Technology: A World History - PDF

 Technology: A World History  The New Oxford World History Technology: A World History Daniel R. Headrick 1 2009  1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works...

 Technology: A World History  The New Oxford World History Technology: A World History Daniel R. Headrick 1 2009  1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Headrick, Daniel R. Technology : a world history / Daniel R. Headrick. p. cm. — (The new Oxford world history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-515648-5; 978-0-19-533821-8 (pbk.) 1. Technology—History. I. Title. T15.H42 2008 609—dc22 2008033426 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Frontispiece: A turbine at the Niagara Falls Power Company. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations  Contents Editors’ Preface............................. vii CHAPTER 1 Stone Age Technology......................1 CHAPTER 2 Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce).......17 CHAPTER 3 Iron, Horses, and Empires (1500 bce–500 ce).......................35 CHAPTER 4 Postclassical and Medieval Revolutions (500–1400).............................51 CHAPTER 5 An Age of Global Interactions (1300–1800).....71 CHAPTER 6 The First Industrial Revolution (1750–1869)....91 CHAPTER 7 The Acceleration of Change (1869–1939).....111 CHAPTER 8 Toward a Postindustrial World (1939–2007)...........................130 Chronology............................... 149 Notes.................................... 151 Further Reading............................ 155 Web Sites................................. 159 Index.................................... 161 This page intentionally left blank  Editors’ Preface T he history of humans and technology is a long one, going back millions of years to the use of stones as tools and to their fash- ioning into more efficient devices through skillful flaking. An- cient peoples discovered the use of fire as a survival technology, only much later devising increasingly complicated systems of water manage- ment for irrigation and later still for hydroelectric power and many other uses. As communications technology developed closer to our own times, it brought people into greater contact and made them more knowledgeable and cosmopolitan. Medical and agricultural technology improved life expectancy, especially in our modern era; artificial organs could replace dying ones, and chemical and nuclear medicines could stop diseases such as cancers in their tracks. Although such technology appears to have an exclusively personal function, making life more pleasant and efficient, ambitious leaders of ancient and more recent times have commandeered technology to help them build states and to conquer other peoples. Aqueducts stretching for hundreds of miles and the building of ships for warfare and trade were among the technologies that allowed leaders of states to maintain and expand their power. Increasingly, the comparatively simple weap- onry of Stone Age people gave way to more complex machinery for conquest and destruction, weaponry that has been put to ever more devastating use in the past century. It is hardly surprising, then, that people have had ambivalent feel- ings about technology of all sorts—and not just about the sophisticated machines of our own day. Pliny the Elder in the first century ce praised iron for its ability to cut stone and fell trees: “But this metal serves also for war, murder and robbery,” he wrote in Natural History, “and this I hold to be the most blameworthy product of the human mind.” Critics have also charged technology with pollution and other devastating ef- fects on the natural world. For all its ability to provide increasing ease for the world’s inhabitants, the case for technology’s drawbacks is a powerful one, showing the tensions produced by the universal human capacity to invent. This book is part of the New Oxford World History, an innova- tive series that offers readers an informed, lively, and up-to-date history  of the world and its people that represents a significant change from the “old” world history. Only a few years ago, world history generally amounted to a history of the West—Europe and the United States—with small amounts of information from the rest of the world. Some ver- sions of the old world history drew attention to every part of the world except Europe and the United States. Readers of that kind of world his- tory could get the impression that somehow the rest of the world was made up of exotic people who had strange customs and spoke difficult languages. Still another kind of old world history presented the story of areas or peoples of the world by focusing primarily on the achievements of great civilizations. One learned of great buildings, influential world religions, and mighty rulers but little of ordinary people or more general economic and social patterns. Interactions among the world’s peoples were often told from only one perspective. This series tells world history differently. First, it is comprehensive, covering all countries and regions of the world and investigating the total human experience—even those of “peoples without histories” liv- ing far from the great civilizations. “New” world historians thus share an interest in all of human history, even going back millions of years before there were written human records. A few new world histories even extend their focus to the entire universe, a “big history” perspec- tive that dramatically shifts the beginning of the story back to the Big Bang. Some see the new global framework of world history today as viewing the world from the vantage point of the moon, as one scholar put it. We agree. But we also want to take a close-up view, analyzing and reconstructing the significant experiences of all of humanity. This is not to say that everything that has happened everywhere and in all time periods can be recovered or is worth knowing, but there is much to be gained by considering both the separate and interrelated sto- ries of different societies and cultures. Making these connections is still another crucial ingredient of the new world history. It emphasizes con- nectedness and interactions of all kinds—cultural, economic, political, religious, and social—involving peoples, places, and processes. It makes comparisons and finds similarities. Emphasizing both the comparisons and interactions is critical to developing a global framework that can deepen and broaden historical understanding, whether the focus is on a specific country or region or on the whole world. The rise of the new world history as a discipline comes at an op- portune time. The interest in world history in schools and among the general public is vast. We travel to one another’s nations, converse and work with people around the world, and are changed by global events. viii Editors’ Preface War and peace affect populations worldwide, as do economic condi- tions and the state of our environment, communications, and health and medicine. The New Oxford World History presents local histories in a global context and gives an overview of world events seen through the eyes of ordinary people. This combination of the local and the global further defines the new world history. Understanding the workings of global and local conditions in the past gives us tools for examining our own world and for envisioning the interconnected future that is in the making. Bonnie G. Smith Anand A. Yang Editors’ Preface ix This page intentionally left blank  Technology: A World History This page intentionally left blank  chapter 1 Stone Age Technology I n a place called Laetoli, in Tanzania, a family—a male and a female carrying a child—once walked across some fine volcanic ash. Their footprints, covered with ashes, remained untouched for 3.5 million years until 1978, when the anthropologist Mary Leakey discovered them. They are the oldest known footprints of Australopithecines (“southern apes”), a species that lived in southern and eastern Africa between 4.5 and 2.5 million years ago. From the fossils of skulls that anthropologists have found, we know that the brains of these apes were as large as those of chimpanzees, about one-third the size of human brains today. Like other apes, they had strong jaws and teeth, with which they scavenged meat left over by other carnivores, as well as vegetable matter and whatever small ani- mals they could catch. They differed from other apes in several ways, however. They lived in open grasslands, not in forests. Unlike all other mammals, they were bipedal; that is, they could walk upright comfort- ably. Their hands had opposable thumbs, with which they could grasp things. Holding objects in their hands, they could walk without slowing down. We do not know whether they carried sticks or hides because such organic matter has long since disintegrated. We do know, how- ever, that they carried rounded stone cobbles and large pebbles long distances from the rivers where they found them. In short, they used found objects as tools. Humans are not the only creatures that use tools; chimpanzees, vul- tures, sea otters, even insects will sometimes pick up a twig or a stone to get at food. Only humans, however, could not survive without tools, and only humans have in turn been shaped by the tools they use. How we got there is a story that began millions of years ago. The oldest deliberately made tools we know of, found in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia, date back 2.5 million years. They, too, were river cobbles but with pieces broken off to make crude choppers with a sharp  edge, useful for chopping wood or breaking the bones of animals to get at the marrow. The flakes that broke off were also sharp enough to cut hide and meat. Gradually, the ability to walk upright, to manipulate objects with their hands, and to manufacture tools transformed not only the way of life of the Australopithecines but their very nature and anatomy. After millions of years, they evolved into a different genus, to which anthropologists give the name Homo or hominid, from the Latin word for “man.” We cannot say that creatures with large brains “invented” tools; rather, brains, other anatomical features, and tools evolved to- gether to create these creatures, our ancestors. Several species of Homo belonged in the genus hominid, all of them living in Africa between 2.5 and 1.8 million years ago. The best known is Homo habilis, “handy man.” These creatures’ brains were half again as large as those of the Australopithecines, though still only half the size of ours. The fact that they carried cobbles up to nine miles from the river- beds where they were found shows that they could plan for the future, something no other apes could do. They used these cobbles as hammers and made choppers by removing flakes from both sides, an improve- ment over their predecessors’ tools. We do not know what other tools they made or how dependent they were on their simple technology. We know, however, that they were well adapted to surviving on the open savannas of Africa, for their anatomies and their choppers remained virtually unchanged for almost a million years. We know much more about the creatures called Homo erectus (“standing man”) who replaced these early hominids around 1.8 million years ago. They had brains two-thirds the size of ours. Like modern humans, their jaws and