Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit One BJ. What is Civilization?

Transcription

1 Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit One BJ What is Civilization?

2 The History of Writing Grog is a genius. He has found that by adding tin to copper he can make a metal that is stronger than either. Through experimentation, he has found that the appropriate copper to tin ratio is 9:1. Grog teaches his apprentices this ratio in the form of a poem to help them remember it: one part tin, nine parts copper makes shields stronger and spears sharper Sadly, Grog is better with metal than with words. One day Grog dies. His apprentices are not geniuses. They don't know why Grog's recipe works. They simply obey the formula they were given... at least as they remember it. Already, they can't agree if it was one part tin and nine parts copper or nine parts tin and one part copper.

3 The History of Writing Within two generations, the recipe is lost; there is no one alive who remembers how to make bronze, and Grog's culture must wait for another genius to re-invent bronze and hope that he comes up with a better poem. That is, essentially, the story of human civilization up until about 3,000 B.C. Writing Emerges Writing first emerged in the fertile valley between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers Who knows how many times we've discovered fire or invented the wheel or identified a toxic plant only to lose the advances that we made? Then, somewhere in the fertile valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a clever person came up with the idea of representing words with pictures. To record these symbols, they took a stick and drew pictures in wet clay.

4 The History of Writing Once their clay dried and hardened, their symbols were preserved so long as the clay was kept dry. The symbols, called pictographs, were the first written language, called Cuneiform, named after the cone-shaped stick or stylus that they used to poke the clay. It is no coincidence that the first traces of writing share a location with the first traces of cities. Cities are impossible to administrate without some sort of writing. It is impossible to orchestrate the activities of thousands of people simply by word of mouth. Cities generate huge amounts of records: inventories, taxes, censuses, decrees and laws. Thus, of all the inventions of humanity, the most important to our development was the invention of writing. Writing makes all our other inventions possible... how?

5 The History of Writing Advantages of Writing Well, let's look at what writing does. The main thing that writing does is it allows people to communicate ideas across space and time. You can learn something from someone you've never met, whether they're far away or long-dead. This has two major advantages: First, writing increases social memory, allowing a society to retain the progress it has made - Instead of having to reinvent bronze when the guy dies without having an apprentice, that information is written down and can be referred to be generation after generation of metallurgists. Secondly, writing reduces the corruption of ideas by oral transmission - oral cultures must depend on what are called mnemonic devices to convey important ideas.

6 The History of Writing This could be poetry, parables or any such thing. We still use this sort of thing to convey conventional wisdom today. 'An apple a day keeps the doctor away' or 'Beer before liquor, never been sicker.' Yet these things can fall apart easily. Think about a game of telephone; by the time the message has passed from one person to another, it's already changed. The more people in the chain, the more messed up it becomes. This isn't a problem if you're just playing a game, but imagine if you're trying to convey something very important like 'this plant, though delicious, is poisonous.' The slightest error in the chain of communication could mean disaster.

7 Gift or Debt Economy Meet Stan the hunter. Stan has killed a deer. He would be hard-pressed to eat an entire deer on his own, so when Stan catches game, he shares it with his tribe. In this way, food is not wasted. Stan's sharing also serves as a sort of insurance. Even if Stan has no luck hunting tomorrow, it is likely someone else in his tribe will. That tribesman will share his meat with Stan, since Stan has shared his meat with him. This system is called a gift, or debt economy. Stan gives the gift of food to his tribesmen in their time of need, and they return the favor. This gift economy is most likely the oldest form of economics and probably dates back to our time as hunter-gatherers

8 This is a more complex form of the gift economy. Yet the gift economy can do more than just prevent waste and provide food insurance for nomadic hunters. It also facilitates the division of labor for settled farmers. In a gift or debt economy, people give gifts in order to receive favors in the future Meet Jack the farmer and Jill the seamstress. Jack raises pigs. Jill makes clothes. Because Jack raises pigs, he often needs new clothes. However, Jack does not have the time to make his own clothes, so Jack has made an informal arrangement with Jill. Jack gives Jill a nice cut of meat every time he slaughters a pig, and Jill makes clothes for Jack when he needs them.

9 This is the specialization of labor referred to by Plato in The Republic. Jack gives Jill the gifts of pork chops, which put her in his debt. Jill pays off her debt by giving Jack the gift of clothing. Jack has similar arrangements with the other members of his village. He regularly gives food to the Ed the potter, Ted the blacksmith, and Fred the weaver. This way, Jack doesn't have to carry around pork chops with him when he goes shopping. It also keeps Jack's friends from having to accept a fresh pork chop every time Jack wants something. People give Jack what he needs, not in direct exchange for food, but out of their debt to him. Finally, the gift economy keeps Jill from having to figure out how many pork chops a sweater is worth.

10 Thus we have seen the benefits of a gift economy. In its earliest form, it keeps food from being wasted and it provides a sort of food insurance. In more complex agricultural societies, gift economies enabled the division of labor by allowing each member of a society enjoy the fruits of everyone else's labor, while allowing them to focus on their own task. Finally, gift economies create bonds of obligation that hold a society together. The gift economy system works great with friends and neighbors - people you're going to see every day and who cannot forget their debt to you. Yet when villages start growing into towns, it becomes increasingly difficult to know everyone. A gift economy cannot work between strangers because there is no guarantee that the stranger will repay the debt with a gift of his own.

