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

4.1 Before and after writing

Think about how someone could learn about your life. They could read your school report card, your family's phone messages or the name on your Aadhaar card. Now take away every written word. What is left are things: a steel tiffin box, a cricket bat, a broken bangle, the walls of your home. For almost the whole human story, things like these are the only evidence we have.

This chapter travels back millions of years, long before the kingdoms and empires of your earlier history lessons. On the way you will meet the first tool-makers, follow people out of Africa and across the world, watch hunters become farmers and arrive at the first cities. Keep four big questions in mind:

• How did people live before the first civilisations?
• Without writing, how did they share ideas and pass on what they knew?
• What can archaeology tell us that no book can?
• Did the early civilisations know about each other, and how did they meet?

So how do we study people who left no writing? Through archaeology: digging up and studying artefacts, bones, buildings and other material remains. And 'before writing' is not one fixed date. A few societies began writing around 5,000 years ago, while many parts of the world had no writing for thousands of years after that.

Here is a puzzle. Archaeologists have found thousands of Harappan seals, pots and small tablets marked with signs. Many signs are tiny pictures of things such as fish, jars or people, so the script is pictographic. The people of the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation, also known as the Indus Valley or Harappan civilisation, were clearly among the world's first writers. Yet nobody alive can read a single line of what they wrote. Their script, Sindhu lipi, is still undeciphered, so we learn about the Harappans from their cities and objects rather than from their own words.

Why does that matter so much? Because a text we can read lets people of the past speak for themselves. At about the same time as the Harappans, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia began pressing wedge-shaped signs into clay (cuneiform), and the Egyptians began carving picture-signs called hieroglyphs. Modern scholars have cracked both scripts. Historians therefore begin the historical period, the part of the past we can study through readable texts, about 5,000 years ago. The long age before it is often called prehistory.

Indian writing that can be read appears much later. Take the great stupa at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh. Short inscriptions on its stone railing name the people who paid for each section, and their gifts can still be read after more than 2,000 years. They are written in Brahmi, a script in use from about 400 BCE in parts of south India and in the Ganga valley. Emperor Aśhoka gave Brahmi a standard form in the 3rd century BCE and used it for his edicts, and Iron Age communities across the south wrote in it too. Most later Indian scripts grew out of Brahmi, a story for higher classes.

The human past therefore falls into two very unequal parts, a long stretch before writing and a short one after it. Table 4.1 compares them, and Fig. 4.1 shows how unequal they are.

4.2 Why should we study early human history?

Why spend time on people who lived before any city, king or book? Because they made us. Over millions of years two kinds of change shaped humans, and both kept responding to a climate that never stood still.

Biological evolution works on bodies. Small differences in genes, passed from parents to children, add up over thousands of generations into big changes: walking upright, a larger brain, smaller teeth. In this way the australopithecines, early members of our family tree, gave rise over millions of years to the genus Homo and finally to modern humans, Homo sapiens. (Australopithecus means 'southern ape', from Latin australis, 'southern', and Greek pithekos, 'ape': the first fossils were found in South Africa.)

Cultural evolution works on ways of life: what people know, make and do, learnt from others rather than inherited. Most of it happened during the Quaternary period, the last 26 lakh (about 2.6 million) years up to today, when the climate swung again and again between icy and warmer phases. Each swing changed which plants and animals were around. The people who could invent a better tool, a new hunting trick or a warmer shelter were the ones who came through.

The biggest cultural change was in food. For almost all of the past, people hunted and gathered. Then some began to grow crops and keep animals. A farming family could grow more grain than it ate: a surplus. That extra grain could feed a potter, a priest or a ruler who grew no food at all. Once enough people lived this way, towns, cities and civilisation became possible: large, complex societies with cities, specialised jobs, government and, usually, writing.

