Unit 10 · The First Civilizations

Modern humans have lived on Earth for at least two hundred thousand years. Writing is only about five thousand years old. That means more than ninety-five percent of the human story happened before anyone could write it down. Historians call this long stretch prehistory, meaning the time before written records. It is not a time without history. It is a time we have to read in a different way.

The people who read it are called archaeologists. They study the physical remains of past people: stone tools, animal bones, ash from fires, seeds, house foundations, paintings on cave walls, and the graves where people buried their dead. Every scrap is a clue. A pile of cracked bones near a hearth tells you what people ate and that they cooked it. A bead made of shell found three hundred miles from the sea tells you people traded or traveled.

An archaeological site is any place where these remains are found. Some sites are caves that people lived in for thousands of years. Others are open camps by old lakeshores, or mounds where a village stood. In Illinois, archaeologists have found spear points and camps along the rivers that are more than ten thousand years old. The ground under a cornfield can hold a whole chapter of the past.

The hardest part of prehistory is that objects do not explain themselves. A carved figure might be a toy, a god or a good-luck charm. Archaeologists build arguments from evidence, and they change their minds when new evidence turns up. That is what makes the field honest: the answer is always only as good as the digging behind it.

Stone lasts. Wood, leather and cloth rot away, but a flint blade knapped fifty thousand years ago is still sharp today. That is why the earliest ages of human life are named for tools. The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, covers the long time when people chipped stone into hand axes, scrapers and points. Later people learned to grind and polish stone into smooth axes, and archaeologists call that the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the age when farming began.

Bones talk too. The bones of hunted animals show cut marks where stone blades sliced off meat. Human bones show how tall people were, how hard they worked and what diseases they had. In 1991 hikers in the Alps found a man frozen in the ice with his clothes, copper axe and a quiver of arrows. Scientists nicknamed him Ötzi. He died about fifty-three hundred years ago, and his body showed an arrow wound in his shoulder and worn joints from years of walking hills.

To find out how old something is, archaeologists first look at where it lies. Dirt builds up over time, so deeper layers are usually older. This rule is called stratigraphy, from a word meaning layers. A tool found under a layer of volcanic ash is older than the eruption that dropped the ash. Reading the layers is like reading the pages of a book from the bottom up.

For real dates, scientists use radiocarbon dating. Living things take in a rare form of carbon that slowly breaks down after death at a known rate. By measuring how much is left in a bone, a seed or a piece of charcoal, a lab can estimate its age back to about fifty thousand years. The method was invented in the late 1940s by the American chemist Willard Libby. It changed prehistory from guesswork into a timeline.

In September of 1940, four teenagers were out near the village of Lascaux in southern France. They followed their dog into a hole in the ground. They found themselves in a cave. Its walls were covered with painted animals: horses, bulls, deer and a strange spotted creature with two straight horns. Some of the bulls are more than fifteen feet long. The paintings were made about seventeen thousand years ago, near the end of the last Ice Age.

The painters worked deep underground by the light of small lamps burning animal fat. They ground colored earth and charcoal into powder and mixed it with water or fat. They used brushes of hair, pads of moss and even blew paint through hollow bones to make a spray. They used the bumps of the rock to make a horse’s shoulder swell out. These were not clumsy scratches. They were the work of trained artists.

Lascaux is not alone. Chauvet Cave, also in France, holds paintings of lions, rhinos and bears that are about twice as old. In Spain, Indonesia and Australia, other caves hold hands stenciled onto the rock and animals drawn in red ochre. Wherever people lived in the Ice Age, some of them made cave art.

What did it mean? No one knows for certain. Some scholars think the paintings were hunting magic, made to bring the herds. Others think the caves were places for ceremonies, or that the animals were spirits, or that the art recorded stories. Almost no pictures show plants, and very few show people. Whatever the reason, the caves prove one thing: people thirty thousand years ago had minds as full and curious as our own.

For most of prehistory, every person on Earth was a hunter-gatherer. People hunted animals, fished and gathered wild plants, nuts, eggs and honey. They did not plant crops or keep herds. They lived in small groups, called bands, usually of twenty to fifty people who were related by blood or marriage. When the food in one place ran low, the band moved to the next.

This life took enormous knowledge. A gatherer had to know hundreds of plants: which roots were safe, which berries were poison, when each ripened. A hunter had to read tracks, know the wind, and understand the habits of every animal. People made spears, bows, nets, traps, baskets, needles from bone, and rope from plant fibers. They knew how to make fire and how to cook a poisonous plant until it was safe. In many bands, plants gathered by women provided more of the daily food than hunting did.

Bands shared. When a hunter killed a deer, everyone ate. This was not just kindness; it was insurance. A hunter fails most days, so sharing meant no family went hungry for long. Studies of hunter-gatherers who still lived this way in the twentieth century found that many worked fewer hours to feed themselves than farmers did. They had little property because everything had to be carried.

There were no kings and no rich families. Leaders were people others chose to listen to, and a leader who bossed people around could simply be ignored. Life was not easy. Injuries, hunger in bad seasons and childhood illness were common, and few people lived to old age. But it was a way of life that worked for two hundred thousand years.

About twenty thousand years ago the Earth was in the coldest stretch of the last Ice Age. Sheets of ice a mile thick covered Canada and reached south into what is now Illinois. The ice scraped the land flat and left behind the rich soil that Illinois farmers plow today. So much water was locked in ice that the oceans were roughly four hundred feet lower than now. Coastlines stretched far out, and land bridges connected places that are islands today.

South of the ice lay cold, dry grasslands. On them grazed animals that are now gone: woolly mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, and bison much bigger than today’s. Hunters followed these herds. A single mammoth could feed a band for weeks. People used the bones for tools and, in places with no trees, built huts out of mammoth bones and tusks covered with hides.

Surviving the cold took invention. People sewed fitted clothing with bone needles, built warm shelters, and kept fires burning through long winters. They made spear throwers, a short stick that let a hunter hurl a spear farther and harder. They stored meat in cold pits. Living through the Ice Age was one of the hardest things humans have ever done.

