people who made the tools travel to the final destination but a series of transactions move these tools across the Near East and brought prosperity to this site it is also an important site because we have some of our first indications of religion but much more evident than what we saw at gobekli tepe which were animal depictions there are various representations of the bolt and hunting scenes some of them may remind you of the paintings at Lascaux in in southern France and of course our earliest depiction of a mother goddess a small figurine and both figures will be reinvented and reinterpreted especially in Asia Minor in Turkey right down to the Roman period the mother goddess associated with felines these look like leopards actually based on their spots and then a bull figure a bull who is the vehicle or the symbol of the sky god Zeus as he would be called in the Greek tradition Tesh up in the hurryin hit high tradition and that religious symbol persists well into the Roman Empire from these advances gobekli tepe is in this area here shuttle Hayek is here on the Konya plane and Turkey these settlements see a shift down to the river valleys both in the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates and I believe one of the speakers may be speaking much more on Egypt and the origins of civilization in Northeast Africa but between about 4,500 and 3,500 BC the river valleys come under cultivation that requires an enormous amount of mobilization and labor on an order that you had not seen it shuttle hoyuk so when you're looking at how did we get cities you start with gobekli tepe you move to shelter logic and you end up with the early cities of eric and or in sumar in lower iraq today and very quickly a unification of the villages in Egypt into the first Egyptian kingdom by the Pharaohs of dynasty one these civilizations can be broken into these river valley civilizations into a chronology I've tried to simplify to give you an idea of what that chronology looks like in the Bronze Age by 3500 BC cities and the beginning of writing appears in lower Iraq as far as we can tell that is the earliest writing we know of anywhere the Sumerians the people who invent this spoke a language related to no language today we have no connection and the only reason we know of it is the fact that it was later retained as a religious language and you have various dictionaries and grammars in Akkadian a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic which we can read and that allows us to break the Sumerian language and they're still working on it in some ways the grammars and syntax is is quite different what it is is it is a glutinous does anyone know Turkish binding chance as a language it's it's a stick together language where you do everything with suffixes or prefixes Turkish is that very very much that way but it's not related to Turkish and this writing system then allows for the sum amassing of resources seize the development of city-states that struggle for primacy of lower Iraq the NCN lugol's and what you want is control of the irrigation systems and the trade routes that's what they fight over and eventually you see the cities states coalesce into the first territorial empires the Akkadian under Sargon lasts about a century a second one under the Dionysus of you last a century and the final one well known to people the amorite Empire Babylon of Hammurabi these territorial states build upon the institutions of the city states they see the emergence of bureaucracies and royal armies which become essential to the running of Imperial orders in the Middle East today and in many ways the later incarnations of these Imperial orders going all the way down to the Ottoman Empire look back to Hammurabi they are also very much linked to the association of the ruler with law as a gift of the gods and the importance of the ruler providing law for his subjects so when you look at Mesopotamia you're you're moving from cities and literacy to warring States to territorial empires and the emergence of a Near Eastern monarchy a Near Eastern monarchy which ultimately will influence developments down to today the Babylonian Empire breaks up and there's a period in the Late Bronze Age where what is today Iraq or miss potamia is essentially divided between foreign rulers the caste sites and the Mitanni that's a snapshot of what I teach usually in Mesopotamian history it very very much dependent on the irrigation systems all of this for providing the densities and populations that could support cities of now twenty to twenty-five thousand people as opposed to villages of maybe five hundred to a thousand it's a whole different change in order of magnitude in sumerian myth the god new nerteaux who is the God of War is also the god of the canals and irrigation in the earliest accounts we have of the rulers of these early city-states they go by the term NC if they're more prominent they use the name lugal big man they will emphasize their irrigation projects and the bring of fertility to land as much as conquest in battle that's how important the system is here is one of the earliest planning's we have from this is from the the later Babylonian period showing a master plan of canals and irrigation system neatly organized and regulated and with that you could collect taxes you could collect surpluses you could support your black bureaucracy and army and of course incredible building programs this is the rebuilt temple of sin or Nana as he's known in Sumerian the moon-god of the third dynasty of or and by the way during the the Iraq war with Saddam Hussein this is where he parked his airplanes in and around this temple because he knew it wouldn't be bombed it is a a rebuilding of a much earlier temple complex going back at least to 3500 BC give you an idea of the reconstruction of what a city looked like the product of all of this from the city of