Most scientists agree that our earliest ancestors evolved in Africa. How do we know that people later spread out of it? Follow the tools. Teardrop-shaped handaxes and straight-edged cleavers appear first in Africa. Tools of the same kinds then turn up at sites across Asia and Europe dated between about 2 and 0.5 million years ago. Their makers were Homo erectus, the 'upright human', a two-legged ancestor and, as far as we know, the first hominin to leave Africa, starting about 2 million years ago.

Our own species came out much later. Homo sapiens appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago, and a major wave of early modern humans left the continent around 125,000 years ago. Their descendants eventually settled every continent except Antarctica, and every person alive today belongs to this one species.

4.3 Who were our human ancestors?

Try peeling a raw mango with your fingernails, then with a knife. The knife does what your hand cannot; it works like an extra, sharper body part. Archaeologists use exactly this idea when they call tools extra-corporal limbs, limbs outside the body.

The oldest known stone tools were made about 3.3 million years ago, when someone knocked sharp flakes off a stone, following a plan in the mind. Some animals use simple objects (a chimpanzee strips a twig to fish for termites), but shaping stone to a plan is something only hominins are known to have done. Archaeologists treat it as the beginning of distinctly human behaviour, and tool-making became a hallmark of the hominins.

Who made those first tools? We cannot be sure, because our family tree then looked more like a bush than a ladder: several kinds of human ancestors lived at the same time, sometimes side by side. The oldest traces of human life come from Africa, Asia and Europe, the lands that historians call the 'Old World'.

4.3.1 How do we know about our ancestors?

Archaeologists work like detectives at a very old scene. They choose a promising spot, such as a riverbank, a cave or a mound, and dig it slowly, layer by layer: an excavation. Every find is measured, photographed and labelled with the layer it came from, because its position is itself a clue. As Fig. 4.3 shows, layers pile up over time, so deeper layers are normally older.

Nobody buried most old tools on purpose. A worn-out handaxe was dropped where its owner stood, and over thousands of years dust, mud and river sand covered it. The bodies of some ancestors were buried in the same slow way, and over very long periods their bones turned to stone as fossils. Tools and fossils together are the main evidence for the earliest human story.

Digging is only half the work. Archaeologists also experiment. They strike flakes off a stone with a hammerstone to copy an ancient handaxe, then use the copy to cut meat or chop wood. Comparing the wear on the copy with the marks on the original tells them what the old tool was used for, and how much time and skill it took to make.

4.3.2 From 'handy man' to modern humans

Fossils and tools let us put names to some of these ancestors, and Table 4.2 lines up four of them. Read down the table and two patterns stand out. Tools become smaller, sharper and more varied, from a pebble with a few flakes knocked off to whole sets of fine blades. And the map of where people lived grows from one part of East Africa to the whole planet. Every species in the table made tools, but only Homo sapiens built truly complex technology, from sewing needles and boats to, much later, computers.

4.4 Periods in early human history

A story millions of years long needs chapters. Historians split early human history into periods named after the technology that defined each one, above all the material of its best tools. A new period usually also meant a new way of getting food and a new kind of home. Fig. 4.4 climbs through them.

The first three periods together form the Stone Age, when stone was the chief material for tools. Metals came next: first copper alongside stone, then bronze, and finally iron. Remember that these are stages, not world-wide dates. One region could still be in the Stone Age while another, far away, was already building bronze-using cities.

4.4.1 Palaeolithic hunter–gatherers

Start with the oldest and longest period. Its name joins two Greek words, palaios ('old') and lithos ('stone'): the Palaeolithic is the Old Stone Age. With the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) and the Neolithic (New Stone Age) it makes up the Stone Age.

Imagine having no metal, no pot and no knife. A sharp stone would have to butcher an animal, dig up a root, clean a hide and crack a bone for its fatty, protein-rich marrow. Wear marks and experiments show that early stone tools in India did exactly these four jobs.

And they are very early. Traces of people in the subcontinent may go back about 2 million years. Two of the best-studied sites lie in the south:

• Attirampakkam, near Chennai, Tamil Nadu: tools about 1.5 to 1.7 million years old, mostly of quartzite, found with animal fossils.
• Isampur, Karnataka: a spot where people quarried and shaped limestone, about 1.2 million years ago.

