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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Antiquity: Greeks and Romans in Context provides a chronological introduction to the history of ancient Mediterranean civilizations within the larger context of its contemporary Eurasian world.
- Innovative approach organizes Greek and Roman history into a single chronology
- Combines the traditional historical story with subjects that are central to modern research into the ancient world including a range of social, cultural, and political topics
- Facilitates an understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world as a unity, just as the Mediterranean world is in its turn presented as part of a larger whole
- Covers the entire ancient Mediterranean world from pre-history through to the rise of Islam in the seventh century A.D.
- Features a diverse collection of images, maps, diagrams, tables, and a chronological chart to aid comprehension
- English translation of a well-known Dutch book, De oudheid, now in its third edition
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Seitenzahl: 997
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
List of Figures
List of Maps
Preface
PART I: Introduction
1.1 Sources and Chronology
Sources
Chronology
1.2 The Ecology of History
Physical Geography
Agriculture and the Pre-Industrial Economy
Demography
PART II Before 900 BC
2.1 Prehistory
Paleolithic
Neolithic
2.2 Early Civilizations in Eurasia
The Rise of Distinct Civilizations
Peoples and Languages
Western Asia and Egypt in the Bronze Age
The Aegean and Southern Europe in the Bronze Age
Part III 900–500 BC
3.1 A Historical Outline
Eurasian Communities
The Greek World
Italy and Western Europe
3.2 The Social Fabric
Economic Life
Social Hierarchy
Political Organization
3.3 Daily Life and Mentality
The Individual and Society
Men and Women
Religion, Philosophy, and Scholarship
Part IV 500–300 BC
4.1 A Historical Outline
Eurasian Communities
The Greek World
Italy and the West
4.2 The Social Fabric
Economic Life
Social Hierarchy
Political Organization
4.3 Daily Life and Mentality
The Individual and Society
Men and Women
Religion, Philosophy, and Scholarship
Part V 300 BC–1 AD
5.1 A Historical Outline
Eurasian Communities
The Greek World
Italy and the West
5.2 The Social Fabric
Economic Life
The Social Hierarchy
Political Organization
5.3 Daily Life and Mentality
The Individual and Society
Men and Women
Religion, Philosophy, and Scholarship
Part VI 1 AD–500 AD
6.1 A Historical Outline
Eurasian Communities
The Roman Empire
The Greek East and the Latin West
6.2 The Social Fabric
Economic Life
Social Hierarchy
Political Organization
6.3 Daily Life and Mentality
The Individual and Society
Men and Women
Religion, Philosophy, and Scholarship
PART VII: AFTER 500 AD
7 The 6th Century and Later
Eurasian Communities
The Byzantine East
The Christian Church
Islam
The Ancient Heritage
Appendices
Classical Athens
The Classical Roman Republic
Imperial Rome: The Principate
Imperial Rome: The Dominate
Hellenistic Rulers
Roman Emperors
Philosophers
Scholars and Scientists
Poets and Prose Writers
Christian Authors
CHRONOLOGY
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index
This English edition first published 2014
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Originally published in Dutch as Frederick G. Naerebout and Henk W. Singor, De Oudheid: Grieken en Romeinen in de context van de wereldgeschiedenis. Amsterdam: Ambo | Anthos, 2008.
Edition history: Ambo | Anthos (Dutch editions: 1e, 1995; 2e, 2001; 3e, 2008)
Translated from the Dutch by Frederick G. Naerebout and Henk W. Singor. This is an authorised translation from the Dutch language edition published by Ambo | Anthos. Responsibility for the accuracy of the translation rests solely with John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and is not the responsibility of Ambo | Anthos. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the original copyright holder, Ambo | Anthos.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hardback 9781444351385
Paperback 9781444351392
Naerebout, F. G.
[Oudheid. English]
Antiquity : Greeks and Romans in context / F.G. Naerebout and H.W. Singor. – 1
pages cm
Translation of: De oudheid.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-5138-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4443-5139-2 (paper) 1. Civilization, Classical. I. Singor, H. W. II. Title.
DE59.N3413 2014
938–dc23
2013028405
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Syria, Palmyra Ruins. © Ocean/Corbis.
Cover design by Nicki Averill
Set in 10/13pt Minion by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India
1 2014
List of Figures
Fig. 1 Roman road at the Welsh–English border (1st c. AD).
Fig. 2 The dendrochronological method.
Fig. 3 A Sumerian frieze showing dairy production (c. 2600–2350 BC).
Fig. 4 The face of the Tollund Man, an Iron Age bog body from Denmark.
Fig. 5 Worm eggs from the intestines of the Lindow Man, a British bog body.
Fig. 6 Chinese burial site with traces of a chariot (c. 1300 BC).
Fig. 7 Stele with the Code of Hammurabi (1728–1686 BC).
Fig. 8 Mycenaean body armor (15th–14th c. BC).
Fig. 9 An inscribed bronze vase, China (9th c. BC).
Fig. 10 A relief from Nineveh depicting Assurbanipal in his pleasure garden (7th c. BC).
Fig. 11 The so-called Dipylon vase from Athens (c. 735–725 BC).
Fig. 12 A Roman copy and a contemporary depiction of the Athenian sculpture group of the Tyrannicides (originally c. 475 BC).
Fig. 13 Vase in the form of a cock (c. 650–600 BC).
Fig. 14 The Narmer Palette from Egypt (c. 3100 BC).
Fig. 15 Outside of an Athenian cup with a gumnasion scene (early 5th c. BC).
Fig. 16 A kouros and kore from Attica (c. 550 BC) and the so-called Getty Kouros (6th c. BC?).
Fig. 17 The outside of an Athenian amphora and an Athenian oinochoe: battle scenes with Greek hoplites and Persians (c. 480–460 BC).
Fig. 18 An Etruscan helmet dedicated to Zeus of Olympia by the Syracusans (474 BC).
Fig. 19 Ostraca found in the Athenian Agora (5th c. BC).