Then the world warmed. Between about fifteen thousand and ten thousand years ago the ice melted back, seas rose and flooded the land bridges, and forests spread north over the old grasslands. Many of the giant animals died out, from the changing climate, from hunting, or both. People had to find new ways to live. That challenge is part of why farming began when it did.

Modern humans first appeared in Africa. The oldest fossils of people who look like us are found there and are more than two hundred thousand years old. Starting perhaps sixty to seventy thousand years ago, groups of people spread out of Africa into Asia and Europe. They did not set out to explore. Each generation simply moved a little farther in search of game and plants, and over thousands of years they filled the land.

By about fifty thousand years ago people had reached Australia. That took boats, because even at Ice Age sea levels there were stretches of open ocean to cross. It is the oldest evidence we have of humans deliberately crossing the sea. In Europe, arriving humans met the Neanderthals, a different kind of human who had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. The Neanderthals died out, but many people alive today carry a small share of Neanderthal ancestry.

The Americas were the last great landmass people reached. When the sea was low, a wide plain called Beringia connected Siberia to Alaska. Hunters following herds crossed it, and some may also have moved down the Pacific coast by boat. Archaeologists have found campsites in the Americas at least fourteen or fifteen thousand years old, and some argue for older ones. The details are still debated.

Everywhere they went, people adapted. In Australia, in the Arctic and on the American plains, they learned new plants, new animals and new dangers. By about twelve thousand years ago, humans lived on every continent except Antarctica. The hunter-gatherer way of life had spread across the whole planet. Almost nowhere yet did anyone farm.

For two hundred thousand years no one farmed. Then, within a few thousand years of the Ice Age ending, people in several parts of the world began to plant crops and keep animals. Historians call this the Neolithic Revolution or the farming revolution. It did not happen in a day. It was a slow shift that took many generations, and the people living through it did not know they were changing the world.

The earliest well-studied case is the Fertile Crescent, an arc of hills and river valleys that curves from what is now Israel and Lebanon through Syria and Turkey into Iraq and Iran. After the ice melted, this region grew warm and wet enough for huge stands of wild wheat and barley. People could harvest enough in a few weeks to last a year. So they stayed near the grain. Villages of stone-footed houses appeared there before any crops were planted.

Once people stayed in one place, planting made sense. A family could clear a patch, save the best seed, and sow it near home. Settled people also had more children, because babies did not have to be carried on long marches. More mouths meant more need for food, which meant more planting. By about ten thousand years ago, some of these villages depended on farmed wheat, barley, peas and lentils, along with herded goats and sheep.

One surprising site changed how scholars see this story. At Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, hunter-gatherers built rings of carved stone pillars, some weighing many tons, around eleven and a half thousand years ago, before farming. Feeding the workers and gathering people for ceremonies may have pushed them toward growing grain. Perhaps people did not settle because they farmed. Perhaps they farmed because they had already begun to settle.

Wild wheat drops its seeds the moment they ripen, so the plant can spread. That is bad for a harvester, because most seeds fall before they can be cut. A few wild plants carry a rare trait that makes seeds cling to the stalk. Every time people harvested with sickles, they collected more of the clinging seeds and fewer of the falling ones. When they planted those seeds, the next crop clung more. In a few centuries, wheat had changed into a plant that could not sow itself. It needed people.

This process is called domestication: changing a wild species over many generations by choosing which ones to breed. People domesticated wheat, barley, peas and lentils in the Fertile Crescent. They domesticated goats and sheep there too, choosing the calmest animals to keep and eating the wild-tempered ones. Over time the herds became smaller, tamer and woollier than their wild cousins. Cattle and pigs followed.

The first animal people domesticated was not for food. Dogs came from wolves, and they were living with hunter-gatherers thousands of years before any crop was planted. The oldest sure dog burials are more than fourteen thousand years old. Dogs helped hunt, guarded camps and ate scraps. Later, farmers added donkeys, horses, chickens and camels, each first tamed in a different part of the world.

Domestication changed people as much as it changed animals. Adults in most of the world cannot digest milk, but in places with a long history of dairy herding, most adults can. That ability spread because people who could drink milk had an extra food source. Farmers and their animals also began sharing diseases. Measles, flu and smallpox all likely came to people from herds. Living with animals was a bargain with a hidden price.

The Fertile Crescent was not the only place farming began. It was invented on its own, by different people who never met, in at least six or seven parts of the world. Each place tamed the plants and animals that happened to grow there. That is why the world’s diets are so different. Nobody carried farming from one continent to another; people figured it out again and again.

In China, people along the Yangtze River domesticated rice, and people along the Yellow River domesticated millet, a small hardy grain, about nine thousand years ago. They kept pigs and, later, chickens. In Mexico, farmers slowly turned a wild grass called teosinte, with a cob barely an inch long, into corn, or maize. They added beans and squash. In the Andes mountains of South America, people grew potatoes and kept llamas. In New Guinea, farmers grew taro and bananas. In Africa, sorghum, yams and African rice were tamed in different regions.

The Americas had far fewer animals to domesticate. There were no wild horses, cattle, sheep or pigs left after the Ice Age. So American farmers relied on plants, plus llamas, turkeys and dogs. That difference mattered for thousands of years. Without draft animals, there were no plows and no carts, and without herds, fewer of the diseases that Old World people slowly grew used to.

The map of early farming is also a map of where later civilizations rose. Sumer grew from Fertile Crescent wheat. The Shang dynasty grew from millet and rice. The Olmec and Maya grew from maize. The crops came first. In the next two chapters, every city you read about stood on a field that someone had learned to plant thousands of years before.

A good harvest gives a farming family more grain than it can eat. That extra is a surplus. Hunter-gatherers rarely had one, because wild food spoils and cannot be carried. Farmers could store grain in pits, jars and mud-brick rooms for years. A surplus is more than a full stomach. It is time. If ten families grow enough for twelve, two families can do something else.

