Creation of irrigated agriculture in the Euphrates River valley. The most ancient states in Mesopotamia

The third period is the emergence of agriculture, from which cattle breeding then separated, and later crafts, trade, cities, and the state appeared, i.e., civilization began to form.

What caused the emergence of agriculture?

During the Neolithic (New Stone Age), significant warming began and the Earth acquired its modern appearance. Warming is gradually leading to the degradation of hunting tribes in the temperate zone, as the fauna moves north. Once again nature poses a challenge, again a dead end arises: either we survive or we die out. Those who found the right way out were forced to engage in farming. People have long known that a grain planted in the ground will produce several grains. But it was difficult to imagine that this hard, monotonous work would become the main thing, helping not to die of hunger. To this day, hunting remains in the genetic memory of humanity as a creative, interesting activity.

Gradually the epicenter world history moves to the region of the Middle East (Mesopotamian pocket - the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), as well as to the areas of the Nile, Indus and Yellow Rivers. Here agriculture arises on the basis of wheat and rice. In the New World, agriculture developed on the basis of maize. An era begins with agriculture producing economy.

Consequences of farming:

1. There is a social (instead of natural) division of labor. Farmers, cattle breeders, artisans and those who exchange manufactured products appear.

2. An increase in labor productivity by approximately 100 times has led to an increase in the value of a person: each person has turned, first of all, into a worker who can produce more than is necessary to physically support his life. An increase in labor productivity leads to the appearance of some surpluses in excess of the required minimum; the appearance of surplus means that they can be accumulated (especially since it is, first of all, grain, and not, for example, root crops); the accumulated amount can be appropriated. Those who somehow carried out this appropriation gradually formed a class of owners. At the other pole of society, a class deprived of property appeared. These are those who can be exploited and the results of their labor appropriated.

3. The emergence of the state. There was an overwhelming majority of those exploited in early class societies. First of all, these are slaves, peasants. Such a mass of the population had to be “kept in check,” which was carried out both by brute force (various detachments of armed men), and through economic suppression (if you want to be fed, work, pay taxes), and through spiritual suppression (social inequality is an eternal, divine order). In addition, agriculture required large-scale joint irrigation work. Signs of a state: 1) territory; 2) public power, including rulers, squads, army, police, courts, prisons, overseers; 3) taxes from the population.

4. On the basis of agriculture, logical, otherwise conceptual or abstract thinking, and then writing arose. The presence of concepts is a sign of civilized thinking. A concept is a generalization in a word of any important properties of an object or process. For example, wooden, animal, human, quantity, quality.

5. Ideas about wealth are improved: a person acquires numerous objects - a hut, a cart, a potter's wheel, grain reserves, etc. But most importantly material wealth - land, no longer as hunting territory, but fertile soil, as well as money. Significantly developing and spiritual wealth: The division of labor and the emergence of a class that could afford the luxury of not having to engage in everyday physical labor and have plenty of leisure became the basis for the emergence of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, religion, the first scientific knowledge, and wonderful works of art.

6. The value of a person has increased significantly. Now he is a worker creating some useful product.

So, the most important consequence of agriculture is emergence of civilization: cities, public order, writing, social inequality, exploitation, classes. Before the advent of agriculture, the entire history of mankind went one way and in one direction. Starting with agriculture, various paths and development options appeared. Started multivariate story.

Let's consider three known paths human development based on agriculture.

Asia Society .

The transition to agriculture and, accordingly, to a class society did not occur throughout the entire territory of human settlement. Initially in the Nile Valley and in the interfluve - the Tigris and Euphrates region. Subsequently, the development of mankind proceeded:

a) along the lines of the emergence of new independent centers of historical development (for example, the Indus and Yellow River valleys);

b) through the formation of a large number of states in the Middle East.

Features of Asian society.

1. Agriculture led to the emergence of centralized government and, consequently, to the emergence of the state. Labor under these conditions could only be collective, since cultivating the land, drainage, irrigation, and building irrigation structures with primitive tools required enormous energy costs. In other words: centralized power (the state) arises in this case from production necessity, and not because someone thought it up or planned it.

