Agricultural revolution
The invention of agriculture has been a turning
point in the life of early foragers who had turned into a pastoral cum forager society
by 20,000 BC. The invention of agriculture changed their life dramatically.
Although, because of excavated archaeological proofs, it is believed that
agriculture was invented around 7000+ BC, across the Zagros Mountains, however,
the agro-era, in reality, can be even older by a few more millenniums than that
of the assumed era.
We do not know when
exactly it came to the mind of the pastoral people that they need not wander for
food and fodder, but they could produce it. They must have observed the cycle of
nature for ages, seeds sprouting to grow like the same vegetation. They would
have come across a variety of wild plants of wheat or maize or other food. He
could have consumed them. The knowledge of burgeoning
the same vegetation after showers must have been acquired by him from ancient
times. They even could have applied it to the fruit-yielding trees by sowing the
seeds and would have observed for years in awe the growth of it, if spared by
nature. However, it seems they didn’t think they actually could produce food through the
systematic application of cultivation.
However, about, say ten thousand years ago, there seems
a sudden rise in agricultural practices across the globe. The Mehrgarh and Zagros
sites are archaeological sites that are examples of the oldest agricultural
practices. There could be much older proofs as well but they seem to have been erased with sands of time. What could be the reasons for almost all the tribes turning to
agriculture? It couldn’t have been a new invention, agriculture. Before they turned to systematic cultivation, they could have practiced it arbitrarily, maybe as fun. But they didn’t practice it as a means
of livelihood, or at the least, it would seem so. We have to find what exactly could
have happened that suddenly foragers/pastorals turned to agriculture and led to settled life.
Climatic
changes
There is a close association between climatic
changes in the rise and fall of human civilizations. It has not only forced
human beings to change their ways of living but cultural patterns as well. Recent examples are the decline of
Mesopotamian, Indus, and Chinese civilizations and others that came to decline
about 1800 BC because of the gradual climatic change. The living patterns did
change because of the sudden rise in aridity which forced humans to look for
new ways to survive under the changed climatic conditions.
We have to look into the climatic history of the
earth. The human being of those times had experienced a cold era which is known
as Ice Age. The period was more hostile and difficult for survival and cultivation.
However, the genetic makeup of fossilized bones, dating back about 37,000 years
ago, found in Western Russia suggests the continuous history of the Europeans. However,
the ice age, it seems, kept populations limited. But people largely lived in
the same areas during the ice age and after. This is evident from the DNA of the
Kostenki man which was similar to the 24000-year-old boy found in central
Siberia. This also indicates the fact
that the people were more rooted in their known territories despite the hostile
climatic conditions.
About 12 thousand years ago or a little before the
Holocene age began. This was warmer age. The ice melts caused the rising of the
sea levels, by almost 115 feet. Some animal species became extinct
because they could not cope up with climate change. There could have been
population loss during the transitional phase of climate change. The human race
was forced to change its lifestyle. The innate urge for survival made them find
new ways of livelihood. Our ancestors were the product of the Ice Age. They had
experienced a glacial era and had adjusted their lifestyle accordingly to adjust with it.
However, the change in nature, though not sudden,
must have forced humans to look for new ways to survive. The humans would
have moved their settlements to earlier uninhibited regions for the end of the
Ice Age would have emptied many regions that were covered by ice caps.
The beginning of agrarian life coincides with
the beginning of the Holocene. This means this era has significance in our
ancient history. Agriculture helped early agrarians to settle down in their respective regions wherever they could permanently cultivate. The river valleys
were the natural choice for assurance of water supply and fertile lands. This
was a revolutionary turn in human history. It dramatically changed his
lifestyle and social references. In a real sense, he got rooted to the land. The
territories or the regions he used to roam about already shrank because of
agriculture.
People didn’t get more intelligent with
time to invent agriculture, but the invention was forced upon them by the
circumstances. The agrarian era did make the life of the people more difficult and less satisfying as Yuval Noah Harari claims in his famous book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". In this book, he also claims that instead of man
domesticating wheat, wheat domesticated him making his life miserable. I humbly
disagree with him. The life of the forager posed more hardships and dangers upon
him. Agriculture and settled life reduced the risks and hardships. It is
evident from the speed of multi-faceted cultural growth that soon took place
after the 10,000 + years old agrarian revolution if compared with the cultural
growth of hundreds of thousands of years of foraging life. It obviously is not any intellectual shift
among humans but may be that climate change forced them to change
world-view. Whether nature domesticated man or man domesticated nature
only can become a matter of philosophical debate. May it be so, however, the
flow of human life is mostly dominated by the land and its setting, and that
only determines which turn life may take. The fact is agrarian life brought
sea-change in humans.