That something else is specialization. In a farming village, one person might spend the whole year making pottery, another chipping obsidian blades, another weaving cloth. Specialists got better at their craft than anyone in a band could, and they traded their goods for food. Pottery itself was a farming invention: hunters do not haul clay jars around, but villagers needed them to store grain and cook porridge.

Surplus also created something new: inequality. In a band, no one could pile up much more than anyone else. In a village, a family with the best land and a full storeroom could feed workers, buy goods and pass its wealth to its children. Over centuries, some families became richer than others, and social classes appeared: people ranked by wealth and power. Archaeologists see the beginning of this in graves. In the oldest villages, everyone is buried much the same. In later ones, a few people are buried with jewelry, weapons and fine pottery, and most are buried with nothing.

Someone also had to guard the grain, settle fights over land and decide when to plant. Leaders gained power because they controlled the surplus. Priests explained the weather and the harvest. Warriors defended the storerooms or raided the neighbors’. The small, mostly equal band was turning into something with a top and a bottom.

About nine thousand years ago, several thousand people lived in one dense settlement. It stood on a plain in what is now central Turkey. Archaeologists call it Çatalhöyük, a Turkish name meaning fork mound. It was not a city with temples, palaces or streets. It was a honeycomb of mud-brick houses built wall to wall. They were packed so tightly that there were no roads at all. People walked across the rooftops. They climbed down ladders into their homes through a hole in the ceiling. The same hole let out smoke from the hearth.

Inside, the walls were plastered white and repainted often. Some paintings show hunts, geometric patterns and vultures. One may be a map of the town below an erupting volcano. Some houses had the horns of wild bulls set into the walls. People buried their dead under the floors of their own houses. Sometimes many bodies lay in one home, and the family kept living on top of them. When a house grew old, they filled it in and built a new one on the same spot. Layer on layer, the mound rose above the plain.

The people of Çatalhöyük farmed wheat, barley and peas and kept sheep and goats, but they still hunted wild cattle and gathered wild plants. They traded obsidian, a black volcanic glass that makes razor-sharp blades, from mountains far away. They made pottery, baskets, wooden bowls, and small clay figures of animals and heavy-bodied people. There is no sign of a ruler’s house, a temple or a wall. Most houses are about the same size.

The British archaeologist James Mellaart first dug the site in the early 1960s. A large international team took over in the 1990s. Their careful work shows a town that was big and crowded. As far as we can tell, it was still fairly equal. Çatalhöyük is a snapshot of the moment after farming and before kings.

It is easy to assume farming was simply progress. It fed more people, which is why farmers eventually outnumbered hunter-gatherers almost everywhere. It made villages, then cities, then writing, law and everything else in this course. But archaeologists who study skeletons have found something uncomfortable. In many regions, the first farmers were shorter than the hunter-gatherers before them, had more cavities from a starchy diet, and showed more signs of childhood hunger and disease.

Farmers ate a narrower diet, mostly one or two grains, so a bad harvest meant famine, a season of hunger that a band could have walked away from. Farmers worked longer hours: clearing, plowing, weeding, harvesting, grinding. Their bent spines and worn knees show it. Living packed together with animals and their own waste, they suffered from new diseases. And once a family had fields and a storeroom, it could not leave, which made it easier to tax, rule and raid.

So why did farming win? Because it works at the level of populations, not individuals. A farming village could feed ten times as many people on the same land as a band of foragers. More people meant more soldiers, more workers and more children to inherit the fields. Hunter-gatherers were pushed to the margins, or joined the farmers, or were overrun. It did not matter that each farmer might have been worse off than each hunter.

Some scholars have called farming the worst mistake in human history. Others point out that without it there would be no music halls, no hospitals and no books. Both sides are reading the same bones and the same storerooms. Carry this question into the next chapters. Suppose a change makes a whole society stronger but many of its people worse off. Who gets to decide whether it was worth it?

Look at a map of the Middle East and northeast Africa. Most of it is desert. But three rivers cut through the dry land, and along them the first cities in the world appeared. The Tigris and the Euphrates flow from the mountains of Turkey southeast to the Persian Gulf. The land between them the Greeks later called Mesopotamia, which means between the rivers. Today most of it is Iraq. Far to the west, the Nile flows north out of Africa through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.

A river in a desert is life. It gives drinking water for people and animals. It gives water for crops, in a place where rain alone would grow nothing. When it floods it spreads a layer of fine mud called silt over the fields, and silt is rich soil. The Nile is the longest river in the world at roughly four thousand miles, and it flooded every summer so regularly that Egyptians set their calendar by it. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Egypt was a gift of the river.

A river is also a road. Grain, timber, stone and copper are heavy. Carrying them on a donkey’s back is slow, but a boat can float tons of cargo downstream with little effort. On the Nile the current runs north while the wind usually blows south, so boats could sail up and drift down. Cities on rivers could gather food and goods from hundreds of miles away.

Mesopotamia and Egypt were alike in depending on rivers, but the rivers were not alike. The Nile’s flood came on time and gently. The Tigris and Euphrates flooded in spring, often violently, sometimes too early or too late for the crops. Egypt was protected by deserts on both sides. Mesopotamia was open plain, easy to invade. Those differences shaped how each civilization thought about its gods, its kings and its future.

Rivers do not water fields by themselves. Farmers had to dig canals to carry water from the river to the land, and ditches to spread it between the crops. They built earth banks to hold back floods, and gates to open and close the flow. This system is called irrigation. In southern Mesopotamia almost no rain falls, so every field of barley depended on a canal someone had dug and someone kept clean.

Canals silt up. Banks wash out. A gate left open drowns one field and starves another. Irrigation therefore needed cooperation on a scale a village had never seen. Hundreds of people had to dig at the same time, follow a plan, and agree on who got water first. Someone had to organize the work and settle the fights. Historians argue that this need for organization helped create the first governments. A king who controlled the water controlled the food.

