I am sure most of you are wondering why the Oral English teacher is not teaching boring things like the Center Test or TOEIC. Well, there is an easy answer. It’s a waste of time. It is not a waste of my time because it’s actually very easy for me to prepare and teach these stupid classes. All I have to do is find a good listening book, make copies, put the CD into the CD player and push “play”. However, how useful is this for you as a student? How much do you actually learn? How interesting is it for you? Will you remember this class and the endless listening tasks I gave you in 5 years? I doubt it!

So, today we begin something new and dangerous. I am actually going to teach you history, geography, archaeology, and politics in ENGLISH!!!!! Don’t panic! I will teach it in an easy way and will put everything online so you can read the lessons on your computer at home. You will also have plenty of reading to do and of course, you will need to make vocabulary lists for each lesson. It is a good idea to get you a new notebook for your history class! You will have a lot of new material to read and you need someplace to keep it organized. Of course, there will be TESTS so having an organized history notebook will be very useful for you!

Why are we doing this? Well, I want to “kill two birds with one stone”. Do you know this expression? It means to successfully do two things at the same time. In this case you will learn English and at the same time you will learn other subjects like history, geography, archaeology, and politics. This will help make you a clever person and also make preparing for entrance exams much easier. So, you see, I am doing you a BIG FAVOR and creating a lot of extra work for myself!

I am actually an archaeologist NOT an English teacher! At university I studied archaeology, history, anthropology, and politics. I used to teach classes at my university in African Politics, Middle East Politics, and the Politics of Developing Societies. I worked as an archaeologist in the country of Belize in Central America for 3 years.

 I was also a soldier and I served as a peace keeper in the Caribbean country of Haiti.

 So, I have seen a lot of history up close and personal. Now I want to share these experiences with you and maybe motivate you to do learn more about the world we live in and most of all, (this is the dangerous part), to QUESTION EVERYTHING!!!!

Do you think President Bush studied history? Of course he didn't! If he understood history he never would have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan! You see, we weren't the first to invade these countries and suffer horrible defeat. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s and the British in the 1840s. Both countries suffered defeat!! Do you think Bush knew that? I doubt it.

Do you think the American soldiers who went to Iraq knew the British had fought the same war in the 1920s?

You see, history is constantly repeating itself. We fight the same wars and face the same problems over and over again.

Why were Americans shocked over the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941 when the Japanese navy did the same thing to the Russians at Port Authur in 1903? The list is endless.

Yet, like gullible children we believe everything the government or our teachers tell us without question! Don't be stupid, students! Think for yourself! Understand the past and you will understand the future!

Ancient History

Now, let begin at the beginning! Let's go back in time to about 25,000 years ago.

How Complex Society Developed:
The first thing we have to talk about is the development of complex societies and complex technology. Have you ever wondered how modern state society developed? What were the steps in this process? Well, anthropologists devised a very simple scale by which we measure human social complexity. It is divided into four levels from simplest to most complex: Band – Tribe – Chiefdom – State. Let’s look at these more closely.

The simplest social organization is known as a “band” and consists of a few small family groups living together.

The men are hunters and the women are “gatherers” (people who collect nuts, berries, wild fruits, and other edible plants). They are nomadic which means they are constantly on the move from one place to another following the migrations of wild animals. Decisions about the group are usually made by the best hunter. They use stone and bone tools and may have mastered the art of fire making and have basic animistic religious concepts which vary from group to group. They eat (and are often eaten by) wild animals.

We can still see bands of hunters and gathers today in the Amazon and in parts of Africa.

Next we have a large and more complex organization known as a “tribe”. A tribe is usually a collection of bands that are connected by family ties. They are less nomadic than bands. This means they stay in one place for longer periods of time. They hunt wild animals, gather edible plants and grow food on a small scale.

Decisions affecting the whole tribe are made by group consensus. In other words, if the majority of the tribe wants to move closer to the mountains, then that is what the tribe will do. It is also an “egalitarian” society meaning that people are generally treated equally although some people will have higher status than others based on special skills, knowledge or family relationships. Leadership is usually assumed by the oldest members of the group.

A “chiefdom” is a much more complex organization. It is almost always sedentary meaning it does not move from place to place. It is much larger than a tribe and could be described as a large collection of tribes who have decided to join together.

 It is not egalitarian. There are elites with high status and commoners with low status. There are full-time religious specialists who have great power over members of the chiefdom. There is a ruling family or chief who rules the chiefdom with the assistance of religious priests. There is also a weak bureaucratic organization which serves the chief and his priests. Competition for power and position among elite families often causes division of the tribe along family lines. A chiefdom is usually an unstable form of social organization.

Finally, we have the state. It should be familiar to you because you live in a state! A state is a large social organization composed of many different communities of people who may or may not share the same language, culture and religion but share a common state identity in the form of an official passport.

A state has a clearly defined territory with a recognized border which it will defend. It is highly organized with a centralized government bureaucracy that has the power to collect taxes, print money, raise an army, make and enforce laws, administer justice, build roads and other public work projects and draft you into government service either as a soldier or as an involuntary laborer. The state is the only society that has the power to officially order your death, for example,

as punishment for a crime or simply because they do not like you or your opinions. Governments also like to employ bullies to frighten or coerce you into conformity.

For much of human history we have lived in the simplest for of social organization, the tribe. Our earliest ancestors were simple hunters and gatherers who only occasionally encountered other groups of humans. There was plenty of open land and thus our early human ancestors had little reason to collect in larger groups. Populations rose and fell for a variety of reasons but perhaps the most significant factor was climactic change. About 15,000 years ago the weather began to grow warmer, especially in the Mediterranean and the Near East, what is now known as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine.

With warmer weather came more plants and more importantly, more varieties of edible plants like barley, wheat, and chickpeas. Early humans gradually learned to eat these edible grains and to even cultivate them in an organized way. Gradually many hunting bands came to rely more and more on agriculture until there was no longer any reason to continue their nomadic lifestyle. They began to settle on good agricultural land and build primitive homes. Thus, nomadic hunters became sedentary farmers.

This change did not, of course, occur overnight. It took many hundreds of years in some areas and less time in other places. This change in human history is known as the Agricultural Revolution and it was one of the most important developmental events in human history.

