UNIT 1: ORIGINS OF CIVILIZATION EPISODE 1

Just Notes

PART I: MESOPOTAMIA & EGYPT

Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations developed in substantially different environments.
While both civilizations developed in fertile river valleys rich with silt from the annual flooding of the
Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the flood patterns and geography of the
surrounding area
were quite different.
These differences led to the development of starkly different outlooks on religion and political histories.

Farming villages emerged in both regions between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago.
Over time these societies improved agricultural technologies like irrigation canals, leading to population
growth and the
development of the first urban centers like those in Ur and Uruk in Mesopotamia and the kingdoms of
Upper and Lower Egypt.
The invention of the plow helped people settle into communities and societies began.

Mesopotamia developed in the fertile arch (known as the Fertile Crescent) along the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers that runs from the Persian in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the north.
This desert region is prone to flooding and lacks natural boundaries, making it susceptible to frequent
invasions.

Egypt on the other hand developed in the narrow fertile ribbon on the banks of the Nile River.
The Nile floods with remarkable regularity from July to October of each year, each time depositing rich
silt that was ideal for agriculture. This regularity was known as the Gift of the Nile which led to
remarkable stability in Egyptian society.

Another factor that contributed to this stability included natural boundaries that made invasions
unusual. To the north and east large bodies of water protected Egypt and to the south and west vast
deserts.

These environmental differences led to starkly different outlooks of religion. Both the Egyptians and
Mesopotamians were polytheistic with Gods that represented elements of nature, but because the
natural world of each civilization was so different, attitudes toward these Gods were quite different.
POLYTHEISTIC: The belief in many gods

In general, the Gods of Mesopotamia were viewed as unpredictable and often elicited the fear of the
population which tried to win their approval with sacrifices and the construction of elaborate temples
called Ziggurats.

Egyptian religion on the other hand, presented Gods that could be depended on to provide bounty and
prosperity. This difference was also reflected in each civilization’s view of the afterlife.
Mesopotamians believed that the afterlife was a fearful and gloomy place while Egyptians believed that
good deeds in life were rewarded with an afterlife rich in the same pleasures they enjoyed while alive.
These Egyptian views on death and the afterlife led to elaborate burial practices that included the
construction of tombs and mummification.
Environmental difference also led to remarkably different political histories with Mesopotamia marked
by frequent change and Egypt experiencing substantial continuity.
The first phase of Mesopotamia’s political history, known as Sumer, was dominated by several
independent and often warring city-states, each with its own hereditary monarch.

Each city-state had a walled urban area made up of simple mud-brick dwellings and a ceremonial and
administrative center dominated by a Ziggurat.
Outside of the city walls, each city-state controlled the large areas of surrounding farmland land. Around
4,000 years ago the King of Akkad, Sargon, conquered this region creating the world’s first empire.

PART II: RISE OF MONOTHEISM

While aspects of monotheism emerged in a variety of places and times including in Egypt under the
Pharaoh Amenhotep IV in the mid-1300s BCE and in Persia after growth of Zoroastrianism in the 600s
BCE, monotheism reached its most complete and enduring form among the Hebrews starting around
1250 BCE.
MONOTHEISM: The belief in one god

These beliefs, recorded in the Hebrew Bible, begin with the Hebrew people (led by MOSES) entering
into a covenant with God in which God promises to protect His chosen people in exchange for their
exclusive obedience to Him.
The basic tenants and Judaism, including monotheism, were established in this period as the TEN
COMMANDMENTS.

The Hebrew people established a kingdom on the eastern Mediterranean in about 1020 BCE which split
into two kingdoms in 920 BCE.
The concept of monotheism became more formalized during this period and was spread to other areas
by the Jewish diaspora that began with the conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians
in 721 BCE and the deportation of many Jewish leaders to Babylonia in 587 BCE.

While in Babylonia, the institution of the Synagogue was established and in about 450 BCE Judaism as a
monotheistic faith was fully developed with the completion of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the
TORAH.

BANTU TRIBES:
Before 2500 BCE, there were grasslands and savanna in the Sahara. Due to climate change, however,
the area slowly dried up and became a desert—a process called desertification. As a result, people
migrated to find new farmland.
Between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE, people from West Africa moved south and east.
They spoke BANTU languages. These Bantu peoples merged with existing peoples and brought skills in
farming and ironworking.

PART III: GREECE

In the period around 700 BCE, Greece was divided into several independent and often warring
kingdoms.
Each king’s power was supported by an army made up of part-time hoplite soldiers who came from the
class of small landowning farmers, merchants and artisans. In several of these kingdoms, the hoplites
were growing increasingly discontent with the power of their kings. This frustration led to the rise of
tyrants in the period from around 650 BCE to 500 BCE.