In Egypt, the Nile did much of the work. Farmers built low banks to divide the floodplain into basins. When the flood came, they let water into the basins, held it there for weeks so the silt could settle, then let it drain. This is called basin irrigation. It needed less digging than Mesopotamia’s canals, but still needed officials to measure the flood, record the fields and collect a share of the harvest as tax.

Irrigation had a hidden cost. River water carries tiny amounts of salt. When water evaporates from a field, the salt stays behind. Over centuries, fields in southern Mesopotamia grew salty, and farmers switched from wheat, which hates salt, to barley, which tolerates it. Records show harvests falling. Some of the oldest cities were slowly starved by the very system that had fed them.

The first cities on Earth rose in Sumer, the southern end of Mesopotamia near the Persian Gulf. By around 3200 BCE the city of Uruk had walls, temples and a population in the tens of thousands, larger than any place people had ever lived. Others followed: Ur, Lagash, Kish, Nippur, Eridu. Each was a city-state, meaning a city that ruled itself and the farmland around it, like a tiny country. There was no united Sumerian nation, only rival cities that traded, quarreled and fought.

Each city belonged to a god. Ur was the city of the moon god Nanna; Uruk belonged to the sky god An and the goddess Inanna. The god’s temple stood on a raised platform in the center, and its priests owned large farms and workshops. Much of the city’s grain flowed into temple storehouses and out again as rations to workers. A king, called a lugal, meaning big man, led the army and claimed to rule on the god’s behalf.

Inside the walls, life was crowded and unequal. At the top were the king, priests and nobles. Below them were free farmers, merchants, craftsmen and scribes. At the bottom were enslaved people, mostly prisoners of war or people sold for debt. Women could own property and run businesses, and a few priestesses held great power, but men held nearly all political offices.

The city-states fought over water and land for centuries. Around 2334 BCE, a ruler named Sargon from the city of Akkad conquered all of them. He built the first empire, a state ruling many peoples. His daughter Enheduanna was a high priestess who wrote hymns. She is the first author in history whose name we know. Sargon’s empire lasted about a century and a half, then broke apart. But the idea of one ruler over many cities never went away.

Writing was not invented to tell stories. It was invented to count. Temple officials in Uruk needed to track how many jars of oil came in, how many sheep went out and who owed what. At first they pressed small clay tokens into shapes and scratched pictures on clay to stand for goods. By about 3200 BCE, those pictures had become a system: a sign for sheep, a sign for the number ten, a sign for the temple. The oldest writing in the world is mostly receipts.

Over centuries the pictures turned into wedges. A scribe pressed the corner of a cut reed into wet clay, making short straight marks. Because the marks look like wedges, we call the script cuneiform, from a Latin word for wedge. The signs stopped looking like objects and began to stand for sounds and syllables. That made it possible to write any word, including names, poems and laws. A fully trained scribe knew several hundred signs.

Cuneiform outlived Sumer. Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites and Persians all adapted it for their own languages. It was used for about three thousand years, longer than the alphabet has existed so far. Hundreds of thousands of tablets survive: school exercises, contracts, letters, medical texts, star observations and the Epic of Gilgamesh, a long poem about a king of Uruk who searches for a way to escape death.

For two thousand years nobody could read it. In the 1800s, a British officer named Henry Rawlinson copied a huge inscription carved on a cliff at Behistun in Iran. It was written in three languages. Using the Persian version as a key, he and others cracked the Babylonian cuneiform. In 1872, a museum worker named George Smith read a tablet describing a great flood and a boat full of animals. It was older than the Bible. The story goes that he was so excited he began to undress in the reading room.

The wheel seems obvious, but people farmed for thousands of years without it. The first wheels were potter’s wheels, turntables for shaping clay, in use in Mesopotamia by about 3500 BCE. Soon after, someone set two solid wooden disks on an axle under a cart. Wheeled carts and war chariots pulled by donkeys appear in Sumerian art by about 2500 BCE. A cart lets one animal haul what ten people could carry. The idea spread across Europe and Asia, though not to the Americas, which had no animals to pull one.

Sumerians also learned to mix copper with a little tin to make bronze, a metal harder than either. Bronze tools held an edge that stone could not. Bronze swords, helmets and axes changed war. But tin was rare and came from far away, so bronze was expensive, and the age named for it, the Bronze Age, was also an age of long-distance trade. A city that lost its trade routes lost its weapons.

The most visible Sumerian invention was the ziggurat. It was a temple built on a stepped platform of mud brick, rising in terraces like a stair-stepped mountain. The god’s shrine sat on top. King Ur-Nammu built the great ziggurat of Ur around 2100 BCE. After four thousand years it still stands more than sixty feet high. Its base is about the size of a football field. In a flat land, the ziggurat was the only mountain. It told everyone who walked by which city was strongest.

Other Sumerian tools were quieter. They divided the hour into sixty minutes and the circle into three hundred sixty degrees, and we still do. They kept records of the planets. They used a plow pulled by oxen and a seed drill that dropped grain into the furrow. Each invention fed the next: the plow made surplus, surplus paid for bronze, bronze built armies, armies needed scribes to count them.

Hammurabi was king of Babylon, a city on the Euphrates, from about 1792 to 1750 BCE. He conquered most of Mesopotamia. Near the end of his reign he had a set of laws carved on a black stone pillar over seven feet tall. He set it up where people could see it. At the top, a carving shows the sun god Shamash, god of justice. He is handing Hammurabi the tools of a ruler. The message was clear: these laws come from the gods, and the king enforces them.

The code contains about two hundred eighty-two laws. They cover almost everything: wages, rents, theft, marriage, divorce, adoption, medical fees, the duties of builders and boatmen, and what happens when an ox gores someone. Many laws follow the pattern if this happens, then that must be done. Some protect the weak: a widow keeps her home, and a debtor’s family cannot be held as slaves forever. Others are brutal, with death as the penalty for many crimes.

The most famous laws are the ones about injury. If a man puts out the eye of another man, his own eye is put out. If he breaks a bone, his bone is broken. This idea, an eye for an eye, is called retaliation. But it applied only between equals. If a noble injured a commoner, he paid a fine in silver. If he injured an enslaved person, he paid the owner. The same act had three different prices, depending on who was hurt. Justice was real, but it was not equal.

