Theme 4. Formation of ancient civilizations

It is believed that the first civilization on earth was the civilization of ancient Mesopotamia. It is in Mesopotamia in the IV millennium BC. er the first irrigation canals were built; this was the birthplace of the irrigation revolution. Irrigation led to a sharp increase in population, and at the end of the 4th millennium, the first cities appeared on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. The cities of Mesopotamia were temple communities; they came from the tribal communities of the first settlers. At first, the communities were small, and the work was done together in a common field. Then the community grew, and the fields were divided among the community members, with part of the land allocated to the temple; First, the temple lands were cultivated together by community members, and then, when the landless poor appeared, the priests began to invite them as laborers or tenants.

Complicated temple work required records and calculations; first, ideograms were used for recordings, then stylized drawings became hieroglyphs. At the same time, consonances were used to designate verbs, for example, to convey the word “return”, in Sumerian “gi”, they painted the reed icon; Sumerian reed is also gi. Later, hieroglyphs began to be used to convey the individual syllables from which the words were composed - this is how syllable writing appeared. The Sumerians and their neighbors the Semites squeezed the hieroglyphs on clay tablets with the help of a cane stick; the hieroglyphs consisted of several wedge-shaped lines - this was the so-called cuneiform. It is clear that cuneiform icons were a little similar to the concepts transmitted, they soon turned into conventional symbols. At the turn of the II-I millennia, one of the Semitic peoples, the Phoenicians, perfected cuneiform writing and created an alphabet of 22 letters. From the Phoenician alphabet descended from the Greek and Aramaic, from the Greek - Latin and Slavic, from the Aramaic - Persian, Arabic and Indian. The alphabet has not reached China and Japan, and these peoples of these countries still use hieroglyphs.

Under the Sumerian temples, there were e-oak scribe schools. The scribes had to not only know the writing, but also be able to calculate the size of the crop, the volume of the granary, the area of ​​the field. The temples were engaged in trade and usury, so the scribes often had to make all sorts of calculations, including calculating percentages. By the end of the third millennium, a positional number system was created to record numbers — however, it was not decimal, like in our time, but sixty decimal, and various symbols were used to indicate units and tens. On the basis of this system, multiplication tables, division tables, and exponentiation tables were compiled (the scribes hardly dividing large numbers, and they preferred to look into the table). The heirs of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, knew how to solve quadratic equations, knew the “Pythagorean theorem”, the properties of such triangles, knew how to calculate the volume of a pyramid, made field drawings, drew maps — but did not always respect scale.

An important task facing the priests was to create a calendar; the calendar was necessary primarily to determine the time of agricultural work. The Babylonian calendar was lunar, the lunar month consisted of 29 or 30 days (the period of changing lunar phases is 29.5 days); year consisted of 12 months. Due to the fact that the solar year is 11 days longer than the lunar year, the New Year shifted and could fall in the summer or autumn; therefore, an additional month was introduced from time to time.

The Babylonian calendar was not accurate enough; a much more accurate calendar was created in the III millennium BC. er in Egypt. The Egyptian calendar consisted of 12 months for 30 days, with 5 additional days inserted at the end of the year, that is, the year totaled 365 days. This calendar differed from the current one only in the absence of leap days; leap days introduced in 46 BC. er Julius Caesar.

The task of drawing up the calendar was associated with astronomical observations: it was noticed that the Nile spill always occurs on the same day when the star Sirius appears above the horizon. The Egyptians began to record the position of the stars, combined them into constellations and created the first star tables. Observing the position of the stars in the night sky, the Egyptians learned to determine the time. Astronomy has always been closely associated with magic; star tables served not only for practical purposes, but also for predictions. In the I millennium BC. er the first astrologers appeared in Babylon.

It is characteristic that the guardians of knowledge, scribes, astrologers, healers at that time were mostly priests. Egyptian and Babylonian priests kept their knowledge in secret, not allowing them to the uninitiated. This was partly due to the fact that in the Egyptian temples there were workshops on imitation of gold and silver; chemical experiments of priests taught them to forge precious metals. Many of the knowledge of the priests remained a secret for future generations - for example, the secret of the preservation of mummies.

The Middle East was the birthplace of many of the simplest machines and tools — those that were used by many villagers in the last century. This, above all, spinning wheel, hand loom, potter's wheel, well crane. The appearance in Egypt of the well crane, “shaduf”, allowed to raise water to “high fields” and tenfold increased the area of ​​cultivated land. In the I millennium BC. er in Babylonia, a water-lifting wheel, "Sakie", and a circular belt with leather buckets, a "loft" appeared sliding on the blocks.