or with its canal systems and its density of population cities like this needed trade and they are sustained by a complex system of trade routes and in the process of expanding from about 2,000 BC to 1500 BC urban literate civilization moves out of the river valleys of lower Iraq to the wider Near East to northern Iraq to southeastern ran into Anatolia that is the heartland of Turkey today the Levant that would today be represented by Syria by Jordan by Israel and by Lebanon all of those areas come under the influence of the urban elite illiterate civilizations of lower Mesopotamia the writing systems here is a example of the full-blown Kunia form system from Babylon and a letter from Kota pay which is a merchant community of Assyrians people from Mesopotamia in what is now Turkey bringing writing to that region because they set up a quorum or trade community in order to facilitate trade from turkey from Central Asia Minor to the river Valley cities of Nineveh and a Shore that is the cities of northern Iraq if anyone is familiar with living in river valleys I'm just curious has anyone from the New Orleans area or southern Louisiana its muck man is trying to draw a division between Earth and water that doesn't exist I can say that even before Hurricane Katrina I've having lived there many years and the there are no July geologists in New Orleans because there's no rocks to study and the result is when you live in river valleys and you build cities like this the River Valley gives you an enormous amount of abundance but it also exacts a very high toll in death rates eye diseases fevers so there's a constant need to replenish the population by bringing in new comers it also lacks many important items in a higher level civilization such as metals wood stone all of this has to be imported so by the creation of cities in the river valleys you have generated long-distance trade which becomes a significant part of sustaining these urban civilizations and to record and understand that trade writing is invented it's not invented to write great poetry it's not invented to write history it's essentially invented to keep records and the earliest writing system was exactly and in time it evolved into the kind of high literature we associate with writing today and that was a process that occurred between 3500 and 2800 BC and Sumer it's roughly contemporary in Egypt oh that's a very contentious issue as to how the hieroglyphs turned into a writing system it seems to be somewhat later than sumar and there's a debate whether it's independent or the idea of writing was influenced from Sumar I've come out thinking about it on both sides of the issue I don't know what I believe anymore it's it's it's it's it's difficult to tell because of the nature of Egyptian archaeology in any case the writing system also sets a standard which I always tell my students why they're learning all this stuff the Cimmerian set the standard that he who knows how to write and research runs the civilization and everyone else does the grunt work and you should use that with your students when they're asking why do I need to learn this well the rules haven't changed not since the Sumerians set up literacy is the passport to advancement it also sees the emergence of powerful monarchies I give an example of Sargon the first clunker we know of and Hammurabi who stands at the end of those early territorial empires and this is his great steal a in the Louvre which are his two hundred and something like sixty two laws if I remember correctly which are recorded to act as a system for royal officials to adjudicate cases this is the first law code that has come down to us intact they're clearly earlier ones that we've found in fragments but this one is the culmination of a long legal tradition and it was written in the spoken language at the time Akkadian it was not an academic exercise it clearly was intended to be used Egypt is the other River Valley civilization its agricultural developments and origins of hieroglyphics go back to about the same time you see the development of writings and cities in in lower Mesopotamia the Egyptians the ancestors the Egyptians have been in the Nile Valley for a very long time probably moving in there as early as 7000 BC as the Sahara started to dry up and you see evolution to more sophisticated farming and then Egypt takes a very different turn from Sumer Sumer you move from villages to towns to cities quite rapidly Egypt has a series of village communities linked by the Nile some 600 miles in length it has a sort of homogeneous sense of itself the population whatever their origins were thought of themselves as Egyptians as a single unique race and all of a sudden in 3100 BC they jumped from villages to effectively a kingdom the two lands are united by nama and with that there is the building of a great capital at Memphis the ancient equivalent of Cairo and from that point on the norm in Egyptian history is unity you have a kingdom that can move as a single civilization a way that you never have in Mesopotamia in Mesopotamia it's a constant struggle to unite and create territorial empires you need to build bureaucracies legal systems armies in early Egypt you don't have that problem the Pharaoh is put at the center of the civilization as a God King and clearly by dynasty three and the the history of Egypt is arranged by dynasties by the old kingdom they are clearly God's living gods who can consolidate the various cults and rituals and undertake the unbelievable building programs of the pyramids this order breaks up because of Imperial internal reasons but Egypt is then reassembled in a Middle Kingdom which in many ways represents a a improvement on the ruling of the Pharaohs who bureaucratic institutions you get the first imperial expansion particularly in the northern Sudan and what is called Nubia and this order is toppled by an outside