Fig. 20 Philip II? Fragments of a skull from Vergina (4th c. BC) and a facial reconstruction based on those fragments.
Fig. 21 Ancient terracing in Attica.
Fig. 22 Stele with an Athenian decree (408/407 BC).
Fig. 23 Athenian reliefs with two groups of dancers (323 BC).
Fig. 24 Inside of an Athenian cup with the god Dionysus as seafarer (c. 530 BC).
Fig. 25 Copies of the statue of Athena Parthenos from the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis (originally 447–438 BC).
Fig. 26 Coins of Greco-Bactrian and Greco-Indian kings (3rd–2nd c. BC).
Fig. 27 Building block with the dedication of the temple of Athena at Priene (4th c. BC).
Fig. 28 Roman copy of the statue of the goddess Tyche as the city goddess of Antioch (originally c. 300 BC).
Fig. 29 Carthaginian coins with war elephants (3rd c. BC).
Fig. 30 The so-called relief of Domitius Ahenobarbus (1st c. BC)
Fig. 31 Delos and Hatra (2nd–1st c. BC).
Fig. 32 Slaves in Hellenistic art (3rd–1st c. BC).
Fig. 33 Relief in situ at the Horus temple at Edfu, in Greek Apollonopolis Magna, from about 130 BC.
Fig. 34 Sculptures from the Buddhist monastery at Tepe Shotor, Afghanistan (3rd–4th c. AD).
Fig. 35 A model of the acropolis of Pergamon as it looked in the first half of the 2nd c. BC.
Fig. 36 Stele from Petra with the goddess Atargatis (1st c. AD) and the head of an Atargatis statue from Armenia Minor (2nd c. BC).
Fig. 37 Stele of a Cretan dream interpreter from Sakkara in Egypt (3rd–2nd c. BC).
Fig. 38 The so-called Lyon Tabulae inscribed with a speech by the emperor Claudius (1st c. AD).
Fig. 39 The Roman city of Timgad in Algeria (2nd–4th c. AD).
Fig. 40 Stamps on terra sigillata, naming producers, and a terra sigillata plate inscribed with the oven load of a pottery (1st–2nd c. AD).
Fig. 41 Grave stele of Regina, from South Shields on Hadrian's Wall (2nd–3rd c. AD).
Fig. 42 A wooden tablet from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, containing an army strength report (2nd c. BC).
Fig. 43 Graffito of a gladiator from Pompeii (before 79 AD) and gravestone of the gladiator Apollonius, from Asia Minor (late imperial period).
Fig. 44 Altars for the goddess Nehalennia, from the Scheldt river in the Netherlands (3rd c. AD).
Fig. 45 A wall painting from the synagogue at Dura Europos (245 AD).
Fig. 46 The Nag-Hammadi Codices (4th c. AD).
Fig. 47 Sculpture of a foreigner on horseback, China (7th–9th c. AD).
Fig. 48 Mosaic from Ravenna with the Emperor Justinian (6th c. AD).
List of Maps
Map 1 Colonization of the world by Homo sapiens.
Map 2 Languages in Eurasia, 2nd–1st millennium.
Map 3 The Near East and Egypt, 3rd–1st millennium.
Map 4 The Aegean world, c. 1600–c. 1100 BC.
Map 5 Eurasia, 10th–5th c. BC.
Map 6 Greece, 8th–6th c. BC.
Map 7 Western Mediterranean, 8th–4th c. BC.
Map 8 Eurasia, 5th–4th c. BC.
Map 9 Greece, 5th c. BC.
Map 10 The Cleisthenic organization of Attica.
Map 11 Athens, 5th–4th c. BC.
Map 12 The southern half of the Athenian plain.
Map 13 Eurasia, 3rd–1st c. BC.
Map 14 The Hellenistic world, 4th–3rd c. BC.
Map 15 The Second Punic War, 218–201 BC.
Map 16 The Roman Empire, 3rd–1st c. BC.
Map 17 Eurasia, 1st–6th c. AD.
Map 18 The Roman Empire, 1st c. AD.
Map 19 The Roman Empire, 2nd–3rd c. AD.
Map 20 The Roman Empire, 4th c. AD.
Map 21 Rome, 1st–2nd c. AD.
Map 22 Imperial Rome and its environs
Map 23 The Germanic states, c. 525 AD
Map 24 The Germanic states, c. 575 AD
Map 25 The Eastern Roman Empire, 6th c. AD
Map 26 Religions in Eurasia, 7th–8th c. AD
Map 27 The Islamic world, c. 750 AD
Map 28 The world, c. 800 AD
Preface
We wrote this book with a wide audience in mind. It is aimed primarily at undergraduates who in the course of their studies are confronted with the Greco-Roman world. However, all others who for whatever reasons are interested in the ancient world can find here a reasonably comprehensive one-volume overview.
When this book was first published in Dutch in 1995, the question arose: why another general account of ancient history? There were many textbooks available, but not any Dutch-language textbooks that were quite comparable. Anyhow, it became a success, and almost 20 years on, it is still in print. Now it has been translated into English, and again one will ask: why? We feel our enterprise has a number of distinguishing features compared to other such currently available accounts. First, we have tried not to be too concise—which is often the case nowadays—without going to the other extreme. The result is a book that is both a suitable introduction to its subject, and a basic work of reference that one can come back to whenever the need arises. Second, we have also attempted to combine a fairly traditional chronological account with a quite extensive coverage of several subjects taken from social and economic history and the history of mentalities that came to the fore in the 1970s and that are still central to present-day research in the field. Third, we have not confined antiquity to Greco-Roman history, but have tried to show something of the wider temporal and spatial framework in which this history is embedded; that is, on a time scale from early prehistory to well into the Middle Ages, and ranging across all of Eurasia and North Africa.