2. The division into classes and social groups in Asian society occurs on the basis of the place they occupy in the social labor system. For example, in India castes arose and existed for a long time.

3. The main subject of labor (main productive force) in this society there was a community where formally everyone was free, but in fact no one, not even the pharaoh.

4. Asian society was very resilient. It existed for thousands of years and was destroyed from outside, for example, India. This - dead end path development of humanity in the sense that it could not naturally give rise to a society of a fundamentally new quality.

Ancient society.

An ancient or slave-owning society arose on the Balkan Peninsula, in Asia Minor, in the territory of modern Italy. During the period when they appeared slaveholding states, in other regions of the Earth continued to exist Asian society.

Features of a slave society .

1. The original inequality of people: Hellenes and barbarians, free and slaves. Democracy and humanism exist only for the Hellenes, for the free, and a slave is just a thing, a “talking instrument.”

2. The subject of labor (the main productive force) is a slave, or more precisely: a slave + a tool of labor.

The slave-owning path of development, just like the Asian one, is dead end, i.e., it did not give a new quality. Antiquity was also destroyed from the outside.

Feudal society arises on the territory of modern France and then spreads to other, initially European states.

Features of feudal society.

1. The subject of labor here is an individual (peasant, artisan, etc.), and not a community, as in Asian societies, and not a slave + a tool of labor, as in slaveholding societies.

2. The feudal mode of production is the only one of all those named that naturally from its depths gave birth to a fundamentally new society based on personal initiative, competition and competition. Such a new society scientific literature called classical capitalism, bourgeois society, the era of primitive accumulation of capital, industrial or industrial society. The path to this society lay through the development of trade, the colonization of new lands, great geographical discoveries, and bourgeois revolutions.

The oldest slave-owning society and states emerged in the southern part of the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at approximately the same time as in Egypt. Here arises the second most important center of civilization, which had an impact big influence on the political, economic and cultural history of the entire ancient world.

Decomposition of the primitive communal system in Mesopotamia.

Natural conditions and population of Mesopotamia.

The flat part of the country, located between the Tigris and Euphrates in their lower and middle reaches, is usually called the Greek word Mesopotamia (Interfluve). The natural conditions and historical destinies of the northern and southern parts of Mesopotamia are different. Therefore, its southern part, where the flow of both rivers converged (mainly to the south of the area of ​​the capital of modern Iraq - Baghdad), we identify under the name “Mesopotamia”.

This part of the Mesopotamian plain is filled with sediments of rivers that periodically overflow during the spring and summer due to the melting of snow in the upper mountain regions. The most ancient settlements, which were the centers of formation of the first states, were located on both banks along the lower reaches of both rivers, mainly the Euphrates, whose waters are easier to use for agriculture without special water-lifting devices. For use in autumn cultivation of the land, spill waters had to be collected in special reservoirs. The Euphrates and Tigris, in addition to their enormous role as sources of irrigation, are the main transport arteries of the country.

The climate in Mesopotamia is hot and dry. Quantities atmospheric precipitation not much, and they fall mainly in winter. As a result, agriculture is possible mainly on soils naturally irrigated by river floods or artificially irrigated. On such soils, a wide variety of crops can be grown and high and sustainable yields can be obtained.

The Mesopotamian plain is bordered on the north and east by the marginal mountains of the Armenian and Iranian highlands; in the west it borders on the Syrian steppe and the deserts of Arabia. From the south, the plain is bordered by the Persian Gulf, into which the Tigris and Euphrates flow. Currently, both of these rivers, 110 km before flowing into the sea, merge into a single river stream - the Shatt el-Arab, but in ancient times the sea wedged much deeper to the northwest and both rivers flowed into it separately. The center of the origin of the ancient civilization was located right here, in the southern part of Mesopotamia.
The natural resources that could be used by the ancient population of the plain are small - reeds, clay, and in rivers and swampy lakes - fish. Of the tree species it can be noted date palm, producing nutritious and tasty fruits, but low quality wood. There was a lack of stone and metal ores necessary for the development of the economy.

