Episode 101: The Ancient Era, or “Ain’t No River Valley Wide Enough”

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Anti-Sosial Studies Podcast, a place for people who wish they had stayed awake in high school. Before we jump in, let me introduce myself. My name is Emily Glencler, and I am an annoyingly passionate social study teacher who believes that youth, like pretty much everything else in life, is wasted on the young. This includes both education and their ability to pull off crop tops. I teach high school world history, and whenever I meet people and tell them what I do, they always have the same two reactions. One, pity, at the fact that I spend my entire day with teenagers who unironically use words like lit. But two, inevitably they say something along the lines of, man, I wish I'd paid more attention in history class. I've devoted my life to studying the past. I even got a master's degree in history, which is arguably the most useless degree in existence. Sorry, Dad. But I also totally understand that being able to name all of the Chinese dynasties in order is not a skill that's going to save lives one day. I mean, if I were a super villain, I would 100% make that the key to stopping my attempts at worldwide domination, but that's just me. Like I would hide clues in all of my crimes. Maybe I leave my mark on a victim's chin. And the next time I leave behind a tiny figurine of Han Solo. See, if you knew about world history, you would get that joke I just made. But for now, just trust me that it was pretty great. But we've all been in a situation, though, where our life would be slightly to reasonably better if we knew a little bit about history. It could be understanding the never-ending reality show that is the news, winning a gift card at trivia night or just better appreciating the masterpiece of Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. One of my more irrational crushes is Ted Theodore Logan. Keanu Reeves was such a babe. Another irrational crush? Young Joseph Stalin. I promise, Google it, and you're welcome. So for this season, I have created episodes that cover in sweepingly broad strokes the six major eras of world history. This is not meant to teach you everything you need to know, but it'll give you a good overview of where we've been and why you should care. Also, if you like what I'm doing, please subscribe to my podcast so you'll know in the next episodes or app. And if you really like what I'm doing, then go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and give me a review. Thanks so much in advance. (upbeat music) Before we get started, a disclaimer to all the quote unquote experts out there. As a teacher, I am constantly fielding questions and debating with students who claim to know more than me and full disclosure, some of them 100% do. But this is why I started a podcast. It's ideal, a one way conversation where I talk about history and you listen, and I can't hear any of your but actually is along the way. So if you spot some minute inaccuracy, just go to my blog, www.antisocialstudies.org and submit a comment under the contact us page. I guarantee that I will read those complaints just as soon as I get done grading my pile of 150 essays in which an unsettling amount of my students have switched the world wars. Like Hitler shot friends for a man, right? That totally sounds like Hitler. All right, enough business, let's get to history. (upbeat music) Today we're going back to the ancient era or as I like to call it, ain't no river valley white enough. Yeah, that's me. We'll look at the Neolithic Revolution, what it takes to be civilized, and some high points of the major river valley civilizations. If nothing else, after today, you'll learn how to exploit ancient Chinese philosophy to become their emperor, which could come and handy if you ever develop time travel, fingers crossed. This is anti social studies. I'm Emily Glankler, settle in and let's go back in time. (upbeat music) Act one, the Neolithic Revolution. History that we can really understand starts with an event called the Neolithic Revolution, which is just a fancy term for the discovery of agriculture. Before this occurred, we were living in the Paleolithic era. Paleo means old, lithic means stone, so the old stone age. Essentially humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, they lived in small kinship tribes. If you have a friend who's on the Paleo diet, then I'm sure you've heard them talk about this ad, Nazim already. And sure, humans may have eaten healthier, but they also died way earlier, so they just didn't live long enough to develop all the diseases that we have now. So like they ate whole grains, but they also died at 28, so you wouldn't some, you lose some. And even if they were healthier, it's impossible to replicate their diet today because our world is so different now. For example, back then, potatoes were the size of peanuts, which is a strangely adorable image. But there were some ways that life was pretty great during the Paleolithic era. For one, we actually had more free time because if you think about it once you killed a mammoth, you'd done your job for the next few weeks. And society in general was way more equal, especially with gender roles. So men hunted and women gathered, but both genders were equally involved in the all-important task of feeding everyone. That all changed your odd 8,000-ish BCE, and by "ish" I mean give or take a few thousand years. All over the globe, humans started to discover that they could domesticate plants and animals. Domesticate means to take something wild and tame it. So farming is just the domestication of plants. Domestication is also, I'm a dog, Otto von Glencler, doesn't eat my face off in the middle of the night for which I am eternally grateful. Interestingly, it was most likely women who discovered the domestication of plants since they were typically the gatherers. So they would have been the ones to notice that every time their tribe circled back to a region, there was the same plant growing. Or maybe they dropped a few seeds and came back and saw a new plant. Also, I think we can just all agree that women