French archaeologists found the stone in 1901 in Susa, Iran. A later conqueror had carried it off there as loot. It now stands in the Louvre museum in Paris. It is not the oldest law code, but it is the most complete. It tells us what a Mesopotamian king thought a ruler owed his people. He owed them order, protection, and a public list of rules that applied even to the powerful.

Egypt is a long green ribbon in a brown desert. The Nile valley is often only a few miles wide, and almost everyone lived within sight of the river. Around 3100 BCE a ruler from the south, remembered as Narmer or Menes, united the valley, called Upper Egypt, with the wide delta near the sea, called Lower Egypt. From then on Egypt’s ruler wore a double crown, one for each land. That ruler was the pharaoh, a word that means great house.

Historians divide Egypt’s next two thousand years into three great periods. The Old Kingdom, roughly 2686 to 2181 BCE, was the age of the pyramids, when pharaohs had the power and wealth to build the largest stone structures on Earth. It ended in drought, famine and civil war. The Middle Kingdom, roughly 2055 to 1650 BCE, reunited the land. Pharaohs built forts, dug canals and expanded trade. It ended when foreign rulers called the Hyksos, who had horses and chariots, took over the delta.

The New Kingdom, roughly 1550 to 1070 BCE, was Egypt’s age of empire. Pharaohs drove out the Hyksos, adopted their chariots and pushed armies into Syria and Nubia. This period had the rulers whose names people still know. Hatshepsut, a woman, ruled as pharaoh for about twenty years and sent trading ships south to a land called Punt. Thutmose III fought seventeen campaigns. Akhenaten tried to replace Egypt’s many gods with one, the sun disk, and failed. His son Tutankhamun’s tomb was found nearly untouched in 1922.

Ramses II ruled for sixty-six years, built temples everywhere and fought the Hittites at Kadesh, then signed with them the oldest surviving peace treaty. After him Egypt slowly weakened. It was ruled by Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, Persians and finally Greeks and Romans. But for most of three thousand years, the pharaoh, the Nile and the gods held Egypt together with a stability no other ancient state matched.

The Great Pyramid at Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2560 BCE. It was originally about four hundred eighty feet tall, and for nearly four thousand years it was the tallest building on Earth. It contains roughly two million blocks of limestone, many weighing more than a car. Workers cut them with copper tools, dragged them on sleds over wetted sand, and raised them with ramps. The sides face north, south, east and west almost exactly.

Why build such a thing? Egyptians believed that a person’s spirit lived on after death, but only if the body was preserved and supplied with what it needed. They dried bodies with salt, wrapped them in linen and placed them in tombs with food, furniture and small figures of servants. This process is mummification. The pharaoh was not an ordinary person. He was believed to be a living god, and his safe passage to the afterlife kept the Nile flooding and the land in order.

The pyramids were not built by enslaved people. Archaeologists have dug up the workers’ town beside Giza: bakeries, breweries, barracks and a cemetery of laborers buried with honor. Most were farmers who came during the flood season, when the fields were underwater and no farming could be done. They were fed bread, beer, onions and beef, and worked in named gangs. One team called itself the Friends of Khufu. Building the tomb was a kind of tax, paid in labor.

By the New Kingdom, pharaohs stopped building pyramids, which were easy to find and rob. They cut their tombs into cliffs in the Valley of the Kings near Thebes. Nearly all were looted in ancient times. In 1922 the British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun. It was almost the only one still full. Inside were a golden mask, chariots, beds, games and food for a journey that never ended.

Egyptians developed their own writing at about the same time as Sumer. Their formal script is called hieroglyphs, from Greek words meaning sacred carving. It uses hundreds of small pictures: an owl, a reed, a pair of legs, a loaf of bread. Some signs stand for whole words. Most stand for sounds. Egyptians carved hieroglyphs on temples and tombs, and wrote a faster, flowing version with reed pens and ink on papyrus, a paper made from pressed strips of a river plant.

After Egypt fell under Greek and then Roman rule, fewer and fewer people learned the old script. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved in the year 394 CE. After that, for fourteen centuries, no one on Earth could read a single Egyptian sentence. Scholars guessed the pictures were mystical symbols with secret meanings. They were wrong.

In 1799, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, dug up a broken slab of dark stone. It was covered with the same announcement, a decree honoring the boy king Ptolemy V in 196 BCE, written three ways: in hieroglyphs, in a later Egyptian script, and in Greek. Greek could be read. The Rosetta Stone was the key. When the British defeated the French, they took the stone, and it has been in the British Museum since 1802.

Cracking the code still took more than twenty years. The English scientist Thomas Young showed that some signs spelled out the sound of the name Ptolemy. Then the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, who had learned Coptic, a late form of Egyptian, proved in 1822 that hieroglyphs mixed sound signs and word signs. Suddenly tomb walls, temple pillars and papyrus letters could speak. Three thousand years of Egyptian voices came back.

Most people in both lands were farmers who never saw a palace. They lived in mud-brick houses, ate bread, onions, beans, fish and beer, and worked the fields from the end of the flood to the harvest. Children helped from an early age. Few people lived past forty. Sickness was treated with a mix of practical medicine, herbs and prayers to the gods.

Women in Egypt had more legal rights than in most ancient societies. They could own land, run a business, sign contracts, go to court and divorce. Some worked as weavers, brewers, musicians or priestesses. Royal women could hold great power; Hatshepsut ruled as pharaoh. In Mesopotamia, women’s rights were narrower and shrank over time, but they too could own property and trade, and some ran taverns or served as priestesses. In both lands, the household was expected to be led by a man.

Scribes stood between the farmers and the king. They recorded taxes, measured fields, wrote letters and kept accounts for temples. A scribe did not have to dig canals or carry bricks. An Egyptian text known as the Satire of the Trades tells a boy to become a scribe by listing the miseries of every other job: the metalworker’s burned fingers, the barber’s endless walking, the fisherman’s fear of crocodiles. Then it says the scribe is the one who gives the orders.

