Class 9 Social Science Chapter 4: Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation

A Much Longer Story Than You Have Been Told

In earlier grades you studied kingdoms, empires and the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation. All of that is recent.

The history of humanity reaches back very much further, and this chapter asks who our earliest ancestors were, when and where they evolved, what they ate, how they lived, and how they turned into people like us.

Why Bother With It

Studying early human history lets us watch people change in body and in way of living alike, against a climate and an environment that never stayed still.

Those two kinds of evolution are different things, and keeping them apart is the first piece of discipline the chapter asks for.

Biological Evolution

Biological evolution means the gradual physical and genetic changes through which our early ancestors became modern human beings.

Those ancestors are called australopithecines, a name built from australis, meaning southern, and pithecus, meaning primate. What they eventually became is Homo sapiens — us.

Cultural Evolution

Cultural evolution describes something else entirely: how humans adapted to their surroundings in the Quaternary Period, the last twenty-six lakh years including the present.

The mechanism is worth stating plainly. To survive changing climatic and environmental conditions, humans developed tools, techniques and other forms of technology so as to make use of natural resources. Bodies changed slowly; ways of living changed as conditions demanded.

The Change That Made Civilisation Possible

Over time, human ways of living moved away from foraging and towards raising crops and herds.

One consequence follows from that, and it is the hinge of the whole chapter: once a community could grow and make more than it consumed, the conditions for civilisation were in place. Without more food than a household needs, there are no cities, no full-time crafts and no specialists.

The Line That Splits the Past

Now the division this topic is really about. We know the period before writing developed chiefly from archaeological evidence, because script was taken up in one region long before it was taken up in another.

That single line divides the past into two halves of grotesquely unequal length, and the textbook sets them out side by side.

Before Writing

More than ninety-nine per cent of human history falls here — from about three million years ago to five thousand years ago.

The main sources are tools, implements and other material objects made by humans, collectively called artefacts. It is generally difficult to reach the thoughts and ideas of people from such things. And the measurement of time is approximate: dating events and cultures can only be done roughly.

After Writing

Less than one per cent of human history falls here — the last five thousand years, including the present.

Now both material remains and written documents serve as sources. Literature supplies names, events, and social, political and cultural life. And dating becomes relatively accurate, because written documents mention specific dates for events such as coronations and wars.

What the Comparison Really Shows

It is tempting to read that table as a story of progress. It is better read as a warning about evidence.

The long period is not dim because people then were simple. It is dim because they left no documents, and objects are harder to interrogate than sentences. Change the evidence available and you change what can be known — which is why the invention of writing marks a boundary in our knowledge rather than in human capability.

How Archaeologists Work

So how is anything recovered from the long half?

Archaeologists explore early human sites to uncover clues — tools, bones and other objects left behind by our early ancestors — and each clue helps build a picture of how people lived. They also experiment, making and using similar tools themselves, in order to learn how early humans created these objects, used them, and depended on them in daily life.

Why There Is Anything to Find

The survival of evidence is, in a sense, an accident of rubbish.

Humans made tools, used them, and discarded them when they wore out. Those discarded tools lay buried in the upper layers of the earth until they were found. In the same way the remains of some early ancestors lay buried deep in the ground and, over thousands or even millions of years, became fossils — the preserved remains, traces or impressions of plants, animals or humans, slowly turned to stone.

The Earliest Writing in India

One of the earliest known writing systems belongs to the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation, also called the Indus Valley or Harappan civilisation.

Writing and engravings on objects like seals and pottery show that the Harappans used a pictographic script. But it has not yet been deciphered, so the Harappan script, also known as Sindhu lipi, still cannot be read.

The Scripts That Can Be Read

Two other early systems flourished at about the same time as the Harappan civilisation.

The cuneiform script that the Sumerians used in Mesopotamia, and the hieroglyphic script of ancient Egypt. Unlike the Harappan script, both of these have been deciphered, and they mark the beginning of the historical period, about five thousand years ago.

Why Decipherment Matters So Much

Put the three together and the point becomes sharp.

All three societies wrote. Two of them can therefore speak to us about their own affairs — their laws, their stories, their accounts. The third cannot, and so the Harappans remain known almost entirely through their objects, in the manner of a people who never wrote at all. A script that cannot be read leaves its users, for our purposes, still in prehistory.