are better at noticing things typically. Like this morning, my husband literally emptied an entire dishwasher full of dirty dishes. Like he put plates back that still had jelly on them, and I love you, Zach, but. But whether it was women or men, a lot of humans decided that it was a lot easier to settle down and have the food come to you. This was the Neolithic Revolution, and it occurred around the globe over a few thousand years. And this is really interesting because if you were looking at a map of the world as the Neolithic Revolution was going on, starting around 10,000 BCE or so, you would just see these dots popping up all over the world. So over a few thousand years, small farming villages show up everywhere, the Americas, Africa, Eurasia. And this is what we call independent discovery. What it means is that there was no one person who invented agriculture. Everyone just figured out it around the same time. And it's stuff like this that gets the quote-unquote history channel really excited about ancient aliens or whatever. But the most likely explanation is that the earth was coming out of the ice age, and so a period of warming had led to an explosion of new growth. The way that I like to think about the shift that occurred from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era is through the Hunger Games, obviously. So Katniss before the Games was Paleolithic. Her main concern was foraging and hunting for food. Without ever knowing if her family would have a meal the next day, she couldn't really concern herself with anything else. Like how she really should have been taking advantage of those romantic afternoons in the forest with Gail. Really, but I digress. But spoiler alert, after she wins the Games, she now has a steady food source, and she settles down into a more established dwelling, the Victor's Village. Because of that, she's able to specialize her labor and focus her time on other things. In the book, it's like art or fashion or something dumb that makes no sense for her character. But this is what happened to all humans as a result of the Neolithic Revolution. Side note, basically all of world history can be understood through the Hunger Games. And if you don't believe me, then check out my most recent post on my blog, antisocialstudies.org, and I will thoroughly prove you wrong. (upbeat music) Act two, what is a civilization? After the Neolithic Revolution comes the rise of civilization, which really just means that there are more of things than there were before and they're more complex. But historians do this annoying thing where they create lists to quantify what it means to be a civilization. Historians have tried to turn history into a science whenever possible because the alternative of just trying to understand people and the decisions they make and the nonsense that ensues is really overwhelming. So every historian in textbook has a slightly different version of this, but I subscribe to the gospel of a woman named Ethel Wood. She is, I imagine a 92 year old woman who wrote and self published a bunch of AP social studies coursebooks. My students and I all just lovingly refer to her as Ethel. She has a list of seven characteristics that you need to be categorized as a civilization. To be clear, I think that calling these things requirements is problematic and I'll talk about a few of those, but for now let's just go with it. So the first requirement that you need to be quote unquote civilized is the only one that I agree is totally necessary and that's a stable food supply. Because when you don't know where your next meal is gonna come from, it's really hard to spend time on anything else, especially things like diverting rivers and building pyramids. But once you have a stable food supply or a surplus, not everyone in the tribe has to focus on finding food so some people can just start to do other jobs. And this leads to number two, which is specialized occupations. In ancient civilizations, most people were engaged in one of three jobs, farmer, artisan, or trader, which creates the ridiculous acronym of the fat occupations. This is helpful for growth because now you can delegate tasks and get more done and it often leads to number three on the list. Clear social class distinctions. And this is something I take issue with. Like the idea that people need to be divided into a social hierarchy to be civilized bothers me. I mean, yeah, it's what happens, but can't we get future civilizations some hope that they don't have to divide ever on up? I don't know, maybe I've just looked at that picture of young Stalin one too many times and it turned me into a communist. The fourth requirement to be a civilization is a central city that serves the outlying agricultural areas. And the earliest city that we know of was called Irr, it spelled U-R. This is supposedly where Abraham was from. You know Abraham, he's the guy from all the religions. My favorite thing about this first city is just how ridiculously lazy they were in naming it. Like I like to imagine a bunch of dudes just sitting around trying to think of names like, "Ugh, I don't know. Ugh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, sure, uh, that sounds good. Let's move on." Another thing you need according to Ethel are institutions. This is a really general word for just things that help organize your society. So government, religion, a military, a legal system, etc. Speaking of government, I've always thought it was weird that governing fell to men after the Neolithic Revolution. Because if you think about it, women were sitting around at home all day caring for the children while the men were out working on the farms. And so it might have made more sense for the women to get involved in the organization of society and governing because that's something that is a not physical and be able to allow the women to stay close to home. But the problem is that the first governments were developed to settle disputes about farming. So basically men would sit around arguing about who's taking too much water from the river or who's stock of wheat is bigger. And since men were the ones primarily engaged in farming, those