While the Egyptians were screwing around building big useless monuments, and the Mesopotamians were screwing around conquering other people, something with vast implications was brewing on their periphery in the Eastern Mediterranean.
This area was a backwater around 2000 BC because it didn't have the right soil or climate for mass irrigated agriculture as Egypt and Mesopotamia had. There was a bit of arable land that supported a small population, but it wasn't much and so the Eastern Mediterranean littoral and the Aegean Sea area were low-population backwaters. Two civilizations developed there: the Minoan civilization on Crete had some success, as did the related Mycenaean civilization in southern Greece. The Minoan civilization owed its success to its trade between Egypt and the Aegean, supplying a variety of exotic goods. As such, Minos was the first society to build its success on foreign trade.
But these are luxury goods packing high value in a small, lightweight package. Early trade was clumsy, dangerous, and slow; accordingly, only the most precious items were traded.
The Minoans made their killing by developing sea-based trade. Yes, other peoples had traded by sea before the Minoans, but these early efforts were scattered and opportunistic; the Minoans made a living out of it. A ship can carry a lot more cargo than a donkey, and it can cover greater distances faster and more cheaply. Although the Minoans did not invent ships or trading by ship, it wouldn't be going too far to say that the Minoans invented maritime trade as an economic system.
People had been building boats long before the Minoans came along; the Egyptians in particular had built some very large vessels -- up to 40 meters in length. However, the Egyptian vessels were designed for river traffic, not the open sea. In particular, they lacked keels; they had flat bottoms. This is fine for river travel or purely oared propulsion, but if you want to use your sail, a keel is important, because it allows you to deviate from the direction of the wind. A flat-bottomed boat with a sail will go in whatever direction the wind is blowing. But what if you want to go, say, 20 degrees to the left of the wind direction?
The solution is the keel, the central ridge running along the underside of a boat. This diagram illustrates the idea:
The boat on the left is a simple raft with a sail; it will go wherever the wind blows. If the sailor wishes to go in the direction of the green arrow, he's out of luck; there's little he can do other than to row frantically in the desired direction. And in fact, the Minoan ships carried several dozen sailors to row the boat in the desired direction. A typical Minoan ship might be 20 meters long, with a cargo capacity of 10 tons. Unfortunately, the 30 sailors that this ship carried, along with their water, bedding, belongings, water, and food, probably weighed about 2 tons, reducing the cargo capacity by 20%.
Consider now the middle ship in the diagram. It has a shallow keel and so it can steer a few degrees off the direction of the wind without toppling over. The deep-keeled ship on the right can steer even further from the direction of the wind.
This was the problem with all the Minoan ships. With their shallow keels, they were at the mercy of the winds and had to stick close to shore. The journey from Egypt to Crete ran along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the southern coast of Turkey, and thence to Crete. It took three months. With those kinds of travel times, and the costs of all those oarsmen, only the most profitable merchandise was worth trading. The Minoans confined their trade to precious luxuries such as amber, dye, gems, and metals.
By 1500 BC, however, the Minoans had improved the efficiency of their system so well that they could afford to trade in less precious materials. In particular, they could afford to deal in wine and olive oil, which were not as profitable per kilogram of cargo weight, but were still valuable enough to be profitable even on these long routes.
However, Minos was already in trouble by that time. The volcano on Thera had blown up around 1625 BCE, raising a tsunami that destroyed everything at sea level in the Aegean. It is likely that the bulk of the Minoan fleet was destroyed in the catastrophe; certainly many of the trading posts that the Minoans used were destroyed. The entire system fell apart overnight. This opened the door to the Mycenaeans. These were mainland Greeks, but they were primarily a land power; they lived in heavily fortified citadels unlike the unwalled Minoan towns.
It's difficult to say what happened in the Aegean area during the next few centuries. Minoan society was destroyed; the capital at Knossos was sacked and burned around 1400 BCE. Most archaeologists blame the Mycenaens for the destruction of Minoan society. It's likely that the Aegean peoples took centuries to recover from the twin catastrophes.
Something started around 1200 BCE that turned everything upside down. The Hittite Empire, centered in eastern Anatolia, collapsed. The city of Ugarit, the entrepot for all trade between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, was sacked and burned. Cities on the island of Cyprus show signs of some sort of catastrophe. Many of the towns in Mycenaean Greece were destroyed and there was certainly a major loss of population in Greece. Egypt underwent a series of attacks from a mysterious league that they call the Sea Peoples.
In many ways, the three centuries from 1200 BCE to 900 BCE in the eastern Mediterranean resemble the six centuries from 400 AD to 1000 AD in Western Europe. Civilization crumbled under the assaults of barbarians. Trade shriveled away. Population fell and roving marauders destroyed the fruits of civilization. But there is one gigantic difference between the two periods: we know who the marauders were in the European Dark Ages; we have no idea who Bronze Age marauders were.