At both sites people left large cutting tools, handaxes and cleavers, along with smaller scrapers and choppers.

Later toolmakers worked smaller. Middle Palaeolithic kits are full of flakes shaped into scrapers, borers (for piercing holes) and points. A point lashed to a wooden shaft turns a stick into a throwing spear, so a hunter no longer had to get within arm's reach of a dangerous animal.

Then the human toolkit had a sudden upgrade. The Upper Palaeolithic brought:

• Blades: long, thin, parallel-sided flakes of fine, glassy stone, razor-sharp when fresh; the smallest, microblades, were set into handles.
• The bow and arrow: hunters could now bring down small, fast animals as well as big ones.
• Burins: chisel-pointed tools for engraving lines and patterns on bone and shell, even ostrich eggshell.
• Art and ornament: paintings on cave and rock-shelter walls, ochre and other pigments for the body, and the first beads of stone, bone and shell.

Paintings and beads are signs of symbolic thinking: letting one thing stand for another, as words do. This whole toolkit belongs to Homo sapiens, who between about 50,000 and 12,000 years ago spread across the world, reaching even Australia and the Americas.

4.4.2 Mesolithic hunter–gatherers

Around 12,000 years ago the last great cold phase came to an end. Follow the chain of effects in Fig. 4.6:

1. The climate warms, and ice sheets melt back.
2. Forests and grasslands take over land that was frozen or bare.
3. Food becomes varied and plentiful: deer, hares and other small game, fish in rivers, lakes and the sea, and wild grains.
4. With more to eat, more children survive. Many scholars call this the first population boom in human history.

People met the new world with new tools. Microliths are tiny stone blades and points, often no longer than a fingernail. Set in rows in wood or bone, they made arrows, barbed harpoons and sickles, and fishing became one of the main ways of getting food.

Bhimbetka, in the forested hills of Madhya Pradesh, shows the artistic side of this age. Its hundreds of rock shelters, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were lived in from very early times. Many walls are covered in paintings, mostly in red and white: bison, deer and boar, hunters with bows, dancers and scenes of daily life. Caves and rock shelters like these were favourite homes in the Mesolithic.

4.5 The Neolithic Revolution

Picture a band of gatherers who return to the same valley every year. They notice that seeds dropped near last year's camp have sprouted, and that some goats are calmer than others. Small observations like these, repeated over hundreds of generations, slowly turned some hunter–gatherers into farmers. Historians call this switch from collecting food to producing it the Neolithic Revolution.

Its core was domestication. Farmers kept and bred the plants and animals that suited them best, until new varieties appeared that depended on people. Wild wheat scatters its ripe seeds on the ground; early farmers kept replanting the plants whose seeds stayed on the stalk until harvest. Wild boar became pigs, and wild goats and sheep became tame herds.

Look at the farmers' tools in the comparison above: polished axes to clear forest, hoes, sickles and grinding stones are all for growing, harvesting or processing food. Clay pots of many shapes and sizes appear because there is now grain to store and porridge to cook. And since fields cannot be carried along, families settle in villages, the first step on the road to towns and cities.

Farming did not begin everywhere at once, nor with the same crops. Each region domesticated what grew there. Fig. 4.7 marks a few starting points. Wheat and barley were grown in West Asia about 12,000 years ago, and at Mehrgarh around 9,000 years ago. Farmers in north China grew millets, and those along the Yangtze grew rice. In West Africa, pearl millet was domesticated only about 4,500 years ago. Indian farmers also domesticated millets and, in the Ganga plains, rice. In some regions, including parts of China and Africa, people were making pottery even before they farmed.