invasion the Hyksos and while the Hicks sauce bringing into the Middle Kingdom it simply galvanizes the Egyptian populations in the upper or southern part of Egypt to drive out the Hyksos and recreate the Imperial Order of Egypt which then goes out and launches an incredible period of expansion and creates an empire in Asia so when you look at the narrative of Egyptian history you see a pattern similar initially to what you had in Mesopotamia but the creation of this unified homogeneous civilization which has a real sense of itself and always can assimilate Outsiders it too saw the triumphs in farming one of the significant points about the plants and animals in the Nile Valley they had been brought in by people from the Middle East at some point very early cattle sheep barley wheat had probably been domesticated in what is now southeastern Turkey and the Levant and at the time it was easy to cross the Sinai there's constant movement back and forth across the Sinai and by 3100 BC these animals and domesticated plants had long been established in the Nile Valley I showed the normal palette to give you this was a ceremonial symbol that was mounted on a pole for the first Pharaoh of Egypt it shows him wearing the crown of Upper Egypt where it was from from the south and then after his triumph wearing the crown of Lower Egypt and they always thought of the Pharaoh of the two kingdoms represented by two goddesses and iconography and a unified realm the Pharaohs of course had by the third dynasty had been so closely associated with the gods we use the term Pharaoh which is a Hebrew rendition of he who dwells in the great house you generally didn't use the name of the Pharaoh because it was too sacred he actually had five different names that you use in different rituals and as all Egyptians eventually were conceived to have he had a spark of life a personality within the body and this is what the CAW is what one and join the gods the BA is what rests in the tomb and for the two to interact in the Otherworld you must maintain the BA in the tomb and when you destroy the BA you essentially destroy the COFF and that's the whole purpose of pyramids is to provide the proper royal burial the Pharaoh was also associated with the attributes attributes of the god Ptah the god of wisdom intelligence authoritative word the pharaoh word the Pharaoh speaks law takes place the law is ordered just as in what little we have of a creationist of Egypt there's a constant notion of an eternal order once the gods conceive and speak of it it comes to be the same powers our tribute to the Pharaoh and above all Mart and justice which becomes one of the great attributes of Pharaoh's especially in the Middle Kingdom so this is the intellectual and religious beliefs behind the construction of the Great Pyramids which are one of the great architectural achievements of the early of really anywhere on the globe it is a massive construction these are the Pyramids of Giza along with additional complexes and you have to realize that the pair that the main tomb was part of a whole complex of subsidiary tombs and temples and rites that continued to move informed to the Pharaoh after his death there was a third River Valley Civilisation which they're still studying and that is sometimes called the Indus Valley Civilisation I like to call it Melua that was the name apparently given to it by people from Mesopotamia who traded with it archeology is now demonstrated a similar pattern early origins of urbanism with villages domestication of animals moving into high civilization and trade and some kind of literacy unfortunately is less than 2000 of these stamped seals and inscriptions we don't know what language they spoke and we can't read the tablets we're in the dark there's been a number of proposals best guess is it's somehow related to Dravidian languages of South India today it peaks at approximately the time of the middle Bronze Age contemporary with Middle Kingdom Old Kingdom Middle Kingdom Egypt with the Akkadian Empire and the Sumerian empires it goes into what we think is a decline and clearly the civilization was never a single political unit those of you familiar with Indian history know that there's two great river valley systems one is the Ganges the other is the induce and very rarely in Indian history have they been United in a great Imperial order it's only very late that that unity really comes to be effective with the moguls and then the British Raj and the the suspicion is that this area was this the civilization was always always broken up into a series of political orders and we really can't understand how did it how did Orban ISM just decline and fall apart over this long period and it is in that period that the ancestors of the people who brought Sanskrit and we use the term indo-aryan to describe them migrated into India and eventually will revive literate urban civilization it'll be an alphabetic system it'll be a very different religious system as far as we can tell we call it Vedic India or the the bacha that is the notions of caste and that will come to define Indian civilization and its connection with this earlier urban civilization is still considerably understood under way in study I will be glad to talk about that more individually with people of what my thoughts are it's it's quite controversial and again it's complicated by the fact that we can't read anything we cannot read that script which would provide at least some information and what we have is probably inventories and ownership seals we don't have continuous texts and I suspect they existed but they were written probably on palm paper has anyone ever seen that I'm just curious it was you have you in India it's it's it's very commonly used in India before the advent of paper under the moguls and it's incredibly fragile I've seen it on various okay it doesn't hold up well particularly