teeth were smaller than those of Homo habilis, and their arms were shorter and their legs longer. They were much less adept at biting and chewing and at climbing trees than earlier species. They could not have survived without tools. Their tools, however, were much more developed than their prede- cessors’. We call their stone tools hand axes, or bifaces, because they were carefully flaked on both sides to provide a fairly even and long- lasting cutting edge. Some had a sharp point, and others, called cleav- ers, had a straight edge. Hand axes and cleavers could weigh as much as five pounds. They were multipurpose tools used to skin and butcher animals, to scrape skins, and to carve wood. Evidently, these hand axes served them well, for they hardly changed for close to a million years. More important, Homo erectus mastered fire, the only creatures to do so. Fire allowed them to protect themselves from predators, to 2 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y frighten animals, to warm themselves in cold weather, and to roast meat, which they needed to do because their small teeth had difficulty chewing raw meat. Australopithecines and Homo habilis had hunted, but only small or weak animals; otherwise, they scavenged the leftovers of more powerful predators, such as the big cats. Homo erectus, in con- trast, were big-game hunters. Working in teams, they were able to drive wooly mammoths, larger than elephants, into swamps where they could be killed with spears and stones. Like all hominids, much of their nutri- tion came from vegetable matter collected, probably by females. Thanks to fire and their superior hunting skills, Homo erectus could live in temperate climates and could therefore migrate from tropical Af- rica to other continents. More than a million years ago, Homo erectus reached the Caucasus, northern China, and Java, and later Spain and France. But they could not survive in really cold climates, like north- ern Eurasia, nor could they cross bodies of water; therefore, they never reached Australia, the Americas, or the islands of the Pacific. Several species of Homo erectus existed at the same time. Sometime between 150,000 and 100,000 years ago in Africa, one species, and possibly more than one, evolved into a more advanced creature with a brain as large and jaws and teeth as small as ours. We call this creature Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” because we think of ourselves as wise. It was so similar to us that some anthropologists claim that if one of them reappeared on earth and sat on a bus seat next to us, we would think it was just another passenger. There were two distinct species within the genus Homo sapiens: one with thick brows, strong bones, and the physique of a wrestler, called Neanderthal, after the Neander Valley in Germany where their remains were first found; the other, called archaic Homo sapiens, was physically exactly like modern humans. These two species lived side by side in the Levant (the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean), but they did not interbreed. Then, 35,000 or 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals vanished, and no one knows why. The technology of the two species was identical and considerably more sophisticated than that of Homo erectus. Instead of making one kind of hand axe, they made many different stone tools for different purposes: stone spearpoints they attached to wooden shafts, blades of various sizes, and curved scrapers used to prepare hides, among others. Microscopic analysis shows that different tools were used to cut wood, to saw bones, to cut meat, and to scrape antlers. Australopithecines, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus had distinc- tive stone tools but barely changed them for hundreds of thousands, S t o n e A g e Te c h n o l o g y 3  These stone points, dating from around 4200–3000 bce, came from North Af- rica. Their concave bases indicate that they probably were used as arrowheads. Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College even millions, of years. Similarly, the tools of archaic Homo sapiens and Neanderthals changed very slowly over tens of thousands of years. Then, 70,000 years ago, an explosion of innovations began, not only in tools but also in aspects of life unknown to previous hominids: art, religion, and ocean navigation. Some anthropologists call this event the Big Bang. Here was something new in the world: human culture, chang- ing incomparably faster than the slow biological evolution of species. We know much more about the material culture of modern humans than about that of their predecessors because modern humans created far more things and because many of the things they made out of or- ganic matter—bones, antlers, hides, and wood—have survived over the past 70,000 years, especially in cold places where earlier creatures would not have ventured. Consider just one kind of tool, the sharp-edged stone. Modern hu- mans made a great variety of tools for cutting, scraping, and piercing, even burins or chisels used to engrave fine lines on antler and bone. They even made microliths, tiny pieces of sharp stone that they embed- ded in a bone or wooden haft to form a saw. 4 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y  One anthropologist calculated how much cutting edge hominids were able to get from a one-pound piece of flint. Homo habilis, 2 mil- lion years ago, could break off a flake, leaving three inches of cutting edge; Homo erectus, 300,000 years ago, could obtain eight to twelve inches from the hand axe and the flakes; a Neanderthal, 100,000 years ago, could obtain 30 to 40 inches of cutting edge; by 30,000 years ago, a skilled hunter could turn that pound of flint into 30 to 40 feet of blades. In 1991, mountain climbers found the complete remains of a man, frozen and perfectly preserved since around 3300 bce, in a glacier in the high Alps along the border between Italy and Austria. The Ice Man, as he is now known, was dressed in a leather cap, vest, and leggings sewn with leather thongs. On his feet he wore calfskin shoes padded with grass for warmth. Over his clothes, he wore a cloak of woven grass. He carried the tools of a hunter: a bow, a quiver filled with flint-tipped arrows, a bag containing flint knives, scrapers, and burins for punching holes in leather. He even had an axe with a wooden handle and a copper blade, one of the very first metal tools. His equipment was just as so- phisticated as that of much more recent hunters who need to survive in cold places, such as the Indians of the Rocky Mountains or the Inuit of the Arctic. His equipment was not only useful, but it was also danger- ous, for he died of a wound from an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder. This was the first known case of one human killed by another. As the Ice Man’s equipment shows, humans made all kinds of use- ful things never seen before: they sewed clothes with bone needles, they wove ropes and nets, they carved fishhooks, and they made spears, spear throwers, and later, bows and arrows. Like their predecessors, they hunted big game and gathered nuts, fruits, and berries. But they also knew how to fish and catch shellfish and sea mammals. They made strings and ropes out of vegetable fibers and used them to make fishnets, fishing lines, and necklaces of beads. With this equipment, humans ventured into ever-colder climates. In western Europe, much of which was still covered with ice, they lived in caves overlooking valleys through which great herds of animals migrated twice a year. To light their way into deep caverns, they made oil lamps. In the steppes of southern Russia and Ukraine, where there were no caves, they built houses out of the ribs of mammoths covered with hides, build- ings large enough to shelter 50 people. They even knew how to store meat in pits covered with heavy stones to keep other animals away. The artifacts of modern humans went far beyond the needs of sur- vival. Whereas the artifacts of Homo erectus and Neanderthals were S t o n e A g e Te c h n o l o g y 5  purely practical, humans made objects with no known practical appli- cation, which were created, instead, for religious, magical, or esthetic reasons. As early as 70,000 years ago, they made bone spearpoints smoother than was needed for hunting and even engraved them. They made musical instruments, such as a flute carved out of bone, 32,000 years ago. They sculpted figures of animals out of bone or ivory. Small sculptures of women show them wearing string skirts, some with metal beads at the ends. They used pigments and dyes to paint pictures of ani- mals drawn with great artistic talent on the walls of caves, sometimes hundreds of yards underground. They carved stone spearpoints in the shape of a leaf so thin they could not possibly have been used for hunt- ing. They decorated themselves with beads and perforated seashells and animals’ teeth. They also buried their dead with ornate objects, like the 60-year-old man buried in Russia 28,000 years ago with pendants, bracelets, necklaces, and a tunic on which hundreds of ivory beads had been sewn. They had something new in the world: a sense of beauty. What happened to transform archaic Homo sapiens into modern humans? Their bodies and brains were identical, so the change must have been purely cultural. Of their culture, we know only the material artifacts that have survived. So we have to make some educated guesses. The creation of objects that were not immediately practical or neces- sary for survival gives us a clue. These objects—cave paintings, musical instruments, sculptures, and adornments—are symbols that represent ideas such as beauty, control over animals, or life after death. All humans today, and throughout historic times, express their ideas in language as well as in artifacts. Could it be possible that the sudden change in the creativity and life of Homo sapiens happened when they learned to talk? If so, then it explains why humans all over the world suddenly began to use symbolic representation and act in creative ways at around the same time: they learned language, sym- bols, and skills from one another. Cultural evolution, tied for millions of years to biological evolution, was now free to race ahead. Since the sudden emergence of symbolic representation, human culture has never slowed down or ceased to find new and more ingenious ways of doing things. Like Homo erectus before them, Homo sapiens liked to travel. From their original homeland in Africa, they migrated to southwestern Asia 100,000 years ago. They reached South and Southeast Asia and Indo- nesia 70,000 years ago. By 40,000 years ago, they had settled in west- ern Europe. Between 35,000 and 15,000 years ago, they occupied the steppes of southern Russia and Siberia, a more forbidding landscape. 