Brahmi

The story of writing in India continues later.

From around 400 BCE a script called Brahmi came into use in parts of southern India and in the Ganga Valley in the north. It was later formalised by the Emperor Aśhoka in the third century BCE, and by contemporary Iron Age people across southern India. Inscriptions in it survive, such as those on the railing around the stupa at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh.

The name australopithecine is built from two words: australis, meaning southern, and pithecus, meaning primate.

Archaeologists do not only dig. They also make and use copies of ancient tools themselves, so as to learn how early humans created them, used them and depended on them day to day.

Early tools are sometimes called extra-corporal limbs, because they worked as extensions of the human body and let people do what bare hands could not.

The two evolutions — Bodies change biologically. Ways of living change culturally. — One traces the skeleton from australopithecine to Homo sapiens. The other traces tools, techniques and habits as the climate shifted around them.

Which scripts can be read — Cuneiform yes. Hieroglyphic yes. Sindhu lipi still no. — Two of the three earliest systems have been deciphered. The Harappan script has not, which is why so much about that civilisation remains out of reach.

The Old World

The earliest human settlements have been found in Africa, Asia and Europe, and together these make up what is today called the Old World.

Different kinds of human ancestors co-existed at this time. They were not a neat single line succeeding one another, but overlapping kinds living in the same wide stretch of the earth.

The Moment Humans Became Human

Around 3.3 million years ago, one of these ancestors made the earliest stone tools.

That act is taken to mark the beginning of so-called human behaviour, unlike animals, which lack the mental ability to make tools of this kind. It is why human beings came to be known as hominins, or tool makers.

Why Tools, and Not Something Else

It is worth pausing on the choice of criterion.

Many animals use objects. Making a tool is different: it requires holding in mind a shape that does not yet exist, and working a stone until it matches. That is a cognitive act, and it leaves a hard, datable trace in the ground — which is precisely why archaeologists can use it as a boundary at all.

Extensions of the Body

The tools they created are sometimes called extra-corporal limbs.

They worked as extensions of the human body, letting people do jobs their bare hands could not manage. A cleaver opens a bone; a scraper cleans a hide; a digging tool reaches a tuber. None of that is within the reach of fingers.

Out of Africa, the First Time

Most scholars agree that our earliest ancestors evolved and lived in Africa, and started leaving the continent about 2 million years ago.

Homo erectus, an early ancestor carrying stone tools such as handaxes and cleavers, was the first hominin to exit Africa. Those tools have been found in other parts of Asia and Europe, which indicates both their origin in Africa and their dispersion beyond it, between 2 and 0.5 million years ago.

Out of Africa, Again

A second big wave of migration out of Africa came around 125,000 years ago.

This one is associated with early Homo sapiens — ourselves — who also evolved in Africa, about 300,000 years ago, and have since spread across the whole earth.

Four Ancestors in Sequence

The fossil evidence gives a sequence, and each member of it is identified by where it lived and what it made.

Homo habilis, the handy man, lived in Africa, above all in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and Kenya, and made chopper stone tools. Homo erectus, upright or bipedal, lived in the Eastern African Rift Valley and invented handaxes and cleavers. Homo neanderthalensis lived in Europe and south-west Asia until about 40,000 years ago, making Middle Palaeolithic flake tools. Homo sapiens are the only human species living today on earth.

Tool Makers, and Then Technologists

One distinction in that list is easy to miss.

All human ancestors were tool makers. What sets Homo sapiens apart is that they developed complex technologies — the bow and arrow, blades set into handles, engraving tools made to work on other materials. The difference is not making things, but making things that make things.

How the Periods Are Divided

Early human history is divided into distinct periods on the basis of technological progress: how tools were developed and used, how agriculture began, and changes in human lifestyle and settlement patterns.

They run in order: Palaeolithic — hunting and gathering, simple stone tools. Mesolithic — microlithic or tiny stone tools, a transitional phase. Neolithic — the shift to agriculture and settled life, domestication of animals, polished stone tools. Chalcolithic — copper used alongside stone, and early metallurgy. Bronze Age — bronze metallurgy, mixing copper and tin, with trade, towns and early civilisations. Iron Age — widespread iron metallurgy, stronger tools and weapons.