early venting sessions between farmers slowly turn into a government with men in power. And like, that's that. Once you have an organized central city with institutions, then you might start trading with other, uh, civilizations in cities around you. And this is another quote unquote requirement trading. We know that the various River Valley civilizations traded with each other because we found these seals, like these clay seals from the Indus Valley in modern day Pakistan, although in Mesopotamian modern Iraq. These are beautiful artifacts with images of women with horned headdresses and bulls and unicorns. And a lot of them have script, but unfortunately we still can't decipher the writing of the ancient Indus Valley. One of my biggest dreams is that someone will figure out how to read the ancient Indus script before I die. And if you're interested, there's a really great TED talk about the cryptologists who are working right now to decode it. I knew I should have majored in cryptology in college. The final requirement that really bothers me is an organized writing system. And this one keeps me up at night, and I'm not being sarcastic. According to historians, in order to be civilized, you have to document what you're doing in writing. This emphasis on written records is going to create a lot of problems for other societies like African societies. They have a long tradition of oral history in Africa that's transmitted through grieats or official storytellers. They're basically like the giver in the book The Giver. But Western historians don't trust oral history. For some reason we think that just because someone wrote something down it automatically makes it more reliable. Well then, explain the entire internet to me historians. But back to the need to write things down, I mean what about the Inca? Their only form of record keeping was a system called Kippu, which was a series of knots tied up in rope that was used for basic accounting. It's really cool. You should look at it on the podcast appendix. I mean sure the Inca built Machu Pichu on the top of a freaking mountain without wheels or useful domesticated animals I might add like llamas don't do much for carrying things up a mountain. But since they didn't write out their grocery list, they can't be civilized. That's dumb. Or is it dumb? This last requirement of having written records is a really good study and point of view. Remember this list was created by Western historians, all of who highly value written works. In fact their entire job depends on having access to primary documents. So from that perspective it totally makes sense that they so heavily favor societies that also valued record keeping. Because if a civilization exists and does incredible things but no one writes any of it down, did it really happen? I mean yes it did. But if you're a historian then kind of no. If you're interested in reading more about the question of who gets to write history and the problems with the way we quantify world history, you should check out my post on antisocialstudies.org. So these are the seven requirements of a civilization. Take them or leave them but those processes occur around the world after the Neolithic Revolution and civilization rises especially in areas near rivers. We call them wait for it. Act 3. The River Valley Civilizations Once civilizations rise we enter officially the ancient era. This lasts from around 4,000 BCE to 600 BCE and it consists of four main civilizations. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley which is in modern day kind of Pakistan and China. And because honestly you don't really need to know every last detail about these civilizations, instead I want to talk about a few characteristics of all of them according to spice themes. So spice stands for social, political, interaction with the environment, cultural and economic. It's one of many tools that teachers use to try to help kids understand and simplify these massive concepts in history. There are a lot of other ones too but I chose spice because it gives me the opportunity to tell the kids things like spice up the Romans which they love. I'm sure. Social things get pretty rigid in the ancient era and they basically stay that way for most of the rest of history. So as jobs get specialized society gets divided up into varying degrees of privilege. So even though agricultural work is the most important job of this time it typically is the lowest on the social ladder just above slaves. The further you work from agricultural work or manual labor the more highly regarded you were. I've tried to find a decent theory on how this all started like who keeps working on the farms and who gets to go become a king. My best guess is that the more intelligent members of society figured out how to work less and talk more and they became politicians but really I have no idea. What we do know is that the patriarchy or essentially the dominance of men in a society gets firmly established during this time period. We know this by the fact that there are very few records of female rulers in any of these ancient civilizations. There are a few exceptions and the biggest one that kind of proves this rule is Hatshepsut. She's the female Egyptian Pharaoh or Pharaoh S. I don't know. I guess they never really needed a name for it since it was really just the one. She ruled as a queen alongside her husband in the 15th century BCE and when he died she ruled as regent for her stepson until her death and this is sort of a key that happens throughout history is typically when women want a rule they have to kind of do it in the name of some man in their life so a lot of times it's there like young son. Her reign was marked by peace, monument building and the general flourishing of Egypt nicely done Hatshepsut. Unlike earlier rulers she was less concerned with conquering new lands and more interested in improving the land that Egypt already controlled. Unfortunately her stepson didn't seem too keen on the idea that his legacy would be tarnished by the embarrassment that his stepmom ruled for him so when she died he tried to eraser from the archaeological record. Hatshepsut died when