Although this book has a broad scope, the Greco-Roman world of between 1000 BC and 500 AD holds center stage. This one and a half millennium is discussed in four parts: the Archaic period (1000–500 BC), the Classical period (500–336 BC), the Hellenistic period (336–30 BC), and the Roman imperial period (30 BC–500 AD). These four parts are arranged in a strict chronological order: we have avoided the time-honored but utterly misleading division of Greek and Roman history into two individual accounts. Also, all four parts consist of the same number of chapters, which have identical titles in each of the four parts in order to stimulate a comparative approach to their contents. This core of the book is flanked by two parts that provide an overview of early prehistory down to 1000 BC, and of the 6th century AD and beyond. These six parts are preceded by an introductory account of sources and methods, and of the material foundations of the ancient world from an ecological, demographic, and economic standpoint.
The book contains images, maps, diagrams, tables, a chronological chart, and suggestions for further reading. We speak of images, not illustrations, because these are not merely illustrative, but, together with their captions, intended as a source of information in their own right. The maps, diagrams, tables, charts, detailed index, and the bibliographical material enhance the suitability of this book as a work of reference.
This textbook is the work of just two authors. We are only too aware of the almost insurmountable problems involved in writing a book of this kind. Nobody can master the sources or the literature, not even for a small part of the history that is dealt with here. Still, we both feel that a team of specialists would not be a good choice to write a general and synthetic account such as our book seeks to provide. We would rather have some unity of vision and of style, with all its faults. Once in a while, someone has to attempt the impossible.
Having a co-author was a great help. But two authors are two human beings with their own individual histories. Even though we have critically examined each other's texts and both accept responsibility for the entire content of the book, we have decided not to remove all traces of individuality. Below we have indicated who is responsible for what chapter.
A final word about the history of the present text: six years after its first publication, it was fully revised, in 2001. In 2008, we again revised the full text. In part, these revisions were in response to comments by the book's users, and in part they were an attempt to keep it up to date. Of course, this is a textbook, which implies that we have always been quite conservative: you are not likely to find last week's new insights here. Developments in the field will trickle down into our text with a delay of a couple of years, when the dust has settled and it seems that the new findings have come to stay. For the English translation— each of us translated his own part of the book—we have based ourselves on the 2012 16th printing of the Dutch edition. We have made corrections and slight revisions and rearrangements where this seemed necessary.
Leiden 11 June 2013
Frederick G. Naerebout and Henk W. Singor
PART I
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1.1
Sources and Chronology
Sources
The diversity of sources
Without sources, there is no history. The human memory cannot be trusted, and it has a limited range. To memorize the past, humanity is in need of an external memory. This external memory is provided by the sources. Almost everything can function as a source, whether it is intended as such or not. Thus, sources consist of not only writings, but of all relics of human behavior, even if this behavior was not intended to produce a source of some kind. We should even include phenomena that have occurred independent of human interference, such as a layer of soil deposited by flooding water; all can be used to inform us about the circumstances of life at some moment of time. To come to grips with this extremely diverse material, we had best categorize the sources. The most common classification is that of written and unwritten sources.
Written sources
Written sources are the results of the application of a human script. This category can be subdivided into primary sources, that is, sources that are the immediate result of past actions (documents), and secondary sources, that is, sources that have been mediated, have gone through some filter such as a historian's selection and arrangement (literary sources). The opposition between primary and secondary sources is not absolute but relative: whether a source is considered primary or secondary depends on the questions asked. For example, if one is interested in the social and economic dimensions of slavery in the ancient Greek world, plays in which slaves figure are a secondary source, as opposed to primary sources such as so-called manumission decrees, texts drawn up when a slave was granted his or her freedom. But if one is interested in how Athenians of the 5th century or the 4th century imagined slaves or slavery, those same plays, written and watched by contemporary Athenians, have turned into primary sources. And this would certainly be the case if one chooses not Athenian slavery but Athenian drama as the object of one's research.
The ancient world has left us a wide range of written sources. First, we have countless inscriptions, also called epigraphic sources: all texts cut into a carrier of some sort, usually stone, ceramics, or metal. Many texts written with ink or paint on hard surfaces or laid out in mosaic are also classified as epigraphic material, although these are strictly speaking not inscriptions. Inscriptions have been produced by every society that was able to write. They range from the codification of laws to shopping lists, from epitaphs to obscene graffiti. Inscriptions can be archival texts, for example, many of the inscribed clay tablets of the ancient Near East; or texts put up in some public space, for example, many of the hieroglyphic texts of ancient Egypt; or texts put to some more specific use, for example, the inscriptions on so-called oracle bones used in large quantities in ancient China. The Greek and subsequently the Roman culture displayed a most remarkable propensity to make public texts of many different kinds by having these inscribed and put up for all to see. Thus, for the study of classical Greece, the Hellenistic world, and the Roman Empire, epigraphy is a very important source indeed: we have thousands upon thousands of texts, and new ones are found all the time.
Written sources other than inscriptions from the ancient world are rare: papyrus, parchment, paper, and other perishable materials, as bamboo or silk, have only seldom been preserved. In the Mediterranean world, papyrus was the most common kind of writing material, as was paper in China from the 2nd century AD. Alas, most texts written down on these carriers have been lost, the only exception being Egypt, where papyri have been preserved in large numbers owing to the desert conditions prevailing in most of the country.
Many written sources have not been preserved in ancient texts, but have been handed down to us: the writings of most ancient poets, philosophers, historians, orators, and so on, have survived by being copied, usually repeatedly. For the millennium between the epic poetry ascribed to Homer, of which the version that has come down to us should probably be dated to the second half of the 8th century BC, and 200 AD, we have now over 20 million words of over 1600 authors, and by far the largest part of this huge amount of texts is known to us from medieval manuscript sources. Still, this large corpus is only a small part of Greek literature, as we know from references or small fragments. With Latin texts it is not different.
The modern historian, of course, relies heavily on the works of ancient historians that have managed to survive. There we find the ancients reflecting on their own history and society. But other written sources can be as important, or, depending on the subject, even much more so. Literally every text that has survived, in its original form or via tradition can be put to some purpose in studying the ancient world.