The civilization of Babylonia is sometimes called the "clay kingdom": in Mesopotamia there is no wood and stone, the only building material is clay. Houses and temple towers were built from clay, ziggurats — only outside they were lined with bricks. In Egypt, temples and pyramids were built of stone. The pyramid of Cheops has a height of 146 meters and consists of 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing 2 tons. For the transport of these blocks, a sled was used under which wooden rollers were placed; the blocks were raised to the top of the pyramid along inclined planes. Blocks were delivered from the quarries to the construction site on huge barges 60 meters long and with a displacement of 1.5 thousand tons.

According to Herodotus, 100 thousand people worked on the construction of the pyramid of Cheops by way of labor service, which changed every three months. Labor service, which extended to the entire population, made it possible to create not only pyramids, but also huge irrigation facilities; in the II millennium, the Fayum Canal was built, which allowed irrigating vast areas of land in Lower Egypt.

The largest technical achievement of the Ancient East was the development of smelting metals. Apparently, the secret of copper smelting was found by chance during the firing of ceramics. Then they learned how to melt copper in primitive furnaces; such a horn was a hole dug in the ground about 70 cm in diameter; the pit was surrounded by a stone wall with a hole for the blast. Blacksmith was made from goat skins and supplied with a wooden nozzle. The temperature in this furnace reached 700-800 degrees, which was enough for smelting metal.

The first copper products appeared in the Middle East in the VI millennium BC. e., however, copper is a relatively rare and, moreover, soft metal; it is inferior in hardness to flint. This technical revolution occurred only with the development of the metallurgy of iron, at the end of the II century BC. er According to legend, the first forgers of iron were the mysterious Khalibs who lived in the mountains of Armenia. In those days - and much later - the furnaces did not give a temperature sufficient to melt iron (1530 degrees); the metal was obtained in the course of the cheese-making process, in the form of a crits-porous lump with an admixture of slag. Khalibs invented a way to get rid of slag using long-term forging; the result was solid, low carbon iron.

Iron ore is much more common than copper, which is why iron has become a widespread metal. The iron tip of the plow improved tillage, an iron shovel allowed digging irrigation canals. Previously, with a slash-and-fire system, efforts of the entire genus were required to clear a new section; now with the help of an iron ax, a saw, a shovel, a loner could cope with this, as a result, the disintegration of the genus began and the selection of individual sections.

Huge changes also occurred in military affairs; in the eighth century BC. er Assyrian king Tiglatpalasar III created the “royal regiment” armed with iron swords. It was a fundamental discovery, followed by a wave of Assyrian conquests and the creation of a great Assyrian power - a new cultural circle, the components of which were not only iron swords and the regular army, but all Assyrian traditions, including the autocratic power of the kings. Thus, the story once again showed that people's lives are determined by technical discoveries.

The beginning of the “Iron Age” was the heyday of the great Middle Eastern civilization, the civilization of Assyria and Babylon. In the VI century BC. er The 400 km Palucat Canal was built; this canal allowed to irrigate vast expanses of desert lands. Babylon turned into a huge city, whose population reached 1 million people. Babylon was famous for its “Tower of Babel”, the Etemenanki ziggurat, “hanging gardens” and the bridge over the Tigris; This bridge had a length of 123 meters and rested on 9 pillars made of brick. The triple walls of Babylon were striking in their power - the inner wall was 7 meters thick.

The city was crossed by wide avenues, the Babylonians lived in high-rise brick houses. At this time, banks and joint stock companies appeared - in terms of everyday life, this world was not very different from modern bourgeois society. Just as now, “psychotherapy” was in high fashion — diseases were treated mainly with spells — and spells often helped. True, there were also doctors who treated with herbs, they were a special corporation that was at enmity with the psychotherapist spellcasters, but the struggle of the two medical schools ended in the defeat of herbalists. As at all times, merchants-merchants traveled to distant countries, large knitted reed ships took on board hundreds of passengers and sailed to Arabia and India. Travelers maintained contact with their homes through postal pigeons.

The world outside India remained unknown to the Babylonians; they believed that there, further, the world ocean begins, and beyond the ocean the earth merges with the dome of the sky. In total, there were seven domes of heaven, in the seventh sky the gods lived; under the earth was the kingdom of the dead. These ideas of the Babylonians were also shared by the surrounding nations, including the Jews; from the Jews they got into the Bible.