she was around 50 years old recently scientists have speculated that her death was caused by a salve to fix a chronic skin condition that may have had toxins or carcinogens in it. What a stereotypically female way to go death by lotion. Polinically these river valley civilizations were pretty straightforward they were theocracies or more specifically autocracies rooted in religion that means one person rules and they justify their rule using religion. In all civilizations the kings were considered messengers of the gods but in Egypt the pharaoh went one step further and was seen as the representation of a god on earth. So King Tut for example is short for Tutankhamun or the living image of Amun who was the main god of the Egyptian empire. When the pharaoh died he became divine and passed on his sacred powers to his son creating these epically long dynasties that provided stability for Egypt. I always think about this when I watch the news and see everyone flabbergasted at how much the Middle East is struggling to create western style democracy like giving some space they've been used to authoritarian theocracy for about 6,000 years and may take them a few tries to figure it out. Anyway on the topic of leaders justifying their rule China is the outlier here partly because their religion is different from the others. While Egypt messaged me in the Indus Valley we think again we can't read their writings we don't know very much about what's going on in India at this time but all these religions were pretty standard issue polytheistic religions but China focused more on ancestor worship so instead of seeing their rulers as messengers of the gods they believe that the king had received a mandate from heaven. This idea is so important to Chinese history it is the divine right of dynastic rule but it is also used to justify overthrowing those rulers. There's this really cool loophole that exists in Chinese history so whereas other civilizations only focus on the top down approach so the gods have chosen the king so shut up and do what he says or else you'll suffer forever in the afterlife. It's a pretty compelling campaign ed but in China the mandate of heaven could be lost if a ruler had grown corrupt or was seen as unfit to rule so if the people of China saw that he was losing his mandate maybe there were environmental disasters or discontent amongst the people then a new leader could claim that they must honor the heavens by overthrowing him and establishing a new government with a new mandate. Now if I'm being cynical which is where I feel the most at home if I lived in ancient China I would totally just wait for a bad crop year and then go around to the peasants and talk about how terrible the emperor must be for the heavens to punish us like this then when they inevitably start rebelling I would go to the elites and say see peasant revolts he's lost his mandate. Q full-scale dynastic overthrow and boom I'm the new emperor. As I'm saying this I'm realizing that this is basically what Mao Zedong did and I'm not sure how I feel that my instincts so quickly turn to a corrupt personality cult but I'm just gonna breeze right past it. Back to the minute of heaven this is a surprisingly advanced idea for the ancient era it's essentially an early version of the social contract between a government and its people that guys like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes will claim to have invented during the enlightenment and this is a recurring theme in history basically Asia does something cool and like doesn't make a big deal out of it so Europe steals it tweaks it and then freaks out of her great-there. The eye in spice theme stands awkwardly for interaction with the environment and the type A in me desperately wants it to be one word so that it matches the other four themes but that's an issue for my therapist. In the ancient era this theme is 100% the most important hands down. the natural environment dominates ancient life and dictates everything about your civilization. The best example of this is with something that seems really boring, but it's actually I think pretty interesting, and that's the flooding of rivers. So the river is key to your success as a civilization. Again, they're called river valley civilizations. And how your river floods has enormous ripple effects. See what I did there? Ripple effects. For example, the Nile River is relatively straight, and it floods predictably, so much so that the Egyptians could set their calendar to it. And by that I mean they were able to create a surprisingly accurate 365 day calendar using the annual floods as their marker event. Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flood unpredictably and uncontrollably. And remember that ancient civilizations believe that everything in their natural world was dictated by the gods. So if your river floods predictably every year, producing highly fertile soil in its wake, then the gods must be pretty pleased with you. Life is good, and so is the afterlife. This is why the Egyptians were so obsessed with mummifying and intuming dead people. Like the afterlife was so great that you should bring all your cats. On the other hand, the Mesopotamians developed a really dark outlook on the gods and the afterlife. You can look at these primary source documents that detail the Mesopotamian concept of the afterlife, and it is dark as hell, like literally. You can check out my podcast dependence on the blog if you want to read some of these documents to see the difference. Culturally religion was really the most important factor in ancient life, but they also had other things going for them too. Some great literature was produced during this era. The epic of Gilgamesh is considered the first epic work of literature. Also, Dib's baby name, Gilgamesh, I called it. The story centers around a massive flood, which is a story that we find in almost every other early civilization, think like Noah's Ark. Mesopotamia also produced Hamarabi's code, which is one of the earliest law codes and it's documented on this massive blackstone pillar that you can actually go visit in the Louvre. This law code is the famous "i" for