The Old Stone Age

The Stone Age falls broadly into three stages — Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. Palaeo means old and lithic means stone, so the Palaeolithic is also called the Old Stone Age.

The oldest human settlement in the Indian subcontinent goes back some 2 million years ago. Attirampakkam in Tamil Nadu has been dated to roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million years ago, and Isampur in Karnataka to 1.2 million years ago.

What Those Sites Contain

At these sites, animal fossils have been found together with large cutting tools such as handaxes and cleavers, along with tools like stone scrapers and choppers made of quartzite and limestone.

The uses are known from the tools themselves: to cut up meat, dig out tubers, scrape hides, and split animal bones to extract protein-rich marrow.

Tools Get Smaller, Hunting Gets Better

Advances in hunting and gathering show up in the making of smaller stone tools — chiefly scrapers, borers and points.

These indicate improved efficiency in hunting, through the development of projectiles tipped with sharp points. A smaller tool is not a lesser one. It is the one that can be hafted, thrown, and used at a distance from a dangerous animal.

The Later Palaeolithic

Later still, humans invented the bow and arrow, and parallel-sided blade and microblade tools made from rocks with a glassy texture, which are very sharp when freshly made. They hunted small game animals as well.

They also developed symbolic communication: they decorated the walls of caves and rock shelters with paintings, used pigments to decorate their bodies, and were the first to produce beads of stone, bone and shell. A distinctive tool, the burin or engraver, was used to cut symbolic features into bones and shells such as ostrich eggs, and microblades were fixed into a handle for ease of use.

The World Fills Up

These changes are linked with our immediate ancestors, Homo sapiens, who slowly spread across the world — including Australia and the Americas — between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago.

A Warmer Earth

Around 12,000 years ago, the earth grew warmer, which changed the environment a great deal.

Forests and grasslands expanded into areas that had previously been covered by ice sheets, and the new landscapes offered a wider variety of resources: small game animals, fish, and edible wild grains. The world then witnessed the first-ever population explosion in human history.

The Mesolithic

A variety of microlithic tools enabled people to collect food from the water, both sea and fresh, and fishing was the mainstay of their subsistence economy.

Art activity flourished in this period, and new habitats like caves and rock shelters were often lived in. The World Heritage Site of Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh has hundreds of painted rock shelters showing Mesolithic and earlier human occupation.

Reading the Sequence Properly

Notice what drives the whole story. A change in climate opens new landscapes; new landscapes offer new resources; new resources call for new tools; and more food supports more people.

That chain is cultural evolution at work, and it is the same chain that will, in the next stage, carry people from gathering wild grain to growing it deliberately.

Homo habilis means handy man, and the name records exactly what earned the species its place in the sequence — the chopper stone tools it made at the Olduvai Gorge.

The sharpest Palaeolithic blades were struck from rocks with a glassy texture, which are at their keenest when freshly made.

Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, a World Heritage Site, holds hundreds of painted rock shelters with Mesolithic and still earlier human occupation.

The four ancestors in order — Handy, Upright, Neanderthal, Us. — Homo habilis the handy man, Homo erectus the upright one, Homo neanderthalensis of Europe and south-west Asia, and Homo sapiens ourselves.

Which tools name which age — Big stones old, tiny stones middle, polished stones new. — Handaxes and cleavers belong to the Palaeolithic, microliths to the Mesolithic, and polished stone tools to the Neolithic.

How Farming Began

As hunter-gatherers gained adequate familiarity with the seasons and with different types of food resources, people slowly moved over to producing their own food. That transition is known as the Neolithic revolution.

Notice the word gradual. Nothing here happened in a generation. What earns the name revolution is not the speed of the change but the reach of it.

The Hallmark

The hallmark of the revolution was domestication: the bringing of selected animals and plants under human control, and the breeding of new breeds through cultivation and husbandry.

That second half is easy to skip and is the more remarkable part. Keeping a goat is one thing. Choosing which goats breed, generation after generation, until the herd itself has changed, is another.

Tools Change Their Purpose

The shift shows itself in the toolkit, and the difference is one of purpose rather than of skill.

