Why study Ancient Mesopotamia?

Why is it interesting and important?

Here’s one answer…

Why were Europeans able to conquer the Australian Aborigines?

Why were Europeans able to conquer the Australian Aborigines?

Why are the Americas dominated by people of European descent?

Why is Africa recovering from European colonialism of the 19th and

20th centuries?

Proximate Causes

• Superior technology?

• Germs

But why did the Europeans have these advantages?

Guns, Germs and SteelJared Diamond (1999)

Ultimate Cause = Food Production

Food production is more productive than hunter-gathering

“… one acre can feed many more herders and farmers - typically, 10 to 100 times

more – than hunter-gatherers.”(Diamond 1999: 88)

Therefore, food production increases population.

Domestic animals:

meatmilkfertilizerplows

Therefore, food production increases population.

Shorter birth interval

• Food production requires sedentary lifestyle

• Hunter-gatherer mother can’t give birth until last baby can walk and keep up with mobile tribe. Children typically spaced by about four years.

• This constraint doesn’t apply to sedentary people – birth interval usually much smaller.

Therefore, food production increases population.

Clothing and Goods

• “Crops and livestock yield natural fibers for making clothing, blankets, nets, and rope.” (Diamond 1999: 90)

- Cotton- Flax- Hemp- Wool- Silk- Bones- Leather

Transport• “Big mammals further revolutionized human

society by becoming our main means of land transport until the development of railroads in the 19th century. Before animal domestication, the sole means of transporting goods and people by land was on the backs of humans. Large mammals changed that: for the first time in human history, it became possible to move heavy goods in large quantities, as well as people, rapidly overland for long distances.”(Diamond 1999: 91)

Food production leads to:

• Technology • Literacy• Centralised government • Germs

Technology

• Food production creates a surplus.

• Sedentary lifestyle, required by food production, allows storage of surpluses

• Some members of the community can specialise in other activities: eg, pottery, metallurgy, weaving, writing, ruling, war

Technology

• The sedentary lifestyle required by farming makes technological development feasible (it’s just not viable to acquire and possess a large amount of material goods when you’re nomadic). Eg. Clay fired figurines and weaving in Czechoslovakia 27000 years ago.

• Also: proximity to other peoples

Centralised Government

• “[Typically]… large or dense populations arise only under conditions of food production…”

• Large populations tend to lead to centralised governemnt: conflict between unrelated strangers; impossibility of communal decision making; redistribution;

Literacy

• “Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes.” (Diamond 1999: 236)

• Independent invention of writing – Sumer, Mexico and China (?)

Germs

• Diamond, p. 195