We even know about a strike. At Deir el-Medina, the village of the workers who cut the royal tombs, the grain rations stopped arriving in about 1157 BCE under Ramses III. The workers laid down their tools, marched to a temple and refused to go back until they were paid. A scribe wrote it all down. It is the oldest recorded strike in history, and it worked, at least for a while.

Mesopotamia had mud, reeds, barley and wool, and almost nothing else. There was no timber, no stone and no metal. So Sumerian merchants sent wool cloth and grain down the Gulf and up the rivers. They brought back cedar from Lebanon, copper from Oman and tin from far to the east. They also brought lapis lazuli, a deep blue stone, from the mountains of Afghanistan, more than a thousand miles away. Seals from the Indus cities have been found in Mesopotamian sites, proof of contact between the world’s first civilizations.

Egypt was richer in stone and gold but sent ships too. Expeditions went south to Nubia for gold, ivory and ebony. Others sailed to a land called Punt for incense and exotic animals. Punt was probably on the coast of the Red Sea or the Horn of Africa. Hatshepsut had her Punt voyage carved on her temple walls. The carvings show the ships, the goods and the people she traded with. Egypt bought cedar from the port of Byblos in Lebanon for ships and coffins.

Trade and war went together. Egypt’s New Kingdom armies pushed into Syria partly to control the trade routes there. Around 1274 BCE, Ramses II met the Hittite army at Kadesh in one of the largest chariot battles of the ancient world. Both sides claimed victory. About fifteen years later they signed a treaty, promising peace and to return each other’s runaways. A copy in Hittite and a copy in Egyptian both survive.

Mesopotamia’s open plain made it a land of conquerors. Akkadians, Amorites, Hittites, Kassites, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians took turns ruling it. The Assyrians, around 900 to 600 BCE, built the most feared army yet. They had iron weapons and siege engines, and they moved whole conquered peoples to new lands. Their capital at Nineveh held a library of thousands of tablets. It included the best copy of Gilgamesh, saved by being baked when the city burned.

Look at the top of a worksheet. There is a date, and the date comes from Egypt. Egyptian priests noticed that the bright star Sirius rose just before the sun at about the time the Nile flood began, once every three hundred sixty-five days. They made a calendar of twelve months of thirty days plus five extra days at the end. Julius Caesar borrowed it for Rome, adding a leap day. With small fixes, it is the calendar on your phone.

Now look at a clock. The sixty minutes in each hour come from the Sumerians’ counting system based on sixty. The twenty-four hour day comes from Egypt, which divided day and night into twelve parts each. Then look at the words on the page. Alphabets came later, from peoples who traded with Egypt, but the idea that marks can stand for sounds began with cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Every letter you write is a descendant.

The deeper legacy is harder to see. Mesopotamia and Egypt invented the state: a government with officials, taxes, records, written law and an army, ruling a large territory. They invented the idea that laws should be written where all can see them, and that a ruler is responsible for justice. They invented the school, the contract, the receipt and the map. They also invented the imperial army, the enslaved war captive and the tax collector. The package came together.

These civilizations also left problems that are still ours. Salt ruined Sumer’s fields. Kings claimed to be gods. Wealth piled up in a few hands while most people farmed. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than four thousand years ago, is about a king who learns that even he must die and that the only lasting thing is the city and the wall he built for others. It may be the oldest answer to the question of what a life is for.

Around 2600 BCE, along the Indus River and its branches in what is now Pakistan and northwest India, people built cities unlike any before them. The two largest are called Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, though we do not know what their builders called them. Mohenjo-daro may have held forty thousand people. Dozens of smaller towns and hundreds of villages spread over an area larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined.

The first thing archaeologists noticed was the planning. Main streets ran straight, north to south and east to west, crossing at right angles to form a grid. The bricks were baked and made in one standard size, with sides in the ratio of one to two to four, in every city across a thousand miles. Stone weights for weighing goods followed one system everywhere. Somebody, or some shared set of rules, was in charge across the whole region.

The second thing they noticed was the water. Many houses had their own well and a bathroom with a brick floor. The bathroom drained into a covered sewer under the street. Sewers had inspection holes so they could be cleaned. Nothing like it existed in Sumer or Egypt. Most cities in the world would not have such drains for another four thousand years. On the raised mound at Mohenjo-daro sits the Great Bath. It is a watertight brick pool about forty feet long, probably used for ritual washing.

Harappa was first noticed in the 1850s. British engineers building a railway used its ancient bricks as ballast under the tracks. Serious digging began in the 1920s. Indian archaeologists working under John Marshall uncovered the cities. In 1924 Marshall announced to the world that a civilization as old as Sumer had been found. Because the script cannot be read, everything we know comes from the bricks, the drains and the objects themselves.

Thousands of small square seals have been found in Indus cities, carved from soft stone and about the size of a postage stamp. Most show an animal, often a bull, an elephant, a rhinoceros or a one-horned creature that may be imaginary, with a line of signs above it. Pressed into wet clay, a seal left a mark. They were probably used to seal bundles of goods and show who owned them. Indus seals have been found in Mesopotamian cities, so Indus traders traveled far.

The signs are writing, or something very close to it. Scholars have counted about four hundred different signs, which is too many for an alphabet and too few for a system like Chinese, so they probably mix sound signs and word signs. But no inscription is longer than a few dozen signs and most have only five or six. There is no Rosetta Stone. Nobody knows what language the people spoke. Dozens of people have claimed to read it, and no two agree.

Because the script is silent, the Indus civilization is a mystery in ways Egypt and Sumer are not. We know no king’s name. We have found no palace, no royal tomb and no large temple. There are almost no images of rulers, wars or gods. One of the few portraits is a small stone bust of a bearded man in a patterned robe, called the Priest-King. No one knows whether he was a priest, a king or neither. Weapons are rare, and there are few signs of large battles.