6 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y  They were now in territory no hominid or other primate had ever inhabited before. They reached New Guinea 40,000 years ago and Aus- tralia 5,000 years later, at the very latest, and possibly 10,000 or 15,000 years before that. At the time, the oceans were much lower than they are now, and these two great land masses were joined in a continent we call Sahul. But between Sahul and its nearest neighbor Sunda (which then included Asia and the Indonesian archipelago) stretched 62 miles of open water. In other words, to reach Sahul, the ancestors of today’s New Guineans and Australian aborigines had to build boats large enough for several people, stock them with provisions for a journey of several days, and venture into the unknown. We have no idea what these craft were like, but the very fact that they reached Sahul attests to the ingenuity as well as the courage of these ancient mariners. Just as mysterious and controversial is the arrival of the first hu- mans in the Americas. Some anthropologists claim that humans arrived as far back as 45,000 ago, but most find their evidence unconvincing. All agree, however, that humans reached the New World 15,000 years ago at the latest and had spread to every corner of this continent within 3,000 years. They probably came on foot across the land bridge that then connected Siberia and Alaska, a forbidding land of glaciers and tundra. Then again, they may have paddled canoes along the coast, surviving on seafood and marine mammals; if they did, their campsites, and all the evidence thereof, are now under a hundred feet of ocean. Like the first Australians, the first Americans were skilled hunters who made fluted stone spearheads called Clovis points after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where these points were first discovered. The first Americans found their new homelands populated by many spe- cies of large animals we call megafauna: mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths, camels, bison, and moose. Most of these huge animals became extinct just around the time that humans appeared. Perhaps it was not a coincidence. By 10,000 years ago, humans occupied almost every piece of land on earth except for the Arctic, Antarctica, and the islands of the Pacific. Their tools and artifacts were becoming ever more elaborate. So was their diet, as they hunted more kinds of animals, fished more efficiently, and gathered a greater variety of plant foods. To do so, they needed not only a more complex toolkit but also a deeper understanding of plants and animals, their behavior, and their value to humans. The technology of Stone Age people may seem simple to us, but their knowledge of their natural environment must have been enormous and has perhaps never been surpassed. S t o n e A g e Te c h n o l o g y 7  Of all the earth’s environments, the shores of the Arctic Ocean offer the greatest challenges to human life. Nowadays, those who venture there from the temperate zone must bring everything they need to sur- vive: ships, airplanes, snowmobiles, and tons of supplies and equip- ment. Yet long ago, the Inuit mastered the Arctic without elaborate imported paraphernalia. The first inhabitants on the American side of the Arctic Ocean, an- cestors of the Inuit, came from Siberia 10,000 years ago to hunt cari- bou. Later inhabitants ventured out onto the ice to kill seals as they came up to breathe at air holes. Their descendants went out in teams to kill whales that approached the shore. On land, they hunted with bows and arrows, but to kill whales and sea mammals, they fashioned harpoons with detachable heads attached to sealskin floats by lines of sinew. Once they impaled an animal, they could track its underwater movements by following the floats on the surface. Their boats—kayaks with which to hunt seals and larger umiaks to carry several people and to hunt whales and walruses—were made of wood and animal skins. To travel on snow, they used sleds pulled by dogs. Their houses were built of stones and sod; in the winter out on the ice, they built igloos of snow. For heat and light in the months-long winter nights, they made lamps in which they burned animal fat and whale blubber. Their clothes and shoes were made of the skins of seals, polar bears, and other animals. Having the right clothing was a matter of life or death in the Arctic. Making them was the work of Inuit women, who spent hours softening the hides by chewing them and sewing them into airtight and watertight clothing for each member of the family. To survive, hunter-gatherers had to keep moving, following the herds of animals or seeking places where plants were ripening. Seldom did they settle in one place for long, for very few places on earth could support a group of foragers year round. One such place was Mount Carmel in Palestine, where a people we call the Natufians hunted with bows and arrows, fished with hooks and harpoons, and collected ber- ries, fruits, nuts, and other edible plants. They reaped wild grains with bone sickles into which they inserted small flint teeth and then ground the grains with millstones. In Syria, foragers built a permanent village of 300 to 400 inhabitants we call Abu Hureya, where they lived by hunt- ing and gathering for more than 2,000 years. Another place foragers settled year round was in southern Japan, where a warm, rainy climate and the close proximity of forests, moun- tains, and seacoast provided a diversity of wild foods year round. There, 12,000 years ago, foragers began making pottery, thousands of years 8 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y before anyone else in the world. Their first pots were large cone-shaped earthenware cooking pots, clearly too heavy to carry around. Later, they decorated their pots by pressing ropes into the soft clay before firing them, giving the pots, and the people who made them, the name Jomon (Japanese for “rope coil”). These people built villages of 50 or more dwellings and buried their dead in cemeteries. Their numbers may have reached a quarter million, with the highest population density and possibly the highest standard of living of foragers anywhere in the world. Their culture lasted for 10,000 years, long after their neighbors in Korea and China had developed an entirely different way of life. Very few humans were as lucky as the Jomon people. In most places, necessity forced Stone Age hunter-gatherers to shift from hunt- ing large animals to foraging for an ever-greater variety of wild foods. A slowly growing population needed more food, but previous migra- tions meant there were fewer places not already inhabited by other humans. With more mouths to feed and nowhere to go, people had to intensify their local foraging or starve. As good hunting grounds became crowded, hunters clashed more often; their skeletons, like the Ice Man’s, show marks of violence. There was another alternative, however: helping edible plants grow and raising captured animals. This happened quite independently in several places around the world, proving that food production was not the “invention” of some lone The first potters were the Jomon people of southern Japan, who pressed rope into clay to create elaborate decorations, such as this jug’s ornate handles. Metro- politan Museum of Art S t o n e A g e Te c h n o l o g y 9  genius but a necessity that many people responded to in a similar fash- ion. Technological innovation, in this case growing plants and raising animals, was more of a change in culture and a new way of life than a new set of tools and artifacts. The first place people began growing food was the Middle East, spe- cifically a region called the “Fertile Crescent” that stretches north along the Mediterranean from Palestine through Syria and then southeast into the hills of Iran that overlook the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. From 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, with the end of the Ice Age, the climate of this re- gion became warmer, and grasslands expanded. Among the grasses that grew in the region were several that produced edible seeds, in particular wild wheat and barley. At first, people harvested only the wild seeds, but around 12,000 years ago, they began to sow some seeds in favored locations and then remove competing plants and water the growing crop. In short, they began to garden. Gardening could be interrupted and picked up again (unlike hunting), and it could be combined with the nursing of babies and the care of small children. At a burial site in Abu Hureya in Syria, dating to 9700 bce, the bones of women (but not of men) show malformations of the toes, knees, and vertebrae due, probably, to hours spent grinding grain on a grindstone. Women then, as later, prepared the food. The transition from planting a few seeds to supplement a diet of wild foods to depending largely on domesticated plants took 2,000 years or more. To obtain more food with less effort, these early gardeners had to select seeds through a process of trial and error. They cleared land, sowed seeds, weeded, watered, harvested their crops, and generally adapted their activities to the cycle of plant growth. They also changed their way of life, settled down in villages, and made pots in which to cook their food. Not everyone preferred such labors to the wandering life of hunting and gathering. As one twentieth-century hunter-gatherer told a visiting anthropologist, “Why should we plant when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” As people settled down to growing plants, they also began domesti- cating animals. The first animals to be domesticated were probably dogs that hung around the camps and followed humans around, waiting for scraps. Nomadic hunters also understood the behavior of animals like wild sheep and goats, whose herds they followed. When they caught young animals, rather than eating them right away, they penned them in and fed them to be eaten later. They let the more submissive ones breed, thereby producing, after hundreds of generations, tame animals that would not flee or fight approaching humans. Sheep and goats were 10 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y the first herd animals to be domesticated, followed by pigs and donkeys and much later by cattle. Domesticated animals offered a valuable addition to the lives of early farmers, compensating them for the disadvantages of relying on domesticated plants alone. They could be slaughtered and eaten at any time, not just at the end of a successful hunt or after the harvest like vegetables. After centuries of breeding goats, sheep, and cattle, humans learned to milk them; in most societies, milking cows, churning butter, and making cheese and yogurt were the work of women. Sheep bred for a soft fleece provided wool for clothing. And animal droppings were used as fertilizer or fuel. Animal husbandry was not confined to mixed farming communi- ties. Sheep and goats were herded to distant pastures according to the seasons, up into the mountains in the summer and down to the valleys in winter. After the domestication of horses around 1000 bce, herding peoples kept their flocks of sheep and herds of cattle on the move year round, thereby inaugurating a new way of life, pastoral nomadism, that contrasted with, and sometimes threatened, the settled lives of farmers. When cattle were domesticated, many peoples in dry areas like central Asia and the Sudanic belt across Africa became full-time herdsmen. The transition from foraging to farming took place in several cen- ters around the world. The inhabitants of the Yellow River Valley in northern China began growing millet around 6500 bce and later added soybeans, sorghum, and hemp. By 6000 bce and possibly earlier, people in southern China and Southeast Asia cultivated rice. Taro and bananas also originated from that region, as did pigs, chickens, and water buf- falo. From southern