Among all the peoples of the Middle East, the Phoenicians, a tribe of navigators and merchants, knew most about the world around them. The Phoenicians built ships with a keel, frames and a solid deck: such a ship could cross the Mediterranean Sea in 70 days and reach the Atlantic Ocean. The Phoenicians reached the shores of the Gulf of Guinea and Britain; in the VI century BC. er they sailed around Africa. The Phoenicians also own two remarkable discoveries, glass and purple paint.

Glass, according to legend, was discovered by chance, when a ship carrying saltpeter crashed and the sailors lit a fire from saltpeter on the shore. Purple dye was made from the shells of mollusks, the secret of its manufacture was kept secret; only kings and priests wore purple clothes.

The Indians achieved the highest successes in the field of weaving in ancient times. India was the birthplace of cotton, a plant that surprised strangers; Europe has long believed that cotton grows on trees. Indian masters weaved the finest batiste and muslin; a cambric shawl could be passed through the ring. Fabrics were dyed with indigo juice - indigo and are now used, for example, for dyeing jeans.

In India, they grew another remarkable plant - rice. At the beginning of our era, the Indian peasants mastered the technology of cultivation of flooded rice. It was a rather complicated technology. At first, the community built a dam on the river and a snout of a pond; irrigation ditches were diverted from the pond. Rice seedlings were grown in a special nursery with an adjustable microclimate; then it was planted on flooded fields. Later, for weed control, carp were bred on flooded fields. The yield of sea rice was twice as high as that of wheat, and not one, but two or three harvests per year were harvested. It was a new fundamental discovery, a new victory of man over nature.

A new fundamental discovery led to the emergence of a new cultural circle. Indian colonists and traders brought flood rice to the shores of Indochina, to Burma, to Indonesia; along with flood rice, they brought their culture, their writing and their religion - so the countries of Indochina are often called "Outer India". Following flood rice, Buddhism came to China and Japan. The spread of flooded rice meant the expansion of the ecological niche; the former territory could have a threefold or fourfold larger population - as a result, South and Southeast Asia turned into the most densely populated region of our planet.

The eastern part of Asia is separated from the western part by mountains and deserts; therefore, it has developed its own distinctive civilization. The Chinese remained unfamiliar with many achievements of the West - they did not know the alphabet, did not know how to build stone buildings, did not know grapes and wine. On the other hand, technologies that had not been known to the West for a long time were mastered in China. The Chinese learned to weave silk, in the II century they invented paper, and in the VI century - porcelain.

China has long remained isolated from the rest of the world.

The Chinese believed that their country - this is the "Celestial", which is surrounded by four seas - East, South, Sandy and Rocky. The rocky sea was the mountainous country of Tibet, and the sandy sea was the endless Gobi desert. In 138 BC. er Emperor Wu-di sent Guards Officer Zhang Qian to explore the desert; Zhang Qian was captured by the Huns, then fled, wandered for a long time in the desert, then crossed the Tien Shan mountains and unexpectedly discovered another world - a country where, like in China, there were rivers, cultivated fields and large cities.

So the Chinese discovered the outside world; they borrowed from this world glass, spices, the art of building stone buildings. The Great Silk Road became the connecting thread between the two worlds - it was the exchange of the achievements of two civilizations.

In the 6th century, two monks came to Constantinople along the Great Silk Road, on behalf of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, they removed the silkworm larvae from China, hiding them in their staffs. Silk production was established in Byzantium, and then in Persia. In 751, the Arabs in a battle in Central Asia captured several Chinese who knew the secret of making paper; after that, the paper began to be fabricated in the same way in the Middle East. The Chinese also invented the compass, which hit Europe a thousand years later, in the 13th century. The most remarkable achievement of Chinese civilization was the creation of blast furnaces and the production of iron. The kilns were loaded with coal and high phosphorus ore; blowing was carried out with powerful bellows driven by a water wheel. Externally, the Chinese furnace was a rectangular ditch, lined with refractory bricks; crucibles with ore were placed in them, coal was poured between the crucibles; This technology made it possible to produce cast iron, as well as malleable iron with a low carbon content, that is, steel. In the XI century, an amazing building was erected in the province of Henan - a 13-storey iron pagoda; It was made of cast iron plates without the use of wood and stone. Secrets of obtaining iron and porcelain remained a mystery for Europeans until the beginning of the New Age.