As humans started settling down, except for
neighboring settlers, his exchanges of cultural advances became limited. The
settled life demanded various inventions and innovations. Implements for
agriculture, permanent houses, and safeguards would have been their first need
to adjust to the new life. Early architecture, crops, various utensils,
potteries, etc. were the outcome of the imminent needs of the people of those times. They also would have needed a new vocabulary to express these cultural changes that were filled with more complexities and challenges.
However, this transitional phase too couldn’t have
been easy. The wars and aggressions to occupy fertile lands by the large or
aggressive tribes would have been evident. Many smaller or weak tribes would
have been subjugated, even enslaved, or made extinct. The tumulous situation
persisted for a long period in human history. Even the otherwise peaceful-sounding
Indus civilization wouldn’t need to build fortification walls around their
cities for protection.
From 10,000 BC onwards till 5000 BC, we find the growth of rural settlements all over the globe. Many such ancient village sites are
found and excavated such as Gobelki Tepe, Nevali Kori, Jhusi, etc. Many more have
been erased from the pages of history for either repetitive use of the same
sites for new constructions or completely ruined because of their abandonment
or bringing them into use for other purposes after they were vacated. However,
the excavated sites give us a fair idea about the technological advances of
those times.
As the complexities of the settled life in particular geological set-ups grew, the
languages too took mostly independent courses from region to region based on the linguistic
accumulations from the wandering past. However, it seems, this caused to give
rise in the net of the languages. Many words, concepts, technological terminologies,
epithets, personal names to plant names, which occur in the various
pan-territorial languages have roots in the remote past of the human being. We
cannot solve the mystery of such linguistic similarities just by formulating
“migration” theories but by a simple understanding of the human past. Agriculture
and related technical inventions were added to the vocabulary. Numerics also must
have advanced in this era. In a way, we can call it a linguistic explosion!
Anyway, human beings
gradually started settling around 10000 BC. The archeological proofs of early
settlements and agriculture have surfaced almost everywhere. In India, Kenoyer
has shown from the archeological finds that the people of the Indus-Ghaggar
Civilization traded with the people of the Iranian plateau since 7000 BC. Kenoyer
asserts that “….These data indicate that
foragers were present in the exact locations where we later see the emergence
of settled agro-pastoral communities during the Early Food Producing Era
(7000-5500 BCE) and the Regionalization Era (5500-2800 BCE).”
In Gangetic plains, agrarian
settlements have been discovered that date back to the same period, or even
earlier to that. In the Zagros region of Iran, archeologists have recently
discovered proofs of agriculture that date back to 12000 BC. In short, we can
surmise that by 10,000 BC, barring a few tribes, human beings were almost
settled on the globe in their respective territories. We do not trace any massive
migrations taking place after that.
Indeed, migrations are not a
new phenomenon occurring in the human world. It is widely assumed that since
ancient times, the human race has been moving from one place to another in search of food. The geographical spread of human beings is attributed as a reason
for this. However, according to scholars, human beings had started settling down in different regions
in the Mesolithic period (approx 15,000 years BC), in the regions that were known to them since the ancient past when they were living foragers life.
C.K. Chase-Dunn
(Institute for Research on World-Systems (IROWS), University of California,
states, “The earliest sedentary societies
were of diversified foragers in locations in which nature was bountiful enough
to allow hunter-gatherers to feed themselves without migrating. These first
villagers continued to interact with nomadic peoples in both trade and
warfare. The best known of these is the Natufian culture of the Levant,
villagers who harvested natural stands of grain around 11,000 years ago. In
many regions, the largest villages had only about 250 people. In other regions,
there were larger villages and regions with different population densities were
often in systemic interaction with each other.”