in in tropical climates it just disintegrates my suspicion is the records were kept on something like that and that's why they haven't come down to us it was not in the illiterate civilization it's just that the writing hasn't survived here's an idea of the scope of where what it covers it covers the induce it now excavations have shown that Gujarat was included and particularly the upper Ganges and the region between the upper Ganges and the the land of the five rivers the ad is the great tributaries of the induce the Punjab and that region is known as the DOE AAB the do a B this is the cockpit of Indian civilization and in the later period it seems to have broken up here's an example of the building at one of their major sites mohenjo-daro and examples of the writing I spoke of as well as one of the few statues that have come of apparently a priest King it clearly breaks up into differentiated material cultures what this represents linguistically and politically we don't know and eventually it is replaced by a new or in the early iron age which shifts the whole balance into the Ganges and the doe op and that is to be associated with the arrival of the indo-aryans and the bringing of the language that evolves into classic Sanskrit and the traditions of India we have today including cashed those are our three River Valley civilizations in the Near East I mentioned briefly at the start of this lecture that it is the first river valley civilization that seems to have the greatest influence in extending urban literate culture this is very true in the Levant there have been important excavations at abla and lugar it which is today in Syria we have variety of people her Ian's Canaanites Amma writes the second two are Semitic speakers the hurryin speak a language that has no relationship but again because of grammars and dictionaries were able to read this and the Guerette fellows are very important because they begin to simplify the cuneiform writing system into a syllabary that is moving from 700 to 800 symbols to down to around 90 to 100 and this is again for record-keeping Fuger it is on the met rannian it's in trade with egypt it's on the routes leading to lower Mesopotamia it's in contact with Asia Minor a bla is farther inland this was a major site in the Bronze Age and one of the first cities in Syria to attain high literate civilization it was excavated by the Italians starting in the 1960s both of these sites have verified that in the middle Bronze Age period we see the extension of literate urban civilization the other area that's also brought into this orbit is the Aegean world the origins of Greek civilization that includes the Minoan civilization on Crete which sees the development of a syllabary and what is important with Crete the first significant development of Seabourn Commerce in Minoan Crete is born the essentially the Metro a nyan seaborne trade these are the people who set some of the basic fundamentals of later Greek civilization and they transmit their cultural heritage to newcomers in the mainland Greek speakers who are believed to arrive somewhere between 2000 and 1900 BC and that leads to development of palaces on the mainland the creation of a new writing system and these Greeks sometimes called Kean's or Mycenaeans take over Minoan Crete and then begin to expand their commerce through the Metro a nyan world and the archaeological evidence shows these early Greeks active in a wide circle this is the original trade cultural zone of Conesus the capital of Minoan Crete and that is then you can see the sailing distances here to give you how easy it is to sail around and and that becomes the basis for the Metro Indian trade which rests on dry farming techniques unlike the River Valley civilizations in the Metro a nyan world you cultivate the olive the vine and grains these are inter cultivated and you depend on winter rains to nourish the grains the grains are then harvested in May and June depending on conditions it is very different you don't have the kind of pooling of Labor in the Indus Valley in Sumar in Egypt and you get a very very different pattern of villages and agriculture that type of farming in order to sustain the palaces you see in Bronze Age Greece requires the development of Seabourn commerce some of our earliest depictions of ships in the met reign Ian come from Minoan civilization this is from Akrotiri on the island of thira as a Santorini as what is called today has anyone ever been there have you it was a it was a volcano that blew up around 1550 or 1600 BC and sank about 3/4 of the island and on it was a Minoan colony it's it's only about a sailing little over a day sailing from Conesus from Crete and the result was the burial of a Minoan settlement with all these marvellous frescoes that show already a great variety of ships warships commercial ships that were available to the Minoans of Crete that gave them the their so-called thala sokrati or sea power in the Aegean which was then extended by the Greeks who came in and took over this civilization two things should be kept in mind there are two scripts linear a linear B the Minoans invented the writing because they develop cities and Seabourn commerce by 2100 BC they have a writing system it's probably a celebrate and it was probably inspired by writing systems that you had in the Levant in Syria that writing system was then taken over by the newcomers of the mainland who were Greek speakers that's called linear B and I don't know how many of you are familiar with it that was deciphered back in 1953 by a man named Michael Ventris a British cryptologist in the second world war who assumed that the syllables represented Greek values substituted in based on the way he broke German codes in the Second World War and presto linear B is Greek it is a form of Greek that eventually evolved into what we call East Greek or ionic Greek in