Theories abound. The most common theory was that a wave of barbarians from north of Greece poured into Greece, killing and looting. These people, the Dorians, later became the mainstream Greeks. They were also, according to this theory, the same people who tore up the Hittite Empire, and either they or some of the peoples they displaced became the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt. Other scholars have suggested that the Sea Peoples came from Illyria (the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea), Sicily, or southern Anatolia. The fact is, we simply don't have enough data to draw any firm conclusions. Whatever happened, it destroyed the existing order in the Eastern Mediterranean and cleared the slate for new developments.
We know that the recovery began around 900 BCE. Population all over the Aegean littoral began a dramatic rise. This is usually attributed to little more than the recovery from the depopulated state created by the Dark Ages. However, I think that there was more to it than just recovery. I believe that something fundamentally new was afoot.
The Minoans had created the first large-scale trading system, but it was held back by low cargo capacities and long voyage times. But in the 600 years following the Minoan collapse, a series of small developments converged to change everything.
The first of these was the development of larger ships. The Minoan ships were typically 10 or 20 tons in displacement, but by 1200 BCE, there were 50-ton ships plying the Mediterranean. And bigger ships with more cargo capacity stimulate even more trade. We know that some of these ships carried grain; a letter from Ugarit to Pharoah expressed appreciation for the recent shipment of grain to the city.
The second development was the gradual replacement of oar power by sail power. This process was very slow; it took about 1500 years to complete. There's no question that the Minoan craft used sails as opportunity arose; they relied on oars as their primary power source. But driving a 50-ton ship with oar power is a lot harder than driving a 10-ton ship with oar power. Why? The answer is complicated; basically, things don't scale up neatly. You can build a paper airplane that will fly quite nicely, but if you try to make a big paper airplane that's ten times bigger and uses cardboard instead of paper, it won't fly anywhere near as well as the paper airplane. A deer is a delicate thing, but if you take the same basic design and scale it up, it will collapse under its own weight. For that size, you need something like an elephant, with much heavier bones to support the additional weight. In the same way, scaling up a ship from 10 tons to 50 tons doesn't work by simply quintupling the number of oarsmen. Those oarsmen need space to work in, which makes the ship longer, which makes it even heavier, which requires even more oarsmen... this just doesn't add up.
You might object that the Greek trireme of 500 BCE was exactly what I'm saying is impossible: a big, powerful ship with loads of oarsmen. But a trireme was a warship, not a merchantman; it had zero cargo capacity. Its whole purpose in life was to ram other triremes. For that it needed the ability to move very quickly for very short periods of time. The difference between the Greek trireme and the merchantman was similar to the difference between a dragster and a Mack truck. The basic quandary still faced the merchantman: adding more cargo capacity demanded more oarsmen, who eat into the cargo capacity.
The solution, slowly and painfully developed over 1500 years, was to rely more and more on sailpower. By deepening the keel, shipbuilders were able to increase the fraction of time that sailpower could replace oar power. These early sailors had to learn a great deal about how to handle a ship using sailpower. There was rigging to consider, and how to handle a ship with a deeper keel, and navigation, and above all, the art of tacking: sailing into the wind.
The Aegean area has highly variable rainfall. From year to year, rainfall may vary by 50%. This means that crop yields are completely unpredictable. Moreover, this variability is highly localized. Robin Osborne, in Greece in the Making 1200 - 479 BC, points out that Greek topography is so rugged that regions just 20 miles apart can go through completely different cycles of drought and rainfall. During the Bronze Age and the Dark Ages, this variability did not matter much because populations were low enough to survive most droughts. But I believe that the development of bigger ships and greater reliance on sailpower opened up a completely new economic system, at first born of necessity but later triggering a population explosion. Trading in grain is not economically viable overland, especially over Greece's rough terrain. But trading grain by sea is another matter entirely. I believe that the Achaeans developed a system for overcoming the vagaries of drought by trading surpluses among themselves. At first, this was nothing more than an immediate response to a local crisis, but it evolved into something completely different.
Consider the problem of the community facing a grain shortage. Obviously, they want to purchase grain from a nearby community, but what have they to barter with? The answer, it turned out, was wine and olive oil. Grapes and olive trees are not as susceptible to drought as cereals are. If your community maintains a sufficient number of olive trees and grapevines, then in bad crop years it can fall back on the olive oil and wine to pay for imported grain.
At first this was nothing more than an expedient, an ad hoc solution to an immediate crisis. But once the basic concept had taken hold, it began to expand in every direction. People planted more and more olive trees and grapevines to provide better safeguards against drought. The range of trade was extended; people further and further away began participating in the trading system. What drove this process into a virtuous circle was the fact that the Greeks could get more food by growing grapes and olives than by growing grain. For a given amount of land and labor, they could obtain more grain by growing olives and grapes and selling the olive oil and wine for grain. This created an incentive to plant more and more olives and grapes, and less and less grain. The balance point between grain and cash crop lay in the additional cost of transportation and the richness of the soil. It still made sense to grow grain in the flat, easily accessible lowlands with rich soil. And as the Greeks grew and sold more olive oil and wine, they created food surpluses that caused their population to expand. This in turn created incentives to improve the trading system: ships, navigational techniques, connections with foreign ports, and so forth. Once this virtuous circle began turning, it just kept growing and growing.