11 So how are strangers supposed to trade with one another? Bartering in a Commodity Economy One solution is bartering. Tom the stranger could trade Jill the seamstress something for a shirt. Yet for this to work Tom must have something that Jill wants that is of similar value to the shirt. This is called a coincidence of wants, and it is a hard thing to come by. There is no guarantee that Tom the stranger will have anything that Jill the seamstress wants, and even if he does, there is the problem of value. Say Jill wants Tom's knife. Well, Tom's knife is worth twice as much as Jill's shirt. So what is Tom to do? Cut the knife in half?

12 Then it's no longer a knife, just a chunk of iron, which is worthless to Jill. It looks like this deal is going nowhere. But wait! Jill does need iron for sewing needles. Even though Jill can't turn a lump of iron into a needle, Ted the blacksmith can, and he always needs more iron. This system is called a commodity economy. Tom can give Jill an otherwise worthless lump of iron in exchange for a shirt. Jill can then take that iron to Ted the blacksmith. Ted can use some of the iron to make Jill's needles and keep the rest of the iron in exchange for his work. Though different crafts require different goods, most of these crafts require at least a little bit of metal

13 Thus metal becomes a basic commodity for trade. In a commodity economy, something that is of value to many people is traded for other goods Ingots and Shekels And indeed, lumps of metal called ingots are the first form of currency. Instead of trading in finished goods, like knives, which not everyone might want, people begin trading in the metal itself. By working with a raw material like iron, a buyer can give a seamstress the makings of a bunch of needles, a warrior the makings of a new sword, and a farmer the makings of a new scythe - all with one commodity. Metal is not the only thing everyone needs, though. And there will always be people who do not need metal at all. Yet there is something everyone needs, and that is food.

14 It is no surprise, then, that the earliest named form of currency, the Sumerian shekel, was originally a unit of weight for measuring barley. The original shekel was probably a bag of grain of set weight, which people used to trade. Yet walking around with sacks of perishable grain proved inconvenient, whereas metal was portable, durable, and easily divided. Moreover, the value of grain fluctuates with the seasons. Grain is cheapest after harvest, and most precious in the spring, whereas metals retain their value over time. Over the years, the sacks of barley came to be replaced with ingots of metal, considered to be worth as much as a shekel of barley, and the name shekel transferred from the barley to the lump of metal.

15 Early Currency and Counterfeiters Commodity economies seem to have served civilization for a few thousand years. Yet commodities have their own limitations as currency. The value of a lump of metal depends on two things: its weight and its purity. Weight is a difficult thing to determine accurately without a scale, and a scale was a very precise, and thus rather expensive, tool for the age. Yet even if everyone had scales to measure the weights of ingots, they would have a difficult time ascertaining their purity. No sooner had people begun accepting lumps of gold as payment then some clever counterfeiters began coating lumps of lead with a thin layer of gold, or mixing precious metal with common ones to make ingots of impure alloys.

16 Early Currency and Counterfeiters It would take a pair of Greek inventions - the touchstone and the measurement of volume by immersion in water - for a person to be able to measure purity at home. Until then, to facilitate trade, a way had to be found to guarantee the purity and weight of metal ingots. Trade is the lifeblood of a civilization, and without confidence in a commodity, trade would have been limited to gift economies between friends and neighbors. Such transactions have two major limitations from the perspective of a ruler. First, gift economies do not bring goods into the civilization; they only move them around within a small group. Also, gift economies do not lend themselves to systematic taxation.

17 Around 700 BC, coins seem to have been invented independently in a lot of places, from the Aegean region to India to China. Early Currency and Counterfeiters With Jim paying his taxes in pigs, Fred paying them in baskets, and Jill paying them in clothes, the royal treasury will end up looking like a flea market. To solve this problem, kings, priests and other leaders begin marking commodities with seals guaranteeing their weight and purity. This is the first official sort of money: bags or ingots of a commodity with a seal stating their quality and their weight. Such seals depended on people's fear of authority, either divine or secular, to keep them from debasing the currency. The First Coins in Society From sealed ingots, it was just a short leap to standardized coinage.

18 The First Coins in Society With coinage, merchants could function without carrying around weights and measures, and trade quickly accelerated. Coins would continue to be the main form of currency for millennia. Their unique form reassured traders of their purity and also guaranteed their weight. Metal coins were just as durable as ingots, but more portable, and unlike hefty ingots, coins were already divided into useful denominations. Yet coins had their own limitations. A coin economy is still very much a commodity economy. That is to say that the value of the coin lay in the metal - the commodity - that it was made of. The problem is that someone might cut bits of a coin off and still use it to buy something with its full purchasing power.

19 The First Coins in Society This is where we get the term 'to cut corners.' To counter this, authorities made their coins round, but this did not prevent people from shaving a bit of gold off the edge. Another problem with coins was that a civilization that traded precious metals for other commodities would soon find itself running low on precious metals. This problem would contribute to the collapse of the Roman economy. They took their gold and silver and traded it for silk and spices, and soon ran out of gold and silver. Finally, no one would mistake a brass ingot for a gold ingot, but someone might confuse a brass coin for a gold one.

20 The First Coins in Society Clever counterfeiters could replicate minting stamps to make brass coins look like gold ones, and thereby undermine confidence in the currency. The problems of coins would continue to plague Western civilization until the introduction of paper money, or fiat currency, from China around the 13th century A.D. But that is a story for another lecture.