Some archaeologists think the Indus cities were ruled by councils of merchants or priests rather than kings. Others think power was there but shown differently. The honest answer is that we do not know. Until someone reads the seals, the people of the Indus will keep their names to themselves.

By about 1900 BCE the great Indus cities were in trouble. Streets were no longer kept clean. Houses were divided into smaller rooms and built with reused bricks. The standard weights and seals stopped being made. Over the next two centuries, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were largely abandoned, and people moved east toward the Ganges plain into smaller villages. The cities were not destroyed all at once. They wore out.

For a long time scholars blamed invaders. Early excavators found a few skeletons lying in the streets of Mohenjo-daro and imagined a massacre by newcomers from the north. Later study showed the bodies came from different times and showed few signs of violence. No burned layer, no heaps of weapons and no destroyed walls have turned up. The invasion story does not fit the evidence.

The rivers fit better. A large river, now dry, once flowed east of the Indus, and many settlements lined its banks. Its water seems to have dwindled as its sources shifted. At the same time, studies of ancient lake beds and cave formations show that the monsoon, the seasonal rains that South Asia depends on, grew weaker after about 2200 BCE. Less rain meant smaller floods, thinner harvests and cities that could no longer feed themselves.

Trade with Mesopotamia also faded, and disease may have spread in the crowded, damp cities. Whatever the mix of causes, the lesson is one we saw in Sumer. A civilization built on a river is only as strong as the river. The Indus people did not vanish. Their descendants farmed the same land. Some of their crafts, crops and perhaps their beliefs flowed into the later history of India.

The Yellow River is called the Huang He in Chinese. It rises in the mountains of the west and flows about three thousand four hundred miles to the sea. It gets its name from the fine yellow dust it carries. That dust is loess, a soft, rich soil blown in from the deserts over thousands of years. It lies hundreds of feet deep across north China. Loess is so soft that early farmers could work it with wooden tools. It is so fertile that it grew millet year after year.

Along the Yellow River, farming villages appeared by about 7000 BCE. By 3000 BCE there were walled towns. They had pottery painted in red and black, silk woven from the cocoons of silkworms, and jade carved into blades and rings. Jade is so hard that carving it took months. A jade object announced that its owner could feed a craftsman for a long time. Rice farming grew separately in the warmer, wetter south along the Yangtze.

The river gave with one hand and took with the other. All that loess settles on the riverbed, raising it higher year by year. In time the river runs above the level of the surrounding plain, held in only by the banks people build. When a bank fails, the river bursts out and can change course by hundreds of miles, drowning whole regions. Over recorded history it has done this many times and killed more people than any other river on Earth. The Chinese called it China’s Sorrow.

Controlling the river became the first job of any Chinese government. A legend tells of Yu the Great. He spent thirteen years digging channels to drain the floods and was made the first king for it. Whether or not Yu existed, the story shows what people expected from a ruler. They wanted not just armies and temples, but banks, canals and grain stores. A king who let the river flood had failed at his one true task.

Chinese tradition names a first dynasty, the Xia, but no writing from it has been found. The first dynasty we can prove is the Shang, which ruled the Yellow River valley from about 1600 to 1046 BCE. A dynasty is a line of rulers from one family. Shang kings ruled from walled cities, the last and greatest near Anyang. They commanded armies with bronze weapons and horse-drawn chariots, and they kept their power by keeping close to their dead ancestors.

The Shang believed that dead kings joined a high god called Di and could help or harm the living. So the king was also chief priest. He asked his ancestors questions through oracle bones, turtle shells or ox shoulder blades cracked with heat, and offered them food, wine and sometimes human victims, usually war captives. When a king died, servants and soldiers were killed to go with him. The royal tombs at Anyang hold dozens of such victims along with bronzes, jades and chariots.

Shang bronze work is among the finest ever made. Craftsmen cast huge vessels for offering food and wine to ancestors, covered in patterns of animal faces, dragons and spirals. One vessel weighs nearly a ton. Bronze was for the king, the nobles and the gods. Farmers still used stone and wood. That gap between the bronze-owning few and the rest is the shape of Shang society.

In 1976 archaeologists opened the only untouched Shang royal tomb yet found. It belonged to Fu Hao, a wife of King Wu Ding. It held hundreds of bronzes and jades, along with weapons. Oracle bones say she led armies of thousands in battle and performed sacrifices herself. She is the earliest Chinese woman general we know by name. Her tomb is a reminder that the bones can name people the legends forgot.

The Shang fell to a people from the west called the Zhou. Around 1046 BCE the Zhou army defeated the last Shang king, who according to tradition burned himself in his palace. The Zhou faced a problem every conqueror faces: how to explain why they deserved to rule. The Shang had claimed their ancestors gave them power. The Zhou gave a new answer, and it lasted longer than any dynasty.

The answer was the Mandate of Heaven. Heaven, the Zhou said, is a moral power that chooses a worthy ruler and gives him the right to govern. That right is not forever. A ruler who is cruel, greedy or lazy, who lets floods rage and people starve, loses the mandate. Floods, famines, earthquakes and rebellions are signs that Heaven has withdrawn its favor. Then Heaven chooses someone new. The Shang had lost the mandate through their wickedness, the Zhou said, and Heaven had handed it to the Zhou.

This idea cut both ways. It let a new dynasty claim it ruled by right, not just by force. But it also meant that a bad ruler could be overthrown, and that the rebel who won had proved Heaven was on his side. For the next three thousand years, every Chinese dynasty rose by claiming the mandate and fell when people decided it had been lost. An old text says that Heaven sees through the eyes of the people and hears through their ears. That put a limit, in theory, on every emperor.

The Zhou ruled a much larger area than the Shang, too large to control directly. So the king gave land to relatives and allies who ruled it as lords in exchange for loyalty and soldiers. Over centuries those lords grew strong and the king grew weak. By the last part of the Zhou period, states fought each other in the Warring States period, until one of them, Qin, united all of China in 221 BCE. That story belongs to the next unit.