Unwritten sources
This category of sources, negatively defined as everything that is not a written source, can also be subdivided. First, there are objects: everything surviving from the past, from complete buildings to the smallest find. These objects need not be human-made, such as tools, jewelry, or coins. Also, biological matter, from a complete skeleton down to carbonized seeds or fossilized pollen, should be included. Architectural features are the most obvious immovable objects, but many other immovable objects or even particular characteristics of such objects can be relevant, from a discolored patch of soil or a crop mark as indicative of some past occurrence, to complete landscapes or infrastructures. These sources are all the subject of archaeology, assisted by a range of scientific disciplines such as air photography, cartography, and even surveying by satellite.
Figure 1 Roman road at the Welsh–English border (1st c. AD.) Roman surveyors and engineers have left their mark on the European landscape, in the form of roads, bridges, aqueducts, and field systems. On this aerial photograph, we can see the road known as Watling Street West, which runs south (the direction we are looking at) from Wroxeter, Roman Viroconium Cornoviorum, along the Welsh–English border. The road is still in use, and with its hedgerows is easily the most conspicuous feature of this landscape. It runs between the hills and marshland, along the valley floor. In the far distance, it bends toward the so-called Church Stretton Gap. The road may have been built as part of the Roman effort to subdue Wales between 43 and 77. Photo: Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography
Second, there are images made by humans, of course objects too, but still easily distinguished as falling in a category of their own. Images or representations are unwritten sources, but are more closely related to texts than are other objects. Texts are also, in a sense, images made by humans of their surroundings, their fellow creatures, or themselves. Images should be approached with care: never can they be used as if they convey the same kind of verity that we find in documentary photography. Works of imagination would actually be a better word to describe many of the images that have come down to us. In order to interpret the images produced during some past period, one has to have some acquaintance with the procedures governing portrayal during that period. Even if we have such knowledge of a period's image making, many questions surrounding the use of images as sources will remain unanswered.
Generally speaking, unwritten sources will never be allowed to monopolize research, unless there is no alternative (obviously, this is the case when dealing with a community that is without writing; also, there are scripts that as yet have not been deciphered). However, unwritten evidence can complete, nuance, or correct the views based on the written sources. In that way, unwritten sources are without doubt of the utmost importance. However, interpreting, for example, the remains of a wall is not always an easy task, and interpreting the image painted on a wall or a pot might very well be much more difficult still. The written sources, primary or secondary, will always be fundamental to any historical account.
Using the sources
As we just saw, there is no end to what can be used as a source in historical inquiry. This ensures an almost unlimited supply of source material. Still, we should not forget that for many questions that can be asked, the situation is not nearly as favorable as this general picture suggests. Sources are not distributed evenly across periods, areas, and subjects; nor are all sources equally useful. Not only can appearances be deceptive, but human-made sources can also be produced in order to deceive (interesting in itself, but then one has to recognize such instances first). There are no easy ways around this problem; thus, it is a mistake to consider, for instance, that inscriptions are always more reliable than literary texts. Every source has to be carefully scrutinized as to what it can actually contribute. A source is like a telescope, or a magnifying glass: without it we cannot see anything, but it sits between the observer and the observed and distorts whatever there is to see.
In the end, we are left with many questions to which none of the sources available provide any answer. Then one can sit and wait until new relevant sources will be found, or, more realistically, try to come up with some hypothetical answer: what seems to be at a given moment the best, most consistent explanation. Theory, model making and comparison by way of sources from other periods and places will usually play an important part in the formulation of any such hypothetical answer.
Someone eager to learn about the past will most of the time not immediately turn to the relevant sources, but will make use of modern literature that is based directly or indirectly on source material. If one is after some information concerning the early Roman Empire, one does not nowadays read the Roman historian Tacitus, but will seek this information in some work of reference or, if the need arises, in more specialist publications. This also holds good for the present-day historian, who, even when he or she might have been inspired by reading some sources, will not usually embark upon a study of all possibly relevant sources, but will first read modern scholarly works in order to be better able to formulate questions, to get acquainted with a wider context, or possibly to build some model to guide further research. Of course, the subject selected and the kind of information wanted determine at what moment one will one turn from the modern literature to the sources: treading relatively unknown paths, one will be forced to turn to the sources fairly soon. However, serious scholarship almost always necessitates going back to the sources sooner or later. In dealing with antiquity, these will often be published sources, such as text editions or excavation reports. This does not mean that the ancient historian need only pick up the sources in order to get the required information. It might be possible to quickly falsify the work of some other historian, but usually the sources, whether published or not, have to be interpreted in a painstaking process. This implies that although every piece of historical scholarship ultimately depends on the sources available, the relationship between the sources on the one hand and the publications based on those sources is hardly ever simple and straightforward: the necessary act of interpretation always interferes.
Chronology
Relative and absolute dating
In order to use sources in writing history, they have to be dated. And when dealing with written sources, also the occurrences reported in the source need themselves to be dated. In dating, we should distinguish between relative and absolute dating, even if these two methods of dating cannot be separated. Relative dating provides the age of something relative to something else: A is older, as old, or younger than B. Absolute dating provides something with an age relative to some fixed point: A is x units of time before or after point P on the total time scale. An actual example of relative dating is the stratigraphic principle in archaeology. In a greatly simplified form, this states that if layer x is covered by layer y, layer x is the older of the two layers; finds from layer x are thus older than finds from layer y (if they have not moved from their original position). An example of absolute dating is, for example, the dating of layer x some time after 54 AD, because among the finds from layer x is a coin struck during the reign of the emperor Nero, who succeeded to the throne in 54 AD. “After 54” is an absolute date, because the Christian era is based on a fixed point in the time scale. Though absolute, “after 54” is not precise: the archaeologist or historian has to try to take everything into account; in the case of a coin among other artifacts, that coin could have remained in circulation or could have been hoarded for long periods.