4.5.1 Neolithic period in the Indian subcontinent

Within the subcontinent, too, farming took hold region by region, not all at once. The earliest farming village found so far is Mehrgarh, beside the Bolan River near the Bolan Pass, in what is now Pakistan. People settled there around 7000 BCE, making it the region's oldest Neolithic site. Excavations show a rich village life:

• Homes and stores: houses of handmade, sun-dried mud bricks, and separate granaries for grain.
• Crops and herds: wheat and barley; sheep, goats and Indian humped (zebu) cattle.
• Crafts: ornaments of lapis lazuli, carnelian and shell, some brought from far away.
• Burials: the dead were laid in graves, often with ornaments.
• Metal: by about 4000 BCE its people were making copper objects, so they had become Chalcolithic, users of copper and stone.

Mehrgarh's long story, from first farmers to copper workers, laid the base for the Bronze Age Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation. What did Neolithic villages look like elsewhere? By about 2500 BCE you could have found one in most regions of the subcontinent. Villagers grew a mix of cereals, millets and pulses and kept herds of cattle, sheep and goats. At Burzahom in Kashmir, families lived in pits dug into the ground; in the south, villages sat on granite hills. In some areas these farmers lived alongside copper-using Chalcolithic communities and traded with them.

One southern example is Sanganakallu, near Ballari in Karnataka. Around 2000 BCE its people lived on top of granite hills and made polished stone axes from the hard, dark rock around them.

4.6 Sindhu–Sarasvatī Civilisation

Great cities do not appear out of nowhere. The Harappan cities, standing by about 2600 BCE, had roots going back thousands of years to villages like Mehrgarh, from where farming had spread up the Indus valley and eastward. Fig. 4.8 follows one imaginary settlement along that road. Archaeologists point to four ingredients that came together:

• Copper. Around 4000 BCE, villages in the region learnt to get copper out of its ore, becoming the subcontinent's first Chalcolithic sites and opening the way to the Bronze Age. Copper tools helped farmers get more from the rich river-laid soils of the Indus and Ghaggar-Sarasvatī plains, and villages prospered.
• Crafts. Potters worked on a large scale, and each region painted its pots in its own style. Copperwork, shell work and beads of semi-precious stone improved step by step; Early Harappan bead workshops are known from Harappa (Pakistan), Kunal (Haryana) and Datrana (Gujarat).
• Early city features. Settlements began to build walls around themselves. Potters at Harappa, Rehman Dheri and Kunal scratched signs (graffiti) on pots, and a few seals carry geometric patterns or simple animals: possible first steps towards the script and inscribed seals of the cities.
• Links between regions. As contact and trade grew, local styles merged into the shared, standard features of the civilisation, in place by about 2500 BCE.

These sites flow without a break into the cities: the same pottery traditions, beads, shell bangles, terracotta (baked clay) objects and copperwork carry on. So archaeologists call this stage Early Harappan (about 3300–2600 BCE in the Harappan timeline). Some sites are older still. At Bhirrana and Kunal, in the dried-up Sarasvatī belt of Haryana, radiocarbon dates suggest that the earliest, Pre-Harappan, layers go back to 7000–5500 BCE.

4.7 Bronze Age civilisations outside India

While Harappan potters were firing their pots, people far to the west and east were also building cities. Three other great Bronze Age civilisations flourished in the same centuries: in Mesopotamia, in Egypt and in China. As you meet each one, compare it with what you learnt about the Harappans in Class 6: their planned streets and drains, standard weights, beads, seals and still-unread script.

Each of the four grew up on a river plain, as Fig. 4.10 shows. The Harappans lived along the Sindhu and the Sarasvatī, and the Mesopotamians along the Euphrates and the Tigris in West Asia. The Egyptians farmed beside the Nile, and the early Chinese in the Huang He basin. Geography also decided who met whom. Mesopotamia was the Harappans' nearest neighbour among the four, and the two kept up close contact and trade. Egypt and China were much farther away, and archaeologists have found little solid evidence that either dealt directly with the Harappans.