The first complex society of the Americas took shape around 1200 BCE. It grew in the hot, wet lowlands along the Gulf coast of Mexico, in what is now Veracruz and Tabasco. We call these people the Olmec. That was a name later Aztecs used for the region. It means rubber people, because rubber trees grew there. We do not know what they called themselves. Their main centers were San Lorenzo, which flourished first, and La Venta, which followed around 900 BCE.

The Olmec are famous for their colossal heads. These are giant portraits of rulers carved from a single block of basalt, a hard volcanic rock. Some are about ten feet tall and weigh many tons. Seventeen have been found. Each has a different face and a different helmet-like headdress. That suggests they show real individuals. The basalt came from mountains dozens of miles away. It had to be dragged and floated across the swampy lowlands without wheels or draft animals. Only a society that could organize thousands of workers could manage it.

Olmec farmers grew maize, beans and squash on the rich river soils. Their leaders traded far for jade, obsidian and iron-ore mirrors and built earthen platforms and a large pyramid of clay at La Venta. Their art shows jaguars, snakes, and half-human, half-jaguar beings that may be gods. They played a ball game on a court with a rubber ball. They may also have used a calendar and early written signs, though the evidence is thin and scholars argue about it.

By about 400 BCE the Olmec centers were abandoned, for reasons that are unclear. But their ideas did not die. Pyramids, the ball game, jade, jaguar gods and calendars all appear later among the Maya, the Zapotec and the Aztec. So does the honoring of rulers with monuments. Many historians call the Olmec the mother culture of Mesoamerica, the region from central Mexico into Central America. Others argue that several early peoples shared these ideas.

The coast of Peru is one of the driest deserts on Earth. But the cold ocean beside it is one of the richest fishing grounds. Small rivers cut green valleys from the Andes to the sea. In these valleys lies a region called Norte Chico. Here people began building large stone and earth platforms around 3000 BCE. That is about the same time as the first pyramids in Egypt. The best known site is Caral, in the Supe Valley, with six large platform mounds and round sunken plazas.

What is strange about Norte Chico is what is missing. There is no pottery. There are almost no signs of maize or other grain crops. Instead, the people of the valleys grew cotton and gourds with irrigation, and traded cotton nets to fishing villages on the coast in exchange for dried anchovies and sardines. Fish bones fill the rubbish heaps at Caral, twelve miles from the sea. A civilization was built on fish and cotton.

Caral’s largest platform is about sixty feet high and the size of several football fields. Building it took organized labor over generations. Archaeologists have found flutes made of pelican and condor bones, and a bundle of knotted strings that may be an early quipu, the knotted cords the Inca used to keep records four thousand years later. There are no walls, no weapons and no signs of war. There are also no clearly royal tombs.

The Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady began major work at Caral in the 1990s. Her team’s dating, published in 2001, pushed the start of cities in the Americas back by more than a thousand years. Norte Chico faded by about 1800 BCE. Like the Indus, it shows that a civilization does not need a great river, grain or pottery to build monuments. It needs a reliable food surplus, and a reason to gather.

Put the six together: Sumer, Egypt, the Indus, Shang China, the Olmec and Norte Chico. None of them learned from the others, except that the Indus and Sumer traded. Yet all six share a core. Each had a food surplus, usually from irrigation. Each built cities or large centers where thousands gathered. Each had specialists: potters, weavers, metalworkers, priests. Each raised monuments that took organized labor: ziggurats, pyramids, platforms, heads. Each shows social classes, with a few people buried or portrayed far above the rest.

Historians call this package civilization. The word does not mean these people were better or kinder than hunter-gatherers. It describes a way of organizing many people in one place. Every civilization also paid the same costs: harder work for most, disease from crowding, war over land and water, and rulers who took more than they gave. The pattern repeats so exactly, on four continents, that it seems built into what happens when farming succeeds.

But the differences are just as real. Sumer, Egypt and China developed writing; the Olmec may have; Norte Chico did not, and the Indus wrote so little we cannot read it. Egypt and the Shang had god-kings and rich royal tombs; the Indus and Norte Chico show no clear kings at all. The Shang and Egypt made war and sacrificed captives; the Indus and Norte Chico show almost no weapons. Some civilizations were violent and some, as far as the evidence shows, were not.

That should change how you ask questions. Instead of asking what all civilizations must have, ask what choices each one made. Did they need a king, or did they choose one? Did monuments have to honor rulers, or could they honor the community? The early Americas and the Indus suggest that the Egyptian and Sumerian model, the one most textbooks start with, was one road among several.

Everything in this unit came out of the ground, so it is worth knowing how. Archaeology begins with a survey. Teams walk fields to collect surface finds and study old maps. Today they also use satellite images and lasers fired from airplanes that can see mounds and roads under jungle. Then a team chooses a spot and lays out a grid of squares. Each square is dug one thin layer at a time with trowels, brushes and, for delicate finds, dental picks. Digging is destruction: once a layer is gone, it cannot be put back.

That is why recording matters more than finding. Every object is measured, photographed and mapped in its exact spot before it is lifted. Its context, what lay beside it, above it and below it, is what gives it meaning. A gold ring is just a ring. A gold ring on the finger of a skeleton under the floor of a house, beneath a burned layer dated to 1900 BCE, is a story. A looted object, dug up and sold, has lost its story forever, which is why archaeologists fight the trade in stolen antiquities.

Dating uses several tools. Stratigraphy gives order. Radiocarbon gives years for anything once alive. Tree rings can date wood to the exact year in some regions. The style of pottery, which changes over time like car designs, lets a trained eye guess a date at a glance. Scientists in labs study seeds, pollen, animal bones, teeth and DNA to learn what people ate, where they came from and what killed them.

The last step is argument. Archaeologists publish what they found and what they think it means, and other archaeologists push back. The invasion theory for the Indus, the massacre at Mohenjo-daro, the age of Caral, the meaning of the Olmec heads: each was debated and some were overturned. Being wrong in public is how the field improves. If you like solving puzzles with missing pieces and can accept that the answer may change, this work is for you. Illinois has thousands of sites still waiting.