Thus, it is in the Near East and the Mediterranean that we begin to see the development of complex society. This is why we refer to this area today as the “Cradle of Civilization”. But why did farming lead to more complex societies. Well, farming requires a lot of labor and more importantly it requires a lot of organization. People organized themselves into groups to do the heavy work of farming in a cooperative way. Gradually some people became better at some particular task and that was the task that he would continue to do as would his children. It might be making a particular tool or some utility item like rope or a wooden bucket. Sometimes the skill would be mental rather than physical. A person might be good at the more scientific aspects of farming. For example, predicting the weather or understanding the changing seasons. Eventually they became less directly involved in the farming and more involved in supporting the farmer’s labor. This is known as the specialization of labor.

People gradually became specialists and were rewarded for their special skills by receiving food in return for their specialized knowledge.

Another factor for the development of complex society can be seen in the image above. Look at the middle section. What do you see? Cows? Yes, that is a cow although it doesn't look much like the cows we see today. These are some of the first domesticated cows ever depicted by humans. They are descended from a wild breed of cattle known as aurochs which were massive, aggressive animals that stood over two meters high. Gradually humans learned the art of taming or domesticating these animals by first capturing alive their young and then raising them by hand. Other wild animals were domesticated in the same way. Cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, etc. Instead of going out looking for wild animals to kill, ancient people learned to domesticate animals for food and for labor. It was no longer necessary for them to be nomadic. A sedentary lifestyle was easier.

A sedentary lifestyle with a reliable and stable source of food created larger populations. Before the agricultural revolution unnecessary children were simply abandoned to die in the forest. They were a burden to nomadic people. However, once people began to settle down to an agricultural lifestyle, children provided a valuable and cheap labor source for farm families. The larger the family the greater the labor force. Think about your grandparents. How many brothers and sisters did they have? Quite a few I would imagine because they were most likely rice farmers. Expanding populations meant that not everyone had to be a farmer. Some could do other things not directly related to farming.

In the bottom panel of the above image we can see a man holding domesticated ducks. These animals were raised not just for personal consumption but also for trade. Look at the man standing to the left of the duck man. He has two large baskets or crates which he is carrying somewhere, perhaps to a market. Possibly he is a duck seller? Having a surplus of domesticated animals or food meant that people could trade these surpluses with people who needed these items. Thus, trade began. Trade requires transportation networks, warehouses, ports, and a method of long-distance communication: a writing system. It is not surprising that the first writing systems evolved in Mesopotamia and that they related to trading activities.

The weather is also an important factor. When there is plenty of rain farmers are happy. But when there is a lack of rain, what happens? The farmers despair as they watch their crops wither and die. Now this may be bad for the farmer but it was good for human development. Why? Well, think about it. If your life is easy and your rich parents give you a nice allowance, how hard will you study? How hard will you seek to develop new and useful skills? Not much. But, what about the opposite situation? Your parents are poor and you have no allowance. What would you do? You would get off your butt and start studying and you would find a way to make money by using your brain. This is sort of what happened in the Near East or Mesopotamia. Farmers there had access to two very nice rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. There was plenty of water there but the problem was how to get it to the farmers? Some clever fellow decided that if the farmer couldn’t go to the water, the water would go to the farmer! This is known as irrigation!!!!

And it was the complex planning and intensive, cooperative labor of building irrigation canals that led to the development of even more complex social organizations and the further division of society into different classes: slaves, peasants, land owners, bureaucrats, religious specialists, princes, and kings.

Around 8,000BC some of the world's first towns developed. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of two of the earliest cities in Palestine and in Turkey. the ancient city of Jericho had a population of about 2,000 people around this time. It was a walled city, well-defended with towers and ditches.

At Catal Hüyük in Turkey archaeologist have uncovered an even larger city surrounded by marshes and farmland.

It is interesting to note that Jericho was surrounded by walls and guarded by towers and defensive ditches. Why? Well, wealth attracts trouble. Not everyone wanted to shovel cow poop for the rest of their lives. Some people became outlaws. These people, as you might guess, lived by stealing from the weak or careless. Bandits must have been a serious problem around Jericho if they felt it was necessary to build large defensive walls and towers. However, something else was needed to defend the city. How about police or soldiers? Well, that is what happened, At first these were city residents who joined together in an emergency. However, as the city became richer a more reliable and better trained force became necessary. Here we can see the emergence of the first military/police organizations.


Thus, people moved from bands to tribes to chiefdoms and eventually states!

Ancient Egypt

By 5000 BC, farming had become the full-time occupation of people living along the Nile. Twice a year the rains would cause the river to flood bringing nutrient-rich soil to the agricultural fields along the river. Because of the floods, these rivers became incredibly productive. Farmers could produce tremendous amounts of wheat and barley. The Nile was thus seen as a source of life to these farmers. They began to worship the life-giving force of the Nile.

 Villages began to develop along the high ground near the river. Greater concentrations of farmers meant that less productive land was occupied and irrigation networks were devised to bring the waters of the Nile to dry land. Complex social activities like irrigation demanded bureaucratic organizations to control and direct large numbers of workers. As more land became productive, greater amounts of food could be grown. Surpluses would have been traded to people up and down the Nile.

Long distance trade with other people along the Mediterranean became easier once a writing system was developed. A writing system also enabled bureaucrats to record the number or amounts of items being traded and most importantly, to take a portion of the trade profits for themselves in the form of tariffs. In Egypt, this early form of writing utilized small pictures or symbols to represent words. This became known as hieroglyphs and they can still be seen amongst the ruins of ancient Egypt.

As these villagers grew wealthier, they would need even more complex bureaucratic organizations to control security amongst many other things. This element is perhaps the most important. Security can only be obtained if there is some means of recognizing right and wrong. This means that there must be some sort of rules by which society functions, in other words, laws. Once the rules of society are established there must be some organization which enforces these laws and punishes those who ignore or break the rules, in other words, a police force. However, in some cases a police force cannot protect a community against a large group of bad guys, for example, people from a rival village who decide to burn your village, steal your food, and carry off your women and children as slaves. In cases like this we need a military organization, either full-time or part-time, that can deal with these sorts of serious threats.