Ways of reckoning time
The preceding example of absolute dating begs the question: how do we actually know that Nero became emperor in 54 AD? In using the absolute chronology commonly used in historical scholarship and in large parts of the world, with the fixed point put at the supposed year of Christ's birth, we tend to forget that both past and present know of several other absolute chronologies. Thus, before the 6th century AD, the specific Christian way of reckoning time did not yet exist. To convert the many different chronologies, absolute, but also relative, to one another is no easy task. One has to ask what, in a particular time reckoning, was the duration of whatever basic unit was employed, how this was subdivided, where the beginning of every unit or of longer cycles was located, and how units were named or numbered. Some examples might illustrate the remarkable complexity of this problem.
In ancient Egypt, a year was 12 months of 30 days each, with five festival days added. This year of 365 days gets out of pace with the sun, but the Egyptians did not use leap years. The years were counted from the succession of the reigning monarch. In Mesopotamia, many local calendars were in use, with different solutions to keep lunar months and solar years in track. The Assyrians named every year after the magistrates who oversaw the time reckoning (they are called eponymous magistrates, “magistrates who give their name”). The Babylonians originally numbered the years in a single sequence, but later they gave every year an individual name derived from some particular occasions. From the 16th century BC, we find regnal years in common use in Mesopotamia. Greece originally did not count years, but generations of variable duration; or the regnal years of the Persian monarch were referred to. In the 5th century, the tradition of naming of years after eponymous magistrates or monarchs established itself, and happily we have some lists of names that enable us to at least date texts or occurrences relatively. In Rome, the annual consuls were the eponymous magistrates, and later the regnal years of the emperors were used.
We also find systems comparable to the Christian chronology, using a fixed point: the so-called eras. To reckon time effectively in any such system, one needs a regular year, with leap years to stay in sync with the sun. Hellenistic rulers copied this from the Babylonians as the basis of their eras. Later, in 46 BC, Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar; this so-called Julian calendar was an improved version of the Egyptian solar calendar, with one leap day inserted every four years. An important era was the Seleucid era, with its fixed point in, to put it in our terms, 312 BC, which was widely used in the Near East, until well into the middle ages, and by the Syriac Church even to the present day. But in Hellenistic and Roman times, there were several other eras in use in monarchies and in individual cities. Roman historians reckoned from the founding of the city of Rome, in 753 BC. The Greeks had a time-honored era: the Olympiads. The Olympics were a festival in Olympia that was held every fourth year and which was important enough to serve as the basis for a Panhellenic chronology. The Olympics run from 776 BC in our terms (776 BC is Ol. 1.1, that is. the first year of the first Olympiad). Already in ancient Greece, the Olympiads were synchronized with lists of rulers and eponymics.
The Christian chronology was created in the 6th century. The monk Dionysius computed the future dates of Easter, which were based on the Jewish lunar calendar, but had to be fitted in with the Julian solar calendar. In the 6th century, the Diocletian era, which began with the first year of the reign of the emperor Diocletian, 284 AD, was still in common use, but Dionysius did not want to head his Easter table with a reference to a heathen emperor who persecuted the Christians. Instead, he computed the date of Christ's birth and re-baptized the year 248 of the Diocletian era as the year 532 “after the incarnation of Our Lord.” Thus, a Christian era was born, adopted in the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century, and in the 8th century all over Christian Europe. Now dates expressed in the Diocletian era or in Olympiads could be converted into dates before or after Christ's birth, the last year before Christ (1 BC) being immediately followed by the first year after Christ (1 AD).
In order to check whether our conversions of other dates into the Christian chronology are correct, we need information on events that are astronomically absolute and can be expressed unambiguously in the Christian chronology. Thus, an eclipse mentioned by an 8th-century Assyrian governor must have taken place on the 10th of June, 763 BC, and another eclipse reported by the Greek historian Thucydides can be dated to the 3rd of August, 431 BC. And so on and so forth. Now we are left with some certain dates. However, this does not mean that all our problems have been solved: the struggle to reconcile different methods of reckoning time, which began in antiquity, is still under way.
Science-based dating
When dealing with objects, an absolute dating can often be arrived at by using scientific methods, among which the best known is radiocarbon dating. This is based on the fact that in the atmosphere there is both 12C (carbon-12, non-radioactive carbon) and 14C (carbon-14, a radioactive isotope formed under the influence of cosmic rays). Both types of carbon occur in the CO2 (carbon dioxide) present in the atmosphere and dissolved in water. CO2 is absorbed by living creatures, and thus the entire biosphere contains 14C. If an organism dies, the absorption of carbon dioxide stops. The levels of carbon are not replenished. The radioactive isotope goes on decaying at the immutable rate at which all 14C is decaying all the time, but the amount of 12C remains constant. In organic material, one can measure how much 14C is left, and as of course the rate of decay, the half-life, of the isotope is known, one can establish the age of the sample being studied; that is, if we correct (calibrate) for a number of systematic errors, especially variations in the amount of 14C present in the atmosphere. The result is a dating in years BP (“before present,” understood to be 1950; remember, we need a fixed point for absolute dating). The importance of radiocarbon dating can hardly be overrated: before it arrived on the scene, many archaeological finds were dated only relatively. However, the dates procured are not very precise; there is a wide margin of error.
Figure 2 The dendrochronological method. The dendrochronological method is based on a comparison of year ring patterns in different pieces of wood. If there is a match, such pieces can be fitted into an overlapping sequence. If within a certain area there is enough wood available from trees with overlapping life spans, it will be possible to obtain a reference chronology stretching back for centuries.
Radiocarbon dating is supplemented by other techniques, among which the most important is dendrochronology: the study of tree-ring dating. Seasonal variation in the growth of trees leads to observable annual rings. The width of these rings varies under the influence of climate. The resulting patterns of wide and narrow rings are unique. Thus, pieces of the wood of trees felled at different dates can be compared and matched in order to create an overlapping series of tree rings ranging from the present back to as far as a continuous series of timbers can be established. In some parts of Europe, this continuous series now stretches back for 9000 years, which means that every piece of well-preserved wood, not older than 9000 years and of the same or a comparable species, can be dated with exactitude. This is not just a revolutionary way of providing dates that are absolute and exact; dendrochronology has also helped to calibrate the radiocarbon results, and generates data to be used in the research into past climate.
