funding for this program is provided by annenberg cb2 advanced excellent
teaching ancient Assyria Babylon Persia out of their bloody wars our
civilization grew as one Empire gave way to another trade and culture spread
barbarians were tamed a new cities were founded around the Mediterranean from
bronze to iron this time on the Western tradition
yeah
and now UCLA professor Eugene Webber's continuing journey through the history
of Western civilization last time you may recall I ended on a subject dear to
the heart of many of us money how there was growing prosperity in Mesopotamia
among the merchants and also among the temples which filled their Treasuries
and put the money out to rent in other words they acted rather like banks and
yet this new wealth benefited only a small part of the population and oddly
enough one of the major factors in spreading the wealth and breaking up the
rather stifling institutions of the third millenium where the great
plundering wars in which the kings of a card and later of Babylon and me they
distinguished themselves it was war not peace that spurred the greater social
changes some of the booty DS Kings fought for consisted of the jewels and
ors they either could not or would not buy from savage tribes or from other
foreigners the Egyptians used to send armed expeditions to extract the copper
ores in the Sinai desert in the same way sumerians and more especially the
Semitic kings in a card and Babylon sent expeditions north and west to get the
raw materials they couldn't do without metals stone timber
the plundering wars of Kings likes aragon of assyria around 18 50 BC also
shared tremendous quantities of blood and if you read the annals of the kings
of Assyria in northern mesopotamia you find him awash with pride and blood and
gore cities are taken and plundered and burn captives are flayed or impaled
alive and heads hands and feet are cut off in but sounds like industrial
quantities but between the rapes and murders and humiliations there are also
long lists of plunder silver and gold and metals and crops and cattle and
slaves there is one revealing passage from the assyrian king astral body part
of the 7th century bc who boasts the people the asses camels sheep i carried
away spoils to Assyria when astral body politic distributed the camels and sheep
to his people there were so many that they came down in price until they were
a drag on the market as the King tells us tavern keepers got camel slaves
received camels Brewers for a drink of beer and gardeners for a basket of fresh
dates and so the forcible distribution of concord wealth that had been hoarded
in treasury spread purchasing power throughout Mesopotamia and this
stimulated demand it stimulated production while at the same time war
captives swell the supply of slaves and of available skills the merchants who
then contracted to dispose of the look and the tribute these merchants could
make profits and the staff of the merchants would benefit to and so a
distinct social group began to take shape that we might call the middle
class in between the Warriors and
Reese on one side and the poor masses on the other and the money economy spread
until even land no longer the sole property of God or King even the land
came to be bought and sold just like any other commodity and war also helps
spread what we might call culture the success of the Akkadian armies for
example was due to their superior bronze weapons and their superior armor if you
wanted to resist the Acadians who had to manufacture similar armaments you had to
find smiths and supply them with raw materials you have to organize trade so
the imperialism of societies like those in Mesopotamia either concord and
assimilated or else generated resistance and the resistance in turn generated
Bronze Age economies which were dependent on trade and which were as
close to those of the aggressor as the resistors could possibly make
it's possible in fact to argue that technological and economic improvements
throughout history followed less the plow than the war chariot and what was
true in the early bronze age around 2400 BC seems to be equally true of the
period of Anarchy several hundred years later when one barbarian dynasty
succeeded another in Babylon and nobody's property or life was safe from
the endless raids and Wars of the time what happened in those circumstances was
that the pillaging of the countryside and the disruption of the great is
States emphasize the value of incorruptible and much more mobile metal
wealth as compared to the real but perishable wealth produced by the land
it was easier to safeguard a bag full of silver in the field full of body during
this period the natural economy collapsed in Anarchy over and over again
and this to encourage the spread of the money Khamenei and as the money economy
spread or at least exchanges bread production for the market became
increasingly common businessmen realized that they could go in for speculative
imports of cargoes of this or that to sell in the market and that they could
make better profits this way than by working on commission to get specific
articles that a state or a temple might order this was so in part because there
were more people buying in the market
in Mesopotamia has in Egypt to the end of the second millennium for the rise of
an army of literate officials appointed by the state ranging from junior clerks
two judges collecting taxes and fines and keeping accounts and they got their
incomes not just in kind but in money to they didn't have farms of their own they
couldn't produce their own necessities any more than the soldiers could who