the Classical Age and so the Minoans in effect taught the people who eventually would be the ancestors of the classical Greeks writing Seabourn commerce and that close contact with the Near East looking at early Bronze Age civilization in Greece is actually looking at a adaptation and extension of civilization of the Near East and in many ways it's social values its organization of society wouldn't be that too different from say Babylon it would be much smaller it wouldn't be as impressive but we suspect that the structures of kings the bureaucracies the lawyers support of these monarchies would be similar the difference was it was built on Seabourn Commerce and naval power these are examples of the writings that have come down to us linear B this is a stirrup jar that's used to export perfumed oil and the Minoans are really pioneered the idea of importing raw materials metals Cotton's or ivories and exporting high finished premium goods that's clearly what's going on in the trade connections this gives you a of the extent of the networks by the middle Bronze Age by 1500 BC Greek trade has extended all the way to the Western Med is very very closely linked to what's going on in the Near East and as I say there's considerable influence coming in from Egypt and from the cities of the Levant these early Greeks are also clashing with the Hittite Empire we'll get to in a minute that organizes the first great state in Asia Minor in Asia Minor if anyone has travelled to the plateau of Turkey today Anatolia as its called civilization develops much later with the arrival of the speakers of languages that lead to classic hittite and it very much depends on trade contacts with Mesopotamia I showed you one of the early Kunia form tablets from cool tempeh and starting from 1600 BC down to 1200 BC a series of Kings unites the Anatolian plateau and build up an imperial order which has got maybe a third of the population as Egypt and is able to fight the Egyptian pharaohs to a standstill it is a remarkable case of organization this is what the Hittite Empire looks like at its greatest height it covers this area largely it is a collection of vassal Kings and it could be understood in two ways first it has taken the civilization of the Near East and transplanted it and infused it to create a new urban civilization in Asia Minor for the first time and second its political power rested in bringing the areas of western and southern Asia Minor under control and then marching these vassals and allies into the Near East to conquer the more civilized areas of Mesopotamia and Syria that random head-on into the Egyptian Empire this is an example of the Citadel at hakushi oz the great capital excavations proved it was now a ritual City the massive wall constructions have been reconstructed by the German team and it is a city of numerous temples and the way the Hittite monarch kept power is to relocate all the cults of this diverse Empire vassal states within the great capital to shots today known as Bosco in Turkish or Bosco leg as they elevated the term and above all the great chambers at use allah kiya which are the funerary burials of the late hittite kings showing all the gods in procession and the King in the company of the gods this is the God shoroma and it is believed that the Hittite monarchs had amassed enough power and wealth within Asia Minor to try to approximate the kind of power the Pharaoh in Egypt had they were in competition with the Egyptian Empire this is what the political order looks like by the middle Bronze Age a Hittite Empire extending its control to the west to the southeast an Egyptian Empire that expelled its invaders and has taken over much of the Levant and the main clashes are between the Hittites and the Egyptians and those clashes probably contribute to the collapse of the Bronze Age Imperial water this is just a quick chronology for later Egypt and this is what most of your students are familiar with outside of the pyramids Queen Hatshepsut the first rule we know of to rule in her own right a female as pharaoh thutmose the third often called the Napoleon of the Near East my favorite wacky Pharaoh Akhenaten did he pervert or did he actually represent the epitome of veronik power a solar monotheists and of course ramasees ii noted for his very long reign and his ability to put his name on everyone's previous monuments to exalt himself one of the great PR pharaohs of all time here's an example of Hatshepsut with feminine features but here she is represented as pharaoh with the ritual beard she ruled as pharaoh that represented a Chipman of Egyptian civilization that she had the dynastic credentials and the bureaucracy and army behind her to rule effectively as Pharaoh a testimony to the facilitation and success of the Egyptian Imperial Order this Egyptian Imperial Order takes quite a different change from earlier orders in Egypt of the middle and old Kingdom the Pharaoh is represented in combat frequently here's Tut most the third smiting the Asiatics at Megiddo it also sees a religious revolution by the pharaoh akhenaten who abolished the cults in year two and worshipped the Sun as the sole God in a solar monotheism that represented a veritable religious revolution and resulted in a construction of a new capital at the modern site of tell our mana and the neglect of the empires it turned out because while the Pharaoh is busy with his religious reforms the Hittites are gobbling up Egyptian Syria the failure of that monotheistic Creed leads to the restoration of an effective dynasty 1819 and Rama sees the second who is able to recover a part of the Empire from the Hittites and the two Imperial orders sign a remarkable treaty and 1250 7th BC it is a treaty that recognizes the territorial boundaries and if you go to the UN today you will see a copy of it in front of the UN building because it was a regulation representing