Yay!!!!! Finally I am blogging on world history, one of my favourite topics.
I first started my readings from this book called A World History by McNeill, but I switched later when I bought my own one-volume world history by Clive Ponting.
I skipped the early history on the Earliest Man, as I don’t believe it, on to the earliest civilisations…
Earliest civilisations were not real civilised cities, more often isolated cities incapable of expansion. They needed a broader ecological base, as in Sumer, such as the flat alluvial plain between Tigris and the Euphrates. Sumer’s unique ecological climate ensured the growth of civilisation, as summer rains did not fall on the south of the middle east, therefore the land needed irrigation.
Specialisation created a managerial class. How exactly they arose is not certain, it could have been by:
Conquest and subjection, or
priests – self-made managers, since later Mesopotamian myths explained that the Gods had created men to be slaves so that there was enough food etc in the temples
The management system eventually created civilisation per se: hypothesis by McNeill
This was probably due to heavy taxation such that farmers were enslaved to priests in order to get wages in terms of rice etc. This ensured labour for big scale projects and made specialisation possible.
Regarding the priestly mandate, why were priests so powerful? This was probably because they could predict the seasons through maintaining a calendar that recorded the moon’s waxing and waning and movements of the sun etc., and ordinary farmers probably thought this ability foretold special connections with the gods. Therefore priests wre seen to have the mandate to govern and have a say in managing crops.
Sumerian religion:
Other than sacred songs and texts to please the gods, Sumerians worked out a theological system to explain natural and human phenomena (after all, the civilisation was a theocracy).