Archaic Egypt (3100 – 2650BC)

Well, how did a state develop in ancient Egypt in 3000BC? Well, two rival chiefdoms, one in the north and one in the south, went to war over who would dominate the land along the Nile. In this war, the southern chiefdom, led by the warrior-king Menes, emerged victorious and united all of the communities along the Nile into one powerful kingdom.

Now, for the first time in Africa, a large scale state had come into existence and with it all of the characteristics of a state: a government, full-time bureaucracy, a military, laws and a judicial system, a police force, taxes, all within a well-defined territory.

King Menes was not just an ordinary king either. He defined himself as a “god-king” – a living god on earth whose commands were instantly obeyed and his body worshipped. This type of state is known as a theocratic state and was to dominate Egyptian history for the next 3,000 years. Each and every king which followed was believed to be a god and thus, divine. While this may seem ridiculous to us in the 21^st century it wasn’t so long ago here in Japan that the same ideas existed. Ask your grandparents if they were even allowed to look at a photograph of Emperor Hirohito when they were children. Perhaps we are not so modern as we think, right?

The Old Kingdom (2650 – 2134BC)

This was the richest and most creative period in Egyptian history. The wars to unify the country ended. Large scale irrigation projects changed previously unusable land into productive agricultural areas. Agricultural surpluses on a tremendous scale meant that trade with other regions began on a large scale. Plenty of food also meant people had the resources to have more children. Thus, during the period of the Old Kingdom a population explosion occurred which created a surplus population that was not needed simply as agricultural workers. These surplus people meant that the kings of this period had a huge labor supply that could be used for their own personal projects. In fact, it is at this time that we see the construction of the great pyramids.

King Djoser built the first known as the “Step-Pyramid” because it was a simple construction based on six platforms built one on top of the other.

Later kings changed the design as their building techniques improved and their knowledge of geometry developed. The most famous pyramids were built in the lifetimes of only four kings, Snorfu, Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus.

These pyramids were built as a symbol of the king’s power and contained his tomb and rooms filled will all of the objects that the dead king would need in the afterlife.

For, as you may have guessed, the god-king did actually die but this was simply explained as the death of his earthly body. As a god-king he was expected to have an afterlife among the other gods and he would need all of his possessions in this new life including his human body which was carefully mummified in a long and complicated process. This is why we find mummies even today.

The Middle Kingdom (2040-1640BC)

This next period began after the collapse of the Old Kingdom. A series of droughts and poor growing seasons caused widespread starvation in ancient Egypt. The state fell apart and there was a long period in which a series of chiefdoms developed around major cities. Eventually order was restored and the power of the state was reestablished by a new set of kings. Their names are not really important to be honest with you. What is important to remember is that even the greatest states rise and fall. The god-kings of the Old Kingdom must have seemed like real gods to any Egyptian who saw them and the state they developed was one of the most powerful and prosperous the ancient world had seen up to that point. Yet, within a few years it was all swept away by an environmental and ecological disaster. This is the important things I want you to remember! Even the greatest powers will fall! No man is a god and no man is more powerful than nature!

         An interesting point to remember about the Middle Kingdom is that it was the first time large numbers of foreign people migrated into ancient Egypt. The Egyptian government would not allow these immigrants the rights and privileges granted to Egyptians even though they were forced to pay taxes and tariffs. Rejected by the government and discriminated against by the Egyptian people, these foreign people were forced to form their own communities outside of Egyptian society. Eventually, these disenfranchised communities formed their own governments which eventually became more organized and more powerful that the local Egyptian kings. Over a period of a hundred years, small, independent city-states, ruled by foreigners developed as the weak Egyptian government collapsed into impotent disarray. These foreign kings and their small, independent kingdoms were known as the Hyksos and they controlled Egypt for a short time until the Egyptians could reorganize themselves and drive them from power.

         What can we learn from the Hyksos? Well, in this modern age immigration has become a necessity for many countries, especially Japan with its aging population and declining birthrate. Without immigration eventually Japan will simply become a nation of obatarians with nobody to take care or support them. Perhaps, it might be better to create a society in which the best and the brightest immigrants are welcomed and given an opportunity to assimilate and become citizens. Now, many well-educated foreigners are treated like criminals in Japan and face a lot of discrimination when it comes to renting an apartment or buying a home. Right-wing groups harass them and even attack them without provocation while the police stand by and laugh. Even the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, regularly makes disparaging remarks about foreign people and uses racist slurs to describe Asians.

On the other hand, other developed countries have encouraged the best and brightest to immigrate to their countries so that their citizens can benefit. The American space program would have never made it to the moon if German scientists hadn’t provided their knowledge and expertise. Universities in Europe and America welcome foreign teachers and researchers and receive in return the tremendous financial benefits gained from their inventions and their expertise. Even Japanese researchers go to America where they can freely conduct their research and obtain well-paid positions in American universities and research institutions. Ordinary Japanese have also left Japan and immigrated to the USA and other countries so that in some places in America like Hawaii there are more Japanese than Caucasians, Hispanics, or African Americans! As a matter of fact, on average, 7,000 Japanese people become citizens of the USA every year. How many Americans are allowed to become citizens of Japan each year? Less than 10! And those are usually sumo wrestlers or soccer players! So, what will happen to Japan in the future if it doesn’t rethink its animosity towards immigrants? Remember the Hyksos!

The New Kingdom (1550 – 1070)

The war to recover Egypt from the Hyksos created a powerful military elite in Egypt. They began expelling foreigners and built large fortifications along the Egyptian border to keep them out. Their large armies became restive so they invaded Palestine and Syria and seized territory there forcing the people to pay tribute and heavy taxes to the Egyptian state. To the south, Nubia was also invaded and occupied.
Egypt was indeed, a very powerful state at this time. Much of the great monumental architecture that we marvel at today was build during this period. However, like all great empires it was destined to rise and fall. Again, the culprit was environmental. Another series of droughts and a disruption in world weather patterns caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland caused a decrease in food production. A series of weak kings who were unable to control the corruption of their own bureaucrats led to much unrest amongst the Egyptian people.

A conflict for power between the priests and King Ramses XI led to chaos, insecurity and eventually a series of foreign invasions and occupations, first by Libya, then by Nubia, then by the Assyrians, and then the greatest power of the age, Persia.

Yet, even the great Persian Empire fell to the Greeks led by the great Alexander in 332BC.