The most ancient population of the country, who laid the foundations of civilization in Mesopotamia, were the Sumerians; it can be argued that already in the 4th millennium BC. e. The Sumerians were the main population of Mesopotamia. The Sumerians spoke a language whose relationship with other languages ​​has not yet been established. The physical type of the Sumerians, if you trust the surviving statues and reliefs that usually quite roughly convey the appearance of a person, was characterized by a round face with a large straight nose.

From the 3rd millennium BC. e. Cattle-breeding Semitic tribes begin to penetrate into Mesopotamia from the Syrian steppe. The language of this group of Semitic tribes is called Akkadian or Babylonian-Assyrian, according to the later names that this group of Semites acquired already in Mesopotamia. At first they settled in the northern part of the country, turning to agriculture. Then their language spread to the southern part of Mesopotamia; By the end of the 3rd millennium, the final mixing of the Semitic and Sumerian populations took place.
Various Semitic tribes at this time made up the bulk of the pastoral population of Western Asia; the territory of their settlement covered the Syrian steppe, Palestine and Arabia.

Northern Mesopotamia and the marginal highlands of Iran, bordering the Tigris and Euphrates valleys on the east, were inhabited by numerous tribes who spoke languages ​​whose family ties have not yet been established; some of them may have been close to certain modern Caucasian languages. In the northern part of Mesopotamia and on the tributaries of the Tigris, settlements of the Hurrian tribes are early attested by monuments; further to the east, in the mountains, lived the Lullubei and Gutei (Kutii). The river valleys of Southwestern Iran adjacent to Mesopotamia were occupied by the Elamites.

For the most part, these and tribes close to them in the 4th-3rd millennia BC. e. were settled mountain farmers and semi-sedentary pastoralists who still lived under the conditions of a primitive communal system. It was they who created the Eneolithic “culture of painted ceramics” in Western Asia; their settlements - Tell Halaf, Tell Brak, Arnachia, Tepe-Gaura, Samarra, and deeper in the highlands of Iran Tepe-Giyan, Tepe-Sialk, Tepe-Gissar, Tureng-Tepe - allow us to judge the nature of the development of the tribes engaged in mining -stream farming during the Neolithic and Eneolithic periods. Most of them at first were still ahead in their development of the tribes that inhabited Mesopotamia, and only from the second half of the 4th millennium the population of Mesopotamia quickly overtook their neighbors.
Only among the Elamites in the lower reaches of the Karuna and Kerkh rivers did class society emerge, only a little later than in Sumer.

Monuments of the 3rd millennium indicate that by sea route along the Persian Gulf. Sumer was connected with other countries. Cuneiform texts mention the island of Dilmun and the countries of Magan and Meluhha, famous for gold and ebony. Only Dilmun is indisputably identified with the present-day Bahrain Islands off the coast of Eastern Arabia, so we cannot definitely say how far the sea connections of Mesopotamia extended. However, epic songs about the travels of Sumerian heroes to the east, “beyond the seven mountains,” and about friendly relations with the local population, as well as seals with images of Indian elephants and signs of Indian writing, which were found in the settlements of Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. e., make us think that there were connections with the Indus Valley.

Less certain are the data on the earliest connections with Egypt; however, some features of the earliest Chalcolithic culture of Egypt force a number of researchers to assume the existence of such connections, and some historians suggest that in the last third of the 3rd millennium BC. e. There were military clashes between Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Ancient settlements in Mesopotamia.

The example of the history of the peoples of Mesopotamia clearly shows how the influence of conditions geographical environment on the course of historical development has relative character. The geographical conditions of Mesopotamia have hardly changed over the past 6-7 thousand years. However, if at present Iraq is a backward, semi-colonial state, then in the Middle Ages, before the devastating Mongol invasion in the 13th century, as well as in antiquity, Mesopotamia was one of the richest and most populated countries in the world. The flourishing of Mesopotamian culture, therefore, cannot be explained only by the country’s favorable natural conditions for agriculture. If we look even further back into the centuries, it turns out that the same country in the 5th and even partly in the 4th millennium BC. e. was a country of swamps and lakes overgrown with reeds, where a rare population huddled along the shores and on islands, pushed into these disastrous places from the foothills and steppes by stronger tribes.
Only with the further development of Neolithic technology and the transition to the Metal Age did the ancient population of Mesopotamia become able to take advantage of those features of the geographical environment that had previously been unfavorable. With the increase in human technical equipment, these geographical conditions turned out to be a factor that accelerated historical development tribes who settled here.