The range of science-based dating techniques is growing all the time. Many are designed for dating prehistoric evidence. Important for historical times is thermoluminescence, which enables one to establish when an inorganic object (that cannot be dated by radiocarbon) was heated to over 300°C for the last time, as, for example, dating when a piece of ceramic was fired.
Chapter 1.2
The Ecology of History
A number of material factors are of evident importance in deciding the course of history, such as climate and soil, the organization of agriculture and economic life in general, and demography. Of course, these factors do not determine history: a specific soil, climate, or population density does not necessarily lead to predictable results. Still, material factors can be called the “basics” of history: they determine what, under given circumstances, is possible and what is not; they create preconditions for and impose restraints on human life. Thus, every culture has been in many respects the expression of the ways in which some group of human beings managed to adapt to the ecosystem in which they happened to be living, which might also be described as ecological anthropology.
Physical Geography
Climatic and geological change
Paleoclimatology is the study of past climates: the plural form, climates, expresses the fact that climate is not unchanging, even although change has been slow on a human time scale. Methods such as the reconstruction of the variable extension of glaciers, or the measuring of tree rings, enable us to say something about long-term climatic change. From 10,000 BC, that is, after the end of the fourth Ice Age, there was a period of rising temperatures that caused the borders between different climatic and vegetation zones to move apart and toward the poles. This was a slow process: in 4000 BC, for example, the Mediterranean was still a cooler and wetter place than it is nowadays. Apart from this type of change on the very long term, there also occur fluctuations of shorter duration: 1300 to 450 BC was a relatively cold, and 450 BC to 700 AD a relatively warm period.
Similar to climate, Earth's crust is changing continuously. The rising temperatures after 10,000 BC melted most continental ice. The subsequent rise of sea levels meant a slow but drastic change of the continents' coastlines. Also, geological processes as erosion or sedimentation can change a landscape beyond recognition, in a long-drawn-out evolution, in an overnight disaster, or anything between those two extremes. In this context, one should certainly mention seismic and volcanic activity, both caused by the drift of the tectonic plates that form Earth's crust. Especially along the edges where plates collide, earthquakes occur frequently, and active volcanoes are found: this is the case in the Mediterranean, around the Arabian peninsula, along the southern rim of the Himalayas, along the coastline of all of East and Southeast Asia, and along the western rim of both Americas. Except for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, there also occur destructive flood waves, tsunamis, when certain kinds of earthquakes have their epicenter somewhere in the sea. Often, such natural disasters leave traces in geological, archaeological, and historical sources. Examples of large-scale disasters that keep many scholars occupied are the explosion of the island of Thera or Santorini in the second millennium BC (the exact dating of this giant eruption is strongly debated; it is important because it provides a means of calibrating our chronology of that period); and the eruption of the Vesuvius in 79 AD, when pumice, ashes, and other volcanic matter buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, a disaster that provided posterity with unique insights into Roman town life.
Vegetation zones and climate zones
In the past 5000 years, there can be distinguished three natural vegetation zones in Eurasia and the Mediterranean. These were not always in exactly the same place: climatic fluctuations led to temporary changes in the exact location of these zones. Thus, the limit of viticulture was situated further north than in the recent past during the aforementioned warm interval between 450 BC and 700 AD. But the general picture has remained quite stable for five millennia, until present-day global warming has set things moving. It should be stressed that we are talking of natural vegetation: this natural vegetation cover has in many places been largely or completely replaced by crops and pasturage, or otherwise destroyed by human interference. This profound alteration of the landscape had already started in the ancient world.
The first zone, to the north of the limit for viticulture (around 40 degrees north latitude, in Europe only 50 degrees) has, from north to south, tundra, boreal coniferous forests (taiga), mixed forests and deciduous broadleaf forests, steppe and (semi-)desert, and at the higher altitudes, specific mountainous vegetation. Northern, western, and central Europe are mainly forest areas, except for a bit of tundra in the extreme north. The climate here is humid, from the sub-Arctic climes in the north, by way of the marine climes of the west to the continental climes of the center. Central Asia has extensive steppe areas, stretching all the way from Hungary in the west to Manchuria in the east; toward the north, this shades into desert, which in its turn gives way to taiga and Arctic tundra. In the south of this area, the climate is cold and (semi-)arid, and in the north it is sub-Arctic: humid with long, severe winters. Eastern Siberia and northeastern China form an intermediate zone with mixed forests and broadleaf forests: they have a humid continental climate with cold winters and warm summers.
The second zone lies between the limits of viticulture and the Tropic of Cancer (at 23.5 degrees north latitude) and is characterized by Mediterranean vegetation, steppe, desert, and mountainous vegetation. Southern Europe and northern Africa have a specific Mediterranean climate: warm dry summers and mild humid winters. The typical Mediterranean vegetation, with evergreen broadleaf trees and shrubs as the most conspicuous feature, is found all around the Mediterranean, although in parts of northern Africa the desert nowadays reaches the sea. The desertification of the Sahara region is a comparatively recent phenomenon: northern Africa started drying out from about 5000 BC, but only in the third millennium did traffic across the Sahara begin to be impeded by the desert. Slowly, but surely, northern Africa became isolated from sub-Saharan Africa. Ever since, the desert has been encroaching. Egypt, the Near East, and the Arabic peninsula are largely desert and steppe, and have a desert climate. Only the river valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris, and a number of oases are the exceptions: alluvial instead of desert soils and plenty of water. From Anatolia in the west to the Punjab in the east stretch mountain ranges and upland plateaus, with steppe and desert vegetation, and again mountain vegetation on the higher slopes. Further to the east we find the mountains of Afghanistan and the Himalayas. The climate varies from a warm and dry continental one to a tundra climate in most of the Himalayas. In China, the north consists of plains and regions with loess soils, with a steppe or desert vegetation and a climate to match. The south is mountainous, with forest cover, and a humid and warm subtropical climate.