Egypt then became a province of the Greek Empire under the rule of the Ptolemys. No Egyptian king would rule Egypt for the next 2,000 years.

Oral Presentation Task 1:
Prepare a PowerPoint presentation on your assigned topic and present it to the class. Follow this link to see a good example of a presentation. Model Presentation
Present your information as simply as possible. Spell-check your presentation. Use lots of photos or examples which will make your presentation interesting. Use the internet to find your information. Some recommended sites:
British Museum
University of Chicago
Mesopotamia
 Bring your presentation to me for approval at least one day before you give the presentation. Don't just copy! Use your own English skills!
It is also ok to use Japanese-language pages but your presentation must be in English!

Ancient Mesopotamia
(The following lecture was taken from Washington State University online course for World Civilizations)

The Mesopotamians were a culture that rivaled and even surpassed that of the ancient Egyptians. Although we may imagine that Mesopotamia was a single, coherent culture, in fact there were many cultures in Mesopotamia which were diverse and varied. Mesopotamia consisted of largely independent city-states with their own often completely different religions, languages, kings, and administrations. So when we speak of Mesopotamia as one group we are simply referring to the many different cultures that developed in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates between 3500BC and 540BC.

We'll begin our journey with the Sumerians, that mysterious people that, for some reason, began building cities in the southern areas of Mesopotamia around 3500 BC. The Sumerians would create a culture that would pass from people to people, religion to religion, and from language to language long after the Sumerians ceased to walk the sands of the area "between the rivers."

The Sumerians (3500BC – 2000BC)

Among the earliest civilizations were the diverse peoples living in the fertile valleys lying between the Tigris and Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, which in Greek means, "between the rivers." In the south of this region, in an area now in Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, a mysterious group of people, speaking a language unrelated to any other human language we know of, began to live in cities, which were ruled by some sort of monarch and a religion-based bureaucracy housed in massive structures known as Ziggurats. These were the Sumerians, and around 3500 BC they began to form large city-states supported by intensive agriculture and trade in southern Mesopotamia. The names of these cities speak from a distant and foggy past: Ur, Lagash, Eridu. These Sumerians were constantly at war with one another and other people as water and fertile land were valuable resources. The result over time of these wars was the growth of larger city-states as the more powerful swallowed up the smaller city-states.

Eventually, the Sumerians would have to battle another peoples, the Akkadians, who migrated up from the Arabian peninsula. The Akkadians were a Semitic people, that is, they spoke a Semitic language related to languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. When the two peoples clashed, the Sumerians gradually lost control over the city-states they had so brilliantly created and fell under the hegemony of the Akkadian kingdom which was based in Akkad, the city that was later to become Babylon.

But that was not the end of the Sumerians. The Akkadians abandoned much of their culture and absorbed vast amounts of Sumerian culture, including their religion, writing, government structure, literature, and law. But the Sumerians retained nominal control over many of their defeated city-states, and in 2125, the Sumerian city of Ur rose up against the Akkadians and gained for their daring control over the city states of southern Mesopotamia. But the revival of Sumerian fortune was to be short-lived, for after a short century, another wave of Semitic migrations signed the end of the original creators of Mesopotamian culture.

While the Sumerians as a distinct culture disappear from the human story around 2000 BC, the invaders that overthrew them adopted their culture and became, more or less, Sumerian. They adopted the government, economy, city-living, writing, law, religion, and stories of the original peoples. Why? What would inspire a people to deliberately adopt foreign ways? For whatever reason, the culture the later Semites inherited from the Sumerians consisted of the following:

Monarchy

The Sumerians seem to have developed one of the world's first systems of monarchy; the early states they formed needed a new form of government in order to govern larger areas and diverse peoples. The very first states in human history, the states of Sumer, seemed to have been ruled by a type of priest-king. Among their duties were leading the military, administering trade, judging disputes, and engaging in the most important religious ceremonies. The priest-king ruled through a series of bureaucrats, many of them priests, who carefully surveyed land, assigned fields, and distributed crops after harvest. So the Sumerians seemed to have at first justified the monarch's authority based on some sort of divine selection, but later began to assert that the monarch himself was divine and worthy of worship. This legitimization of monarchical authority would serve all the later peoples who settled or imitated Mesopotamian city-states.

Writing

The principal character of Sumerian government was bureaucracy; the monarchy effectively held power over great areas of land and diverse peoples by having a large and efficient bureaucracy. This bureaucracy, which consisted largely of priests, bore all the responsibility of surveying and distributing land as well as distributing crops. For city living greatly changes the human relation to food production: when people begin to live in cities, that means a large part of the human population ceases to grow or raise its own food, which means that all those people who do grow and raise food need to feed all those who don't. This requires some sort of distribution mechanism, which requires the greatest of all inventions of civilizations, the bureaucrat. And to make sure that the entire mechanism works, the newly urbanized needs to invent a tool to make the bureaucrat's life easier: record-keeping. And record-keeping means writing in some form or another.

The first writings, in fact, were records—tons of records: stone tablets filled with numbers recording distributed goods. These early writings (besides the numerals) were actually pictures, or rough sketches, you might say, of the words they represented; this early Sumerian writing was pictographic writing. The Sumerians would scrawl their picture words using reeds as a writing instrument on wet clay which would then dry into stone-hard tablets, which is very good because it's hard to lose your records if they are big old heavy tablets. (And more permanent: when all the paper in all the books you see around you has gone to dust and ashes, the Sumerian tablets will still bear mute witness to the hot days when farmers brought grain to city storehouses and bureaucrat-priests parceled out food to their citizens while scratching on wet clay with their reeds) Eventually, the Sumerians made their writing more efficient, and slowly converted their picture words to a short-hand consisting of wedged lines created by bending the reed against the wet clay and moving the end closest to the hand back and forth once. And thus was born a form of writing that persisted longer than any other form of writing besides Chinese: cuneiform, or "wedge-shaped" (which is what cuneiform means in Latin) writing.

Science and Mathematics

All this administration of agriculture required much more careful planning, since each farmer had to produce a far greater excess of produce than he would actually consume. And all the bureaucratic record keeping demanded some kind of efficient system of measuring long periods of time. So the Sumerians invented calendars, which they divided into twelve months based on the cycle of the moon. Since a year consisting of twelve lunar months is considerably shorter than a solar year, the Sumerians added a "leap month" every three years in order to catch up with the sun. This interest in measuring long periods of time led the Sumerians to develop a complicated knowledge of astronomy and the first human invention of the zodiac in order to measure yearly time.

