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World History in a Year (Week 7) - 3000s BC

There are several central developments in the 3000s BC that profoundly affected the course of later history: states, writing, bronze, and the domestication of horses. (And possibly the wheel. The pottery wheel was invented in the 4000s BC, as discussed last week; wheeled vehicles may also have originated in either the 4000s or the 3000s BC, but the 3000s BC was when they became more common.)

This is when we get our first three state-level societies, in Mesopotamia (Sumer), ancient Egypt, and arguably coastal Peru (Caral-Supe or Norte Chico; whether it’s a state is debated by archaeologists, but I’m going with yes). A state is basically defined by having a greater degree of political organization and hierarchy than non-state forms like chiefdoms, and having sources of ideological or institutional power than go beyond kinship relations to the population of the state. Archaeologically, whether something is a state is generally assessed based on how much political organization and control would be needed to produce things like monuments, palaces, elaborate tombs containing valuable goods, and other large constructions.

First I’m going to discuss some of the commonalities and differences in what may have driven the formation of these states. I know very little about theories on state formation; this is my general impressions, not an academic, poli sci, or anthropological perspective.

Reasonably abundant resources appear to me a necessary but not sufficient condition for a state. To have a state, you do need enough to be able to provide food for the people who are doing work (e.g. governing, administrating; in a city, construction and specialist craft production) that is not farming/hunting/gathering. But a society can have plenty of food and not have a state, if they don’t need or want one.

As is the case with agriculture, pottery, and permanent settlements, the arguments I’ve encountered that feel the most convincing are that people adopt states when they have a problem that a state will solve. Going by Wikipedia, in the case of states the issue is complicated by the additional question of: qui bono? Who benefits from having a state: the populace in general, or just the people at the top?

For these three states, it seems like it could be a bit of both. Sumer, Ancient Egypt, and Caral-Supe are all in relatively similar areas: river valleys surrounded by desert. Egypt’s agricultural fertility was based on the flooding of the Nile; in Mesopotamia and Caral-Supe, by the 3000s BC there were extensive irrigation systems.

As far as I can tell, the problem that Sumer and Caral-Supe faced did involve irrigation systems. In Sumer the connection was direct: irrigation agriculture was how you grew enough food to feed people in the cities. In Caral-Supe it was indirect. The main food was fish (particularly anchovies) and shellfish, from the sea; irrigation agriculture was how you grew cotton to make the fishnets and gourds to use as floats for the nets. In either case, the stability of a state could ensure the upkeep of these systems (and, at least in Mesopotamia, defend them from enemies). Egypt seems a little different. It seems like Egypt’s problem was population. From about the 5000s to 3500 BC the Sahara was turning from habitable plains into a desert, and the Nile Valley was the place for everyone in the vicinity to move to. This created very high population densities, and probably some need for a larger, state-level scale of government to manage conflicts over resources between those people.

But there’s also elements of control by the rulers, not just general benefit. Religious ideologies would have played a role in legitimizing the new states: this is when organized priesthoods, temples, and the like start to show up.

Additionally, all of these states being in fertile areas surrounded by desert seems to me to be significant, because if you’re a farmer who doesn’t want to have to supply some of your crops and labour to a state, you have few options. It’s not easy to leave. Walking across the desert and hoping you get to the other side without starving and find something better is a huge gamble. So the ruling classes have, to some extent, a captive population. This doesn’t apply to some of the other early states we’ll see later (Harappa in South Asia was spread over a massive area, and China’s Yellow River did require substantial infrastructure to control but wasn’t surrounded by desert), but notably, the early states in South Asia and China also didn’t have massive monumental architecture of the kind we see in the early states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Caral-Supe. So there is a potential case that the ability of early states and rulers to put substantial resources into self-aggrandizing monuments relied on having a dense population that couldn’t easily leave.

Fertile areas surrounded by desert could have contributed to states in another way as well, namely the need for defence. When you have a rich agricultural area in a limited space, having a state with an army makes it harder for other people to take that territory from you (and gives the potential for conquering other states and taking their land).

One last thing before we jump into the specifics of these states. I feel it’s important to note that the period of time when the world had agriculture without any states (9500-4000 BC, or 5500 years) was nearly as long as the period when it had agriculture and states (4000 BC – AD 2000, or 6000 years). If we set the origin of anatomically modern humans at about 120,000 years ago and represent all of human history from that time as a year, agriculture begins in late November and the first states appear around December 13th. (Fittingly, the change from BC to AD happens on Christmas.) So agriculture does not automatically lead to states.