came back with captives and goods and so all wound up as buyers in the bazaar and
there were also growing numbers of professional priests as the victorious
rulers and the superstitious citizens endowed more and more temples and trees
and these priests would go shopping too so now craftsman and peasants find a
growing market for their products like these jars and they begin at lost to get
a larger sharing the technical benefits of civilization beside an arrow in the
back
metal begins to spread to the countryside and even Egyptian peasants
now start to use tools made of metal around fifteen or sixteen hundred bc
iron was so rare that it was worth twice as much as gold after 1200 BC when they
learned how to harden I and by carburation it becomes increasingly
affordable and it provides better cocking tools whether for sharing wool
or castrating animals or humans because iron is cheaper to produce a more
readily available than bronze it democratizes agriculture and Industry
until around 800 or 900 BC cheap iron perfect the process that economic
imperialism and started thousand years before the peasants could finally afford
iron axes and closures the common art is an could own his own toolkit and be
independent of temples or patrons and the commoner could use iron weapons and
meet Bronze Age nights like this one on better terms which also means that iron
democratizes water poor and backward barbarians could now challenge the
armies of civilized states which until then possessed a monopoly of bronze
armaments
so once again the interaction between war and technology becomes manifest the
Bronze Age collapses around the end of the second millennium and we see the
rise of great military empires which are able to fulfill the aims of earlier
Mesopotamian powers by gathering in all the lands and the products that they're
poor native economies might need and next we get several centuries of blood
and gore and chaos about which we can speak calmly because we weren't there
and then when we look again we find that things have moved forward once more
between about a thousand and 500 BC the zone of literate urban society had
expanded far more than it had grown in the fifteenth centuries of the Bronze
Age the change was largely due to the great empires of Assyria and Neil
Babylon and Persia
each of these empires unified tremendous territories under their rule and even
though they did this at frightful cost in human lives and will the political
unification be imposed promoted intercourse on an unprecedented scale
over a wider area than ever before as armies and slaves and skilled workers
and traders moved all over these vast areas they developed a lingua franca a
common speech so they could make themselves understood wherever they went
it was a Syrian language from the region around Damascus and it was called era
Mike Aramaic had its own script with 22 letters all consonants as in most
limited languages
it was then absorbed by the Chaldeans who ruled in Babylon and later adopted
as the official language of the Persian Empire around the 6th century BC in the
process it replaced Hebrew as the language of some of the Old Testament
texts and it's probably what Jesus and His apostles spoke centuries later the
Assyrians and still more the Persians also built post roads to collect tribute
more effectively and these roads were used by soldiers and officials and
couriers & merchants by the fifth century BC even people of modest means
like her auditors the first professional travel writer could afford to tour the
backlands of Asia
the Assyrians and their neo-babylonian heirs were also forcibly transporting
whole communities from one end of their empire to the other to make them less
dangerous by getting them away from home one unintended result of this was a very
thorough pooling of people's which made the big cities thoroughly cosmopolitan
the Assyrians brought disaster to among other people's the Hebrews who may have
come from or in Mesopotamia but who eventually settled to the West in Canaan
by way of Egypt the Hebrews established two kingdoms in Canaan one was called
Judah with its capital Jerusalem and the other called Israel to the north this
northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC the Old Testaments
book of Isaiah which was probably reckon shortly after describes what it must be
like
your country lies delant your cities are burnt with fire in your very presence
aliens devour your land it is desolate was overthrown by aliens and the
daughter of Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard like a large in a cucumber
field like a besieged city in 586 BC the Hebrew southern kingdom of Judah was
also defeated this time by the babylonian king nebuchadnezzar the
second thousands of captives were taken off to Babylon and enslaved but the
Hebrews were not the only people to be moved about in this way and there were
also many members of subject communities who were recruited for service in the
Imperial armies in the sixth and fifth centuries bc the kings of Persia hired
archers from Central Asia and Indian chariot troops to fight along with
Syrian levies and Greek mercenaries and these people carried the germs of one
culture to another just as the caravans and the ships that moved about
increasing number through the vast relatively pacified relatively secure
impire the largest of these empires was established in the sixth century BC when
Cyrus the Great of persia are made an alliance with Babylon and then led a
rebellion against the meetings were the overlords of persia through subsequent
conquests the persian empire spread from India to the GNC
the Persians were warrior horsemen huling over a terribly disparate Empire