Record-keeping pushes the human mind in other directions as well. In particular, record-keeping demands that humans start doing something all humans love to do: calculating. Numbers have to be added up, subtracted, multiplied, divided, and sundry other fun things. So the Sumerians developed a high level of sophistication with mathematics that had never been seen before on the human landscape. And all that number crunching led the Sumerians to begin crude speculations about the nature of numbers and processes involving numbers—abstract mathematics.

Religion

We know very little about the early Semitic religions, but the Semites that invaded Mesopotamia seem to have completely abandoned their religion in favor of Sumerian religion. Sumerian religion was polytheistic, that is, the Sumerians believed in and worshipped many gods. These gods were incredibly powerful and anthropomorphic, that is, they resembled humans. Many of these gods controlled natural forces and were associated with astronomical bodies, such as the sun. The gods were creator gods; as a group, they had created the world and the people in it. Like humans, they suffered all the ravages of human emotional and spiritual frailties: love, lust, hatred, anger, regret. Among the gods' biggest regrets was the creation of human life; the Sumerians believed that these gods regretted the creation of human life and sent a flood to destroy their faulty creation, but one man survived by building a boat. While the destruction of the earth in a great flood is nearly universal in all human mythology and religion, we can't be sure if the Semites had a similar story or took it over from the Sumerians. This is, of course, a question of contemporary significance: according to Genesis, the originator of the Hebrew race, the patriarch Abraham, originally came from the city of Ur.

Although the gods were unpredictable, the Sumerians sought out ways to discover what the gods held in store for them. Like all human cultures, the Sumerians were struck by the wondrous regularity of the movement of the heavens and speculated that this movement might contain some secret to the intentions of the gods. So the Sumerians invented astrology, and astrology produced the most sophisticated astronomical knowledge ever seen to that date, and astrology produced even more sophisticated mathematics. They also examined the inner organs of sacrificed animals for secrets to the gods' intentions or to the future. These activities produced a steady increase in the number of priests and scribes, which further accelerated learning and writing.

Law

Among the inventions of the Sumerians, the most persistent and far-reaching was their invention of law. While all cultures have some system of social regulation and conflict resolution, law is a distinct phenomenon. Laws determine right from wrong and establish rules for retribution and conflict resolution.

Although we don't know much about Sumerian law, scholars agree that Sumerian law followed a simple rule of revenge in kind: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life," and reveals to us that human law has as its fundamental basis revenge.

Sumerian law recognized class distinctions; under Sumerian law, everyone was not equal under the law. Harming a priest or noble person was a far more serious crime than harming a slave or poor person; yet, the penalties assessed for a noble person who commits a crime were often far harsher than the penalties assessed for someone from the lower classes who committed the same crime. This great invention, law, would serve as the basis for the institution of law among all the Semitic peoples to follow: Babylonians, Assyrians, and, eventually, the Hebrews.

The Akkadians (2340BC – 2125BC)

The Akkadians were a Semitic people living on the Arabic peninsula during the great flourishing period of the Sumerian city-states. Although we don't know much about early Akkadian history and culture, we do know that as the Akkadians migrated north, they came in increasing conflict with the Sumerian city-states, and in 2340 BC, the great Akkadian military leader, Sargon, conquered Sumer and built an Akkadian empire stretching over most of the Sumerian city-states and extending as far away as Lebanon. Sargon based his empire in the city of Akkad, which became the basis of the name of his people. This great capital of the largest empire humans had ever seen up until that point later became the city of Babylon, which was the commercial and cultural center of the Middle East for almost two thousand years.

But Sargon's ambitious empire lasted for only a blink of an eye in the long time spans with which we measure Mesopotamian history. In 2125, the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia rose up in revolt, and the Akkadian empire fell before a renewal of Sumerian city-states.

The Amorites or Old Babylonians (1900BC – 1600BC)

After the last Sumerian dynasty fell around 2000 BC, Mesopotamia drifted into conflict and chaos for almost a century. Around 1900 BC, a group of Semites called the Amorites had managed to gain control of most of the Mesopotamian region. Like the Akkadians, the Amorites centralized the government over the individual city-states and based their capital in the city of Babylon, which was originally called Akkad and served as the center of the Amorite empire. For this reason, the Amorites are called the Old Babylonians and the period of their ascendancy over the region, which lasted from 1900-1600 BC, is called the Old Babylonian period.

While the Sumerian civilization consisted of independent and autonomous city-states, the Old Babylonian state was a behemoth of dozens of cities. In order to make this system work, power and autonomy was taken from the individual cities and invested in the monarch. As a result, an entirely new set of laws were invented by the Old Babylonians: laws which dealt with crimes against the state.

Perhaps the most important legal text in history is an Old Babylonian code of laws written by Hammurabi (around 1792-1750 BC), the most famous of the Old Babylonian monarchs. This code, called the Code of Hammurabi is generally regarded as Sumerian in spirit, but with all the harshness of the Old Babylonian penalties.

The Hittites (1600BC – 1200BC)

Roaring into history from mysterious origins, the Hittites would rule a great empire that stretched from Mesopotamia to Syria and Palestine. The Hittites are shrouded in fog and mystery; we don't where they came from, and for a long time the language they spoke was undecipherable. In the end, it turns out they were Indo-European, that is, they spoke a language from the Indo-European language family, which includes English, German, Greek, Latin, Persian, and the languages of India. Their invasion spelled the end of the Old Babylonian empire in Mesopotamia (1900-1600 BC), and like so many others before them, the invaders adopted the ways of the conquered; after the conquest of Mesopotamia, the Hittites adopted the laws, religion, and the literature of the Old Babylonians thus continuing the long heritage of Sumerian culture.

Their empire was at its greatest from 1600-1200 BC, and even after the Assyrians gained control of Mesopotamia after 1300 BC, the Hittite cities and territories thrived independently until 717 BC, when the territories were finally conquered by Assyrians and others. But the Hittites are perhaps one of the most significant peoples in Mesopotamian history. Because their empire was so large and because their primary activity was commerce, trading with all the civilizations and peoples of the Mediterranean, the Hittites were the people primarily responsible for transmitting Mesopotamian thought, law, political structure, economic structure, and ideas around the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Greece. So the Hittites are the great traders in the culture built by the Sumerians and adopted and modified by later peoples.