The third zone to the south of the Tropic of Cancer is characterized by subtropical and tropical vegetation. The main landmass is the Indian subcontinent, with the alluvial plains of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, and to the south plains and uplands. The annual rainfall increases from west to east, with the exception of the western rim of the subcontinent. The vegetation varies from desert immediately to the east of the Indus to tropical monsoon forests in the delta of the Ganges. The southern subcontinent has tropical rainforests on its west coast and in Sri Lanka; otherwise, there is dry tropical forest and savannah. The climate also runs the gamut from desert to tropical. Southeast Asia is an area with mainly tropical rainforest and monsoon forests. The climate there is tropical, except for the subtropical north.
Agriculture and the Pre-Industrial Economy
Carrying capacity
Agriculture is the manipulating of living organisms, both plants and animals, by humans in order to safeguard their food supply. An important concept in judging the impact of agriculture is carrying capacity, that is, the maximum population density at which the balance between the environment and the human population can be maintained. The technology humans use to acquire food and other raw produce is an important factor in determining the carrying capacity: when the necessities of life are satisfied by hunting and gathering, the carrying capacity is relatively small. One could also say that the territory that a group needs for its survival is comparatively large. The population densities we have to think of when dealing with hunter-gatherers are 0.1 persons per square kilometer (247 acres) or less, down to as little as 0.01. But with agriculture playing an important part in the food supply, densities can rise to 4 or 5 persons per square kilometer. In a fully developed agricultural economy, this can be as high as 30. This is the average density across a whole area, of which usually only a part is cultivated, and of which not every part will be equally fertile. These figures are still relatively low densities: what one can expect of the carrying capacity of an agriculture that is technologically primitive. On different grounds, a population of 50 to 80 million has been proposed for the Roman Empire at its largest extent, from Scotland to the Euphrates. That figure tallies quite well with the carrying capacity as supposed above.
The rise of agriculture
As the account on carrying capacity shows, agriculture enables a community to feed a larger number of people on the same territory. But what could have been the reason to increase the carrying capacity in the first place? On this, there are several different hypotheses. One, held by many, presupposes scarcity. That is, within a given area, either the population is growing, or natural resources are dwindling. Agriculture then is a way to combat scarcity. Another interesting hypothesis presupposes the wish to produce a surplus as an insurance against lean years. This, however, causes the population to increase, and if there is nowhere for this extra population to go, the population density increases. Before long, there is no turning back: the choice is between carrying on with agriculture or starvation.
Whether agriculture arises out of scarcity or an attempt to avoid scarcity, it can only do so in favorable climatic and geographical circumstances. In the climatic and vegetation belts in the north (tundra, taiga, or desert), small groups go on hunting and gathering, with the possible addition of some stock breeding. As already indicated in the preceding text, Central Asia and Iran have a very limited agricultural potential, and thus a very limited carrying capacity. In the steppes of Central Asia, nomads took to extensive cattle breeding. It is only on the margins of the Eurasian continent that agriculture can flourish. In the Near East, about 8000 BC, at the end of a long drawn-out process, a number of plants and animals have become domesticated, especially wheat, barley, sheep, and goats. From 6500 BC, agriculture makes headway in Europe and in what is now West Pakistan; in 5000 BC, millet is cultivated in Northern China (along the Huang He or Yellow River) and rice in Southern China and East Asia. These dates are, it should be noted, provisional: all the time new archaeological discoveries push back the earliest dates of agriculture in Asia. Possibly, we are dealing here with developments independent of what happened in the Near East. That is certainly the case in New Guinea, where an independent horticulture develops from around 7000 BC. Africa enters into the story rather late: from the 3rd millennium BC onward, millet and sorghum are cultivated. Central America and South America are a world apart: from the 7th millennium BC onward, products such as beans, peppers, potatoes, manioc, and maize are domesticated; cattle breeding, however, always remained relatively unimportant. In due course, the specific New World agriculture would give rise to complex cultures independent of Eurasian or African developments.
Figure 3 A Sumerian frieze showing dairy production (c. 2600–2350 BC). This Sumerian frieze of limestone inlaid with bitumen and copper, from a sanctuary at Tell Ubaid, near Ur, now in the British Museum, has been dated to between 2600 and 2350, and thus is the oldest known depiction of the milking of cows (on the right-hand side) and what probably is the churning of butter (on the left). Dairy production, the spinning of wool and the usage of animals as draft or pack animals and as mounts are the most important outcomes of the so-called secondary products revolution. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Domestication is not a single event: it is an ongoing process. Vines and olives, for example, were domesticated in Syria and Egypt in about 3000 BC. Newly domesticated animals and plants go on dispersing: thus, the cultivation of vines and olives reaches Greece in about 2500 BC, and enables the characteristically Mediterranean polyculture of grain, vines, and olives to develop. Also, the so-called secondary products revolution, which followed the original domestication, was as important as the domestication itself. During this secondary products revolution, in fact not so much a revolution as a slow evolution, ever more secondary products were extracted from domesticated animals and plants, such as dairy products, wool, hair, and linen, and animals were put to work as draft animals in front of sledges, carts and plows, and as mounts or beasts of burden.
Thanks to agriculture, sedentary societies arose on the periphery of the huge Eurasian continent: in Europe, in the Near East, in India and Pakistan, and in East and Southeast Asia. These sedentary societies, quickly developing into states, were largely dependent on farmers. The northernmost parts of Eurasia were too sparsely populated to allow for state formation, and the Central Asian heartland became, as was stated earlier, the realm of pre-Mongolian stock-raising nomads. Different climatic zones give rise to different societies: two basic economic systems can be distinguished, that of the cattle-herding nomads who mainly exploit the natural resources in a certain area and then move on, and that of the farmers who invest in the land they work, by weeding, plowing, manuring and so on, and thus tend to stay put. Both systems usually exist symbiotically side by side. Nevertheless, there is also endemic conflict between the haves of the periphery and the have-nots of the center. In these conflicts, the peoples of Central Asia sometimes prevailed, as when in the last half of the second millennium BC, groups that were later to be called Iranians and Indo-Aryans turned to the south and established themselves in Iran and India. Also, from about 1200 BC, Mongolian nomads, and in the first centuries AD, the Turks, played an important part. But usually the successes obtained by the invaders from Central Asia were short-lived, as the communities of farmers on the periphery were so populous: the invaders were almost always absorbed by the groups they tried to subject.