an "i" legal system, but it was a little more complicated than that. For example, if you poke out the "i" of an equal, then your "i" gets poked out too. But if you put out the "i" of a slave, then you only have to pay the owner half the slave's value. So that's a bargain. In the Indus Valley, even though we know so little about them, their main cities that we've discovered of Harapa and Mahanjo Daro tell us that they were incredibly advanced technologically. Their cities were laid out on a perfect grid system, which really must have required extreme government planning. That's why we assume they had an autocracy as well, is to have that level of organization get off someone at the top. They had multi-story buildings, like three story buildings, which does not seem that exciting now, but it was a really big deal back then, I promise. And they even had this rudimentary plumbing system. But my favorite cultural artifact from the ancient era is easily the Oracle bone. And that is definitely the nerdy thing I've said all day. So in China, part of the practice of ancestor worship consisted of divination to communicate with your ancestors. Fortune tellers, and at this point, if you're not picturing Professor Trilani from Harry Potter, then I think you're listening to the wrong podcast. But Fortune tellers would carve symbols on an ox bone or tortoise shell. They would basically ask questions of the ancestors. And they would heat up these bones until they cracked and then interpret the patterns for answers. And to me, these are such cool artifacts because they give us insight into some of the deepest concerns and questions that people are having during the Shang Dynasty in China. I guess it's how future historians will feel about being able to use all those transcripts of our Google searches to write a book on how the 21st century world was inordinately interested in single serving microwave mug brownie recipes and cat worship. Because some things never change, right? Instead of this thing, we honor cats by putting slices of bread on their face. The last theme on our spice themes, Torah of the Ancient Era, is economics, which is honestly by far my least favorite, but we'll get through it together. So there is an interesting theory that comes up in the real world more often than you think, and it's about exchanges. There was this book published in 1997 called Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It was all the rage if you're a geographer and nope, really just geographers. But Diamond is a biologist and geographer who wanted to get to the bottom of why Eurasia and Europe more specifically was able to seemingly win history. What he comes up with is the theory that Eurasia's success was predicated on its east-west axis. If you look at a map of the world, you'll notice that every continent except Eurasia and Australia, but we don't really talk about Australia and world history, and every other continent is taller than it is wide, meaning they are oriented on a north-south axis. To travel from one end to the other, you'd have to cross a lot of different latitudes or longitudes or whichever one goes left and right. And you'd also have to travel through a lot of different climate zones. So if I had just domesticated this really strong new type of corn, for example, it wouldn't be able to grow in as much of the land mass because so much of the continent is in a different climate zone. So if I was in the very bottom of South America and I wanted to take the corn somewhere else, it could grow. I would have to cross through a lot of other climate zones. I'd have to go over the equator until I went up into North America to find a similar climate zone where it could survive, but at that point, traveling through that long way, it might have died. But Jared Diamond points out that Eurasia is wider than it is tall. It's oriented on an east-west axis, and so there are these long stretches of land that are all in the same climate zone, and this makes it easier for exchange to occur, so exchange of plants, animals, people, ideas, innovation, everything. So Diamond's theory on why Eurasia was able to get ahead of the rest of the world was because of their geography. And all these different River Valley civilizations were situated in relatively similar climate zones, so they were able to share ideas and develop faster possibly because of it. It's important to note that there has been some criticism of this theory by other academics, for one, it assumes that Europe has consistently won history, which just isn't true, for most of world history, East Asia and the Middle East are dominating. But the bigger thing is it pushes the blame associated with things like conquest and imperialism back to some long ago environmental factor. So essentially, it kind of makes it easier to excuse some of the terrible things that Europeans have done in the name of their superiority as geographically predetermined or inevitable. At the end of the day, it's a pretty good theory that has some problematic implications, but for now, you can just impress people at your next party by asking them their opinion on Jared Diamond's theory of geographical determinism and world history. And then just hope to God that no one else at the party has actually read the book or listened to this podcast. So across Africa and Asia, River Valley civilizations grow, and as power continues to be consolidated by these semi-divine leaders, they are also going to start looking outside of their own kingdom for expansion opportunities, and an up-and-coming region called Europe is going to make its first appearance in world history. To be continued. For notes, pictures about some of the things I mentioned, links to sources, and other fun stuff, check out the podcast appendix page at www.antisocialstudies.org. Join me next time on antisocial studies as we explore the classical era, or that time everyone plagiarized the project. And don't forget that if you like what I'm doing, please subscribe to my podcast so you'll know when the next episodes are out. And if you really like what I'm doing, go to iTunes wherever you get your podcasts and give me a review. Thanks!