China, rice cultivation spread to northern China and Korea and, by 400 bce, to Japan as well. A similar diffusion took place from the Levant to Egypt and Eu- rope. The peoples of Egypt and Greece, where the climate was similar to that of the Levant, adopted wheat and barley by 6000 bce. Central and western Europe lagged because these Middle Eastern crops did poorly in colder, wetter climates; not until oats and rye were domesticated could the inhabitants rely on crops for most of their food. The idea of horticulture may have spread from Egypt to sub-Saharan Africa, but Middle Eastern crops could not survive in the tropics. There, horticulture had to await the domestication of local plants, such as mil- let and sorghum and, in the moister regions, yams. An African variety of rice was first grown along the Niger River around 3500 bce and later spread to Guinea and Senegambia. Not until the first millennium bce S t o n e A g e Te c h n o l o g y 11  could horticulture feed substantial numbers of people. Tending a garden could be done while caring for small children. For many centuries, this was the work of women, while men hunted or herded large animals. The peoples of the Americas were cut off from the Eastern Hemi- sphere, so their domestication of plants and animals was completely independent of the rest of the world. The environment of the Americas also presented greater challenges than that of the Eastern Hemisphere, for there were fewer wild animals that could be tamed and the wild plants, while numerous, were difficult to domesticate. As a result, the transition to full food production took much longer than in the Mid- dle East or East Asia. Around 5000 bce, the people of central Mexico began experimenting with teosinte, the ancestor of maize, later adding squash, beans, tomatoes, and chili peppers. Yet it was not until 1500 bce that most of their food intake was from farming. The only animals they domesticated were dogs, ducks, and guinea pigs. The Indians of South America created an entirely different form of horticulture based on potatoes, quinoa (a grain), and beans. While the farmers of the Middle East learned to use donkeys, cows, and oxen to pull plows, these large animals did not exist in the Americas. The llamas and alpacas that South American Indians domesticated could be used as pack animals and raised for their meat and wool, but they were too small to be ridden or made to pull a plow. Without stronger animals, farming was much more heavily dependent on human labor than in the Eastern Hemisphere, imposing limits on the Indians’ diets and productivity. The gradual development of horticulture and agriculture trans- formed the world. People who grew or raised their own food could obtain much more from a given piece of land than foragers ever could. Fertile land could support up to a hundred times more farmers than for- agers. As their numbers increased, farmers migrated to areas inhabited by hunters and gatherers, whom they soon outnumbered and, in many places, replaced entirely. The cultures and ways of life of hunters and gatherers, which had lasted for millions of years, only survived in places too dry to farm, like the plains of North America and central Asia, or too humid, like the rain forest of equatorial Africa. To obtain lands for their fields and ashes to fertilize their crops, farmers cut down forests and burned the trees. This transformed the global environment much more rapidly than ever before, although still slowly compared to our own times. One major result of the agricultural revolution was the prolifera- tion of settlements, villages where people lived year round, while they 12 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y farmed and continued to forage in the vicinity. Jericho, in Palestine, may have been the first such village, dating back to 10,500 bce. Its inhabitants grew wheat, barley, lentils, and peas. Within 1,000 years, the inhabitants were getting 80 percent of their food from growing bar- ley and wheat and raising goats, and the rest was from foraging. They traded local products for obsidian, a volcanic glass with a sharp cutting edge used to harvest grain. They also imported seashells and turquoise from far away to make jewelry. For protection against marauders, they surrounded their town with a wall and a ditch. By 7350 bce, Jericho had grown into a town of some 2,000 inhabitants. Jarmo, in northern Iraq, was another such village, founded around 7000 bce, that sheltered about 150 inhabitants. Inside the walls, the inhabitants built small houses of sun-dried bricks with flat roofs and less substantial huts out of reeds. In other places with a wetter climate, farmers often built houses out of wood with thatched roofs. Settling down in one place opened up a world of possibilities. Vil- lagers could devote time to creating new technologies; more important, they could make objects too heavy or fragile for people to carry from A brick wall protected the city of Jericho from invasion. Originally, this mud-brick wall was on top of a stone outer wall; only the stone part is still intact. Library of Congress LC-M32-290 [P&P] S t o n e A g e Te c h n o l o g y 13  place to place. Archaeologists call this early agricultural period the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, because the stone tools dating from this period were polished smooth. Many of them were axe and adze heads, and polishing made them less prone to fractures. But this was only one of many technological changes that characterized this period. The tools that farmers needed were very different from those of foragers. Axes were used to chop down trees. Once cleared of trees, the land had to be prepared with digging sticks and stone-bladed hoes. Farmers harvested grain with bone or wooden sickles into which they inserted sharp stones. To store grain, sometimes for as long as a year, until the next harvest, they made baskets out of reeds and bins of wat- tle and daub (branches covered with mud). Protecting grain from in- sects and rodents demanded even tighter containers, as did carrying water and cooking. Clay pottery, long known to the Jomon people of Japan, appeared in the Middle East between 7000 and 6000 bce, soon after the first farming villages. Before grain could be eaten, it had to be crushed with grinding stones or with wooden mortars and pestles. People also cooked by dropping hot stones into a water-filled clay pot, causing the water to boil. Their diet contained much more starch and less protein than that of hunters and gatherers. Their remains show that they were smaller and less healthy than their ancestors. Textiles also appeared in the early farming villages, replacing ani- mal skins. The first woven cloth we know of was made in Jarmo. Mak- ing cloth or rugs required a source of fibers, such as hemp, flax, cotton plants, or wool from sheep. The fibers first had to be cleaned, carded with combs to make them lie parallel, and spun on spindles to make yarn. They were then woven on looms, the first of which dates from around 6000 bce. The sources of fibers and the equipment needed to make cloth required year-round settlements. Like tending a garden, spinning yarn and weaving cloth were tasks that could be combined with the care of small children. For that reason, this work was almost universally done by women. The earliest representations of spindles and of looms from Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Scandinavia show women spinning and weaving. Neolithic people, by definition, made tools out of stone. They used not only local stones but also fine-grained stones—flint, chert, and obsidian—imported, in some cases, from hundreds of miles away. This meant they had extensive trading networks—for instance, be- tween Mesopotamia and Spain or Britain or between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes of North America. They also used metal when they found it in the raw state, as occurred in deposits of copper, 14 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y silver, or gold; in the Americas, all metals were of this variety. The Ice Man of the Alps carried a copper-bladed axe. Smelting—that is, making copper from ores—began in Anatolia by 5000 bce, in China before 2800 bce, in the Andes around 2000 bce, and in West Africa by 900 bce. The most extraordinary expression of Neolithic technology is the construction of megaliths, or huge stone monuments. Neolithic people erected monuments in many places, from western Europe to Easter Is- land in the Pacific. The earliest were the temples of Malta, built 6,000 years ago. Most astonishing of all, however, is the great stone circle at Stonehenge in England. The largest stones weigh between 25 and 50 tons each and were transported 25 miles overland. Eighty-two blue stones weighing five tons apiece were brought from 150 miles away, partly on rafts. All of the work was done without the help of pulleys or other devices. Archaeologists estimate that building Stonehenge re- quired the work of several thousand people over the course of many years between 2800 and 1100 bce. Yet on certain days of the year, the stones are perfectly aligned with the moon and the sun, leading many to speculate that they were used for astronomical observation or to establish a calendar. During the millions of years between the Australopithecines and the builders of Stonehenge, the ancestors of today’s human beings under- went a long evolution, both biological and cultural. Beginning with the Australopithecines, apes who could walk on their hind legs, hominids changed over time, until the most recent of their species, Homo sapiens, appeared more than 100,000 years ago. Because they walked upright, hominids could use their hands to carry and make things. For several million years, what they did with their hands was limited by their brains. Thus, their technology changed as slowly as their brains and bodies. In the last 100,000 years, however, the pace of change has accelerated. Although the bodies and brains of modern humans have hardly changed in this time, the variety, effec- tiveness, and meaning of the artifacts they created have increased ex- ponentially. Thanks to their techniques and artifacts, by 10,000 bce, humans had become the most efficient foragers and the most successful predators the world had ever seen, and they had spread to almost every region of the world. Homo sapiens had become the dominant creature within the natural world. At this point, living within the natural world no longer sufficed. Propelled perhaps by a growing population or a changing climate, hu- mans found ways to manipulate the natural world to their advantage. S t o n e A g e Te c h n o l o g y 15  A revolutionary development, the production of food through the do- mestication of plants and animals, allowed people to settle down and create many other technological artifacts from cloth to megaliths. But was this progress? The bones of early farmers that archaeolo- gists have studied show that they were shorter, more poorly nourished, and more disease ridden than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. They must also have worked much harder during certain seasons of the year than foragers ever did. Most of their efforts went to ensuring their sur- vival, a risky venture when a drought, a flood, or a plague of locusts could destroy their livelihood. Yet there was no turning back. Farming and herding could support more people in a given environment than foraging ever could. As their numbers multiplied, agricultural people could not go back to hunting and gathering but could only practice their new way of life ever more intensively. Some were more successful than others. 