I’m going to add a cut, because this has gotten REALLY long.

Mesopotamia had multiple Sumerian city-states in the 3000s BC. The main one was the city of Uruk. Uruk’s White Temple (not just a temple, but also a centre of government and a location for storehouses and craft workshops) was on top of a stepped mound, a precursor of later ziggurats. It was also in the 3000s that the Sumerians became the first people to develop a system of writing, cuneiform, to aid in record-keeping. The Sumerians traded overland with Anatolia and Iran, as well as intermittently with Egypt.

In Egypt and Sudan, the Sahara was finishing drying out, and people who had been living there moved east to the Nile valley. This included the people from Nabta Playa, mentioned last week: around 3300 BC, we see the first cattle burials on the Sudanese Nile, similar to the ones at Nabta Playa. Significantly, the Sudanese Nile also had two cultural elements associated with later Ancient Egypt: sacral chiefdoms (that is, rulers considered to have spiritual power) that could be the origin of the Egyptian religion centred on the pharaohs, and large conical mounds of earth that can be seen as predecessors to the pyramids. The animal burials and astronomical symbolism associated with Nabta Playa provide further connections to Ancient Egyptian culture.

Towns developed along the Nile over the 3000s, both in Egypt and Sudan, and small kingdoms, which competed and fought with each other. There must have been trade networks, because goods from western Asia are found in the graves of the rulers of one Sudanese kingdom, Qustul, during the period 3500-3200 BC. By 3200-3100 BC, Qustul declined and Upper Egypt rose in power, also annexing Lower Egypt to the north (‘lower’ because further downstream on the Nile). A unified Egyptian state was created around 3100 BC, with its capital at Memphis, near present-day Cairo, on the border between Upper and Lower Egypt. The earliest king of Egypt whose name we know was Menes.

The Caral-Supe civilization of the central Peruvian coast, built along four river valleys with largely desert land in between them, was of a scale equal to those of Egypt and Sumer. The first city in the area was Huaricanga, dating back to 3500 BC, and another, Caballete, dates to 3100 BC. Both were on the Fortaleza River, the northernmost of the four rivers. Another, Aspero, was further south on the Supe River; by 3055 it covered at least 15 hectares and had pyramids. Unlike the later pyramids of Egypt, which were made of solid blocks of stone, Caral-Supe’s were made from stacks of bags filled with smaller rocks. The people of Caral-Supe relied on fish and shellfish for food, and grew cotton to make fishnets as well as other textiles. Trade between inland cotton-producers and coastal seafood-producers was probably very important.

There was also monumental architecture outside of these three states during this period. This included megalithic temples and the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum (an underground religious site) in Malta; Newgrange in Ireland; and Watson Brake in Louisiana. I’ll focus on Watson Brake because it’s probably the least known.

Watson Brake (constructed from around 3350 BC to a little after 3000 BC) was a complex of 11 different earthen mounds, with ridges connecting them. The purpose of the site, and the forms of organization that enabled its construction, remain unknown. The area was rich in food at the time, but there is no indication of either agriculture or extensive trading networks; artifacts indicate the people living there were hunter-gatherers eating a variety of foods including fish, nuts, and deer.

A major invention of this time was bronze, used in both Western Asia and Egypt. Bronze was generally made from an alloy of copper and tin (though a lower-quality bronze can be made using arsenic in place of tin); as copper and tin often occur in different areas, bronze generally requires some degree of long-distance trade. Being harder than copper, bronze was useful for both tools and weapons.

Another trend was the use of an increasing variety of materials for textiles. In China, people used both hemp (presumably for everyday clothing) and silk (presumably for luxury clothing). In Niger, people wove raffia fibres. In Mesopotamia, breeding of sheep to produce more and better wool began in this period. Wool may have also been available in South America, as both llamas and alpacas were domesticated in either the 3000s or 2000s BC (llamas are larger, alpacas are woollier).

And finally, probably the most crucial domestication during this period was that of horses. When and by whom the first horses were domesticated is strongly debated, but it was somewhere on the Eurasian steppe. The earliest hard evidence of horse domestication is from the Botai culture in what is now Kazakhstan, around 3500 BC. Botai sites show traces of bits on horses’ teeth, indications of bridles and riding, and traces of mares’ milk on household pottery. Genetic tests of Botai horses show they were more closely related to the wild Przewalski’s horse, and were not the ancestors of most domesticated horses alive today, so there were likely multiple instances of horse domestication. Genetic evidence indicates that the origin point for the ancestors of present-day domesticated horses was in Ukraine.

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