Hunter-gatherers produced tools for procuring food. Neolithic farmers made tools to produce and process food — for sowing, reaping and grinding rather than for chasing and cutting. They also developed a variety of earthenware pottery in many shapes and sizes.

The First Villages

They utilised several raw materials and resources, and they established the first village settlements.

This is the step that lays the foundations for the urban revolution that follows. A field must be returned to; a granary must be guarded; a pot is heavy and not worth carrying far. Each of those facts pushes people towards staying in one place.

Not Everywhere at Once

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture took place at different periods in different areas of the world.

Wheat and barley in West Asia, millets in India and West Africa, rice on the Ganga plains and along the Yangtze in south China — each region has its own crops and its own timing. The order of developments recurs, however: cultivation, pottery, livestock, sedentism, and finally a settled agricultural landscape.

Mehrgarh

In the Indian subcontinent there is regional variation in when farming begins. In the north-west, Mehrgarh, on the Bolan river in what is now Pakistan, is the oldest Neolithic site and also the oldest farming village, going back to around 7000 BCE.

People there built handmade sun-dried brick houses and granaries, laid their dead in graves, and made many kinds of ornaments from semi-precious stones like lapis lazuli, carnelian and shell. They grew wheat and barley and kept sheep, goats and Indian cattle — the zebu humped bull in particular.

Mehrgarh Enters the Metal Age

The people of Mehrgarh were also the first to make copper objects, and so entered the metal age, becoming called the Chalcolithic people by around 4000 BCE.

On this base rose the Bronze Age Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation around 3500 BCE. One village, one river valley, and an unbroken line of development running for several thousand years.

The Subcontinent Fills with Farmers

By 2500 BCE, most of the Indian subcontinent was home to Neolithic agricultural communities.

The way of life is described by what it kept and what it grew: cattle, sheep and goat herding, together with growing cereals, millets and pulses — at times in contact with the Chalcolithic cultures of the same age in some parts of the country. Sanganakallu, a Neolithic site on top of a granite hill, dates to about 2000 BCE.

Copper in the Plains

The Neolithic way of life that emerged at Mehrgarh spread into the middle and upper Indus valley and further east, and some of these settlements learnt the smelting of copper from its ores around 4000 BCE, becoming the earliest Chalcolithic sites in the subcontinent.

The arrival of copper tools on the fertile alluvial plains of the Indus and Ghaggar–Sarasvatī basins raised output, which led to increased prosperity. This is also a period of large-scale pottery production showing diverse regional styles.

Early Harappan

Those regional styles in pottery and craft became more evident at the early Chalcolithic sites of Baluchistan and the two basins from 4000 BCE on. A few radio-carbon dates suggest that at sites in the dried river belt of the Sarasvatī, such as Bhirrana and Kunal, the Pre-Harappan phase started between 7000 and 5500 BCE.

Many regional styles evolved over time and became standard features of the civilisation by about 2500 BCE. Since these sites show cultural continuity, the stage is generally described as Early Harappan.

What Carried Forward

The continuity can be listed item by item: pottery traditions, shell bangles, semi-precious stone beads, terracotta objects and copper working.

Some other developments probably had their beginnings in this stage as well — a perimeter wall built round the settlement, seals in use, and even the Harappan script itself. The cities did not arrive from nowhere; they were assembled out of things already in use.

More Than Farmers

The Harappans were not merely agriculturists. They practised many arts and crafts, and pottery was among the chief crafts that strengthened their economy.

Pottery found in different regions has its own styles in vessel shapes and in their painted designs. Other crafts that developed step by step include copper and shell work, and the making of semi-precious stone beads — the last attested at Harappa in Pakistan, Kunal in Haryana and Datrana in Gujarat.

Marks Before Writing

There was also widespread graffiti on pottery, and a few seals carrying geometric and simple animal designs found at early Harappan sites such as Harappa, Rehman Dheri and Kunal, can be seen as forerunners to the script and the inscribed seals of the civilisation.

These technological advances and this economic integration in the Early Harappan period are what gave rise to the urban centres.

Two Things the Harappans Got Right

Two details are worth holding on to, because each shows a whole system behind it.

