The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [16]
Sumer gave the world another item easily recognizable today, a numbering system based on 60, the sexagesimal system (!!—are they kidding?). Never heard of it? Recall that our time base is 60—sixty seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour. The number of degrees in a circle (360) is also from the base of 60. Therefore, the basis of modern time and writing came from the long ago land of Sumer.
The Bronze Age replaced the Stone Age about 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. Metallurgy made remarkable advances and became a mainstay of urban civilization. Bronze is a mixture of copper and tin, which makes bronze much harder than copper alone. Bronze Age tools were superior to Stone or copper tools. Craftsmen turned out better plows, needles, tools for tending crops, and weapons. Such useful knowledge and materials quickly reached other areas. Bronze weapons gave the city folks an edge over nomads persistently battering at their gates. In China, the Bronze Age began earlier than the Middle East, and it seems each area independently developed its metalworking expertise. How is it that two widely separated civilizations both discovered that tin mixed with copper produced a harder metal? Can it be that humans think along similar lines no matter where they are located?
Figure 3 Sargon of Agade—first conquer
Human beings are endlessly competitive it seems, and that bit of human nature immediately caused trouble. As originally constituted, the cities of Sumer comprised twelve independent city-states. Then a fellow named Sargon of Agade invaded and conquered the cities in 2334 BC, thereby establishing himself as the ruler of them all. It is said that Sargon was the world’s first conquer, although Menes of Egypt seems to have been ahead of him. He expanded his empire, but it did not last, and the city-state system returned with the city of Ur being the big dog of the pack for a few hundred years. Ur fell around 2000 BC to other invaders, and the story of the Middle East—and the world—has not changed since. One empire after another conquered the area of Sumer, or part of it, only to be overthrown by another in due time. The Middle East is a key starting point for urban civilization, and war and conquest emerged instantly thereafter. It seems civilization got off to a bad start and never recovered.
These early wars were horrible. Imagine you live in a walled “city” of 8,000 people (men, women, and children), meaning you can field an army of less than 2,000 maximum. The normal figure for fighting men would be twenty percent of the population, or about 1,600 men in this instance. Assume an army of 5,000 well-armed invaders appear demanding that your city send out wagonloads of copper and grain, plus all the girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. Your choices are: (1) give them what they want, knowing a similar bounty will be required every year, moreover, your girls will suffer rape and slavery in a faraway land; or (2) fight, knowing defeat means burning your city, slavery for your young men, slaughter for the older citizens, and rape and slavery for your all your girls. These were the hard choices faced by the city’s leaders. The city’s army was like a college football team; the biggest, strongest, and most athletic young men the city can muster will fight the invader, probably within sight of the city.[8] If your young men lose, you get to watch them butchered as you contemplate your own demise. A “win” still requires the death and wounding of many of the city’s young men; however, you keep your independence and your property. Nevertheless, the invaders may regroup and return. As one can see the choices were anything but good.
Abraham
Around 2000 BC a man left Ur with his wife and traveled west, eventually settling in the land of Canaan which we now call Israel or Palestine. This one man was to be the father of the world’s three great monotheistic