Agricultural yields
An enlarged carrying capacity does not imply abundance. On the one hand, the increased food production is offset by a growing population (demographic growth may even have preceded the introduction of agriculture, as was suggested earlier). On the other hand, agriculture in the ancient world can increase the carrying capacity only ever so much. The yields we may expect in ancient agriculture, especially in arable farming, must have been very much lower than those obtained today with the introduction of modern systematic plant breeding and the use of fertilizers. In order to estimate how much lower the yields were, we need detailed information on soil, climate, crops, crop rotation, and fallow. The influence of soil and climate is obvious; even microclimates and microenvironments can make all the difference—but if we want to say anything at all, we will have to generalize. Some plants can stand heat and drought better than others: thus, we find more barley and less wheat in Mediterranean farming. However, yields also differ per species: for instance, different types of wheat have stalks with different numbers of grains. We have to know whether fields were left fallow, and how often: there can be a two-field or a three-field system. Such a system can also encompass crop rotation: a field is not left to rest, but is sown with, for instance, legumes, a crop that restores the nitrogen levels of the soil. In general, we want to know about the number of different crops being farmed; in the ancient world, arable farming was mostly polyculture. There will have been grain, but also viticulture, olive trees, fruit trees, vegetables, and fodder crops. The techniques in use and how much labor was available per unit of land also influence yields.
What we want to get at is the yield per plant, and the yield per unit area of land under cultivation: the number of seeds sown, and the number of seeds harvested, per plant and per hectare. With the sparse information in our sources and with the comparative evidence adduced by the historians of agriculture, we can start figuring—a decent guesstimate is all we can hope for. In the case of barley, rye, and wheat, the ratio of seeds sown to seeds harvested is supposed to have been very low: 1:3 to 1:5. And one should not forget that one third to one fifth of the harvest has to be set aside as seeds for sowing. For the drier parts of the Mediterranean, it has been estimated that the yields from one hectare under grain could support a single individual for one year, if we accept the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) figures for the amount of calories a human needs to stay healthy and functioning, and if we accept that in antiquity three-quarters of these calories came from the consumption of grains (that assumption seems reasonably secure). The daily needs are likely to be somewhat overestimated, the yields to be somewhat underestimated. The fact that despite this one hectare can feed one person is quite reassuring, because what we know of landholdings shows these yields to be at subsistence level or over.
Reality was of course very different from the earlier guesstimates: it has already been stressed that the productivity of one piece of land may be very different from that of another piece of land the same size, even if they are situated in the same region. And this certainly holds good when we look at the bigger picture: thus, irrigated arable land, as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, had far larger yields. Some places may have had multiple harvests. Also, as already stated earlier, most farmers will have practiced polyculture: they did have other crops besides grain. And then there is also animal husbandry and fishery. The importance of livestock differed from one region to the other. In the Near East, outside the river valleys, sheep and goats were quite essential, whereas along the Nile and the Mesopotamian rivers, cattle was of greater importance. But in all sedentary agricultural communities, livestock was secondary compared to the basic food supply from arable farming. In southern Europe, animal husbandry was less important than in the Near East. Goats, sheep, and pigs—the last-named being the main source of meat—were most prominent among domestic animals. The eating of flesh was a relative rarity, although we have to take hunting and the breeding of domestic fowl into account as well. It was goats and sheep that not only produced wool and hair, and horns and hides, but also milk and cheese, never cows. Cattle were important for plowing or for drawing ox carts. In Italy, animal husbandry may have been slightly more important, especially in the north, where there was more pasturage. This certainly holds good for north-western Europe, where pigs and cattle were much more common than in the Mediterranean world.
Quantification is not possible, but it is certain that agriculture in the modern Western world is a completely different business. In the ancient world, it was mostly small-scale, and all labor was manual labor, at most assisted by oxen or donkeys as draft animals. Implements were mainly hoes, mattocks, plows, sickles, and mill stones. Poor farmers, but also those working fields on steep slopes, had to use the hoe and had to prepare the soil for sowing with their manual labor alone; the richer farmer might have possessed a pair of oxen to draw his plow: he could work a larger plot. But even the farm large enough to employ slaves was a relatively simple affair.
Environmental consequences of agriculture
Agriculture increases the carrying capacity, but this increase comes at a price. It has already been stated that humans have often replaced the natural vegetation with crops and pasturage. Even when we disregard the large-scale developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the extension of arable land into steppe and desert areas by way of irrigation and the use of fertilizer, we can still say that the landscape of Eurasia is in large parts human-made. Of course, this differs from region to region: thus, large parts of Central Asia and of the taiga forests remained to some extent untouched. But elsewhere, humans modified their environment, almost always in harmful ways.
A decreasing complexity of an ecosystem, for instance, a decreasing number of plants or animals, usually implies an increasing instability of the system. Even attempts to improve soil quality, such as fertilizing, can have such effects, but one should think above all of deforestation in order to clear land for cultivation or pasturage (permanently or for so-called shifting cultivation), or to obtain wood or charcoal. Overgrazing can stop a forest from regenerating. Deforestation and overgrazing can lead to soil erosion by wind and water, and this in turn can deregulate water systems, and so on. There are other mechanisms of soil degradation as well: drainage leading to oxidation and settling, as in peat bogs in northern Europe, or salinization because of irrigation as along the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile. Desertification or flooding can be the ultimate consequences.