16 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y  chapter 2 Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) T he Book of Genesis in the Bible describes the third day of the Creation in these words: God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters He called Seas. And God saw that this was good. And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: seed- bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that this was good. We now know how this happened. Six thousand years ago, a people called Sumerians began separating land from water and planting crops in the newly reclaimed wetlands rather than relying on rainwater as Neo- lithic farmers had done. In doing so, they created the first civilization. The word civilization, as historians and anthropologists use it, re- fers to large-scale societies whose members contribute taxes, labor, or tribute to the state and pay homage to their leaders. Such societies were radically different from Neolithic villages or foraging bands, whose members knew each other and were related by blood or marriage. Not only did civilizations include far more people, but they also built monu- ments and cities, invented writing, mathematics, and calendars, and cre- ated elaborate religions, literatures, philosophies, and other forms of culture. Some civilizations eventually collapsed or were conquered by outsiders, but others survived for millennia. In later centuries, people often looked back nostalgically to a “Golden Age” or a “Garden of Eden” before they became civilized. But once they had crossed the line, they could never return. Unlike Neolithic villages where everyone helped provide food, in larger societies, some people performed tasks other than farming or  herding. A few were full-time religious, political, or military leaders. Some were warriors, artisans, and merchants. And others were servants to the elites or upper classes. To feed them, the farmers, herdsmen, and fishermen had to produce more food than they themselves consumed. The key to the transformation from Neolithic villages to civilizations, therefore, was the methods used to produce a surplus of food to feed those who did not farm. New and more productive farming practices went hand in hand with a radically new organization of society. The earliest civilizations did not arise in fertile rain-watered lands in the temperate zone. Instead, they began in dry or desert regions where water came from a river, a lake, or a swamp. Farmers who grew crops on the very banks of the river or the shores of the lake or swamp were always at the mercy of devastating floods or droughts. When they suc- ceeded in controlling the water, however, the results were spectacular. Whereas Neolithic farmers in the Middle East might hope to reap four or five grains of barley for every grain they planted on rain-watered land, in a river valley, a grain of barley receiving the right amount of water during the growing season could yield up to forty grains. The farmers who settled closest to the rivers could depend on peri- odic floods to water their fields. Those who came later, however, settled further from the riverbanks. To bring water to their fields, they had to dig canals, dikes, and other earthworks. Building and maintaining these works required the labor of hundreds, even thousands, of men directed by a cadre of supervisors. Although farmers had to contribute their labor, they were not slaves driven by men with whips. People obeyed because they realized the need to work together, because of the peer pressure of their neighbors, and because they were afraid that refus- ing would bring down the wrath of the gods. Moreover, they knew that they had nowhere else to go. In rain-watered environments, people could wander off seeking new land, but in desert regions, survival was impossible outside the river valleys. The place where the first civilization arose was Iraq, a land the Greeks called Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” Tigris and Euphrates. The valley has good alluvial soil but is difficult to farm. It is very hot and dry in the summer and cold and dry in the winter. Al- though little rain reaches the valley, in the spring water rushes down from the mountains to the east and north when the snows melt. The rivers carry a great deal of silt that gradually raises them above the sur- rounding plains until they overflow their banks in devastating floods. All the peoples of the region told legends of the flood, most famously the Hebrew story of Noah’s Ark told in the Bible (Genesis 5–9). 18 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y  To the Neolithic farmers who lived in the surrounding hills, the flood plain presented both an opportunity and a challenge. By the sixth millennium bce, the bolder ones were moving down into the plains and building villages. By the fifth millennium, they were digging short feeder canals to irrigate their fields and drain excess water. To keep the floods from washing away their crops, they built dikes. To hold some of the water back when the floods subsided in the summer when the crops needed water the most, farmers built small reservoirs. Keeping the water flowing was a constant task because silt clogged the canals and the salt and gypsum it contained would poison the fields if they were not properly drained. As the population grew, farmers drained marshes and built canals and reservoirs ever farther from the rivers, requiring ever larger work crews. Success depended on good leadership and the cooperative work of thousands. By carefully watering the rich alluvial soil, farmers grew an abun- dance of barley, wheat, and date palms, along with lentils, beans, peas, onions, and reeds, out of which they built houses and boats. They raised sheep, goats, donkeys, cattle, and pigs and caught fish in the canals. There was more than enough for the farmers and herders to eat. After 3500 bce, villages in the wetlands of southern Iraq grew into towns, and towns grew into cities. The techniques used by the Sumerians grad- ually spread up the rivers and to the outer edges of the valley. After 2000 bce, farmers began watering their fields with a shaduf, or “well- sweep,” a long pole with a bucket at one end and a counterweight at the other. Instead of using a hoe or a digging stick as their ancestors had, they cultivated their fields with an ox-drawn plow and planted seeds with a seed drill, a device that dropped seeds at regular intervals. This shift from horticulture to true agriculture produced much greater yields. Under the direction of their rulers, gangs of laborers dug canals up to 75 feet wide and many miles in length. The most famous of their kings, the lawgiver Hammurabi who reigned from 1792 to 1750 bce, named one of his canals “Hammurabi-spells-abundance.” Egypt was an easy land to farm compared with Mesopotamia. The Nile flooded its valley in late summer and early fall, after the harvest. Unlike the Tigris and Euphrates, the timing of the Nile flood was pre- dictable, and the silt its waters carried was fertile and salt-free. The Egyptians built low dikes that divided the land into basins, letting water stand for about a month to deposit its silt and soak the soil before it was allowed to flow downstream to the delta of the Nile. Crops were planted in October or November and harvested in April or May, before the next flood. Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 19  Neolithic peoples had inhabited the Nile Valley for centuries, farm- ing on the riverbanks and hunting and fishing the wild game in which the land abounded. In the fourth millennium bce, Egypt was divided into little kingdoms, each of which had a “water house” that planned the building of dikes and the soaking of the fields. In the early third millennium, after lower and upper Egypt were united under the Pha- raoh Menes, engineers installed what we call nilometers, devices that measured the height of the river. The regularity of the floods led them to devise a 365¼-day calendar. When they saw Sirius, the brightest star, rising in the dawn sky in line with the rising sun, they knew the flood was imminent. They also developed surveying instruments and a practi- cal geometry to help them place boundary stones to mark the edges of fields and irrigation basins. They used shadufs and other devices such as pulleys and treadmills to lift water above the level of canals. The result- ing food surpluses not only supported the creation of the elaborate cul- ture and awe-inspiring monuments for which ancient Egypt has always been famous, but they also produced the most secure and sustainable civilization the world has ever known—one that lasted, with only brief interruptions, for 3,000 years. Thirteen hundred miles east of Mesopotamia, the Indus River flows through Sind, now a province of Pakistan. The environment of the Indus Valley was similar to that of Mesopotamia, with a rich soil, a hot, dry climate, and a violent river that periodically flooded the plain. Unfor- tunately, we know far less about the civilization that arose there than about Sumer or Egypt because the few writings that have survived have not yet been deciphered. We know that the organization of flood control in the valley began between 3200 and 2600 bce. Villagers dug irriga- tion and drainage canals and built embankments to control the floods and protect their settlements. They grew wheat and barley and traded these crops with nearby nomadic tribes for metals, semiprecious stones, timber, sheep, and goats. They also traded with the peoples of Sumer and the Arabian Peninsula, as evidenced by pieces of Indus pottery and metal objects found in both places. Some time after 1700 bce, for rea- sons we do not fully understand, the population shrank, water control was abandoned, and the cities of the Indus Valley were destroyed by floods. The distinctive cultures of Egypt and the Indus Valley were in- spired by the example of nearby Mesopotamia. In China, Mexico, and Peru, three different agricultural systems developed quite inde- pendently of outside influences. The earliest center of civilization in East Asia appeared on the plains of northeastern China, along the 20 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y Yellow River. The land there was exceptionally fertile, composed of loess, windblown and waterborne silt that was soft enough to cultivate with digging sticks. On average, rainfall was adequate for agriculture, unlike the river valleys of Mesopotamia, the Nile, and the Indus, and farmers could plant dry-land crops such as millet and wheat. Some years, however, drought parched the land. Worse were the years when too much rain fell on the mountains of central Asia. Then the Yellow River became so laden with silt (hence its name) that it built up its bed above the flood plain and then broke through its natural embankments in raging floods that swept everything in their path. That is why the Chinese people call it “China’s sorrow.” By the fourth millennium, Neolithic farmers were clearing the for- ests and building dikes, channels, and reservoirs to control the