4.7.1 Mesopotamian civilisation

Picture an arc of green foothills curving like a new moon along the Zagros and Taurus mountains, from the Mediterranean coast round to the Persian Gulf. Crops grew so well there that it is called the Fertile Crescent, and farming began in the region about 12,000 years ago. At its eastern end lies a flat plain watered by two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Greeks called it Mesopotamia, 'the land between the rivers'. Today this land lies mostly in Iraq and Kuwait, with parts in Türkiye and southwestern Iran. The world's earliest city-based civilisation arose here.

Metal came late to this old farming land. Copper tools reached the river plain only around 4500 BCE, but once they did, farmers, craftworkers and traders all became more productive, and farming spread over the whole plain. As towns grew, some developed governments of their own and became city-states. From about 3500 BCE four city-based civilisations rose one after another: the Sumerian, the Akkadian, the Assyrian and the Babylonian (Mesopotamian timeline).

The Sumerians

Sumer, in the far south of Mesopotamia (today's southern Iraq), gets very little rain. Its people solved this by building dams and digging canals to carry river water to their fields, among the earliest irrigation systems we know. They also learnt to build with mud bricks and with fired (burnt) bricks, for homes, temples and thick city walls. Ur, Uruk, Lagash and Eridu were among their cities, and Sumer became the world's first civilisation centred on cities.

Stand in a Sumerian city and one building towers over everything: the ziggurat, a huge stepped temple for the city's chief god (Fig. 4.11). Sumerians believed in many gods who controlled floods, storms and other forces of nature, but each city had its own special protector. The temple was also the city's economic headquarters: farm work, trade and the movement of goods were organised through it, and its storerooms held the city's wealth. Yet ordinary people could not enter the sacred shrine; only high priests and priestesses, probably members of the ruling group, could. Society was clearly divided into ranks.

Away from the temple the contrast was sharp: a king's palace with many rooms, and streets of small brick houses for everyone else. Farming kept most families busy, but a walk through a Sumerian market would also have shown you metalworkers, potters, weavers and traders. Inlaid scenes on a decorated wooden box from Ur show people in draped clothes and jewellery, and carts with solid wheels pulled by animals.

The beginning of writing

Writing in Mesopotamia probably began with a practical worry: how do you keep track of who owes the temple how much barley? By about 3200 BCE Sumerian scribes had an answer, one of the world's earliest writing systems. They pressed the cut end of a reed into a tablet of damp clay, leaving small wedge-shaped dents. From the Latin cuneus, 'wedge', the script is called cuneiform, and it used several hundred different signs. By 3000 BCE, city-states all over Mesopotamia wrote in cuneiform even though their people spoke different languages, much as Hindi, Marathi and Nepali are all written in Devanagari today.

Learning hundreds of signs took years, so scribes were respected people, ranked close to priests and priestesses. Most surviving tablets are everyday records: grain stored and paid out, herds counted, rations for workers, loans and land sales. But scribes also wrote down myths and epics, hymns, laws and lessons for students, so the tablets let us hear the Mesopotamians' own voices.

The Akkadians

Akkad, a city to the north of Sumer in central Mesopotamia, took the lead in 2334 BCE. Its king Sargon and his successors brought city after city under their control, and Akkadian records describe one realm ruled by one family: the world's first dynastic empire. The Akkadians spoke a language quite different from Sumerian but borrowed the cuneiform signs to write it, just as English is written in an alphabet borrowed from Latin. It was also an age of creative literature.

Akkadian tablets also show where Mesopotamia's luxuries came from. Sargon boasted that ships from three eastern lands, Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha, tied up at the quay of his capital. Dilmun was Bahrain and Magan the Oman peninsula, both on the Persian Gulf, and most scholars think that Meluhha was the Harappan land. From the Harappans came beads of semi-precious stone, ivory, timber, gold dust and probably copper. Harappan-style carnelian beads and seals dug up in Mesopotamian cities such as Ur confirm the story.

The Assyrians

Akkad's lead lasted less than two centuries. Around 2154 BCE, by your textbook's dating, Assur, a city-state in the north, took over, and Assyrian power spread across Mesopotamia and into lands to the west and south. It lasted into the early 1700s BCE.

