Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by
R.J. Forbes
When the higher lands of the Near East began drying up with the great clima
tic changes caused by the end of the last Ice Age (from about 60,000-10,000 B.C.
), the population of this area was driven from the once fertile land which is no
w the Sahara Desert and from the barren highlands of Iran and Arabia into the
river valleys. By 3000 B.C. urban civilizations, dependent on agriculture and
coincident with the development of metallurgy, had begun to arise in the river v
alleys. The earliest of these were in Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in th
e valleys of the Nile and the Twin Rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, respectively, a
lthough somewhat later similar cities sprang up farther east in the Indus Rive
r Valley (India) and in that of the Yellow River River (China).
Once established in the valleys the peoples of both Egypt and Mesopotamia f
ound it necessary too wage an annual war against the floods of the great rivers.
In meeting this overwhelming need, each civilization developed social and poli
tical systems tailored to the technological necessity of survival. Because of
differences in the geographic environment and because the flooding habi
ts of the Nile differed from those of the Tigris-Euphrates, these two societie
s developed differing technologies, and it is not surprising that their politic
al and social systems also differed considerably. So too did the underlying
social attitudes of these regions differ. The people inhabiting the Mesopot
amia area were pessimistic in philosophy, and in great fear of demons and ev
il spirits; the Egyptians, instead of being morbidly concerned with death and
the after-life (as some Greek authors of Classical antiquity would mislead us i
nto believing), actually loved the good things in life, which they wanted
to enjoy beyond the grave, but without such unpleasant things as taxes and
manual labor. These cultural differences were undoubtedly related to the mat
erial differences between these two peoples.
LEARNING
In both Egypt and Mesopotamia the only form of education was the temple school,
where those who were to become clerks, officials, and priests learned to read
and write. Later they were initiated into the various fields of knowledge and b
ecame the class of "scribes," looked upon with awe by the common people. I
n both countries pupils were taught the "order of things as established by th
e gods in the beginning," in the form of the word lists previously describe
d. These schools taught their pupils the religious mysteries and other suc
h knowledge restricted to this elite group. Mathematics consisted mainly of si
mple computations involving the conversion of standard measures or weights and
the calculation of areas and volumes of various geometrical figures and bodies
, such as the volume of earth needed to build a dike or the area of a piece of
land. These were subjects of value to technicians, and we know that the
officials who surveyed engineering works often had been pupils in such
schools. On occasion technical projects were submitted to the scrutiny and
advice of learned bodies of priests who formed advisory boards in the towns of
Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was only on these infrequent occasions that cr
aftsmen had contact with the learning accumulated and transmitted in the temple
schools. Thus at the very beginning of history, science and technology develo
ped along separate lines with but little contact between the scholarly, cler
ical caste and the workaday world of the craftsmen.
Outside the great river valleys, in hilly countries like Palestine and
Syria, terrace irrigation was practised on a modest scale, the water usually b
eing derived from dammed brooks or rivulets. In more mountainous regions, t
he inhabitants tapped the water in the foothills of the mountain ranges by
driving horizontal tunnels into the hillsides, using vertical shafts for vent
ilation and inspection purposes. Such tunnel channels, the ancestors of aque
ducts, are still constructed and used in Iran and Armenia.
TRANSPORTATION
Transportation of farm products and other materials was mainly by water, for mo
ving bulky goods by land still constituted a major problem. Although wheeled v
ehicles were known to have been used by 3000 B.C., their wheels were solid and
rimmed with nails or strips of leather. Not until a thousand years later di
d spoked wheels and lighter wagons begin to appear. War chariots drawn by oxen
had for some time conveyed warriors to the battlefield where they then fought
on foot, but the light war chariot which now came into use was differently
used. Drawn by the horse, it became a new arm of the military, and the
charge of these earliest "tanks" created a new strategy. The Egyptian a
rmies adopted the horse-drawn war chariot about 1500 B.C.
War chariots did not affect land transport, largely because there were no
properly constructed roads of any length. Few city streets were paved, the maj
or exceptions being those connecting the city-temple with the summer-temple o
f the god outside the city walls. These processional roads sometimes had r
uts hewn into the pavement stones to guide the carts bearing the statues of
the gods. Such special tracks or roads were known in prehistoric Europ
e, too. Most traffic, whether of goods in wagons or on the backs of pack
animals, tended to lead to the nearest water, which carried the long-dist
ance transport, a situation which existed in most parts of the West until the
18th or 19th century. The taming of the camel (c. 1000 B.C.) made the crossing
of deserts possible, thus opening a shorter route from Mesopotamia to Palesti
ne and Egypt. Not until the later Persian Empire, with its centralizing tend
encies, was there a proper concern for roads. At that later date also, ela
borate bridges were built along with road stations (with garrisons of soldier
s and reserve horses for the postal express) and a chain of fire-signal tower
s. These transportation improvements were short lived, however, disappear
ing with the decline of the ancient Persian Empire.