The oldest settlements discovered in Mesopotamia date back to the beginning of the 4th millennium BC. e., to the period of transition from the Neolithic to the Eneolithic. One of these settlements was excavated under the El Obeid hill. Such hills (tells) were formed on the plain of Mesopotamia on the site of ancient settlements through the gradual accumulation of building remains, clay from mud bricks, etc. The population living here was already sedentary, knew simple agriculture and cattle breeding, but hunting and fishing still played a role big role. The culture was similar to that of the foothills, but poorer. Weaving and pottery were known. Stone tools predominated, but copper products had already begun to appear.

Around the middle of the 4th millennium BC. e. include the lower layers of the Uruk excavations. At this time, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia knew the cultures of barley and emmer, and domestic animals included bulls, sheep, goats, pigs and donkeys. If the dwellings of El Obeid were predominantly reed huts, then during the excavations of Uruk relatively large buildings made of raw brick were found. The first pictographic (pictorial) inscriptions on clay tiles (“tablets”) date back to this period, the second half of the 4th millennium - ancient monuments writing systems of Mesopotamia. The most ancient written monument of Mesopotamia - a small stone tablet - is kept in the Soviet Union in the State Hermitage (Leningrad).
By the end of the 4th and the very beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. include layers of excavations of the Jemdet-Nasr hill, not far from another ancient city of Mesopotamia - Kish, as well as later layers of Uruk. Excavations show that pottery production reached significant development here. Tools made of copper are found in increasing numbers, although tools made of stone and bone are still widely used. The wheel was already known and cargo was transported not only with packs, but on swampy soil on sleds, but also with wheeled vehicles. There were already public buildings and temples built from raw brick, significant in size and artistic design (the first temple buildings appeared at the beginning of the previous period).

Development of agriculture.

Those Sumerian tribes that settled in Mesopotamia were able, already in ancient times, to begin in various places in the valley to drain the swampy soil and to use the waters of the Euphrates, and then the Lower Tigris, creating the basis for irrigation agriculture. The alluvial (alluvial) soil of the valley was soft and loose, and the banks were low; therefore, it was possible even with imperfect tools to build canals and dams, reservoirs, dams and dams. Carrying out all this work required a large number of workers, so it was beyond the power of either an individual family, a primitive community, or even a small association of such communities. It became possible at a different, higher level of social development, when the unification of many communities took place.

Work on the creation of an irrigation system was possible only at a certain level of technological development, but they, in turn, inevitably had to contribute to the further development of agricultural technology, as well as the improvement of the tools that were used for digging work. In drainage and irrigation work, tools with metal parts are beginning to be used. In connection with the growth of the irrigation economy, the more intensive use of metal should have led to very important social results.

The growth of labor productivity led to the possibility of producing a surplus product, which created not only the necessary preconditions for the emergence of exploitation, but also led to the emergence in communities that initially conducted collective farming of strong families interested in organizing separate independent farms and striving to seize the best lands. These families eventually form a tribal aristocracy, taking control of tribal affairs into their own hands. Since the tribal aristocracy had better weapons than ordinary members of the community, it began to capture most of the military spoils, which in turn contributed to increased property inequality.

The emergence of slavery.


Already during the period of the decomposition of the primitive communal system, the Sumerian tribes used slave labor (mentions of female slaves, and then slaves, are available in documents from the period of the Jemdet-Nasr culture), but they used it to a very limited extent. The first irrigation canals were dug by free members of the communities, but the development of a large-scale irrigation economy required a significant amount work force. Free representatives of society continued to work on the creation of the irrigation network, but slave labor was increasingly used for excavation work.
The victorious cities also involved the population of the conquered communities in the work of artificial irrigation. This is evidenced by reflecting the conditions of the beginning)