as conquerors the Persians and needs were the privilege dominant race their
King was not a god rather the delegate over God the way local people we're used
to being and the way the God designated him was characteristic the particular
warrior chief whose horse a sacred animal had been the first to nay in
salute to the Rising Sun became key whether the Great King was mortal or
divine his subject people still had to pay tribute as you can see them doing on
the walls in Persepolis the Persian capital in present a year on the Medes
and Persians themselves on the other hand code only military service but as
the Empire expanded there weren't enough Medes and Persians to will route so the
subject peoples had to serve as well which meant they were forced to bear
arms in defense or the state that kept them in servitude
so the Persians really couldn't rely on their loyalty as they eventually found
out still for a century or so the Persian centralized bureaucratic state
kept the peace more or less and that's nothing to scoff at and the Persian
piece helped to spread civilization from Asia Minor into the Mediterranean there
in that great
midland see a few hundred years before the birth of Christ we find vigorous
barbarians tamed by rubbing against Syrians phoenicians persians Egyptians
barbarians who are going to create an intellectual and artistic Renaissance
which combined strength and a new vision with the technical skills that they
learned from the older traditions of the nearest
just after the ninth century BC the Phoenicians founded new cities around
the Mediterranean and after the eighth century bc the greeks founded there's
but these cities were not established to be provincial capitals and garrison
towns and tax gathering centers for the central power as the asian cities were
instead they were overseas settlements of immigrant farmers for whom there was
no room in the narrow coastal plain of Phoenicia and the still narrow valleys
of Greece what these colonists wanted a new lands to kill new fishing grounds
new basis for piracy and comics so the Phoenicians colonize North Africa and
from there fanning out from Carthage they colonized Western Sicily Sardinia
the coast of Spain while the Greek spread around the Black Sea and westward
to Eastern Sicily southern Italy and on to Marseille finally there were the
Etruscans of people from Asia Minor who had probably learned civilization
through mercenary service in the Imperial armies of the east and we
established themselves as a ruling class among the indo-european farmers in
central Italy around Florence
the trust comes in pose their kind of civilization on the Barbarian natives
and they founded small cities as centers of an urban economy but some of the
people they concurred with great brutality where people to expel their
alien masters and turn the weapons of Susie from the gangster era presence and
among these people the most notable would be an obscure tribe or Federation
in south central Italy called the Romans at any rate one thing the Greek and
Phoenician colonists brought with them was a simplified form of writing using
22 signs to denote the constants which have been developed in some cave tonight
or Phoenician city and which would become the parent of our modern script
with the alphabet to simplify things reading and writing became as simple as
they are today literacy cease to be the mysterious privilege or the highly
specialized class of priests and scribes administrators engineers medical men
merchants even some soldiers were learning to read and write
by the 7th century BC common mercenary soldiers both Greek and Phoenician were
educated enough to scribble graffiti on their helmets the Greeks then took this
Phoenician script converted some of the signs for peculiarly symmetry consoles
and invented a few more signs to express in Greek the vowel sounds that the
Semites had ignored but that you need in indo-european languages and it was
apparently from Greek colonists in Italy that the Etruscans and hence the Romans
learned how to read and write
of course those who did read were not very numerous but their appearance meant
that a new distinction would join and reinforce the old distinctions between
rich and poor high and low literacy created a barrier which has persisted
ever since between the educated and the uneducated sections of society but
literacy also provided a means of communication that could last through
time a means of communication which not only stabilized culture but also allowed
to accumulate and grow by compound interest because knowledge was no longer
condemned to die with those who held it for a best to be passed on
garbled by word-of-mouth it could be recorded preserved assimilated by
following generation referred added to summoned up at will
a treasury of memory and inspiration or quite simply in formation so here you
have the beginnings of our world in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean if
you are looking for origin you might say that our culture our Western culture is
an Asian culture and that the Western tradition has its roots in that great to
dust heap of history that runs from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf a dark and
bloody ground that we never cease to recreate in our gods in our wars in our
restlessness but also in our inventiveness and enterprise and
expansionism and this is even truer of the Mediterranean which is a kind of
liquid history around who's Shaw's the
old traditions were transmuted and from whose shores they have irrigated the
entire western world as we shall see in the program's ahead
yeah
there we go
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