The Early Harappans ploughed fields at Kalibangan with furrows running both across and lengthwise, pointing to double crop cultivation, much like today's seasonal Rabi and Kharif crops practised even today. And they kept standard systems of weight and measurement — a binary multiple system of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 for smaller units and multiples of ten for larger denominations, preserved in cubical stone weights found at several sites.

Why the Weights Matter

A standard weight is a small object with a large implication.

It means that a measure agreed in one town held good in another, and that trade between distant regions could be conducted without each transaction being argued from scratch. Meticulously planned settlements and efficient interregional trade both rest on that quiet agreement.

The ploughed field found at Kalibangan carries furrows running both across and along it, which points to two crops being grown in the same field — much like the Rabi and Kharif seasons still followed today.

Harappan weights used two systems at once: a doubling sequence of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 for small units, and multiples of ten for larger denominations.

At some sites in the dried Sarasvatī river belt, such as Bhirrana and Kunal, radio-carbon dates place the Pre-Harappan phase between 7000 and 5500 BCE.

The line of development — Village, copper, walls and seals, then cities. — Mehrgarh about 7000 BCE, copper by about 4000 BCE, the Early Harappan features, and then the urban centres of the civilisation.

What Neolithic tools were for — Hunters made tools to GET food. Farmers made tools to GROW and GRIND it. — The purpose of the toolkit shifts from procuring food to producing and processing it.

Four Civilisations, Four River Plains

Before turning to Mesopotamia, it is worth seeing the pattern it belongs to.

Four early world civilisations emerged in river plains: the Harappan along the Sindhu and Sarasvatī, the Mesopotamian around the Euphrates and Tigris in West Asia, the Egyptian along the Nile, and the Chinese in the Huang He basin in northern China. Rivers gave water, silt, and a road.

Who Was Near Whom

Geography decided who could meet whom.

Mesopotamia and the Indus and Ghaggar–Sarasvatī valleys lie closer to each other, and that proximity facilitated strong contacts and trade between the two. The Egyptian and Chinese civilisations, by contrast, have little tangible evidence of direct contact with the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation.

The Land in Between

Mesopotamia is the Greek name for the land watered by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in West Asia, and the word means the land in between.

In modern terms the region takes in chiefly Iraq and Kuwait, with some parts of Turkey and south-western Iran.

The Fertile Crescent

The crescent-shaped foothills of the Zagros and Taurus, running from the Mediterranean on the west to the Persian Gulf on the east, are known as the fertile crescent, because of their high agricultural potential.

Farming began in this region 12,000 years before the present, and copper tools arrived around 4500 BCE. The arrival of copper improved agriculture and other economic activities such as craft production and trade, and this eventually helped spread farming across the vast plains of the two rivers.

From Cities to City-States

Over the next two thousand years, some large cities became city-states by developing governing systems — a city-state being a sovereign state centred on a city that rules the surrounding territories.

From 3500 BCE onwards, four major city-based civilisations flourished here: the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian. Although the four world civilisations were contemporaneous, the earliest city-based one emerged in Mesopotamia.

The Sumerians

The Sumerian civilisation was the first to become a civilisation of cities, at Ur and several other cities in Sumer, in present-day southern Iraq.

They were the first to build dams and canals to irrigate their land, and the first to build with mud bricks and burnt bricks — houses, defensive walls and other structures.

Gods and Temples

The Sumerians worshipped many gods, believed to control natural forces such as floods and winds, and they built a temple for each.

Every city raised a great temple, called a ziggurat for its chief god, and the city spread out around this main temple. A ziggurat is a stepped, pyramid-like tower temple of several storeys, on top of which the main shrine was located; its top was a holy place, and the area around it contained palaces and royal storehouses.

A Temple That Was Also a Treasury

One architectural detail carries a great deal of meaning.

The surrounding walls had only one entrance, because the ziggurat also served as the city's treasury. All economic activities — agriculture, trade, and the transport of goods — were bound to the temple's authority, and entry to the holy temple was restricted to high priests and priestesses, who were probably part of the ruling class.

What That Tells Us About Society

Put those facts together and a social shape emerges.

A building that holds both the god and the treasure, and admits only a few people, reflects a clear division of social hierarchy. Religion, wealth and authority were not separate departments in Mesopotamian society; they stood inside the same walls.

