The second big cultural jump taken by our ancestors occurred about 7,500 years ago. This was the discovery of how to raise food. The development of agriculture and animal-raising made it possible for us to live in crowded nests known as cities. When man had to gather his food in the form of fleeing animals and random plants, it took a lot of land to support a small group. For example, there were probably not over 100,000 people on the entire continent of Europe before they learned to raise food. A good year might have increased the birth rate. But they would soon have been killed off by famine and disease if there were even one rough year when the game and plants were less available.
When man began to raise food, he could stay in one place instead of roaming all over the countryside. Socially and technologically, lots of things began to happen for the first time. He began to accumulate bric-a-brac. The wheel was developed. He learned how to heat metals to make them soft so that they could be poured or beaten into useful shapes. He developed the plow for working the land and the loom for weaving cloth. Social patterns that were needed in city life were developed. He amplified political structures and created armies equipped with death-dealing instruments. Within a thousand years after our ancestors acquired the know-how for raising food, the cultural patterns of city life, politics, business, and technology were invented. Since then they have continued with very little change until recently.
Many anthropologists consider the city as our most fundamental social invention. The first cities evolved in southwestern Asia, and the pattern of the city was well worked out in Mesopotamia by 4,500 to 4,000 B.C. Cities did not appear in China until around 2,000 B.C. Europe had to wait until the Greeks put together a few cities around 900 to 800 B.C. The city did not appear in Scandinavia until after 1,000 A.D.
Writing developed almost simultaneously, about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. The Chinese invented their cumbersome symbols 2,000 years later. When a man’s thoughts were written, they could speak out after his death. The human race began to accumulate information that permitted the building of a modern civilization with a complex value system.
Whereas learning was previously a monopoly of a privileged class, the development of the alphabet eventually made it possible for everyone to acquire an education. All alphabets now in use seem to stem from a single point of origin in the Sinai Peninsula where the Egyptians were busy mining. Most of the time the Egyptians used criminals and prisoners of war for this type of work. Occasionally, some wandering Semites who needed food came to work for them. Since they were pretty smart fellows, the sheiks of the Semites were appointed foremen of the mines. As part of their job they drew up reports on how much metal was mined and how much money was earned by the various men. From the complicated Egyptian system of writing, these foremen abstracted the simple symbols representing single sounds in the Egyptian system. We are indebted to them for giving us the first alphabet.
We were doing business as usual by at least 3,000 B.C. Standard weights and measures were in use in Sumeria. Barley was one of the earliest mediums of exchange. A measure for barley was available for public use in the market place. If a farmer had felt he was being gypped, he could have walked over and measured it out. By 3,000 B.C. convenient metal coins began to be used in place of the more awkward sacks of barley, and a shortage of money became a continual problem for the government. The Code of Hammurabi set the value ratio of barley and metal. This code provided serious penalties for anyone caught cheating. To make sure this money system would work, a merchant could have been put to death if he had refused to accept either barley or coins in payment for his merchandise.
There are cuneiform records of loans with interest that ran as high as 300 per cent when an individual could not offer security. Even the lowest rate was 25 per cent per year. The Sumerians worked out business methods such as stock companies and corporations. Many tablets recording their business deals and their private correspondence have survived. One tablet dated before 2000 B.C. describes the complaint of an old man about the degeneracy of the younger generation. Another tablet is from a boy at school telling his parents about the “lousy food.”
The late Ralph Linton, a noted American anthropologist, wrote:
Many of the economic and social patterns which still operate in modern Western society can be traced to this region. It has been said that if George Washington had been transported back to the court of Hammurabi of Babylon, about 2067–2025 B.C., he would have felt vastly more at home there than he would in the modern capital city which bears his name. Apart from language difficulties, he would have encountered very few things in Hammurabi’s empire which were not familiar and understandable, while in Washington he would have been baffled and confused by the tremendous technological changes ... and the fumbling efforts which our society is making to bring the other aspects of its culture into adjustment with these.
Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), p. 298.
The third enormous step in the development of human culture took place when we began to supplement