These tyrants promised reforms in exchange for the support of the hoplites. Tyrants successfully
overthrew many of the kings and then attempted to establish despotic power for themselves. In most
cases this was unsuccessful and the tyrants were
themselves overthrown by the hoplites ushering the period of the Greek polis.

In the period from about 600 BCE to about 300 BCE Greece was divided into several (again often
warring) city-states, called POLIS.
POLIS: A city-state in ancient Greece
The form of government in each polis varied, with some limited democracies (Athens), some oligarchies
(Sparta), and some remaining monarchies.

Of the Greek polis, Athens and Sparta were the most powerful and influential. Political reforms
instituted by Solon in 594 BCE and Pericles from 461 to 429 BCE brought Athens its closest to a true
democracy.
However, at best, only 10% to 15% of the population of Athens was ever allowed to participate in
government. Women, the foreign born, and slaves (about 30% of the population) were always barred
from participation.

In c. 725 BCE Sparta conquered the neighboring region of Messenia and forced the population into
slavery. This population, called Helots revolted in about 650 BCE.
This revolt led to a series of reforms that basically turned Sparta into a military state in which all males
were expected to spend the majority of their life in military service.

Population growth and limited arable land led many of the Greek Polis to establish colonies around the
Mediterranean.
This spread Greek culture and political traditions to neighboring people, including the
Romans and brought conflict with neighboring empires like the Persians.

This is called CULTURAL DIFFUSION.

In 338 BCE Greece succumb to invasion by their neighbors to the north, Macedonia. While in many ways
the Macedonians had a culture unique from the Greeks they envied Greek achievements and thus
fancied themselves a part of Greek culture.

In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king, led a combined Greek and Macedonian army
to conquer the Persians ushering a brief period empire heavily influenced by Greek culture known as
the Hellenistic Age.

PART IV: ROME

Like the early Greeks, the Romans transitioned from a kingdom to a limited representative government
to an empire.
From about 753 to 507 BCE tradition holds that Rome was ruled by a series of seven kings, the last was a
tyrant and thus overthrown by the wealthy landowning class. This event ushered in the period of the
Roman Republic (507 BCE to about 88 BCE).
Rome enjoyed a much more hospitable homeland than the Greeks with long growing seasons, fertile
soil, vast forest, and rich iron deposits.
These advantages help explain how they came to surpass the Greeks in some areas of cultural and
political development.
The Roman Republic was made up of two basic social classes, the wealthy patricians and plebeians who
constituted a class of laborers and owners of small farms.
In the early republic the patrician class maintained almost complete governmental power through its
control over the main branches of government: the Senate, assemblies and elected consuls. While
plebeians held the right to vote in assemblies their votes counted less than those of patricians.

Over time, discontent and rebellion among the plebeians forced reforms that granted them greater but
never equal governmental power. This republican government proved highly effective and Rome
expanded to control all of the Italian peninsula (290 BCE).

Historians disagree on the exact events that mark the transition from the Republic to the Empire but
most agree that the war with neighboring Cathage from 264 BCE to 202 BCE (the Punic Wars) was an
important factor.
Service in the Roman army and status in the Roman state was largely contingent on
landownership. During Rome’s extended conflict with Carthage two key factors emerged to undermine
the class of small landowners that made up the bulk of the Roman army.

First, extended tours of duty kept men away from their farms and thus unable to plant and harvest
forcing their families sell the land to wealthy patricians.
Second, expansion brought a flood of cheap slave labor into the republic which made it difficult for
soldiers to find work when they returned to civilian life.
These factors, plus falling grain prices, caused a vast number of Romans to fall into poverty. Poor
unemployed Romans congregated in cities leading to urban unrest.
These poor landless Romans no longer qualified for military service thus decreasing the size and
strength of the Roman army and making it difficult for the Roman government to maintain order.

While the plebeian class struggled many members of the patrician class accumulated vast personal
estates and enormous wealth. These conditions proved ideal for power hungry opportunist who could
use their personal wealth to win the loyalty of Rome’s poor.
Men, like JULIUS CAESAR, built private armies and Rome quickly fell into a series of civil wars that lasted
from 88 to 31 BCE.

By the time the wars ended in 31 BCE few elements of the republican form of government survived. The
vast majority of governmental power now rested with an Emperor, of which Caesar Augustus was the
first.
The Senate survived only to give advice to the Emperors and citizen participation in government was
only allowed on the local level. Rome was now an EMPIRE.

