Asia, Europe, and North Africa in 1 C.E.

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Asia, Europe, and North Africa in 1 C.E.
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Writing

• The Development of systems of writing was
  integral to the development of civilization
• With writing came effective long-distance
  communication and the ability to build nation and
  empires. Writing could be used to
• Create records
• Record history
• Preserve imaginative works

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Cities, Nations, and Empires

• The agricultural revolution
• Primitive people were hunters and gathers
• Between 8,000 and 6,000 B.C.E. people began to
  settle and cultivate crops.
• With the increased food supply, civilizations
  were able to develop specialist (non-agricultural
  roles) in cities.
• Over time, vast civilizations emerged.

The Great Ziggurat at Ur Today. Credit Ur,
Photograph 17th January 2004, by Lasse Jensen.
The Great Ziggurat.
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Cities, Nations, and Empires

• Early civilizations grew up near water
• Mesopotamia takes its name from the Greek phrase
  between the rivers
• Tigris and Euphrates rivers, on their banks were
• Ur
• Akkad
• Nippur
• Babylon
• Egypt (on the banks of the Nile River)
• China (on the banks of the Yangtse River)
• India (on the banks of the Indus River)
• Water was important for trade and communication

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Travel, Migration, and Trade

• People were on the move throughout the ancient
  period.
• Armies of conquest
• Traders
• Waves of migration in search of resources
• Much of ancient literature plays to peoples
  fascination with hearing about distant peoples
  and their unusual customs.

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Lyric and Epic

• Lyric poetry gets its name from the Greek poets
  custom of signing their poems to the
  accompaniment of a lyre, a small harp.
• The poetic impulse seems to be universal all
  ancient cultures in the anthology recorded lyric
  poetry long before prose emerged.

Funerary relief with a lyre player. A young boy,
reading in a book role, recites a poem on the
melody. Magna Graecia (South Italia), ca. 420 BC.
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Lyric and Epic

• Poetry was composed in many different settings
• Religious ceremonies
• Entertainment at banquets
• Poets could be seen as powerful verbal magicians
• In China poetry was seen as integral to the daily
  life of any educated person.

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Lyric and Epic

• Epics are long, narrative poems that concern a
  series of great struggles or adventures of a hero
  or group of heroes, aided and opposed by
  different gods, often leading to the forming of a
  people or nation.
• Epic poetry is found in the ancient cultures of
• Babylonia
• India
• Greece
• Rome

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Lyric and Epic

• The oldest epics are collective compositions
• They were developed over time, carried on and
  revised through oral tradition

Deogarh. Here you see the five Pandava princes-
heroes of the epic Mahabharata - with their
shared wife-in-common named Draupadi (although
some had their own wives too). Vishnu, incarnated
as Krishna , was advisor and their charioteer in
battle. The central figure is Yudhishthira  the
two to his left are Bhima and Arjuna . Nakula and
Sahadeva , the twins, are to his right. Their
wife, at far right, is Draupadi . These heroes
are themselves incarnations Yudhishthira
manifests Dharma, the Sacred Order of Life. Bhima
represents the Wind God, Vayu. Arjuna is Indra.
Nakula and Sahadeva incarnate the twin Horseman
Gods (The Greek Dioscuri). Draupadi is Indrani ,
the queen of the gods and wife of Indra- a very
old Vedic (Pre-Hindu) god. Credit Bob King. This
file is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution 2.0 License
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Myth, Legend, and History

• Myth is a term with many meanings.
• Today, sometimes used for anything that isnt
  true
• In ancient Greek, any story
• A certain group of stories about the gods
• Myth in the ancient world can be thought of as a
  story of ultimate truths
• Often used to explain origins

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Myth, Legend, and History

• Ancient literature mixes material that we usually
  think of as distinct.
• Myths, legends, history
• The ancient texts that we have today are rare
  exceptions that survived the centuries
• They were so treasured that they were widely
  circulated
• They simply happened to be preserved in a tomb or
  library

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The Ancient Near East

• The Fertile Crescent is a broad band of settled
  lands stretching from the Tigris and Euphrates
  rivers into what is now Iraq, up into Asia Minor,
  and down through Palestine.