River transport of the Nile was relatively simple. Because of the scarcit
y of timber, which had to be imported from Lebanon or beyond, ship-building sta
rted with canoes and rafts made of bundles of reeds, which evolved into large
r boats. Ships were constructed with small wooden planks, on the model of t
he reed boat, and moved up the Nile with square sails stepped forward on a two
-legged mast required by the rather unstable construction of the frameless hull.
In Mesopotamia, the skin-float (a raft made of hides stretched over a wood fr
ame) and the quffa(tm) (or coracle, a broad and short boat made of waterproof m
aterial stretched over a wicker or light wood frame) dominated the river traf
fic, as both forms of boats were light and portable and could be carried back
upstream by pack animals. Such ships were not fit to sail the seas, however,
and sea transport was mainly in the hands of Cretans and Phoenicians who buil
t plank ships, evolved from the dug-out canoe. Such ships could sail the
Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea with little difficulty.
METALLURGY
Many of the techniques used in quarrying and dressing stone were made possible o
nly through the development of metallurgy. At an early stage man discovered and
collected such native metals as copper, gold, silver, and meteoric iron. At
first he treated them simply as colored stones for ornamentation; then he
realized that they could not only be cut, hammered, and ground to shape like
other stones, but could also be melted and cast in predetermined shapes as wel
l. By experimenting with the blue and green colored stones (ores) often associa
ted with native copper, man found that these could be smelted with charcoal t
o yield molten metal. Still other ores when smelted yielded lead, silve
r, antimony, and tin. Further, several of these could be smelted with unre
fined copper or, later, alloyed with molten copper, to produce an "improve
d" copper: bronze, which was stronger and possessed other special properties
which made tools and weapons superior to the older devices fashioned of stone
and wood. The Bronze Age, which lasted from about 3000 B.C. until about 100
0 B.C. in Egypt and Mesopotamia, used a metallurgy depending mainly on casti
ng and alloying.
The later coming of iron meant the mastering of a completely new set of t
echniques, for the smelting of iron ores did not yield a molten metal but
rather a spongy mass of slag and droplets of iron later called a bloom. Th
is, in turn, had to be reheated and hammered for some length of time to expel im
purities and produce a compact mass of wrought iron. This substance had the p
roperties of a metal, though its melting point was too high for the metallurgic
al furnaces in use in those days. Even though wrought iron was inferior to goo
d bronze for most purposes, by heating it in a charcoal fire and hammering, th
e surface could be made to absorb carbon particles and take on the properties
of steel. The hardness of this "steeled" surface could be adjusted by quenchi
ng in water and tempering (that is, bringing it to the required hardness by hea
ting and then suddenly cooling it), but these were techniques not yet proper
ly mastered in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Instead, discovery of steel-making was
made in the Armenian highlands by the tribe of the Chalybes, and the Greeks we
re to derive their word for steel from the name of this tribe.
OTHER CRAFTS
It would be easy to multiply the examples of crafts which contributed to the dev
elopment of technology in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Pottery and ceramics w
ere produced by craftsmen working in accordance with regional customs, but all c
ontributing to the development and diffusion of better kilns and glazes, and st
imulating such other technologies as metallurgy and glass-making.
One of the most important developments in the potter's craft was the
evolution of the potter's wheel. The simple clay-disc potter's wheel, such as
found at Uruk (3250 B.C.) gradually developed into the foot-wheel (2000° B.C.)
and, some two centuries later, the pivoted-disc wheel.
Glass owes its origin to the production of glazes for pottery. Anci
ent glass-making consisted in fusing the necessary ingredients and casting t
he molten mass in small moulds, or making small rods of glass, which when st
ill hot were modelled around a sand core and then annealed to form a small pot
or flask to contain cosmetics and essential oils or perfumes. However, glas
s-blowing was unknown to antiquity.
It general, the craftsmen of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia must have be
en extremely skilled, for they produced excellent work without the aid of sop
histicated tools and machines. Fine woodwork and ivory work show that the an
cient craftsman would have little to learn from modern specialists in this fie
ld.
Ancient texts mention guilds of craftsmen, but these are not to be confused
with modern labor unions. They were first of all religious organizations devo
ted to the worship of the patron-god. Hence technical operations were still acc
ompanied by religious rites and ceremonies. In many cases, such as the smelting
of ores or making glass, the craftsmen believed that they were merely has
tening processes which would be accomplished by nature led by the gods anyway.
Propitiatory offerings, ritual purity, and prayers accompanied most operation
s of the craftsman, and sometimes he or his tools, such as the smith's hamme
r and his anvil, were held to have magic power. Even after many centuries we
still find traces of the awe with which the craftsmen looked upon their own achi
evements.