Life in the Cities

The cities were large settlements where kings lived in grand palaces while ordinary people lived in small brick houses.

People's lives were mostly centred on farming. In addition, several crafts were practised — metalworking, pottery and textiles — and other professionals such as merchants and traders existed as well.

Writing Begins

The Sumerians began writing before anyone else, around 3200 BCE, and their system is known as cuneiform after the wedge-shaped tool used by the scribes.

The word comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning wedge. Cuneiform is made up of hundreds of marks pressed into the damp surface of clay tablets with sharp reeds cut to a wedge.

Scribes and Their Standing

Its scribes enjoyed a high status in society, similar to that of priests and priestesses.

By 3000 BCE, cuneiform was in wide use across Mesopotamia among different city-states, although their languages differed. That point is worth pausing on: a script is not a language, and one writing system can serve many tongues.

What the Tablets Say

Cuneiform tablets let us look into the lives and beliefs of the Mesopotamians — their hymns, their great myths and epics, the law codes and educational treatises.

Tablets also served for keeping records of farming and crafts, above all of potters, seal cutters, shipbuilders, carpenters and farm workers. The same script carried the sacred and the entirely ordinary.

The Akkadians

Sumerian power was eclipsed in 2334 BCE by a new city-state centred on the city of Akkad, further north in central Mesopotamia.

Its people spoke Akkadian, a language different from Sumerian, yet both used the same cuneiform script. Akkadian records document the consolidation of power over different regions and the establishment of the world's first dynastic empire, and the period also saw the evolution of creative literature.

Sargon and Meluhha

The cuneiform tablets of a leading Akkadian king, Sargon, speak of Mesopotamian trade with the eastern territories of Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha.

Meluhha is generally identified with the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation, while Dilmun and Magan are today's Bahrain and the Oman peninsula. With the Harappans they traded semi-precious stone beads, ivory, timber, gold dust, and probably copper.

The Assyrians

The Akkadian empire lost its leading place around 2154 BCE to Assur, a new city-state in the north of Mesopotamia.

The Assyrian civilisation that replaced the Akkadians went on until early 1700 BCE, and in a short period Assyrian dominance spread across Mesopotamia and over neighbouring regions to the west and south.

The Babylonians

While the Assyrians held the north, a new city-state, Babylonia, came to dominate central Mesopotamia from 1900 BCE onwards.

Its glory began with the ascendance of Hammurabi in 1792 BCE, who conquered neighbouring regions and expanded a small city-state into a large empire. His most significant contribution was the gathering together of rules and regulations for civil and social conduct, now called the Code of Hammurabi, applied throughout his empire and a foundational model for many future legal systems.

Why Babylonia Declined

By the end of 1400 BCE, the Babylonians had lost the standing they once had.

The causes were several at once. Attack after attack by the Hittites and other rising powers, who had gained the upper hand by mastering new technologies and by using natural resources more efficiently. Alongside that came growing environmental degradation, strain on agricultural lands, and internal political and economic problems. Dominance could not be maintained, and new powers emerged in West Asia.

The Sumerian number system was based on 60, which is where the 60-minute hour, the 60-second minute and the 360-degree circle all come from.

Scribes in Mesopotamia held a status in society similar to that of priests and priestesses — a rare case of a technical skill carrying that kind of rank.

At the time the Sumerians were building canal irrigation, the Early Harappans in the Baluchistan foothills were building check dams called gabarbands across small streams for the same purpose.

The four Mesopotamian civilisations in order — Sumer, Akkad, Assur, Babylon. — The Sumerians first, then Akkad from 2334 BCE, then Assur from 2154 BCE, then Babylonia from 1900 BCE.

The four river civilisations — Two rivers, one Sindhu, one Nile, one Huang He. — Mesopotamia between the Euphrates and Tigris, the Harappans on the Sindhu and Sarasvatī, Egypt on the Nile, and China in the Huang He basin.

Egypt, and How We Know About It

The Egyptian civilisation is one of the earliest in the world, known for its rich historical records and its lasting influence on other civilisations.

It was known to the Greeks and Romans, and Greek writers such as Herodotus visited and wrote about Egypt as early as the fifth century BCE. Egyptian history is also reconstructed from papyrus records, which preserve both stories and practical details.

