Agriculture made possible dense and sedentary populations, who lived longer and had more time, therefore leading to complex societies and cosmogonies. States and markets emerged. Technologies enhanced people's ability to control nature and to develop transport and communication. It was the beginning of civilizations.
Three powers had always coexisted in societies, often with one of them prevailing: religion, military and commerce. In all cosmogonies, 3 gods dominated all the others and embodied this trinity of power: the Latins called them Jupiter, Mars and Quirinius - god of gods, of war and of production (including reproduction). In turn, each one of these powers was in control of the riches. The history of humanity has unfolded according to the interaction (or most often the succession) of 3 main political orders: the ritual Order, in which the authority is primarily religious, the imperial Order, in which power is above all military, and the trading Order, in which the dominant group is the one who controls the economy. The ideal of the first one is theological, that of the second is territorial, and that of the third one, individualistic. In the ritual Order, the dominant group utilizes surpluses to build religious edifices and for the rituals, sacrifices, etc. In the imperial Order, it spends it in monuments, and in the trading Order, in productive investments. In each one of these orders, a society remains stable as long as the dominant group controls the split of the resources.
Beliefs appeared around 600,000 BC with Homo sapiens primates, who were entirely subjugated to the forces of nature (rain, wind, thunder...) and saw in them the expression of superior forces.
Cannibalism appeared towards 300,000 BC, not as an act of violence but as a ritual practice meant to absorb the force the dead.
Around 160,000 BC, Homo sapiens considered everything alive, from nature to objects. Cannibalism was still very common.
Around 30,000 BC, the concept of a supreme, vital force emerged, with the idea of a unique god in the beginning (primitive monotheism).
Cannibalism began to give way to its ritual in religious practices: it was then a matter of eating the body of a man who was sent to God, so as to get closer to it.
The sacred beliefs had set up taboos: the group members couldn't hunt, pick or consume certain animals or plants, which were regarded as sacred totems. Humans began to gradually break up the concept of god into several categories according to its expressions in nature: fire, wind, earth, rain... Polytheism appeared as a matter of fact, as the sequel of a primitive monotheism.
Religion contributed to lay the foundation of politics. Humans sent their dead to the afterlife in sophisticated tombs, with ceremonies, offerings, sacrifices, in order to obtain protection for the living from the gods which they will join later. In each group or tribe, a leader (both a priest and a healer) limits the violence by assigning a role to everybody in society, relative to the sacred.
Every leader is the master of the forbidden things, of planning, of hunting and of the force. Cosmogonies designate scapegoats and oracles, which also act as intermediaries with the next world. Singing and flute are the first metaphorical representations of these travels. The manufactured objects are still considered as living things.
20,000 years ago, nomads settle in the Middle-East, whose climate was particularly favourable. Some fixed groups are then created, which name certain gods as masters of their lands. Cosmogonies got more complex, with earth and agriculture in dominant positions and gods responsible for travel experiencing a lacklustre stature. The sacred boiled down to the glory of the land ownership.
In Central Asia, tribes (Mongols, Indo-Europeans, Turcs) discovered the wheel, revolutionizing the conditions of transport and war, and willing to conquer more clement plains in Mesopotamia, India and China. To oppose them, the villages built the first barricades. Taxes begin to be levied to create the first armies. The first states, sedentary by nature, were created to oppose those aggressions, nomad by nature. Travellers were getting only used to trade products and protect villages against other nomads.
Force began to prevail upon the sacred, the military upon the religious. It's the beginning of the age of Empires.
Work is constrained by violence, and essential knowledge becomes related to agricultural production. Objects don't have a name or personality anymore; they become tradable artefacts, tools. The slavery of the majority is the condition of freedom for the minority.
Around 6,000 BC, kingdoms were regrouping villages and tribes spread across larger and larger territories. The leader of each kingdom or empire is prince, priest and warlord, master of the time and of the force, half-god. He is the only one who can let a mark of his death with an identifiable tomb; the others still die in anonymity. It is therefore with princes that the notion of the individual was born; it is also with their dictatorship that the dream of freedom woke up.
The development of cities equated both etymologically and in practice with the rise of civilization itself. The cradles of early civilizations were river valleys where the first states appeared: for example the Sumerian civilization (3500 BC) in the Euphrates and Tigris valleys in lower Mesopotamia, the Egyptian civilisation (3,300 BC) along the Nile, the Harappan civilization (3300 BC) in the Indus valley of the Indian subcontinent, and the Chinese civilisation in the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys in the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC.
Each one of these civilizations was so different from the others that they almost certainly originated independently. It was at this time, due to the needs of cities, that writing and extensive trade were introduced. In China, proto-urban societies may have developed from 2,500 BC, but the first dynasty to be identified by archaeology is the Shang Dynasty.
The 2nd millennium BC saw the emergence of civilization in Crete, mainland Greece and central Turkey. In the Americas, civilizations such as the Maya, Moche and Nazca emerged in Mesoamerica and Peru at the end of the 1st millennium BCE.