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The Ancient Near East

• Due to a unique combination of favorable
  environmental conditions and human ingenuity, the
  worlds first great cities were established.

Ruins of Babylon, 1932. Library of Congress
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The Ancient Near East

• As rulers sought to create empires and merchants
  trading, writing developed to solve communication
  needs.
• Around 3200 B.C.E. early Sumerians developed a
  form of writing that used symbolic
  representations of objects, and later of sounds.
  
• By 3000 B.C.E. the worlds first fully developed
  writing systems had emerged
• Eventually, language became simplified to
  alphabetic symbols and dropped visual signs
  creating the first phonetic alphabets

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The Ancient Near East

• Scribes achieved great authority
• Highly skilled counselors
• Diplomats
• A sort of civil service elite
• Early writing systems were complex and difficult
  to learn.
• Involved carving hundreds of symbols on stone or
  clay tablets, later brushed onto papyrus

Cuneiform Clay Tablet. Credit Permission is
granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later
version published by the Free Software
Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no
Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
copy of the license is included in the section
entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
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Ancient Near East

• Cultural production centered around court and
  temples
• Kings were often seen as partly divine
• Tensions between court and temples over power
• Extensive texts were written to record the
  affairs of both
• Royal annals, medical and astronomical texts,
  hymns, prayers, etc.

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Ancient Near East

• Divinities varied throughout the ancient near
  east but there are strong family resemblances
• A primordial generation that created the world
  and gave birth to a further generation of gods
  that now rule
• A few major divinities and a host of minor
• Major divinities
• Sun Utu (Sumarian), Shamash (Akkadian), Amon Re
  or Aten (Egypt), Apollo (Greece)
• Fertility/Love Inanna or Ishtar (Mesopotamia),
  Isis (Egypt), Aphrodite (Greece), Venus (Rome)
• Cosmic systems relied on a male/female
  interdependence

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Example of the Greek Divine Lineage
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Birth of Monotheism

• The worship of many gods often tempered by
  devotion to a particular god (patron deity)
• Among the Hebrew tribes, devotion to Yahweh
  gradually evolved into monotheism
• United Israel under Saul in 1020 B.C.E. His son
  Solomon strengthened the kingdom but civil wars
  erupted at his death and the country was ruled by
  a series of foreign powers.
• During Solomons reign, writers composed
  chronicles and wisdom texts of their own,
  inspired by older Canaanite, Babylonian, and
  Egyptian sources. They continued throughout the
  years of foreign rule and exile.
• The Hebrew Bible became an extraordinary
  compendium of historical writing, law, poetry,
  and reflection on fundamental questions of human
  existence.

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Language, Cities, Empires

• The ancient world was instable, with constant
  political and social instability
• Empires grew and fell through wars with rivals
• Natural disasters led to mass migrations
• Created an ethnic, linguistic, and cultural
  milieu
• Example Flood stories (Gilgamesh, Bible, etc.)
• Egypt remained a single country with an unbroken
  history for 3,000 years a record only matched
  by China.

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Early China
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Early China

• Early China usually thought of as lasting until
  the first millennium B.C.E.
• Confucius lived at midpoint
• Mythological record credits a series of sage
  emperors with innovations and principles that
  guide the development of Chinese civilization
• Focus on historical beings and world, rather than
  supernatural
• Insistence on respect for ones parents and
  ancestors
• Importance of agriculture, writing, ritual, arts
• Conviction that morality, rather than genealogy,
  validated ones right to govern

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Early China

• Shang Dynasty begins the actual historical
  record at 1550-1040 B.C.E.
• Scapulimancy reading of cracks in heated bones
  or shells
• Demonstrates continuities in Chinese language
• Zhou Dynasty came to power after a tyrannical
  Shang ruler claiming a mandate of heaven
• Like Shang, agrarian people with regulated city
  layouts
• Sacked by a non-Chinese tribe
• A new capital of a revived Eastern Zhou remained
  for five centuries divided into Spring and Autumn
  period and Warring States period