The Babylonians

Meanwhile, from about 1900 BCE, Babylon was rising in central Mesopotamia. Its most famous king, Hammurabi, came to the throne in 1792 BCE, defeated his neighbours one by one and built a large empire out of what had been a small city-state.

Hammurabi is best remembered for a collection of laws, the Code of Hammurabi, which set out rules on trade, property, family life, crime and punishment for his whole empire. It was carved in cuneiform on a tall stone pillar (a stele). At the top, a carving shows the king standing before Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice, as if receiving the laws from him. Many punishments were harsh, and they depended on a person's rank: harming a noble cost more than harming a commoner or a slave. Even so, laws written down for all to see became a model for many later legal systems.

Babylon's power did not last. By about 1400 BCE, your textbook notes, it had lost its leading place. Historians point to several causes working together:

• War: repeated attacks by the 11Rulers of a strong kingdom in Anatolia (modern Türkiye) in the second millennium BCE. Their language belongs to the Indo-European family, like Sanskrit. Hittites and other rising powers, who had mastered newer technologies and used natural resources more efficiently.
• Environment: damaged land and growing pressure on farmland.
• Problems at home: political and economic troubles inside the state.

4.7.2 Egyptian civilisation

Few ancient peoples left as much evidence as the Egyptians. Visitors wrote about them early: Greek and Roman authors knew Egypt well, and the Greek historian Herodotus toured it in the 5th century BCE. Much later, French scholars who travelled with Napoleon's army surveyed the country. Their giant illustrated volumes, the Description de l'Égypte, published in the early 19th century, made ancient Egypt famous across Europe.

Even richer are the Egyptians' own writings on papyrus. Some are practical: medical recipes, letters and accounts. Others are stories. Egyptian readers enjoyed fables about clever animals, ghost stories, tales of magic and romance, and a sea adventure about a shipwrecked sailor that is often compared with the voyages of Sindbad. One tale may even be an early 'Cinderella'. Scrolls were precious, so by about 2000 BCE they were kept in labelled jars on library shelves.

Egyptians watched the sky closely. They noticed that Sirius, the bright 'Dog Star', reappeared on the eastern horizon just before dawn at about the time the Nile began to rise. From this they built a calendar with three seasons of four months each, every month 30 days long:

• Akhet, inundation: the Nile floods the fields.
• Peret, growing: the water goes down, and crops are sown and grow.
• Shemu, harvest: crops are gathered before the next flood.

Five extra days at the end made a year of 365 days, a remarkably good result. But the real solar year is about a quarter of a day longer. So the calendar slipped by about one day every four years and slowly drifted out of step with the seasons.

The gift of the Nile

Without the Nile, Egypt would be desert. Every summer the river swelled and spread over its banks; when the water went down, it left a fresh layer of black silt that made the fields wonderfully fertile. Egyptians named their land Kemet, 'the black land', after this soil, and the barren desert beyond it Deshret, 'the red land'. As this narrow green strip fed more and more people, the first city-states appeared, around 3000 BCE.

Think about what it takes to share a river. Around 5,000 years ago Egyptian farmers began cutting ditches to steer Nile water into their fields and building reservoirs to save some for later. One family cannot dig a canal or repair a dam alone: whole villages had to work together, and someone had to decide who dug where and who got water first. Historians think such shared work produced Egypt's first organisers and officials, the beginnings of local government. Counting the days from one flood to the next also told Egyptians the length of their year.

Pharaohs, pyramids and daily life

Egyptians believed that every person had a ka, a spirit double that lived on after death but needed the body to survive. So a ruler's body had to be preserved by mummification and protected in a tomb, with food, furniture and treasure for the next life. As the rulers, called pharaohs, grew more powerful, their tombs grew too (Fig. 4.13).

Early royal burials lay deep underground beneath a mastaba, a low, flat-topped, rectangular building of mud brick or stone. Later builders piled ever-smaller mastabas on top of one another, and the result was a pyramid. A famous early example is the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, built for King Djoser about 4,600 years ago, with six giant steps.