The Roman Empire continued to expand, incorporating most of Europe and parts of the Middle East and
North Africa.
It was administered by an extensive bureaucracy working through a network of cities linked by paved
roads.

Cities served as provincial capitals with local governors that each reported to the emperor in Rome.
From about 31 BCE to 235 CE the empire prospered in a period termed Pax Romana.
Peace, order, and elaborate infrastructure including paved roads and aqueducts facilitated trade,
cultural exchange, technological development and the arts.

PART V: IMPORTANT PEOPLE OF GREECE & ROME

SOCRATES (GREECE): Socrates was an Athenian philosopher and teacher who lived from 470 to 399 BCE.
He argued that there were no absolute standards for truth and justice and encouraged his students to
question their assumptions, values and opinions.
To accomplish this, he developed a teaching method in which he would ask students a series of leading
questions, now called the Socratic Method.

In doing this, he challenged students to think for themselves rather than accept traditional
understandings of the world.
His work proved to be too much for Athenian authorities; in 399 BCE Socrates was sentenced to death
for corrupting the youth of Athens.

PLATO (GREECE): Plato (427 to 347 BCE) was one of Socrates’ students and is responsible for recording
many of his teachings. Plato continued and expanded the philosophical work of Socrates by continuing
to encourage rational thought. This is perhaps best exemplified in his most famous work The Republic,
published in 370 BCE.
Plato compares the traditions and superstitions that most people rely upon to understand the world
as shadows of the real truth. Plato’s The Republic dominated was the dominant philosophical work for
1,500 years.

ARISTOTLE (GREECE): Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE) attended Plato’s school the Academy and went on to
found his own school called the Lyceum after Plato’s death.
Aristotle worked to collect and categorize all of the knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines
including politics, philosophy, ethics, poetry, physics, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, and
psychology. Aristotle’s work laid the foundation for the modern study of many of these disciplines.

ALEXANDER the GREAT (GREECE): Alexander the Great was a pupil of Aristotle when he was the prince of
Macedonia. His father, Philip conquered and unified Greece in 338 BCE but died shortly afterwards.
In 336 BCE Alexander became the king of Macedonia and in 334 BCE announced that a unified force of
Greeks and Macedonians would invade the Persian Empire ostensibly to extract revenge for the Persian
invasion of Greece in 480 BCE.
Alexander’s armies had defeated the Persian Empire, taking control of the Middle East and Egypt and
crossed the Indus River in northern India.
In his wake, Alexander left a series of new
cities inhabited by a mix of indigenous peoples and Greek colonists. Alexander died at 32 years old in
323 BCE without an heir.
His generals wrangled over the empire, eventually dividing it among themselves. While the political
unity of the empire Alexander created was short lived, the cultural legacy endured for centuries as
Greek culture blended with indigenous traditions across the Middle East and South Asia.
This blending, termed the Hellenistic culture by historians, ushered in an age of vibrate cultural
exchange in scholarship, the arts, and literature.
JULIUS CAESAR (ROME): Julius Caesar took advantage of political and economic instability after the Punic
Wars to undermine the government of the Roman Republic and accumulate power for himself.
In 60 BCE he unified with two other powerful and ambitious Romans to form the first triumvirate. These
three men dominated the government of the Republic for ten years.
During this time, Julius Caesar utilized his military genius to conquer all of Gaul (modern France) for the
Romans. His success worried the other members of the triumvirate and the Roman Senate.
These fears were well founded as Caesar’s soldiers were deeply loyal and he was enormously popular
among the people of the Roman heartland.

In an attempt to control Caesar, the Roman Senate ordered him to disband his armies and return to
Rome. Instead, Caesar marched on Rome with his troops, crossing the Rubicon River in 49 BCE, easily
taking the city of Rome.
By 44 BCE, Caesar defeated his political rivals and pressured the Roman Senate to name him dictator for
life. Many historians mark this as the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman
Empire.
In March of 44 BCE members of the Roman Senate assassinated Caesar in an attempt to restore the
republic.

AUGUSTUS CAESAR (ROME): Augustus Caesar, began his life as Octavian. He was the adopted son of Julius
Caesar and with two other supports of Julius Caesar seized power in Rome after the assassination of his
father.
This Second Triumvirate ruled Rome for ten years. But, like its predecessor, it fell apart because of
political ambition and jealousy.
Octavian managed to force one member into retirement and defeated the other in a civil
war leaving complete control of Rome in his hands. In 27 BCE Octavian accepted the title Augustus
“exalted one” and became Rome’s first emperor, ruling as Augustus Caesar until his death in 14 CE.
Many historians mark the ascension of Augustus Caesar as the beginning of a period called Pax
Romana. This 207 year long period is considered the high point in Roman political, economic and
cultural dominance.