The Assyrians (1120BC – 612BC)

The Assyrians were Semitic people living in the northern reaches of Mesopotamia; they have a long history in the area, but for most of that history they are subjugated to the more powerful kingdoms and peoples to the south. Under the monarch, Shamshi-Adad, the Assyrians attempted to build their own empire, but Hammurabi soon crushed the attempt and the Assyrians disappear from the historical stage.

The monarchs of Assyria, who hated Babylon with a passion since it constantly contemplated independence and sedition, destroyed that city and set up their capital in Nineveh. The most important Assyrian to remember was the monarch Ashurbanipal (668-626 BC), who began a project of assembling a library of tablets of all the literature of Mesopotamia. Thirty thousand tablets still remain of Ashurbanipal's great library in the city of Nineveh; these tablets are our single greatest source of knowledge of Mesopotamian culture, myth, and literature.

The Assyrian state was forged in the crucible of war, invasion, and conquest. The upper, land-holding classes consisted almost entirely of military commanders who grew wealthy from the spoils taken in war. The army was the largest standing army ever seen in the Middle East or Mediterranean. The pressures of war excited technological innovation which made the Assyrians almost unbeatable: iron swords, lances, metal armor, and battering rams made them a fearsome foe in battle.

Science and Mathematics

The odd paradox of Assyrian culture was the dramatic growth in science and mathematics; this can be in part explained by the Assyrian obsession with war and invasion. Among the great mathematical inventions of the Assyrians were the division of the circle into 360 degrees and were among the first to invent longitude and latitude in geographical navigation. They also developed a sophisticated medical science which greatly influenced medical science as far away as Greece.

The Chaldeans (612BC – 539BC)

After the fall of Assyrian power in Mesopotamia, the last great group of Semitic peoples dominated the area. Suffering mightily under the Assyrians, the city of Babylon finally rose up against its hated enemy, the city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, and burned it to the ground. The chief of the Babylonians was Nabopolassar.

Nabopolassar was succeeded by his son, Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BC). Nebuchadnezzar was the equal of all the great Mesopotamian conquerors, from Sargon onwards; he not only prevented major powers such as Egypt and Syria from making inroads on his territory, he also conquered the Phoenicians and the state of Judah (586 BC), the southern Jewish kingdom that remained after the subjugation of Israel, the northern kingdom, by the Assyrians. Under Nebuchadnezzar, the city of Babylon was rebuilt with great splendor; it would eventually become one of the most magnificent human cities in the area of the Middle East and Mediterranean

The great Persian king, Cyrus the Conqueror, invaded the Mesopotamian Empire in 540BC and ended forever Semitic domination of Mesopotamia. The center of the Middle Eastern world shifted to Cyrus's capital, Susa in Persia, and it would shift again after the Greeks invaded and then later the Romans.

Questions for your consideration:

1. How did the Tigris and the Euphrates influence the development of complex societies in Mesopotamia?

2. What role did natural disasters play in the development of bureaucratic organizations?

3. What role did religion play in Mesopotamian society? Compare it to the role of religion of Egypt.

4. Why did the ancient Mesopotamians build huge structures? Why were their constructions different from the ancient Egyptians?

5. What is the importance of a written code of law?

6. Which Sumerian invention was most important? Provide at least 2 examples of how this invention changed lives and affects us today.

7. In what ways did ancient Mesopotamia pave the way for future civilizations?

8. Why did the need arise for laws to govern society?

9. What role did foreign invasions play in the development of this ancient culture? Did the invaders change the culture or were they changed by the Sumerian culture?

10. Why was being surrounded by mountains and desert an asset in development of complex civilizations?

The Minoans: The Palace Civilizations in the Aegean

(This lecture was taken from Washington State University's online course: World Civilizations

Before you begin reading, it might be nice to watch a video: Minoan Crete

The story of European civilization really begins on the island of Crete with a civilization that probably thought of itself as Asian (in fact, Crete is closer to Asia than it is to Europe). Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up on Crete: the Minoans. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual art, and their records. Mountains of records. For the Minoans produced a civilization oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state. They built perhaps the single most efficient bureaucracy in antiquity. This unique culture lasted only a few centuries, and European civilization shifts to Europe itself with the foundation of the military city-states on the mainland of Greece.

Lost to human memory for over three and a half millennia, the Minoans stand at the very beginning of European civilization. They were a people of magnificent social organization, culture, art, and commerce. There is no evidence that they were a military people; they thrived instead, it seems, on their remarkable mercantile abilities. This lack of a military culture, however, may have spelled their final downfall. For a rival culture grew up on the mainland of Greece, the Myceneans, who were a war-like people. The Myceneans, the direct inheritors of Minoan traditions may have been the agents of their destruction.

 But we know now that Greek civilization began off the mainland of Greece, in the Aegean Sea, in the palaces of the bureaucrat-kings of Minoa.

The Land

The Minoan civilization began on the island of Crete, a large island located midway between Turkey, Egypt and Greece. On the island, the climate is comfortable and the soil fertile; as an island, it was isolated from the mainland of Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Egypt (which isn't far away to the south).
None of the earliest great cultures of the ancient world were seafaring cultures, so Crete was spared the great power struggles that troubled other ancient cultures. However, as an island, resources were limited. As the population began to thrive, it also began to increase, and it is evident that the resources of the island became increasingly insufficient to handle the increased population. So the Cretans improvised. Some migrated, populating other islands in the Aegean Sea. In doing so, they took their growing civilization with them and spread Minoan culture, religion, and government all over the Aegean Sea. For this reason, the Minoan culture is also called the "Aegean Palace civilization."
The Cretans who remained on Crete turned to other economic pursuits to support the growing population; in particular, they turned to trade. Crete became the central exporter of wine, oil, jewelry, and highly crafted works; in turn, they became importers of raw materials and food. In the process they built the first major navy in the world; its primary purpose, however, was trade, not war or conquest.