the reality that the Hittites controlled this region the pharaoh of this region and that the cost of war was such that it was worthwhile to the two Imperial orders to come to a diplomatic solution and essentially create ways of working out disputes rather than just going to war it is a remarkable achievement for the Late Bronze Age there are scholars who are now working on the kind of diplomatic correspondence that went on in the Late Bronze Age and there are several books that can be recommended on that topic right now one of the book that came out recently known as the brother Kings which I highly recommend as an introduction this order broke up again it's still under reconsideration this brought to an end the first period of ancient history that is the Bronze Age it sees migrations out of the Balkans that disrupt the Hittite Empire it sees my cease migrations into the Greek world that triggers people push it out of the Greek world to the shores of the Levant shattering Egyptian control of the Levant people's in Libya today also get involved in this movement to move into the Nile Valley and what happens is the great Imperial orders disappear and in the regions where civilization had been extended in the middle and late bronze age in Asia Minor in Greece in the Levant not only is there a breakdown in urban civilization there's a loss of literacy in Egypt and southern Mesopotamia they lose their empires but they retain the cities and literacy their uniform systems hold out or hieroglyphics there is continuity across the Bronze Age into the Iron Age but in all these other areas there's a disruption and break in continuity and you can essentially really trace the changes based on who uses an alphabet and who doesn't those using alphabetic systems got the worst of the Bronze Age collapse those that retain the older writing systems got through culturally and that's a simplified way of looking at what happened to the first period of ancient history there's a lot of theories about why it took place one of them is changes in military technology that is the great Imperial orders depended on great chariot armies that proved very expensive to supplement it they began to hire different types of frontier peoples who had superior fighting skills and weapons examples of this are shown by the new types of slashing swords open order tactics that negated chariot armies and one on one argument is that and again it's only part of the explanation in my opinion it's the same thing that happened with the Roman Empire you use the frontier peoples who are a mix of your own peoples and barbarians to take on defense and eventually the frontier goes into business for itself that's clearly what happens in the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD at least the Western Empire we suspect that was one of the events going on in the Bronze Age another would be if we knew what the finances were to maintain the expensive monarchies building ceremonial cost military cost there's been speculation on climate change there's been speculation on demographics it's still it's still an issue under study but a number of factors came together that undermined those early urban literate civilizations and created a very new order in the Near East in the Levant we see the emergence of three new important peoples Phoenicians ah remains and Hebrews these are Semitic speakers Phoenicians well known for creating the alphabet and also for conducting the reopening of the Metro a nian trade routes that had collapsed and the establishment of colonies in the western met the arameans brought in the camel the development of Caravan trades but above all the Hebrews emerged as the the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah which sees the development of Jewish monotheism and it's a whole interesting question in itself how do we go from here OU's to Jews that is how do you go from a religion that was associated with an ethnic group in a specific area to a religion or monotheism that is detached from its area and can be worshipped anywhere this is a breakdown of what Christians would call the Old Testament and it really sees a codification of these traditions in the late I own age and above all the Babylonian captivity the capture of the city by King Nebuchadnezzar and the deportation of the Jewish literate upper classes to Babylon who put these traditions together and stress the monotheistic worship of yahwah and you move essentially from the worship of the temple to the worship of the synagogue of course they're later restored by cyrus the great and that sees the codification and development of Hebrew texts Judaism is born so those are three of the new peoples that come out of the collapse of the Bronze Age the other are serious Imperial orders the Assyrian Empire the first and most successful gets a bad rep they were brutal and bloodthirsty in many ways but they're also very successful and they're the first Imperial Order in the Near East in over four centuries they set many of the institutions that allow you to build later empires that follow the neo-babylonian the ones that knocked over Judah and above all the Persian Empire which is the great summation of Near Eastern empires by 500 BC all of the river valleys the induce the Tigris Euphrates the Nile are in the hands of a single great king of Persia it is organized into a series of provinces and say trapeze that represents one of the most successful middle-eastern orders that we've seen today and in many ways the basis for the later susannah need Empire and the various Muslim Caliphate to follow this is the Imperial result of the breakdown of the bronze age this is an example from Persepolis of the great king receiving tribute there was however another civilization that comes up and that's Greece the Greek world is divided into two axes one is the Peloponnesus here on central Greece that looks west the