PART VI: GREECE & ROME’S LASTING IMPACT

The classical age Greeks and Romans laid many of the political foundations for the modern western
world. The Athenian and Roman approach to governance that allowed at least a portion of the
population to participate as citizens rather than simply obey as subjects served as an inspiration to the
Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century.

French and English philosophers found inspiration in the writings of the

Greeks and Romans during the European Enlightment and this ultimately led to the emergence of
modern participatory democracy.
Roman law codes survived in Europe long after the collapse of the empire, serving as the starting
point for the development of many modern European law codes.

The Greeks and Romans also left a wide and long-lived cultural legacy. Humanism and rational
philosophy, developed in Greece and explored further in Rome served as the intellectual foundation of
the European Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.

It has since become an important element of modern educational systems around the world.
This legacy is apparent:
In the use of the term humanities as a category of study.
The endurance of Latin-based words.
The ubiquity of Greek and Roman literature in modern curriculum.
The scientific method whose origins are found at Aristotle’s Lyceum.

The endurance and sophistication of this legacy was a product of Greece and Roman’s security and
longevity as classical age states. This security and longevity was, in part, a product of advanced
technologies developed within these states.
Greek and Roman engineers developed technique for the construction of monumental architecture,
irrigation and municipal water systems, and roats that contributed to a prosperous and cosmopolitan
society.
This prosperity facilitated the development of sophisticated scholarship that endured much longer than
the states themselves.

PART VII: RELGION in GREECE & ROME

Polytheism: The belief in many gods
The Greeks and the Romans worshipped a pantheon of gods and goddess that resembled humans both
physically and emotionally. Each god and goddess represented an important aspect of Mediterranean
life like love, wisdom, the sea, and war.
The Greeks and Romans believed that the gods and goddess confronted many of the same emotions as
humans and as such engaged with each other and humanity in complex and often troublesome ways.
These beliefs led to the development of a rich mythological literary traditions.

Attempts to appease the gods and goddess also led to the construction of monumental architecture like
the Parthenon in Athens and the Patheon in Rome and the development of complex state-run rituals
that helped justify the power of the government. The Roman religion was largely a product of cultural
diffusion from Greece.

CULTURAL DIFFUSION: the spreading out of culture, culture traits, or a cultural pattern from a central
point

Christianity in the Roman World

Christianity developed in the Jewish community of Roman controlled Palestine. Jesus of Nazareth was
born to a humble Jewish family and became a traveling teacher as an adult. He preached a message of
reform that argued that charity and compassion were more important than strict obedience to rabbis
and Jewish customs.

With time, Jesus developed a devoted following that believed he was the messiah foretold in Hebrew
prophecy. This developed into a belief that Jesus was the Son of God.
While the teachings of Jesus Christ were popular among some of the common people of Palestine it was
a direct threat to the power and influence of the traditional Jewish leadership and the Roman state.

Pressured by Jewish religious leaders, the Roman governor of Palestine ordered the arrest
and execution of Jesus.
After the crucifixion, the disciples of Jesus preached of his resurrection from the dead and ascension to
Heaven. The resurrection served to prove the divinity of Christ to his followers.
While Christianity only had a limited appeal to the Jewish community of Palestine, it found much greater
acceptance among the Gentile population of the Roman Empire, particular among oppressed groups like
slaves, commoners and women.
This was in large part thanks to the work of Paul who was among the first to take the teachings of
Christ to the Roman heartland.
While the Roman government continued to see Christianity as a threat and persecuted Christians, the
community became increasingly organized thanks to the work of disciples like Peter who established
the first formal centers of worship that would over time evolve into the Roman Catholic Church.

In 313 CE the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and issued the Edict of Milan that
legalized Christianity in the empire. With imperial support, Christianity grew quickly to become the
dominate religion of Europe.

Collapse of the Western Roman Empire

In 235 CE the stability of the Roman Empire came to an end and the empire entered a period known as
the Third-century Crisis.
From 235 to 284 CE Roman suffered from a series of weak and short-lived emperors, invasions,
economic depression, and social unrest.

This led the Emperor Diocletian to institute a series of radical reforms including dividing the empire in
half with two rulers.
Western: Will become the Holy Roman Empire.
Eastern: Byzantine Empire.

These reforms were effective for a time but by 476 the western half of the empire succumbed to
invasion by German tribes from the north, leaving the eastern half (known as the Byzantine Empire by
historians) to carry on Roman traditions.