waters of the Yellow River. But to protect the inhabitants and support a growing population, better flood control was needed. King Yu, founder of the legendary Xia dynasty, is credited with the first large-scale flood-control project in China, around the year 2200 bce. During the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600 to ca. 1046 bce), the first one for which we have evidence in the form of pot shards, walls, and other remains, the Yellow River plain was dotted with thousands of villages whose inhabitants grew millet and wheat, raised pigs and silkworms, and made pottery. Above them ruled an aristocracy of warriors who supervised the engineering proj- ects, built cities, and fought with their neighbors. If China was almost cut off from other early civilizations, the Amer- icas were completely isolated. Thus, the Native Americans proceeded at their own pace, undisturbed by outside influences until Columbus ar- rived in 1492. On their own, albeit much later, they created impressive civilizations similar in many ways to those of the Old World, based on water control in similar environments. As in the Old World, ecological conditions varied from one part of the Americas to another, and so did the methods people devised to make best use of the land and the water. Six thousand years ago, the inhabitants of Mexico began growing maize, beans, squash, and chili peppers and raising dogs and turkeys. There were no large animals that could be domesticated, however, so all work had to be done by humans. By 2000 bce, villages dotted the landscape of central Mexico, support- ing trade between the different ecological zones. The most spectacular water control system in the Americas, perhaps in the world, was that found in the Valley of Mexico. There, streams from the surrounding mountains fed a series of shallow lakes. On the edges of these lakes, especially Texcoco and Xochimilco, farmers created Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 21  chinampas, rectangular islands 300 feet long by 15 to 30 feet wide, sepa- rated by canals. They did this by dredging up mud from the bottom of the canals and dumping it onto rectangular plots. To keep the soil from washing away, they put up reed barriers and planted willows. Periodi- cally, they added layers of fresh mud and floating vegetation from the canals, thereby keeping the soil fertile. Seeds were sprouted in nurseries and then carefully planted in the chinampas. The abundant fresh water, fertile soil, warm climate, and constant labor allowed the chinamperos to grow up to seven crops a year. Each acre of chinampas produced enough food for five or six people, a yield unmatched anywhere else on earth. The earliest chinampas date from the first century bce, if not ear- lier. As the population of the valley grew, more and more wetlands were turned into chinampas. In the first eight centuries ce, they supported Teotihuacán, the largest city in the Americas. Even after the fall of Teoti- huacán and the rise of the Toltec and Aztec Empires, farmers continued to reclaim land from the lakes. In the fourteenth century ce, a small tribe called Aztecs took refuge on an island in Lake Texcoco. There, they built the city of Tenochtitlán and proceeded to construct the most elaborate hydraulic engineering project in the Americas. To prevent the salt-laden waters of eastern Lake Texcoco from harming the chinampas to the west of the city during the annual spring floods, they built a ten-mile-long dike across the lake, with gates to control the level of the water. To supply the chinampas and the city with fresh water, they tapped springs in the nearby hills and con- structed aqueducts and causeways to the island. Hernán Cortés, who led the Spanish expedition that conquered Mexico in 1519–1521, wrote: Along one of the causeways to this great city run two aqueducts made of mortar. Each one is two paces wide and some six feet deep, and along one of them a stream of very good fresh water, as wide as a man’s body, flows into the heart of the city and from this they all drink. The other, which is empty, is used when they wish to clean the first channel. When the aqueducts cross the bridges, the water passes along some channels which are as wide as an ox; and so they serve the whole city.1 By 1500 ce, on the eve of the Spanish invasion, chinampas covered almost 30,000 acres, providing food for a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, one of the largest and wealthiest in the world at the time. In the same period as the rise of civilization in Mexico, another arose along the west coast of South America, where three distinct eco- logical zones lie in close proximity. The first was the highlands and foot- hills of the Andes, a region that was cold but received enough rain to 22 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y The city of Tenochtitlán, capital of the Aztec Empire, was built on an island in Lake Texcoco. Surrounded by water, Tenochtitlán was so impregnable that the first Spanish attempt to take it ended in failure. In their second attempt, the Spaniards were able to take the city by building boats. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 23  grow crops. There, people domesticated llamas, which provided meat and a coarse wool and could be used as pack animals, and alpacas, a smaller species that gave a finer wool. They also cultivated the potato and a grain called quinoa. The second zone was the waters off the coast of Peru. Among the richest fishing grounds in the world, they provided a livelihood to fishermen as far back as 1500 bce. The third zone was the narrow coastal plain. Although one of the driest regions on earth, it is intersected by rivers that come down from the Andes. Along the banks of the rivers, farmers grew warm-climate crops, such as maize, beans, squash, and cotton. From very early on, the inhabitants of the three zones traded with one another. Around 1900 bce, people living along the coastal rivers began dig- ging canals, some of them more than 50 miles long, to bring water and nutrient-rich silt to ever-larger areas of land. Farmers also learned to fertilize their fields with guano, the droppings of sea birds that had ac- cumulated for centuries along the coast. In the highlands, farmers built elaborate terraces to grow crops on steep hillsides. The Moche state conquered most of the coastal valleys around 200 bce and flourished for 800 years, supported by an active trade among the farmers in the rich irrigated lowlands, the herders and farmers of the highlands, and the fishermen along the coast. After 600 ce, the Moche were replaced by two rival civilizations: the Tiwanaku in the southern highlands around Lake Titicaca and the Chimu along the northern coast. By the time the Chimu were overthrown in the 1460s, irrigation canals brought water to millions of acres in more than 60 coastal valleys. The hydraulic engineering projects of these early civilizations both required and supported large populations. But these civilizations are also known for their building projects and for a rich diversity of crafts that could be produced only by specialists living in settled environments. As Stonehenge and other megaliths attest, the urge to build existed be- fore civilizations arose. But in Neolithic times, such construction took many years because the need to obtain food left the inhabitants with little spare time. In the early civilizations, in contrast, the productivity of agriculture provided a food surplus that could be used to feed con- struction workers. Furthermore, the habits of cooperation and obedi- ence that came from working together on massive hydraulic engineering projects could be directed by the elites to political and religious con- struction projects as well. The earliest building projects undertaken by the Sumerians were temples and cities. They used little wood and no stone but made bricks out of clay and straw and let them dry in the sun. With these sun-dried bricks, 24 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y they built ziggurats, pyramidal towers containing temples, storerooms, and workshops. Baked bricks, too costly for ordinary construction, were used only for decoration. Each temple complex needed professional priests and artisans, merchants, and servants. Cities grew to tens of thou- sands of inhabitants; the first was Ubaid, built before 4000 bce. Land close to a source of water was so valuable that it led to dis- putes between neighboring cities. As wars broke out, there arose a class of professional warriors supported, like the priests and their retinues, by the surplus from the farms. Wars forced Mesopotamian cities to sur- round themselves with high walls and gates with heavy doors that could be closed at night or in the event of an attack. The Egyptians were more fortunate than the peoples of Mesopota- mia, for the Nile Valley is bordered by cliffs of good limestone. Stone temples and palaces have survived for thousands of years, whereas ordinary houses, built of sun-dried bricks, quickly melted back into the ground if they were not carefully maintained. The most spectacular constructions in the world, the pyramids of Giza, are almost as good as new after 5,000 years: Khufu, the largest, is 481 feet high and covers The Sphinx and the great pyramids of Giza are awesome evidence of the ancient Egyptians’ mastery of masonry construction. The Sphinx of Giza, carved out of the limestone bedrock, is the largest single-stone statue in the world. Library of Congress LOT 13550, no. 34 [P&P] Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 25  13.5 acres; Khafre is almost as huge; and Menkaure is one-third the size of its two great neighbors. For what purpose were these enormous monuments built? The usual answer is that they were tombs for Pharaohs. Yet one of the earli- est Pharaohs in Egyptian history, Sneferu, who reigned from 2613 to 2589 bce, built three pyramids in succession, two more than he needed as a tomb. The first, at Meidum, began as a step pyramid; an outer mantle, added later to turn it into a true pyramid with 52-degree sides, collapsed into rubble. Next came the Bent Pyramid, so called because it was begun as a true pyramid with 52-degree sides, but once it reached one-third of its intended height, it was quickly finished off at a shallow 43½-degree angle. The third was the Red Pyramid, a true but squat pyramid with 43½-degree sides. To put huge limestone blocks into place required a labor force of tens of thousands of farmers recruited during the three-month flood season and fed with the grain taken from them as taxes during the pre- vious harvest. As work progressed, however, fewer workers could fit on the top of the growing pyramid. Instead of being dismissed, the others were put to work starting a new pyramid. That is why the Bent Pyramid is bent: it was finished off in a hurry when the architects learned of the collapse of Meidum. Frightened by the disaster, they built the next one, the Red, at a shallow angle. In the process, they mastered the technique of using large stone blocks safely. Only then did they dare to build true pyramids with steep sides, the famous ones at Giza built under Sneferu’s successors Khufu and Khafre. In effect, the purpose of pyramid building was to accustom the people of Egypt to cooperate on great construction projects at the behest of their god-king, the Pharaoh. In so