The ambitious warring tribes might have moved to
make military expeditions, but largely the populations did not leave their
habitats, even if they were subjugated and enslaved. They, in the course of time, changed their settlement patterns and vacated earlier settlements to move
into new and advanced ones. Towns and villages and temples or sanctuaries
gradually were developed. So far we have found one ancient sanctuary at Gobelki
Tepe dating back to the 10th to 8th millennium B.C. This
means that collective concepts of religion started developing much earlier
in almost every region in a unique way. This psychological uniqueness can be attributed to the specific geological and geographic patterns of the regions people settled in and have wandered in the known horizons of the same region.
Though varied from region to region, food produced
in fertile lands, with help of the advanced farming equipment and innovative
ideas of canals, grew to a phenomenal extent. The huge granaries found in IVC
stand proof of the surplus agricultural produce. Trade of artifacts, food, and
other agricultural products, such as cotton, began with other distant
civilizations. Indus trade with Mesopotamia, the Middle East, and Iran is established
by the archaeological finds. The concept of trade helped early human beings to interact across the known civilizations enabling them to be introduced to new ideas and cultural varieties.
It can be said that the cultural contact with
Semitic and so-called Indo-European-speaking territories through trade was
simultaneous. It is a wonder, even then
scholars want to deny Semitic influence over North-Western languages, instead,
they claim the influence of the so-called IE languages. It is equally possible
that the North-Western languages of those times had some influence on Semitic
languages because of cultural exchanges through trade. However, such influence means only the exchange of vocabulary and
some cultural concepts. The fundamental cultural traits, including languages,
remained independent in every region.
The civilizations thrived, and reached their heights of
glory, and because of the climatic changes at the end of the second millennia
BC the downfall began almost everywhere. It gave rise to political upheavals.
It forced people to change their settlement and life patterns. The centers of urbanization changed and moved to the wet regions. It does not mean the
people from arid regions moved to occupy new urban centers. They largely
remained in the same regions adapting to the changed socio-economic conditions.
The overview of the human journey tells us that the
territorial and regional consciousness in a human being has very early traits.
The regions they occupied from the early era left an unerasable imprint on his
lingo-ethnic identity. It has nothing to do with racial considerations. It was
land that helped evolve human psychology and thus culture independently. The region-specific geology, geo-magnetism, and local gravity had a tremendous impact on their general psychology which determined their linguistic and cultural patterns. The
early settlement patterns of the human being, though superficially the same, in
course of the time, we find that every civilization acquired its recognizable
distinct face.
After the rise of the agrarian era, territorial languages did not remain the same. The religious practices and the pantheons of the deities did not remain the same. Mythologies too took independent paths, though the basic elements, such as the division between good and evil and their epithets had roots in their wandering past. Languages too started evolving independently and rapidly, based on the accumulated vocabulary and rudimentary grammar of their territorial past. Ways of expression changed from civilization to civilization. The civilizations albeit were in contact with each other, mostly for trade and in case of war-like situations, but one civilization could not erase the cultural past of the other, except for notable exchanges. We find the polity had developed to the extent that the written treaties between the two parties to the war used to be signed. We have a treaty in the form of an inscription engraved in the 14th century BC in Asia Minor between two kings belonging to Hittites and Mitannis. Suppiluliuma I of the Hittites entered into a treaty with the Mitannis. The Mittanis of the Amarna Tablets' fame was linked to the significant power in the region – Egypt. This treaty is widely known as Boghajkoi inscription. Also, we have another proof of a peace treaty that was signed between the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, and Emperor Hattusilis III that dates back to 1258 BC. Though the earlier treaties have not surfaced as yet, in all probabilities many must have been executed across the globe before this.
What we can understand from above is that global
cultures started evolving about a hundred thousand years ago. We find traces of advances, though scanty, the findings from the ancient past.
For example, we have 75000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from South Africa
(Blombos), we have 60000-year-old engraved ostrich eggshells from South Africa,
and also we have from all over the world paintings in rock shelters that contain
geometric symbolism, suggesting the symbolic communication beginning from about
40000 years ago. The symbols are repetitive and believed by the scholars that
they must have been communication symbols. Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh of India
also is a fine example of this where we find the early human being expressing
through art depicting day-to-day affairs, including his hunting expeditions and
dances.
The territorial sense in humans must have evolved long before 40,000 years ago when humans limited their wandering within known
geographies instead of roaming directionless. They must have acquired knowledge
of the regions, flora-fauna, animals, birds, climates, and tribes as friends,
foes, or neutral, within the territories they knew.
