Page 66 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

rendered his judgment: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.” According to the biblical account, “When all Israel heard the verdict the king had given, they held the king in awe, because they saw that he had wisdom from God to administer justice.” After Solomon’s death, Israel began to disintegrate. But how had such a small nation been able to survive as long as it did in a Near East dominated by mighty empires?
The weakening of Egypt around 1200 B.C.E. left no dominant powers in the Near East, allowing a patchwork of petty kingdoms and city-states to emerge, especially in Syria and Canaan. One of these small states, the Hebrew nation known as Israel, has played a role in Western civilization completely disproportionate to its size. The Hebrews played a minor part in the politics of the ancient Near East, but their spiritual heritage, in the form of Judeo- Christian values, is one of the basic pillars of Western civilization.
The small states did not last, however. Ever since the first city-states had arisen in the Near East around 3000 B.C.E., there had been a movement toward the creation of larger territorial states with more sophisticated systems of control. This process reached a high point in the first millennium B.C.E. with the assembling of vast empires. Between 1000 and 500 B.C.E., the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, and the Persians all established empires that encompassed large areas of the ancient Near East. Each had impressive and grandiose capital cities that emphasized the power and wealth of its rulers. Each brought peace and order for a time by employing new administrative techniques. Each eventually fell to other conquerors. In the long run, these large empires had less impact on Western civilization than the Hebrew people. In human history, the power of ideas is often more significant than the power of empires.
On the Fringes of Civilization
Q FOCUS QUESTION: What is the significance of the Indo-European-speaking peoples?
Western civilization took root in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but significant developments were also taking place on the fringes of these cultures. Farming had spread into the Balkan Peninsula of Europe by
6500 B.C.E., and by 4000 B.C.E. it was well established in southern France, central Europe, and the coastal regions of the Mediterranean. Although migrating farmers from the Near East may have brought some farming techniques into Europe, historians now believe that the Neolithic peoples of Europe domesticated ani- mals and began to farm largely on their own.
One outstanding feature of late Neolithic Europe was the building of megalithic structures. Megalith is Greek for “large stone.” Radiocarbon dating, a technique that allows scientists to determine the age of objects, shows that the first megalithic structures were built around 4000 B.C.E., more than a thousand years before the great pyramids were built in Egypt. Between 3200 and 1500 B.C.E., standing stones that were placed in circles or lined up in rows were erected throughout the British Isles and northwestern France. Other megalithic con- structions have been found as far north as Scandinavia and as far south as the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Malta. Some archaeologists have demonstrated that the stone circles were used as observatories to detect not only such simple astronomical phenomena as the midwinter and midsummer sunrises but also such com- plex phenomena as the major and minor standstills of the moon.
By far the most famous of these megalithic con- structions is Stonehenge in England. Stonehenge con- sists of a series of concentric rings of standing stones. Its construction sometime between 2100 and 1900 B.C.E. was no small accomplishment. The eighty blue- stones used at Stonehenge weigh four tons each and were transported to the site from their original source 135 miles away. Like other megalithic structures, Stonehenge indicates a remarkable awareness of as- tronomy on the part of its builders, as well as an impressive coordination of workers.
The Impact of the Indo-Europeans
For many historians, both the details of construc- tion and the purpose of the megalithic structures of Europe remain a mystery. Also puzzling is the role of the Indo-European people. The name Indo- European refers to people who used a language derived from a single parent tongue. Indo-European languages include Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and the Ger- manic languages (see Table 2.1). It has been suggested that the original Indo-European-speaking peoples were based somewhere in the steppe region north of the Black Sea or in southwestern Asia, in modern Iran or Afghanistan. Although there had been earlier
28 Chapter 2 The Ancient Near East: Peoples and Empires
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