The Minoans seem to have genuinely benefited from their geographical isolation. Because Crete was relatively isolated, the palace civilizations that grew up there were spared the constant warfare that mainland cultures suffered. Also, the limited size of the island seems to have limited any territorial greed that drove so many other mainland cultures. The expense of a standing army, the economic disaster of a foreign invasion, and the maintenance of a military bureaucracy all drained economic resources profoundly in all the cultures we've studied so far. The Minoans, however, seem to have been spared this economic burden, so economic growth really did translate into cultural and technological growth.

 

The History

We know of the Minoans only through their ruins. Splendid as they are, with their remarkable architecture, their beautiful art, and the richness of cultural artifacts, they spoke a language we don't understand and they wrote in a script which we can't read. However, all of their writing seems to be one thing: accounts and records. The Minoans were, after all, a great mercantile people and they kept profoundly accurate records of their transactions.

So much of what we know of Minoan history is nothing more than a good guess. The archaeological evidence points to only a few reasonable certainties about Minoan history. Around 3000 BC, Crete was settled by a people who probably came from Asia Minor. By 2000 BC, they were already living in cities, trading with other nations in the Mediterranean, and employing a hieroglyphic system of writing, probably derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. They built magnificent palace centers at Knossos, Phaistos, and Kato Zakros; these palaces seem to have dominated Cretan society.
We have no idea what language the Minoans spoke, but they certainly spoke a non-Hellenic language (that is, a language not closely related to Greek) and probably spoke a non-Indo-European language.

All archaeological evidence suggests that the Cretan states of the first half of the second millennium BC were bureaucratic monarchies. While the government was dominated by priests and while the monarch seemed to have some religious functions, the principle role of the monarch seemed to be that of "chief entrepreneur," or better yet, CEO of the Cretan state. The Cretans operated their state as a business and entrepreneurship seemed to be the order of the day. While the bulk of the population enjoyed the wealth of international trading, all aspects of trade were tightly controlled from the palace. Beneath the king was a large administration of scribes and bureaucrats who carefully regulated production and distribution both within the state and without. This administration kept incredibly detailed records, which implies that they exercised a great deal of control over the economy.

In order to facilitate trade, the Cretans and their Aegean relatives developed the most advanced navy that had ever been seen. While scholars earlier believed that Crete must have been a "sea power," that view has been seriously challenged. The Cretans probably did not develop a military navy, as did the Egyptians, but concentrated solely on trade and mercantilism. They did build what looks like warships, but it seems that these warships were most likely mercantile ships with the capability of defense against pirates.

Their trade was extensive. The Egyptians were highly familiar with the Cretans, who even appear in Egyptian art. Cretan artifacts turn up all over Asia Minor and they seem to have been involved in trade with the tribal clans living on the Greek mainland. All of this concentrated mercantile activity produced great wealth for the Cretans, which went into massive building projects, art, and technological development.
The Cretans, for instance, seem to be the only people in the ancient world that would construct multi-room buildings for a large part of society including even the poorest people. The common household in the ancient world, of course, was a single room (this would be the norm up until the 1600's in Europe. The Cretans were the first to build a plumbing system in their buildings (a technology that was forgotten when Cretan society collapsed). 
 Cretan society seems to be the first "leisure" society in existence, in which a large part of human activity focused on leisure activities, such as sports. In fact, the Cretans seem to have been as sports addicted as modern people; the most popular sports were boxing and bull-jumping. Women actively participated in both of these sports. The immense concentration of wealth in such a small population led to an explosion of visual arts, as well. Unlike the bulk of the ancient world, the Minoans developed a visual art culture that seems to have been solely oriented around visual pleasure, rather than for political or religious reasons.

The concentration of wealth produced another unusual phenomenon in the ancient world: social equality. Society ceased to be organized around family groups and began to be organized around "class," that is, wealth. This always means social inequality, as the more "professional" classes (usually bureaucrats) enjoy more privileges and wealth. In Crete, however, the wealth seems to have been spread pretty liberally. In the excavated city of Gournia, we can discern easily the "poor" parts of town; even there, however, people are living in four, five, and six room houses—much larger than the poorer classes in the Middle East or Egypt! So life was pretty good for just about everyone.

The architecture of the palaces and cities has one more unusual feature. Unlike any other major cities or palaces, the palaces and towns of the Cretans seem to have only minor defensive structures or forts. The presence of only a small amount of defensive works in the archaeological record leads us to a tentative conclusion: the Minoans throughout much of their history were relatively secure from attack. This conclusion helps to explain every other aspect of Minoan history: their concentration of economic resources on mercantilism, their generous distribution of wealth among their people, and, unfortunately, their downfall.

Minoan Collapse
     The downfall of the Cretans was a slow and painful process as near as we can tell. After five centuries of prosperity, the palace centers were destroyed by an earthquake in 1500 BC. The cataclysm may have been more serious. Around 1500 to 1450 BC, Strongphyle, a volcanic island located to the north, erupted in an explosion four to five times greater than the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. This explosion fragmented the island into several small islands, and the caldera of the volcano is centered on the island of Thera; therefore, the event is called the Thera eruption. Based on the size of the caldera, the eruption was somewhere equivalent to 600 to 700 tons of TNT (that is, a 600 kiloton atomic bomb). The earthquake activity preceding the explosion leveled several Minoan cities in the islands surrounding Strongphyle, and probably leveled Knossos as well. But the eruption itself would have produced tidal waves that would have destroyed all the palaces and cities on the northern coast of Crete, including Knossos.

The Minoans, weakened by this catastrophe, seem to have been then conquered by the Myceneans, who had developed their own warlike civilization on the Greek mainland. We know the Myceneans control the area after 1500 BC because a new style of writing dominates Cretan culture sometime between 1500 and 1400 BC. Called "Linear B" script, this writing is conclusively an early form of Greek. It seems the Myceneans employed Minoan bureaucrats and scribes to carry on business, but in a language they understood, that is, Greek. The Myceneans, however, seem to have adopted Minoan civilization comfortably rather than imposing their own more imposing culture. But in 1400, another wave of Myceneans put an end to the palace civilization on Crete for all time.

Minoan Religion

Since we have only ruins and remains from Minoan culture, we can only guess at their religious practices. The most apparent characteristic of Minoan religion was that it was polytheistic and matriarchal, that is, a goddess religion; the gods were all female, not a single male god has been identified until later periods. The transition from goddess religions to god religions is still subject to much debate, but the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle because of agriculture may have fundamentally reoriented society towards patriarchal organization and the subsequent rethinking of goddess religions. The domination of public life, administration, rule, and military organization, by men certainly produced a reorientation of religious beliefs.

