How the World Made the West

Introduction

• Civilization emerged in two stages: singular and plural. The noun was first used in France in the 1750s to denote an abstract concept of advanced society. From the 1760s it was championed by Scottish philosophers who delineated a standard set of evolutions that led to this full realization of human potential, form hunters to shepherds to farmers to merchants and industrialists.
• In 1828, François Guizot introduces the idea of plural civilizations and, at about the same time the notion emerged that humans could be divided into races with differing natural capacities and intelligence.
• Civilizational thinking and the West slowly cam together in a notion of "Western Civilization" characterized by democracy and capitalism, freedom and tolerance, progress and science.

1. A Single Sail (Byblos, c. 2000 BCE)

• 10,000 BCE: As the global climate settled and warmed at the end of the Ice Age, exchange became more important in the so-called Fertile Crescent. In the new temperate conditions abundant local game and wild plants prompted the first experiments in agriculture. Pioneers took local wild grasses with small, easily dispersed seeds and by careful and repeated selection they nudged them into producing fat, firmly attached grains, easier for jumans to harvest, eat, and process into flour bu now in need of human intervention to reseed.
• Another form of selective breeding turned wild animals into human servants: dogs had long been bred from wolves for hunting companions, but now aurochs were transformed into cows, boars into pigs, and sheep were coaxed out of their natural aggression.
• Farming required a more sedentary lifestule, but it still depended on contact and communication. Each domestication took place in a specific are area of the Fertile Crescent - wheat, cattle and sheep in the northern hills, barley and pigs in different areas west of the Euphrates, and goats in what is now Iran.
• 7000 BCE - All the new breeds are found throughout the region. This involved more than just swapping seeds and stock: people had to explain to each other how to sow, cultivate, harvest and cook the new plants, and how to breed, feed and care for the new animals.
• 3500 BCE - The wheel and axel are invented
• Late 3000s BCE, Uruk on the Euphrates was a true city of 250 hectares - about the size of London's Soho - with canals, temples, and a population of 20-40k.
  • Here is developed the first known system of standard weights and measures, based on the load an average man could carry (a talent) and on the length of his forearm (a cubit).
  • The first writing appears here too. Initially just a counting system - circles for tens, lines ofr ones - but then scribes added pictograms to show what was being counted. By the end of the millennium, they had extended this code to record the local language and then literature in signs imprinted into clay tablets with a stylus and now now as cuneiform, from the Latin for "wedge-shaped".
• Late 3000s BCE - Depictions of boats with sails first appear on objects made in Kush and soon after in Egypt
• 3000 BCE, Upper and Lower Egypt come together under the "Old Kingdom" dynasties that wrote in hieroglyphs, built the pyramids, and ruled over more than a million people.
• 3000 BCE - Donkeys have reached Egypt as a form of transport.
• 2600 BCE - Egyptian records start to document regular sea trade with Levantine ports.
• 2500 BCE there is a patchwork of cities rules by kings covering southern Mesopotamia, some with 10k inhabitants.
• 2400 BCE - Wealthy tombs at Ur fill up with exotic stones from far-flung places.
• 2000s BCE, bronze is invented.
• 1500s BCE - Boats with keels