other is Athens in the Aegean which looks north and southeast if you keep that in mind you have the dichotomy of Sparta and Athens right there represented in its economic and cultural divisions I'll talk more about the Greek state at war but you can basically understand the Greek world from the Bronze Age and the arrival the first Greek speakers where it's really part of the Near East it suffers perhaps the worst of the Dark Age collapse it realizations in the so-called archaic period it repels a Persian invasion that leads the Classical Age the conquest of Alexander and then the Hellenistic age this is the formative period here the archaic age sees the Greeks become Greeks or Helene's the Classical Age brings it to its epitome the Hellenistic age represents the extension of Greek civilization to the Near East we call it Hellenistic it's the costs in Greek means like it's Greek like it represents a fusion of Greek and Near Eastern traditions into a new civilization or series of related civilizations you can see that is broken up into various dialects and patterns there was never a United Greek world and once teaching Greek in Roman history I always find that with American students at least Greek history is sometimes a little difficult you're dealing with the history of many different cities it's like trying to understand the history of Europe but when you're studying Roman history Americans like it first the Romans are tacky obnoxious we identify at least come from New York so identify with that immediately second is that it starts out small and sends up being really big which Americans also like and that's one way of understanding these two classical civilizations that came out of that Bronze Age tradition in the so-called iron age or the Classical Age the Greeks also you also must keep in mind that Greek civilization in the Classical period was met Iranian it isn't just the modern kingdom of Greece and had spread around the Metro a nion world on all of its shores with the exception here in North Africa where Phoenicians had settled carthage and in the eastern tip of sicily which would lead to a series of wars between greeks and Carthage the civilization also was rooted in a very different concept of law let me just well on that for a moment this comes from demosthenes the whole life of Athenians whether they dwell in large state a polis or small one is governed by the Nate by nature fuzes is the greek word and by the laws nor moy laws mean laws passed by the citizens of these nature is something irregular and incalculable and peculiar to each individual but the laws are something universal definite and the same for all now nature if it is evil often chooses wrong and that is why you will find men of an evil nature committing errors but the laws desire what is just an honorable and salutary they seek for it and when they find it they set it forth as a general commandment equal and identical to all the law is that which all men ought to believe in many respects but above all because every law is an invention and gift of the gods well the same you would find in Hammurabi's code a tenant of wise men bit contradictory to the first but the monsters is a politician not a philosopher he's trying to win a legal case with this oration and a correction of errors voluntary and involuntary very new interesting concept and a general covenant of the whole state in accordance which all men in that state ought to regulate their lives for there are two objects men of Athens for which all laws are framed to deter any man from doing what is wrong and by punishing the transgressor to make the rest better men this is a change Greek civilization has emerged with civic traditions that's what marks it different from its Near Eastern tradition and it's what sets in motion the intellectual thoughts of Western civilization down to today you can just read the Code of Hammurabi in in as a juxtaposition in which law is issued by Hammurabi as a justice is the gift of the gods it's an interesting comparison to make you can draw many others the result is Greeks do not organize as monarchies they do not have bureaucracies and professional armies in fact they are saved by their poverty they evolved into a executive branch's from a very weak King a council and the so called assembly of citizens who vote and this leads into different types of governments of aristocracy oligarchy tamaak recei and eventually democracy the city-state is known as a polis which is more than just a city in an economic center it is also a political community by which the Greeks identify themselves and in many ways we look at Greek civilization and cultural achievements and we feel a kinship but in two ways it's one very profound way actually it's very distinct citizenship ultimately remained that of birth you could not become a citizenship by naturalization that would be a Roman concept and the result would be you get the emergence of Alliance structures the Peloponnesian League and the Athenian League the Delian League the Athenian Empire I'll talk about greater detail and those two leagues go at it to struggle for the hegemony of Greece and they cannot expand their citizenship and the result is the Greek cities fall under the control of the Macedonian Kings and the Macedonian Kings will then take the resources of Greece in their Kingdom under the genius of Alexander the Great and in six years conquer the Persian Empire and one the most spectacular set of commands the battles and one of the greatest commanders of all time and open to the near East now to Greek civilization his successors who divided up the Empire sponsored Greek cities across the Near East and resulted in the construction of Hellenic cities here's an example coming from what is now in Afghanistan excavated by a french team and it reverses the relationship of the greek world-- to the near east up until Alexander the