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Early China

• Confucius enormous respect for Zhou ideals
• Primacy of a family-based morality and an
  extension of this into other relationships
• Government for the good of governed governing by
  moral example
• Priorities of group over individual
• Proper roles in a social hierarchy led to social
  harmony

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Early China

• Daoists, most important early thinkers to take
  issue with Confucian ideals
• Sought harmony with the way
• Privileged natural over human
• Thoroughgoing relativity undermined active
  commitment of any kind
• Legalists, believed that human nature was not
  inclined to be good.
• Only power could succeed in ordering the state

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Early China

• Qin dynasty
• Short-lived and busy
• Standardized writing system, weights and
  measures, coinage, width of carriage axles
• Construction projects, including Great Wall
• Centralized imperial power through agents
  dispatched across the country
• Also ordered all classical texts burned, searched
  for elixirs of immortality, and commissioned a
  elaborate mausoleum
• Civil war erupted and the Han Dynasty was born.

Herbert Ponting (1870-1935)
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Early China

• The Han Dynasty rejected the excess of the Qin,
  but built up the administrative structure more
• Implemented the civil service exam
• Identified the Five Classics (each associated
  with Confucius in some way), which were the basis
  of the exam, and became the required reading of
  all educated people

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Early South Asia

• History of Early South Asia is obscure until
  around 500 B.C.E.
• Asoka (third Maurya king) is the first that we
  have solid information about
• Mauryan empire ended about 2nd century B.C.E.,
  but we have only a shadowy idea of why

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Early South Asia

• Although Indus Valley civilization appears to
  have been literate. They left only seals that
  are indecipherable.
• Part of Indo-European language family Roots of
  which can be traced from Iran to Ireland
• The Veda (wisdom) is one of the oldest
  remaining texts. It comprises materials used in
  the complex liturgy of domestic and communal
  sacrifices.
• Transmitted orally for 3 millennia (samskrita)
• Much of the Veda is verse same 11 meter found
  in ancient Greek poetry

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Early South Asia

• The Ramayana was composed in the late Maurya
  epoch, around 200 B.C.E.
• The Mahabharata, ascribed to the sage Vyasa, is
  usually thought of as a history. Probably
  created a century or two before Asoka, but
  continued to grow.
• For both the principle theme is meaning and
  extent of power
• The nature of kingly rule and the limits of the
  world within which this rule makes sense
• Sanskrit poets and scholars produced literature
  and theory about literature that dominated the
  cultural scene in South Asia

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Early South Asia

• Vedic tradition encountered a crisis of belief in
  the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.
• One reaction was an ascetic renunciation and
  physical self-mortification
• Another reaction was a new and profound
  reflection on life and death
• Ideas of redeath and rebirth (transmigration or
  samsara) , in accordance with deeds committed in
  a previous life (karma)
• Upanishads and Four Noble Truths
• Vedic thinkers tried to synthesize there many
  tendencies into a doctrine called the four-life
  goals
• Spiritual attachment to various gods remained,
  but three main gods Brahma (creator), Vishnu
  (sustainer note his avatara, or descent into
  human form), and Shiva (beneficent destroyer)
  sometimes merged into a triple godhead

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Classical Greece
The Greeks lived in pockets of what is now
mainland Greece, throughout the islands of the
eastern Mediterranean and along the shores of the
Mediterranean sea.
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Classical Greece

• Mycenaean civilization came in contact with
  Minoan civilization in the late Bronze age
  through trading
• The earliest writing dates back to this period
• Clay tablets used to meet the record-keeping
  needs of large bureaucracies
• Greek speakers later conquered them and adopted
  their writing system to record the sounds of
  Greek
• The Greeks later looked back on this period as
  their heroic age

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Classical Greece

• Epic poetry was by far the most important Greek
  genre
• Aethiopis or Amazonia
• Iliad and the Odyssey
• There appears to have been a dark age where
  written language was lost. Stories passed orally
  and recaptured in 8th century B.C.E.
• Began to use alphabet borrowed from Phoenicians
• Writing often seen as something dangerous (used
  by tyrants)