From archeological evidence, we can be certain that
the population distribution across the globe almost was completed 40000 years ago. Later on, after the rise of the agrarian era the social cultures thrived almost independently. They were aware of
the neighboring and distant reachable civilizations, with which they traded the
essentials even risking their lives. We have proof that the Indus people,
known as Melluha to the Mesopotamians, had established their trade colonies in
Mesopotamia. Such meaningful migrations and settlements in foreign lands may
have been a global practice of those times.
In course of the human history, we do not know for
sure exactly when the faculty of languages emerged in human beings. However, it appears from the available proof, the faculty of language was present in early human beings for their imminent need of communication for survival. The region they had occupied impacted their mindsets heavily reflected in his style of language and speech. Many tend
to think that this phenomenon was accidental, but it does not appear so. Indeed, we can safely say that
when cultural expression began in form of the dance, rituals, painting, and
making meaningful things from natural resources, the faculty of language was sufficiently developed. Rather, we can say that the first utterance of a meaningful word
started civilizing the human being. This was a global phenomenon. It could not
be the case that some hypothetical group developed some superior language first and then
caused its spread with their migrations, just 4500 years ago. This is in a way supremacist approach of the scholars. They present
theories that propose the same illogical logic with confidence.
The Indo-European language theorists often claim that
the invention of the spoke-wheeled chariots and the taming of the horses by the PIE
speakers made them superior to others and their aggressions or migrations
resulted in the formation of the IE language family. This is a reckless,
thoughtless, and unhistorical claim that stands upon a flimsy hypothesis. This
is against the history of the civilizations. This theory is thoughtless about the origin of language. Rather net of the languages was
already formed when the earliest civilization era had begun! The tribes shared basic vocabularies for over the millenniums while they were on the move
within the known territories before they finally started to settle and
then onwards took a largely geography-specific independent course of linguistic developments! In the adjoining or distant regions that had similar geological formations, similar languages sprouted independently. The net of the
languages was already in place. Hence,
the so-called Proto-Indo-European language family needed not any dispersion of
some group of the people that had supposedly developed that language independently
to spread it with the migration. The history of the languages is far older than
the assumed date of the so-called PIE speakers’ migration. It is an imaginary theory
created with political supremacist motives, nothing else. Rather we need to
find, still, why there are different linguistic and cultural groups across the
globe?
However, we can note from the excavated pre-history
that the civilizations were prospering almost in every continent and territory,
and regions almost simultaneously exhibiting their creations and innovations. Every
civilization had its distinct face and characteristics to speak of, exhibiting its
distinct identities. They had their own independent religious beliefs and most
importantly languages. Roots of the languages, though common in every
territory, the languages of every civilization differed significantly, almost
unintelligible except for those spoken in neighboring regions. Also, we can
find overlapping zones of the languages and as we proceed deeper into some regions,
like an island, we come across some entirely different languages which cannot be
classified in the neighboring language groups.
Not only this, but with every region, we find
significant changes in the cultures, no matter whether linguistic or architectural,
or religious beliefs, though largely they fall under a common single
civilization. From region to region, the pronunciation patterns also change significantly, no matter if they are speaking the same dialect! We can notice easily the patterns
of lifestyle changing from region to region. Many factors associated with
the culture thus can be observed taking noticeable forms with the change of the
geographical region.
But we have to think about, why so?
Why we do find closely adjoined regions exhibiting
distinct cultural features including languages? Why cultural patterns must be
changing though the people are of the same ethnicity and language families? Why,
although the religion is the same, the regional religious beliefs, practices, and
ways of expression change? Why do some of the mythologies regionally differ significantly though they have a single source of origin?
We have seen the journey of the civilizations,
though brief and cursory, has ancient roots. The known civilizations of the
globe exhibit their independent identities through religions, architectures,
settlement patterns, and languages. Such distinctive features of the cultures
still survive in the era of globalization.
There shouldn’t be any doubt that it certainly is
the regional psychology of the people that exhibit their cultural
behaviors. We need to examine what makes the people of certain regions behave
culturally differently than the other regions. Why the languages do change
significantly with the regions. Rather, we shall probe further whether every region
has its independent geological qualities that decide human expressions or
whether the present linguistic theorists are right?
*
No comments:
Post a Comment