Greek world is receiving so much from the Neri after Alexander the trend is in the other direction although you have to stress there's a great deal of interaction in fusion between the Greeks and the indigenous populations of the Near East that brings us to the Greek world and I have going on a bit too long about these early civilizations but let me just quickly orient you on the Roman world there's two things you need to know about the Roman Republic first its constitutional developments it is extraordinary in that it evolved concepts beyond the Greek world where citizenship can be extended you can assimilate people to the Romans our Republic is based ultimately on a Roman month naturalization would make sense to the Romans it doesn't make sense to the Greeks and that allowed the Romans to think of citizenship here's an example of Rome in Italy at the beginning of the just before the Romans begin to move overseas there is Roman territory of full Romans there are people with Latin status who have sort of an intermediate citizenship they are independent but they speak Latin they're regarded as kindred people some some people claim they're the canadiens of the Roman Republic the other is a various Italian allies so key and here you have Roman citizens some without the suffrage that's a special category Latin allies Italian allies based on their own counting this is the military manpower they are capable of mobilizing in 226 BC 800,000 men a Greek city-state is lucky if it has 5000 most great empires fielding armies run 35 40,000 the Romans can put on the battlefield some 800,000 trained men now they can't do it all the time the Roman Republic is remarkable it has all of the civic patriotism we associate with Greek city-states and we associate with later Italian city-states in Italy when it has the burek of the power of a bureaucratic Near Eastern monarchy and that is because the Romans not any brilliant philosophical conclusion by the practical need that they needed to supplement their citizen power were able to think of handing out citizenship and alliances and bits and pieces and eventually assimilating people into the Roman body politic and that would ultimately end in a a decree in 212 ad in the Roman Empire when citizenship is extended to all free residents of the Roman world if you spoke Latin wore a toga and thought Roman you are now Roman and that becomes a marked feature of Roman civilization which often makes it very attractive to Americans to study the result of this manpower is awesome the Romans are able to conquer the metro rain e'en world in the late Republic this just gives you a sense of mobilization figures and ends up uniting the metro Radian world for the first and only time and it leads to enormous amount of wealth importation of you can see the growth in the population of the city of Rome the development of a slave Society and South Italy of all these conquered people's to develop commercial farming it leads to a breakdown of the Roman Republic first a series of reforms attempting to reform the state from 133 to 91 that fail and then finally a series of civil wars that leads to the emergence of great commanders known as Imperator Marius sulla clumpy Caesar and ultimately Caesar's heir Octavian and the creation of a Roman monarchy that monarchy the Principate however is very peculiar it is a monarchy here's the Roman Empire it's it's height which is standard public and it is one of the strangest monarchies on record because the Roman Emperor is not a king by law he holds a series of powers that enables him to get things done to maintain a professional army on the frontiers to preside over an economic boom in the Mediterranean world that would have no equal until really the 18th and 19th century but in the end he was a magistrate and he had to conduct himself as a magistrate and the upper classes that wrote the histories in the literature that have come down to us for the first two centuries of the Roman Empire essentially hated the monarchy and nostalgically looked back to the Republic and in a strange way that Civic ideal was passed from the Roman Empire to later European civilization my time is running out and I would like to just close with this anecdote of what the Roman Emperor is like there's a story that's told of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius any of you have seen the movie Gladiator he is the good Emperor at the start who's the British actor who plays him I forget Richard plane will come to me Richard Harris and he has done in by his evil son come Commodus and the movie proceeds from there it's all fictional Marcus Aurelius probably died of natural causes but his son was an unworthy heir Marcus Aurelius styled himself as a philosopher and he very much believed that the emperor should rule in this tradition by example not by by by command that you still paid homage to those civic traditions at least for the ruling classes and the story is told of him riding on a country road in Italy an Italian peasant woman Flags him down with a petition Emperor Emperor I have a petition and Marcus Aurelius says I'm too busy and she yells back stop being Emperor and Marcus Aurelius stops gets off sits under a tree and it is capacity as a Tribune of the plebeians that is a magistrate with legislative powers says citizen what is your complaint and that is the essence of the late role of the Roman monarchy and a good point to end this run down through the ancient world so

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 239,049

Rating: 4.6025643 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, Ancient, PIER, City, Cities, Mesopotamia, Kenneth, Harl, Teaching, Teachers, Introduction, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Institute, History, Kenneth Harl, ancient cities

Id: 0EKk_pjr2hw

Length: 70min 34sec (4234 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2016