What Papyrus Was

To make papyrus, the inner stem of the papyrus plant was sliced into strips, laid crosswise them, and then pressing, drying and polishing them into sheets.

Individual papyri are named after their discoverers. The Papyrus Ebers, for instance, lists more than 700 cures and spells of Egyptian medicine — a reminder that a document can be as practical as a tool.

The River That Made the Country

City-states appeared in Egypt around 3000 BCE, as the population grew and resources became available.

The Nile watered the land on its banks, and each summer the river rose and flooded. These annual inundations left rich mud, called kemet, excellent for growing crops. The Egyptians referred to their own land as Kemet, meaning 'the black', after that black river-valley soil.

A Country Named After Its Soil

Pause on that for a moment.

A people naming their entire country after the colour of the mud left by a flood tells you exactly what they thought their life depended on. The Nile was not a feature of Egypt; it was the reason Egypt existed.

Ditches, Reservoirs and a Calendar

Some 5000 years ago farmers found that ditches let them divert water from the Nile into their fields, and hold water in reservoirs for later.

By counting the days from one Nile flood to the next, they developed a calendar. It had three seasons of four months each — inundation in autumn, peret the growing season in winter, and shemu the harvest in summer — based on the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, with a year of 365 days made up of twelve months of thirty days plus five extra. Accurate, though it slowly lost time, since the real year is about a quarter of a day longer.

How Irrigation Produced Government

Here is the step that matters most, and it is easy to read past.

The need to dig ditches and construct dams required collective effort. Those these early joint efforts probably encouraged the growth of local government, alongside the rise of an administrative class — probably the earliest form of local government in Egypt. Organisation was not imposed on the work; it grew out of it.

The Pharaohs

Over time, powerful individuals called pharaohs emerged as the rulers of Egypt.

After their death they were buried far below ground, with a rectangular structure called a mastaba built over the burial chamber. In time, mastabas were stacked one on top of another to form a pyramid. A prominent example is the step pyramid at Saqqara.

Why Build a Pyramid at All

The pyramids were built primarily because of a belief.

The Egyptians held that each person had a ka, a spiritual double, which lived on after death if the body was preserved through mummification. That process took out every internal organ but the heart and dried the body with natron, then oiling it, wrapping it in linen strips, placing it in a coffin, and burying it with rituals.

Egyptian Society and Its Pleasures

Egyptian society was arranged as a hierarchy: the pharaoh at the top, then government officials, nobles and priests, then free landholders, artisans and merchants, and at the base serfs and slaves.

Early Egyptians also enjoyed leisure. They swam, canoed, played board games, and enjoyed music and dancing. Festivals were central to their culture — each god had a festival in which the statue was paraded to music played on instruments such as the sistrum, and the Sed festival marked a king's thirtieth year on the throne.

Women in Egypt

Egyptian women, in general, had more rights than women in Greece or Rome: they could own property and run businesses.

Cleopatra, who lived from 69 to 30 BCE, was trained from childhood to rule and became queen at the age of eighteen.

Reading Egypt Again

For centuries the Egyptian script could not be read at all. Then came an accident.

In 1799, Pierre Bouchard, a French army engineer repairing a fort in Egypt, found a giant black stone covered in writing. This was the Rosetta Stone, which carried three types of writing, one of them Greek. Since people could still read Greek, the stone worked like a bilingual dictionary for a lost language, and in 1822 the French linguist Jean-François Champollion finally deciphered the script.

Why That Story Matters Here

Compare it with the Harappan case and the point of the whole chapter comes into focus.

Egypt and the Harappan civilisation both wrote. Egypt can now speak in its own words because a bilingual object turned up; the Harappans still cannot, because nothing comparable has been found. The difference in what we know is not a difference in the two peoples, but in our luck.

China, and Its Two Rivers

The Chinese civilisation flourished along the Huang He, the Yellow River, and the Yangtze.

Both valleys were centres of China's early Neolithic cultures, going back to about 7000 BCE. Around 2000 BCE the arrival of copper and bronze metallurgy brought many Neolithic settlements, especially in the Yellow River basin, up to the edge of the Bronze Age.