Before 1,800 BC though, many populations did not belong to states. Scientists disagree as to whether the term "tribe" should be applied to the kinds of societies that these people lived in. Many tribal societies, in Europe and elsewhere, transformed into states when they were threatened or impinged by existing states (ex: in Poland and Lithuania). Some "tribes," such as the Kassites and the Manchus, conquered states and were absorbed by them. The first Agricultural Revolution led to several major changes. It permitted far denser populations, which in time organised into states. There are several definitions for the term, "state." Max Weber and Norbert Elias defined a state as an organization of people that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a particular geographic area. A state ordinarily needs an army for the legitimate exercise of force. An army needs a bureaucracy to maintain it. The only exception to this appears to have been the Indus Valley civilization, for which there is no evidence of the existence of a military force.
Around 5,000 BC, vast territories are governed by chiefs in China. In the North, the culture of Yang Shao developed an agriculture based on millet; in the south, in the maritime provinces of Jiang Su and Zhejiang, rice began to get cultivated, coming from the Pacific islands. It's the beginning of writing there, leading to the accumulation of knowledge and to its transmission. The first tales are written, with the names of the first princes, and of the first empires. In 2697 BC, the first date arguably established, the first prince whose name has been preserved reigned in the north of China: his name was Huang Di. At the same time, a bit more in the south, in the Shandong, the culture of Long Shan was established: it featured villages protected by surrounding walls and an organisation based on Principalities, such as Hao Xi'an. The chaos in the area was total: it was the period of the ten thousand kingdoms.
At the same time in Egypt, the first western prince kept in writings, the King Menes, unified Lower and Upper Egypt.
Other peoples, called "Indo-Europeans" and "Turcs", settled civilisations in northern India and in Mesopotamia; others, called "Turcs" and "Mongols" created city-states in Mesopotamia (ur, Sumer, Nineveh and Babylon).
A revolutionary invention, the cuneiform writing, appeared a bit before. It enabled the conservation of one of the first cosmogonies, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is a reflection on desire as the engine of history and constitutes a matrix for most of the sacred texts of the region. The Upanishads were written at the same time in India; they were a major literary representation of a new vision of the world and of a new ethic based on the denial of desire. These philosophical texts are considered to be an early source of the Hindu religion. As a matter of fact, two key visions of the world were taking shape already.
In Egypt, the Pharaoh Khufu (commonly known as Cheops) ruled in the 4th Dynasty (2551-2528 BC); his well-known undertaking is the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World.
Aryans, Mongols, Indo-Europeans (Scyths then Sarmats) and Turcs (Xiongnu and Khazars) developed civilisations in the Mediterranean, in China, in Siberia, in Central Asia and in Northern India. All worked towards the grabbing of surpluses using the force.
In China, already the most populated, the most active and the most trading region in the world, metallurgy emerged. There, the first decorated tortoise shells appeared; they were the earliest form of Chinese writing. A philosophy of history was then developed there, dominated by the concept of yin and yang and influenced by the five elements and by the hexagrams of the I Ching (or Yi Jing in pinyin). Writings evoke a "Yellow Emperor", whose existence is as mythical as that of his dynasty, the Xia.
Then, as for their precursors, each one of these civilisations was hustled by others, which sometimes desperately tried to erase any trace of their predecessor.
In - 1792 in Babylon, the emperor Hammurabi established a code which regrouped all his laws, and which served as the basis for many other codes thereafter. Soon after, his empire was looted by invaders, the Hittites.
In China, the Chang dynasty appeared, which mastered architecture and bronze metallurgy, built crockery designed for sacrifices, and performed fortune telling by interpreting tortoise shells.
The Tokhariens (an Indo-European people) bring the chariot to China, which enabled it to dominate over Central Asia. In - 1674, Egypt was invaded by the Hyksos, a warlike tribe coming from Asia on horses and chariots; ensuing a new dynasty of pharaohs.
In America and Africa, numerous civilisations, neither using the horse nor the wheel, disappeared as soon as their natural resources depleted.
In - 1363 in Egypt, Amenophis IV, who became Akhenaton, came back temporarily to the idea of a unique God. In - 1290, one of his successors, Rameses II, pushed back the Hittites who came from Mesopotamia and extended his empire to unprecedented boundaries.
At that stage on the planet, more than 50 empires co-existed, getting exhausted out of fighting each other. It got more and more difficult to harness larger and larger territories; there was a need for more and more slaves, soldiers, lands... The imperial Order itself began to lose its meaning: force wasn't enough anymore.
At the same time, in-between those empires, a few tribes coming from Asia settled on the shores and islands of the Mediterranean. Contrary to most of the peoples before them, barricaded in their fortresses and subjugated to the cyclical whims of agriculture, those Mycenaeans, Phoenicians and Hebrews liked change, which they called, one way or the other, progress. Even though they were still venerating their ancestors, intermediary to their gods, and even though they were still glorifying their land, which they deified, these Mediterraneans only sweared by their political and economic rights. Trading and money were their best weapons; seas and ports, their principal hunting ground.
There emerged tiny, marginal, radically different societies out of the imperial Order, which were at the origin of the idea of freedom and represented the cradle of what will turn out to be the market democracy, the trading Order.
based on: Une brève histoire de l'avenir - Jacques Attali (2006)
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