doing, Sne- feru turned a land of Neolithic farmers into a single nation, Egypt. The people who irrigated the Indus Valley also built cities. Two of them, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, reveal an elaborate but very tightly controlled civilization. Unlike the Mesopotamian cities that grew from villages in a helter-skelter fashion, the two Indus cities were laid out in a rectangular grid, proof that they were planned. They did not have walls but embankments, for they feared not people but floods. In the Americas, long before cities appeared, civilization was as- sociated with the building of large ceremonial centers where few peo- ple lived year round but to which many came on special holidays. In the first millennium bce, the Olmecs of Mexico carved gigantic stone statues weighing up to 20 tons and transported up to 100 miles from where they were quarried. By the first century bce, the temples and pyramids of Monte Albán, in the Valley of Oaxaca, attracted enough 26 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y merchants, artisans, and other nonfarmers to qualify as a town. Like- wise, the Mayans of southern Mexico and Guatemala created temple complexes such as Tikal surrounded by villages with several thousand inhabitants. The first true city in the Americas was Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico. Founded around 200 ce, it flourished from 300 to 700 but then declined. The people of the region built two great pyramids, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, along with hundreds of smaller pyramids, temples, and religious or political buildings. Around them, they laid out a city in a rectangular grid, with neighborhoods devoted to artisans in obsidian, pottery, cloth, leather, and bird feathers and inhabited by merchants from other parts of Mexico. In its heyday, Teotihuacán had close to 100,000 inhabitants. In other parts of the Americas, as in Mexico, ceremonial centers preceded cities. El Paraíso in Peru, built about 1800 bce, included six huge buildings and required 100,000 tons of stone. Not until 2,000 years later was the first true city, Chan Chan, built in South America. In the southwestern part of the United States, the Ancestral Pueblo (or Anasazi) people built several ceremonial centers such as Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, or the more famous Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde, Arizona, with its 220 rooms and 23 kivas, or circular reli- gious centers. These centers had only a small permanent population but served as meeting places on special occasions for thousands of people from outlying villages. Not all the technologies of the early civilizations were as grandiose or required as much cooperative effort as water control systems or cities and monumental buildings. Some were on a smaller scale, yet were just as important to the lives of the people. Two of these, weaving and pot- tery, were useful to everyone, even the poorest. Others, like metallurgy and wheeled vehicles, were mainly of interest to the upper classes. Unlike hunters and gatherers who clothed themselves in animal skins, agricultural people needed textiles. In every civilization, weaving cloth was done by both men and women, but spinning yarn was always the work of women. In the Hebrew Bible, the virtuous woman “seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff” (Proverbs 31:13, 19, 24). The distaff was a long stick that held the roving, or loose fibers, while the spindle was a short stick that rotated as it dropped, giving the yarn a twist as it wound it. Using these simple devices, women could spin yarn while walking or carrying out other tasks. To this day, the words distaff and spinster reflect this ancient women’s occupation. Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 27  The string skirts and belts made by Neolithic peoples were of silk, hemp, and flax. By the fourth millennium bce, the people of Mesopo- tamia wove woolen cloth from the inner fleece of goats and of sheep; later, they bred sheep specifically for their fleece. Wool was first made by pounding the fibers together into felt. Documents written in the Sumerian city of Ur describe flocks of sheep and the female occupa- tions of spinning and weaving. Around 2300 bce, herdsmen on the Mediterranean island of Crete began breeding sheep with long woolly fleece that could be combed, spun into yarn, and woven into cloth. Unlike hemp and flax, wool yarn came naturally in a variety of colors ranging from black to white and moreover could be dyed in vivid col- ors. The women of Crete and nearby Greece began producing colorful textiles, including new weaves such as twill and tapestry, that were traded throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Greek poet Homer wrote: “And fifty women serve Alcínoüs: some grind the yellow corn, their mill in hand; and others weave their webs or, while they sit, twist their swift spindles as their fingers glint like leaves of poplar trees swayed by the wind.... As the Phaeácians are the most expert of men in sailing brisk ships over seas, so are their women peerless when they weave.”2 Wool was also the principal textile used by the people of the high- lands of Peru. Ordinary people wore cloth made from the wool of lla- mas. The cloth worn by the elites came from the wool of alpacas raised specifically for that purpose; it was the finest and most skillfully woven cloth in the world, with up to 500 threads per inch, and came in many colors with elaborate designs of birds, jaguars, and snakes. Egyptians, alone among the peoples of antiquity, dressed almost exclusively in linen garments made from flax. Fragments of Egyptian linen date back to 4500 bce. Egyptians used linen not only to clothe the living but also to wrap mummies for burial and to make sails for the boats that plied the Nile. Men grew, harvested, and prepared the flax fibers, and both women and men wove the cloth. Much weaving was done in large workshops where workers toiled under the watchful eye of male—and sometimes female—overseers. The Greek historian Herodotus was shocked: “Their habits and their customs are the exact opposite of other folks’. Among them the women run the markets and shops, while the men, indoors, weave....”3 Since linen could not be dyed, wealthy Egyptians wore white clothes decorated with colorful jewelry made of gold from sub-Saharan Africa, silver from the Aegean, lapis lazuli from Persia, amber from the Baltic, and other precious ma- terials carried over long distances by merchants. 28 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y  In China as in western Eurasia and North Africa, women also wove cloth; before the fourth millennium bce, it was made from hemp or ramie, both vegetable fibers. Then the Chinese learned to raise the silk- worm Bombyx mori that eats only mulberry leaves. Making silk in- volves boiling the cocoons, reeling or unwinding the fibers, and twisting them into threads, all delicate hand operations. The result is a wonder- fully strong and smooth fiber that can be dyed in brilliant colors and woven into many patterns such as tabby and brocade. Although farmers most probably discovered this fiber, Chinese legend attributes it to the mythical Empress Xi Ling-shi. As in other cultures, the Chinese divided tasks by gender; as their saying had it, “men till, women weave.”4 By the Shang dynasty, aristocrats dressed in silk robes while ordinary peo- ple clothed themselves in hemp, ramie, or cotton. For several thousand years, the secret of raising silkworms and making silk was known only to the people of China. Cotton has two origins: India and the Americas. The people of the Indus Valley cultivated cotton and wove cloth as early as 3500 bce. In 700 bce, travelers brought the plant to Mesopotamia, from where its use spread to Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Another variety of cotton was used by the peoples of the lowlands of Peru and of Mesoamerica, tropical regions where the plant grew well and the cloth was better suited to the climate than wool. Next to textiles, pottery was the most important craft of ancient times. The history of pottery has been carefully studied, for pottery shards, unlike textiles, do not deteriorate when left in the ground. Be- cause pots are heavy and fragile, they were of no use to nomadic peo- ples. The very first potters, the Jomon people of Japan, were unique among foragers in having permanent villages. Elsewhere, pottery was a characteristic of Neolithic peoples and of civilizations. The earliest potters after the Jomon were the inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains, north of Mesopotamia. Beginning in the seventh millennium bce, they made pots by forming spirals of clay mixed with straw or grit that they then smoothed out, dried, and fired in a bonfire or a kiln. Pottery had many uses. Large pots were used to store grain, oil, and wine. People used smaller ones to carry water, to cook in, and to drink and eat out of. Like spinning and weaving, pottery making was a domestic art that created domestic objects; in many cultures, it was practiced by women. Pots were often decorated, each culture and period creating its own distinctive pattern. This has allowed archaeolo- gists to identify the origin of pieces of pottery found in the ground and to trace the diffusion of styles and the patterns of trade; pieces of Indus Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 29  Valley pottery have been found in Mesopotamia, and Chinese pottery was traded throughout East Asia. Metallurgy began with the use of native copper and gold. Such were the pieces of copper that the inhabitants of the Great Lakes region of North America and of Anatolia (now Turkey) hammered into knives, chisels, axe blades, and arrowheads. The axe blade belonging to the Ice Man of the Alps was of native copper. Native metals are rare, however. In nature, most metals exist in the form of ores or minerals containing metal oxides and other compounds. Stone Age foragers were familiar with many different kinds of stones such as malachite and azurite that ooze metallic copper when heated. Traders deliberately brought such ores to Mesopotamia by the fifth millennium bce and later to Egypt, the Indus Valley, and northern China. Though fairly common, copper ores are concentrated in certain locations such as Anatolia, Iran, the Sinai Peninsula, Oman, Cyprus, and Nubia. Thus, ores and metals were among the most important items of long-distance trade. Mining ores and turning them into copper were complicated pro- cesses. Surface deposits were quickly exhausted, and underground ores tended to be sulfides (compounds containing sulfur) that had to be crushed and roasted before they could be smelted. Smelting required furnaces with a strong draft and a great deal of fuel. The earliest fur- naces were not hot enough to melt the metal, which had to be repeat- edly heated and hammered into the required shape. Bellows, to create a blast of air and increase the temperature of the fire to the melting point of copper (1,200 degrees Celsius), did not come into use until the late second century bce. After that, it became possible to cast the molten metal into molds of the desired shape. The many skills involved in making metal objects turned their practitioners into full-time specialists—miners, smelters, smiths, and others—who jealously