Why the Cities Came Later

Bronze alone did not make cities.

Urban centres began to appear only around 1600 BCE, and they did so with the expansion of agricultural productivity together with advances in metallurgy and crafts. Out of these came China's first territorial empire of the Bronze Age.

The Dynasties

The history of China is organised into dynasties.

The Shang dynasty ran from 1600 to 1046 BCE and the Zhou from 1046 to 256 BCE; both are Bronze Age. By 600 BCE iron had come into common use across China, and the Chinese Iron Age dates from then. The name China probably comes from the Iron Age Qin dynasty, 221 to 206 BCE, the first imperial dynasty, credited with unifying the country. Another important Iron Age dynasty was the Han, 206 BCE to 220 CE.

The Oracle Bones

China has an abundance of historical records, since official historiographers recorded events. But the earliest source is something else entirely.

The oracles were symbols made on pieces of animal bones and tortoise shells. The bones were heated until they cracked, and interpretations were made from the patterns of the cracks. They were used to foretell the future, and today they tell us a great deal about the hopes, desires and fears of the early Chinese.

Evidence From an Unexpected Quarter

There is a nice irony in that.

Objects made to predict what had not yet happened have ended up as our best record of what people were anxious about at the time. The question asked of the bone survives even though the answer was worthless.

The Chinese Script

The Chinese script is logographic: characters represent entire words or morphemes — the smallest meaningful units of language — rather than sounds.

That is why a character can resemble the object or idea it stands for, and it is why the script could later be read across regions whose spoken languages differed.

Jade, Marble and Bronze

Among the craft items unique to the Chinese civilisation were jade objects and figurines, which served either as ritual objects or as marks of prestige.

They likely mattered a great deal in social transactions, since jade was not locally available and had to be obtained from outside China. Marble was carved into ornaments in the form of birds and animals, and used as bases for wooden pillars. The Chinese also mastered bronze metallurgy to make weapons, tools and ornate ritual vessels.

The Great Wall

The Great Wall of China took shape over a span of up to two thousand years.

Several separate walls went up from 680 BCE onwards under the Zhou and other dynasties, to guard against the violent raids of nomadic tribes. Later these were linked into a single strong defence, and expansion and repair continued till the seventeenth century CE.

Silk, and the Road Named After It

Silk was known to the Chinese from the Neolithic period, about 4000 to 3000 BCE, and became an important craft during the Bronze Age.

But around the second century BCE, during the Han dynasty, silk became a leading item of external trade — so much so that the whole route it travelled along was named the Silk Route.

Chinese Society and Money

By 1500 BCE Bronze Age China was a sharply layered society: the ruling class, nobles and aristocrats stood at the top, then came farmers and labourers. That laid the foundation of the Chinese social hierarchy that evolved later.

A medium of exchange made of metal appeared under the Zhou dynasty, and a money economy had grown up by the fifth century BCE. China was also the first country to bring in paper money, and the first to develop civil services through public examination.

What the Four Have in Common

Stand back from all four and the pattern is plain.

The major Bronze Age civilisations emerged independently in fertile river plains. Harnessing agricultural productivity and taking in new resources drove economic growth, which led to urban cities in every one of these centres. Each developed its social and administrative systems independently. And in each, the development of writing let societies record economic transactions and social activities, and in time led to literary and creative texts — which is why so many of our cultural ways of doing things have their roots in the Bronze Age.

Egyptian libraries dating back to 2000 BCE stored papyrus scrolls in labelled jars on shelves, and one such jar held the oldest known version of the story of Sindbad the Sailor.

Candidates for public office in China were picked only after searching tests, which covered archery and horsemanship as well as calculation, writing and music.

A Zhou ruler held both the throne and the priesthood, and was taken to hold his place by heaven's appointment — yet he could be put out of it if his people failed to prosper.

The Chinese dynasties in order — Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han. — Shang 1600–1046 BCE and Zhou 1046–256 BCE in the Bronze Age; Qin 221–206 BCE and Han 206 BCE–220 CE in the Iron Age.

Why Egypt built pyramids — Preserve the body, and the ka lives on. — Mummification preserved the body; the mastaba covered the burial; stacked mastabas became the pyramid.