Archaeology- Human Origins - Essay Example

Human Origins/Archaeology: Forum Paper 2 The four great river valley civilizations of China, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley and Egypt provide us with very extensive information on way that human beings first learned to organize themselves into large cities. They all have one thing in common: huge agricultural lands watered by the neighboring river system and fed by the rich nutrients in the accumulated silt that the deltas provided. These favourable conditions allowed agricultural products to be stored in surplus, which could then be traded along the river banks with other towns and villages upstream. Plentiful food also encouraged population growth, and efficient technology meant that more and more people could be freed from a subsistence level economy to take up other trades and skills. Bureaucracy was born, along with systems such as writing in the fertile crescent, and even a full monetary system in China. In order to maintain the smooth running of cities, political systems were also developed, usually involving a close connection between the ruling class and the religion of the people, with underclasses providing most of the work. Slavery was practised by the Egyptians using peoples conquered in war. Although there are similarities in the geographical settings for these civilizations, there are also some differences. The Egyptian civilization continued to dominate the Mediterranean for many centuries, erecting stupendous monuments to commemorate their Pharaohs and building strategic alliances through marriage and through treaties with other emerging civilizations. In China dynasties rose and fell, embracing all the surrounding tribes and peoples into a huge nation state. Mesopotamia, located conveniently between East and West, became a successful land and sea trade center, providing a point of connection for the passage of knowledge as well as goods, and constructing libraries which ensured that humanity as a whole benefited from the developments discovered in far corners of the world. Archaeologists have traced the emergence and decline of each of these civilizations, and in digging up the ancient ruins have pieced together the history of human societies before a proper written record was made. One of the problems for modern scholars is the difficulty which can occur when the scraps of data that are available appear to throw up contradictions. The information is usually partial, leaving us to wonder what other information has been lost, and how this might change our view. The reasons for the decline and disappearance of major civilizations are sometimes very obvious, as in the case of burned or ruined cities, with human bodies displaying evidence of violent trauma. In other cases, however, the decline of this or that civilization has been interpreted very differently through the ages depending on the set of information that has been used to study the problem, and the pre-conceived ideas of those doing the investigation. The Mesopotamian and the Indus civilizations are examples where the historians and archaeologists have struggled to reach any agreement, but where the most up to date modern sciences are beginning to bring more clarity. The more textual information there is, the easier it is to cross-reference artefacts, inscriptions and building with other known facts from the same time period. Karen Wright reports how scholars had at one time assumed that the Mesopotamian empire of Akkadia suddenly crumbled in around 2200 B.C. E. because of social and political factors like “disruptions in trade routes, incompetent administrators, barbarian invasions.” (Wright, 1998, no page number). The archaeologists clearly see a sudden withdrawal from cities in the north of Mesopotamia, around modern Syria, because there are layers of building followed by layers of just dust and earth, proving that cities were not continuously inhabited. Written texts from the period report a certain “Curse of Akkad” and they mention images such as “fields that produced no grain and heavy clouds that did not rain.” (Wright, 1998, no page number). Literary scholars have interpreted these images as metaphors for divine displeasure, but the inclusion of recent thinking from the scientific discipline of “paleoclimatology” (the study of ancient climates) to the debate has led to a revision of this interpretation. Using core samples taken from the ground in different parts of the globe, scientists have discovered evidence of a sudden and severe drying of the climate in this area, in exactly this period. This would have caused crops to fail, which in turn would have cut off the main source of wealth for the cities, namely agriculture. Without this essential supply, the population would have had no option but to flee to more viable land areas, and this explains the sudden abandonment of the great Akkadian cities. In the case of the Indus civilization there is a great disadvantage for scholars in the lack of written materials available, and the poor understanding that we have of those small texts that do exist. To this day the language of the Harrapan civilization which occupied the Indus river area is poorly understood. Despite this, however, there are later Indian texts which have been interpreted to imply the peaceful Harrapan civilization was driven out by an incoming warlike race called the Aryans. Padma Manian (1998) surveys the scholarship on this supposed defeat of the Harrapans and comes to the conclusion that the evidence for it is very slim, and that far too much weight has been placed on an initial theory which turns out to be at best very suspect, and more than likely wrong. Early excavations prompted Europeans to deduce the theory about the Aryan invasion but at the time when those theories were made, there was nothing reliable in the way of carbon dating or scientific proof. New scientific evidence now shows the same traces of drought in the same period as mentioned above in connection with Mesopotamia. It appears that in the case of the Indus River civilization, the effects were possibly even more severe, resulting in the loss of an entire river system around the river Saraswati, which may have originally been a greater population than the Indus, after which this region’s human peoples are named (Manian, 1998, p. 28). In the case of the Harrapans, interpretations of later texts were used to attach racial meanings to different colors, rather than the symbolic and moral meanings which appear to have been originally intended. This led to a chain of racial supremacy theories later much abused by the Nazis, who preferred a version of history which showed a blond and blue eyed white people from the fringes of Europe defeating dark skinned and dark eyed Indian peoples. In modern times the dating of Aryan and Harrapan sites appears to conclusively rule out the possibility that the Aryans ever did overrun the Harrapans. The record shows that the Harrapans moved out long before the Aryans arrived, while climatic and migration explanations fit the archaeological record much more closely. Chinese and Egyptian civilizations managed to endure much longer because they diversified out of an economy that was dependent on water and crops, and they were less severely affected by the central Asian droughts of the period around 2200 B.C.E. References Manian, Padma. “Harrapans and Aryans: Old and New Perspectives of Ancient Indian History.” The History Teacher 32 (1) (1998), pp. 17-32. Wright, Karen. “Empires in the Dust.” Discover Magazine March 1988. Read More