The head of the Minoan pantheon seems to have been an all-powerful goddess which ruled everything in the universe. This deity was a mother deity, that is, her relationship to the world was as mother to offspring. There are numerous representations of goddesses, which leads to the conclusion that the Cretans were polytheistic, while others argue that these represent manifestations of the one goddess. 
 The most popular goddess seems to be the "Snake Goddess," who has snakes entwined on her body or in her hands. Since the figurine is only found in houses and in small shrines in the palaces, we believe that she is some sort of domestic goddess or goddess of the house. Most scholars believe that the principle female goddesses of Greek religions, such as Hera, Artemis, and so on, ultimately derive from the Minoan goddesses.

The world for the Minoans seems suffused with the divine; all objects in the world seem to have been charged with religious meaning. The Minoans particularly worshipped trees, pillars (sacred stones), and springs. The priesthood seems to have been almost entirely if not totally female, although there's evidence (precious little evidence) that the palace kings had some religious functions as well.

Women in Minoan Culture

Urbanization dramatically changes social relations. In place of real, biological relationships based on kinship, urbanized cultures organize themselves around "class," that is, economic function, rather than kinship. Economic function produces a kind of social inequality, as administrators, kings, and priests, come to occupy economically more important roles (distribution and regulation) than others. While there is really no such thing as social mobility in the ancient world, class is inherently unstable as a way of organizing society. Urbanization also produces a split in human experience; life is divided into a public and a domestic sphere. Almost universally, men dominate the newly formed public sphere: administration, regulation, and military organizations. Social inequality, then, gets established along sexual lines as well as economic function. For instance, most religions probably began as goddess religions; the new urbanized societies, however, develop god religions in their place.

Crete, so singular in everything else, seems to have avoided this. Not only does Crete seem to be a class-based society where there is little class inequality, archaeological evidence suggests that women never ceased playing an important role in the public life of the cities. They served as priestesses, as functionaries and administrators, and participated in all the sports that Cretan males participated in. The most popular sports in Crete were incredibly violent and dangerous: boxing and bull-jumping. All the representations of this sport show young women participating as well as men.

Women also seem to have participated in every occupation and trade available to men. The rapid growth of industry on Crete included skilled craftswomen and entrepreneurs, and the large, top-heavy bureaucracy and priesthood seems to have been equally staffed with women. In fact, the priesthood was dominated by women. Although the palace kings were male, the society itself does not seem to have been patriarchal.

Evidence from Cretan-derived settlements on Asia Minor suggests that Cretan society was matrilineal, that is, kinship descent was reckoned through the mother. We live in a patrilineal society; we spell out our descent on our father's side—that's why we take our father's last name and not our mother's last name. While we can't be sure that Cretan society was matrilineal, it is a compelling conclusion since the religion was goddess-based.

Minoan Visual Culture

While very little Minoan culture remains for us—no writings, music, or religious texts—we do have Minoan art. For the Minoans literally surrounded themselves with art, and that fact more than any has mesmerized all the scholars and students of the culture.

The Minoans seem to have been the first ancient culture to produce art for its beauty rather than its function. While much of Minoan art, like almost all the art produced in the Middle East and Egypt, had religious and political functions, the bulk of the art seems to be simply decorative. Art in Mesopotamia and Persia served political and religious purposes. The Minoans, however, not only decorated their palaces, they decorated them with art; they used art for pleasure. To walk through a Minoan palace was to walk through room after room of splendid, wall-sized paintings. Minoan art frequently involves unimportant, trivial details of everyday life, such as a cat hunting a bird, or an octopus, or representations of sports events (rather than battles, or political events and leaders, and so on).

Most depictions of human beings represent them in the less dramatic and meaningful events of life, such as bearing a vase or simply walking down the street.

This, perhaps, is the greatest Minoan legacy on the Greek world, for the great revolution in Greek art involves precisely this idea of producing art for pleasure only, "art for art's sake." This is no trivial matter in the development of Western culture, for applied to other pursuits, such as philosophy and mathematics, this attitude towards art produces theoretical knowledge, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which doesn't exist until the Greeks invent it.

Bull Jumping

The Minoans were a sport-centered society; while all sports ultimately derive from religious rituals, by the time the Cretans were enjoying their palace civilization, sport seemed to have passed over into a recreational activity. This is a new phenomenon in the ancient world: sport for sport's sake, and parallels a number of other aspects of Minoan culture. We know a great deal about Cretan sports because they are a common subject of wall paintings and vase sculptures. The most popular sport subjects in Minoan painting and sculpture are two sports in particular: boxing and bull-jumping.

Bull-jumping did not involve killing the bull, rather it was a test of both courage and agility. A bull would run at a jumper or line of jumpers; when it was close enough, the jumper would grab the bull's horns and either vault onto the bull's back or vault over the bull in a somersault and land on his or her feet on the other side of the bull.

The difficulty of this vaulting is eloquently demonstrated in a Minoan vase: when you grab hold of a charging bull's horns, it jerks its head up violently—that's how it attacks with its horns. So the vaulter must get his or her momentum from this incredibly violent head jerk and use it to gracefully mount or vault the bull (we're not sure which). The Minoan depictions of this event show a remarkably graceful and gymnastic sport that seems less about bravery and strength and more about grace and fluidity. Since the bull provides most of the momentum in the vault, it seems likely that the activity has more in common with gymnastics than bull-fighting. In keeping with the singular gender equality of Minoan culture, both young men and young women participated in the sport, although the young women dressed in male clothes.

Questions to consider: Write the complete answers in your notebooks!

1. Where is the island of Crete located?

2. How did Crete's isolation affect the development of Minoan civilization?

3. Describe the Minoan economic system. How was it different from that of Egypt or Mesopotamia?

4. Desribe Minoan art. How was it different from that of Egypt or Mesopotamia?

5. What sports were popular in ancient Minoa? Who played these sports?

6. Describe the Minoan political system. What is a "bureaucratic monarchy"?

7. What role did women play in Minoan society? Were they equal to men?


8. How and when did Minoan society collapse?