What did Egyptians do for fun? On the river they swam and paddled canoes; at home they played senet, a board game found even in royal tombs; and music and dancing filled their celebrations. The biggest occasions were festivals. At a god's festival, the god's statue was carried in procession to the jingle of the sistrum, a rattle hung with metal discs. Other festivals honoured the pharaoh himself: the Sed festival, held in a king's thirtieth year on the throne, was meant to renew his strength.

4.7.3 The Chinese civilisation

China's story also begins with two rivers: the Huang He, or Yellow River, named for the yellow silt it carries, and the Yangtze further south. Farming villages lined both valleys by about 7000 BCE. Then came a long, slow build-up. Bronze working reached the villages of the Yellow River basin around 2000 BCE. Yet cities appeared only some four centuries later, around 1600 BCE, once farms were producing more and metalworkers and craftspeople had grown more skilled. With the cities came China's first Bronze Age state to rule a large territory.

Chinese historians count time by dynasties, ruling families that followed one another (China timeline). The Shang and the Zhou ruled in the Bronze Age, and iron was in common use by about 600 BCE. Later, the short-lived Qin dynasty unified China under its first emperor and probably gave the country its name, for Qin is also spelt Ch'in. The Han dynasty that followed lasted more than four centuries.

How do we know about early China?

Court historians in China wrote down events year after year for many centuries, so later periods are very well recorded. For the earliest times, though, historians turn to a stranger source: oracle bones. These were shoulder blades of oxen and the flat undershells of turtles, which Shang kings used to put questions to the spirits of their ancestors. Fig. 4.14 shows how. The questions reveal what worried the king. Will it rain? Will the harvest be good? Should we go to war? Read together, thousands of these questions show what the early Chinese hoped for and what frightened them; they are also the oldest Chinese writing.

Three materials stand out in early Chinese craft:

• Bronze: casters made weapons, tools and spectacular ritual vessels for food and wine.
• Jade: this hard, smooth stone was carved into ritual objects, figurines and ornaments that marked high rank. It was not found nearby and had to come from distant sources, so jade pieces probably also served as valued gifts in social dealings.
• Marble: carved into birds and animals, and used as bases for wooden pillars.

The Great Wall of China is not one wall built at one time. From about 680 BCE (your textbook's date), the Zhou and other states built separate stretches of wall against raids by nomadic peoples from the north. Later rulers linked them into a single line of defence, and building and repair went on for some two thousand years, until the 17th century CE.

The trade route that linked China with India and the Mediterranean is named after one Chinese product: silk. The Chinese were making silk from Neolithic times (about 4000–3000 BCE), and it became an important Bronze Age craft. Under the Han dynasty, around the 2nd century BCE, silk became a major export to lands in the west. In 1877 a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, gave the whole network the name we still use: the Silk Road, or Silk Route.

Shang society, like Egypt's, had a steep ladder of ranks by about 1500 BCE. A small group of rulers, nobles and aristocrats sat at the top, and most people, farmers and labourers, stood below them. Later Chinese society kept building on this layered pattern.

4.8 What the early civilisations shared

The four Bronze Age civilisations grew up far apart and largely on their own, yet Table 4.3 shows them following strikingly similar paths. Read across its rows and the same pattern appears again and again:

• River plains gave water, rich soil and easy transport.
• More food: better farming and new resources, such as copper and then bronze, produced a surplus.
• Cities grew, full of craftspeople, traders and other specialists.
• Government: each worked out its own system of rulers, officials and laws to keep the economy growing.
• Writing first kept accounts of grain, goods and work; later it recorded laws, prayers, stories and poems.
• Social layers ran from rulers and priests at the top to labourers at the bottom.

Many things we take for granted, from the 60-minute hour and the 365-day year to written laws and standard weights, have their roots in these Bronze Age civilisations. Use the sorter to test how well you can tell the periods and the civilisations apart.