guarded their secrets and passed them on from father to son. They made axe and adze heads, saw blades, drainpipes, knives, swords, armor, and many other objects. Such items were very costly, however, and reserved for the elites. Farmers and ordinary ar- tisans continued to use tools of stone and wood long after copper be- came available to the wealthy. Although copper is easy to work, it tends to become hard and brit- tle with use and needs to be reheated and reshaped periodically. In the third millennium bce, metallurgists learned to mix copper with softer metals to create alloys that were easier to work yet stronger and more durable than pure copper. The first of these was arsenic, often found in nature mixed with copper ores, producing an alloy called arsenical 30 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y bronze. Arsenic is a poison, however, and it was soon replaced by tin, which was less dangerous to work with. Bronze made of copper and tin (usually in a 10:1 ratio) was a superior metal in every way; it had a lower melting point than copper, was easy to cast, did not become brittle, and kept an edge. Tin ores, however, were rare and had to be imported to the Middle East from as far away as England. Although their names have long since been forgotten, we know that merchants traded over long distances because archaeologists have found Middle Eastern pottery shards thousands of miles from where they were manu- factured. Bronze was well known in the Middle East, North Africa, and Eu- rope, but it was Chinese metallurgists who perfected the lost-wax method of casting the metal into intricate shapes. They first created a rough model of the desired object in clay. Once it was dry, they covered it with wax into which they carved fine details. They then coated the wax carving with clay and again allowed it to dry, forming a mold. They then heated it, allowing the molten wax to run out through holes left in the mold. This left a void inside the mold into which they poured mol- ten bronze that took on the exact shape vacated by the wax. When the mold cooled, they cracked it open, revealing inside an exact replica in bronze of the wax carving. The aristocrats of the Shang dynasty period controlled access to the copper and tin mines and managed the smelt- ers and workshops in which bronze was worked. Under their direction, bronze smiths made intricately decorated ritual vessels, musical instru- ments, chariot fittings, and especially the weapons with which the nobles maintained their power over the rest of the population. The Americas also had centers of metallurgy. Native copper, gold, and silver were found in several places in the New World. Peruvian smiths fashioned gold into decorative items as early as 500 bce. By the first century bce, smiths had learned to cast copper in Colombia and later in Peru and Mexico. By the fifth century ce, smiths were casting objects of bronze. On the eve of the Spanish invasion, metalsmiths were using the lost-wax method and making beautiful objects of gold, sil- ver, and platinum, as well as knives, weapons, and tools of copper and bronze. The inhabitants of these ancient civilizations were remarkably cre- ative in many fields, but one technological artifact they were slow to develop was the wheel. In today’s world, the wheel is so ubiquitous and indispensable that it is hard to imagine a world without it. Yet even when the people of early civilizations understood the principle of the wheel, they made little use of it. Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 31  The Shang culture made tremendous progress in bronze working and other military technologies. This object may have been a chariot fitting. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1911.89, Freer Sackler Gallery The potter’s wheel made its appearance in Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium and was adopted in many parts of Eurasia. Around 3700 bce, cattle herders who lived on the plains north of the Cauca- sus Mountains began burying their leaders with two-wheeled carts or four-wheeled wagons drawn by oxen, signs of wealth and power rather than utilitarian vehicles. Their wheels, made of three heavy planks en- circled by leather straps with big copper nails, were firmly attached to their axles, which turned with them. Such vehicles became common in Mesopotamia and Syria by 3000 bce and in the Indus Valley 500 years later. They were also known in northern Europe by 3000 bce and in Egypt after 1650 bce. However, they were very heavy and bogged down in soft soils and could not be used on rocky terrain. Long after the wheel was known, it was much easier to transport goods over long dis- tances in caravans of donkeys. The peoples of the Americas did not use wheeled vehicles at all because they had no domesticated animals large enough to pull them. One of the most important technologies we have inherited from the ancient civilizations is writing, a means of storing and transmitting 32 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y information through space and time by inscribing symbols to repre- sent things, ideas, and sounds. Many different writing systems have ap- peared in the world. Those of Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica were independently invented. Others, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs and our own alphabet, were inspired by the writings of neighboring societies. The Sumerians created the first writing system, called cuneiform, meaning “wedge shaped.” Around 8000 bce, people in and near Mes- opotamia began using small clay tokens to represent such things as sheep, bushels of grain, or jars of oil. Meanwhile, others were draw- ing designs on pottery. Between 3300 and 3200 bce, Sumerian scribes began depicting not only people and things but also abstract ideas. They used the rebus principle, like drawing a picture of a bee and a leaf to indicate the word belief. They inscribed these symbols with a stick with a wedge-shaped end on small tablets of wet clay. Once dried in the sun, these tablets lasted for thousands of years. For the first 500 years after cuneiform was developed, it was used only to make lists, keep track of donations to temples, and the like; 90 percent of the tablets found are bookkeeping and administrative documents. Only later did scribes begin writing histories, laws, leg- ends, and other forms of literature. To do so, they needed 500 to 600 different signs, requiring many years to learn. Only a very few people had the leisure to learn this esoteric skill or the wealth to send their A cuneiform tablet is enclosed in a clay envelope with an inscription and seal, dating from about 2000 BCE and found in Turkey. Consisting of a combination of wedge shapes, cuneiform permitted a high level of commercial and govern- ment transactions. The figures at the top, impressed into the moist clay with a cylinder seal, represent a man stand- ing (probably a king) presenting a gift or tribute to a larger seated figure, who is most likely a god. The inscription is written vertically from top to bottom. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-82973 Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 bce) 33  children to school. Writing became a way to distinguish the literate elite from the rest of the population. The early civilizations brought forth many admirable innovations not only in agriculture and construction but also in all the arts, crafts, and sciences. These civilizations are traditionally extolled as “the dawn of history.” There are good reasons to celebrate their accomplishments, for our own civilization is based on theirs. But the evidence is loaded, as is the very word civilization. All the writings and monuments and most of the artifacts left by these ancient civilizations were created by or for their elites. The historians who have described them, and the readers of their works, are also members of literate elites. For them and for us, civilization represents a great ad- vance over the lives of the hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers who preceded them. Why, if civilization represented such an advance, did it remain re- stricted to a few regions and not spread to the rest of the world for many centuries? This question is usually asked about the indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, and Australia. The same question can be asked about the Greeks and other Europeans, who resisted the attractions of civilization for 2,000 years after the beginnings of Egyp- tian civilization. Were they somehow “retarded”? In fact, quite the contrary is true. The ancestors of today’s Europe- ans were Neolithic farmers who lived in Anatolia some 10,000 years ago. As their food supply increased, so did their numbers, and some of them began to migrate, seeking fertile rain-watered lands. Wherever they settled, their numbers soon exceeded those of the indigenous for- agers. Long after civilizations had emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, these early farmers were still finding new lands to farm. They deliberately avoided becoming civilized as long as possible. Not until the first millennium bce did the inhabitants of Greece and Italy occupy all the arable land and find themselves in the same predica- ment that had led the peoples of the Middle East to adopt civilization. Only then did they submit to the discipline of taxes, laws, and religious or political authorities. Thus, the technologies that characterize the early civilizations rep- resented a great advance in the power of human beings over nature but also in the ability of a small elite to impose their rule on large numbers of their fellow humans. 34 Te c h n o l o g y : A Wo r l d H i s t o r y  chapter 3 Iron, Horses, and Empires (1500 bce–500 ce) P liny the Elder, a Roman nobleman who lived from 23 to 79 ce, at the height of his country’s power, looked back on the invention of iron with great misgivings. What he wrote about iron could also be said of many other technologies. We will now consider iron, the most precious and at the same time the worst metal for mankind. By its help we cleave the earth, establish tree-nurseries, fell trees, remove the useless parts from vines and force them to rejuvenate annually, build houses, hew stone and so forth. But this metal serves also for war, murder and robbery; and not only at close quarters, man to man, but also by projection and flight; for it can be hurled either by ballistic machines, or by the strength of human arms or even in the form of arrows. And this I hold to be the most blameworthy product of the human mind.1 The iron to which Pliny refers—and another innovation, the do- mestication of horses—disrupted the old river valley civilizations of Eurasia. These civilizations had lasted for more than 1,000 years with only minor changes because their religious and political elites had little to gain and much to lose from innovations that could threaten their status. Yet they had no control over the rain-watered lands out- side their borders. It is in these marginal areas that innovations ap- peared. At first, iron and horses allowed people who possessed them to conquer or disrupt the older civilizations. Eventually, the nomadic warriors and the settled river-valley peoples merged to form new em- pires, vast areas with millions of inhabitants ruled by centralized gov- ernments. Suc