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Classical Greece

• Greek society was really a mosaic of many varied
  micro-cultures
• We know the most about Athens thanks to the rich
  written record they left behind.
• Following Mycenaean era, city-states ruled by
  aristocracies
• Some aristocrats eventually set themselves up as
  tyrants
• In a sharp break from traditional forms of
  governance, democracy rose (esp. in Athens). All
  free male citizens chose their magistrates by lot
  (no women, slaves, or non-citizens).

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Classical Greece

• Dramatic festivals were central to Athenian life.
  
• Celebrated Dionysos, god of wine
• Committees of citizens chose the plays and
  awarded a winner
• Tragedy dramatized the epic cycle in music,
  dance, and spoken dialogue
• Comedy featured fantastic plots and direct
  references to their contemporary world. There
  was also a good deal of obscenity and phallic
  humor.

Greece, Athens, Dionysus theater, seen from the
Acropolis
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Classical Greece

• After the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, a
  period of relative peace was established by
  Philip of Macedon.
• His son, Alexander, inherited his kingdom.
  Relentlessly trying to conquer the Persian
  empire, Alexander conquered the Greeks, Egypt,
  deeply into barbarian lands, and east to the
  Indus River.
• At his death, his generals divided his fragile
  empire.
• I.E. Alexandria, under the Ptolemies
• Eventually Hellenistic empire fell under the
  Romans

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Rome

• Mythological origins
• Romulus and Remus
• Aeneas
• Local magistrates expelled the last Tarquin kings
  and gained independence from the Etruscan Empire
  in 510 B.C.E.
• The republic, governed by the Senate, lasted
  until Augustus in 27 B.C.E.

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Rome

• By 1st century C.E. Rome had grown from tiny
  republic to the dominant power in the
  Mediterranean
• Rome itself had an unmatched population
• Problems of overcrowding, supply, and waste
  disposal
• Inspired necessary advances in water and sewage
• Multicultural almost all residents came from
  somewhere else

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Rome

• The republics troubles began with the Gracchi
  brothers attempts to address growing social
  inequality with land redistribution and
  citizenship for all Latins.
• This launched a series of reform measures and
  attempts to grab power that eventually end in
  Caesars dictatorship.
• Caesars power based on his army and track record
  of victories

Modern bronze statue of Julius Caesar, Rimini,
Italy Credit Georges Jansoone This file is
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution
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Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 and Attribution
ShareAlike 1.0 License. In short you are free to
share and make derivative works of the file under
the conditions that you appropriately attribute
it, and that you distribute it only under a
license identical to this one. Official license.
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Rome

• After Caesars assassination in 44 C.E. war broke
  out among potential heirs.
• Caesars adopted son, Octavian, defeated Mark
  Antony and his ally and lover Cleopatra at the
  Battle of Actium, and became sole ruler
• The Roman Empire was born

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Rome

• The Roman Empire was a complex combination of
  military prowess and political savvy.
• Roman legions highly-trained, well-equipped, and
  effective
• Constructed carefully laid-out provincial
  capitals and paved roads and aqueducts to link
  the empire.
• As long as conquered rivals paid heavy taxes they
  were given relative autonomy

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Rome

• Expansion continued through the 4th century.
• At its height, borders extended into Scotland,
  the Rhine and Danube in Europe, and throughout
  the Mediterranean.
• Overtime, emperors became more autocratic powers
  and godlike status, but the military played an
  increasingly important role in selecting emperor
  often resulting in a series of military coups.

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The Roman Empire
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Rome

• Fall of Rome Invasion by northern barbarians led
  by Alaric in 410.
• Military relied on peoples of conquered nations
• Conversion of Constantine in 324 eventually
  shifted power eastward
• The rule of Germanic tribes was less centralized
  and often at odds with Eastern Empire
• Rome continued to decline, although somewhat
  strengthened by the medieval papacy