Here's a map of Greece and the Aegean:
| Distance | 1125-1050BC | 1050-1000BC |
| 0-10km | 39 | 37 |
| 10-20km | 22 | 7 |
| 20-30 km | 6 | 6 |
| 30-40 km | 4 | 0 |
| 40-50 km | 7 | 0 |
| >50 km | 10 | 0 |
And here is a histogram showing the same data:
This shows that the population appears to have shifted closer to the sea; I think it is because trade by sea was beginning to play a larger role in the local economy.
This population increase had completely different political ramifications than the previous population jumps in the agricultural areas of Egypt and Mesopotamia: it was completely decentralized and so beyond the reach of any central government. People were springing up all over those islands and coastlands, but there was no easy way to control them. A bully with some soldiers couldn't readily establish dominion over them as in Mesopotamia or Egypt. Hence the area was a Wild West, an anarchic region in which the ship played the same role that the horse did in the American West.
Thus, the Achaean areas experienced a population explosion during the ninth century. But the Achaeans had one more hurdle to jump before they could become Greeks: piracy. Remember, it takes only one bad apple to ruin everything for the peace-loving folk. In Minoan times, the Minoan navy kept piracy down. But in the tenth century BCE there was no central king to enforce the king's peace; the Aegean was still a collection of small towns with no common government.
Piracy disrupted the trade networks that provided the grain that kept the population alive; as such, piracy was a direct threat to the survival of the Aegean community. For land-based communities self-sufficient in food, piracy was a nuisance that deprived rich people of their luxury goods. But for the Achaeans, piracy meant starvation. Since they could not stop it as individual polities, they had no choice but to develop a group response. They had to establish a group identity and an overall sense of group justice, and -- supremely important -- they had to make this system work voluntarily.
This was absolutely revolutionary in human history. Before civilization, hunter-gatherer groups had established social justice either by small-scale warfare or ostracization. Civilization meant farming, and farms are horribly vulnerable to attack: widely dispersed and having few defenders at each site. The solution to this problem was the city-state: a leader with warriors who bullied the farmers into feeding his warriors and chased away other rapacious warriors. Civilization started as a protection racket; there was nothing democratic or voluntary about the way people lived in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.
But this scheme couldn't be applied to the far-flung islands and towns of the Aegean; the king and his warriors simply couldn't cover that much space. Hence, people simply had to agree on some basic principles of behavior in order to keep the trade system operational. Just as music soothes the raging beast, trade civilized the Wild-West Achaeans and transformed them into Greeks. And the voluntary nature of their predicament forced a more egalitarian approach to government upon them.
This egalitarian style wasn't the same thing as democracy. There was still social stratification, but the key is that the social stratification was not based so much on land ownership as on mercantile success. In other words, the leading citizens weren't just the landed aristocracy, they also included the merchants. There was lots of overlap between the two groups, but their relationship was dynamic and worked, in general, to the advantage of the merchants. The landed aristocracy could not guarantee the food security of the community; only the merchants could do that. While the landed aristocracy was a closed social group maintaining its dominance through inheritance, the merchants were a meritocracy open to anybody. Thus, the fossilization inherent to aristocratic systems was kept at bay by the constant injection of new blood from the merchant class. Most important, political decisions could no longer be made by fiat from the powerful. Some element of consultation and voluntary cooperation was now vital to the survival of the city-states around the Aegean. Moreover, seizing power just didn't have the same returns that it had in the good old days when power flowed from the soil of the land. In these new trade-dependent polities, if a tyrant offended the merchants, they simply sailed away to greener pastures.
By 800 BCE all the pieces were in place. A civilization based on trade had been established, controlled by slightly democratic political systems and a system of larger group identity that allowed widely-dispersed city-states to think of themselves as part of the Greek community. Institutions to support that sense of identity, such as the Olympic Games and the oracle at Delphi were developed to cement the sense of community. From this point forward, it was just a matter of time and expansion to get to The Glory that Was Greece.
Athens provides an interesting if uncharacteristic example. The town predates the Dark Ages, and was located on a readily defensible height (the Acropolis) in classic Mycenaean fashion. However, as the city grew, its dependence on trade grew with it, and so the Athenians built extensive port facilities at the Piraeus. Later on, the Piraeus became so vital to Athenian existence that the Athenians built the Long Walls stretching from Athens all the way to the Piraeus -- some ten kilometers in all. It was an expensive undertaking, and the scale of the effort demonstrates just how important trade had become to Athens.
Especially important, for our purposes, was the way trade scattered Greeks all over the Eastern Mediterranean, while requiring them to keep in touch with each other. The best available means of coordinating all that mercantile activity was writing. The Greeks stole the idea of the alphabet from the Phoenicians, but they made a big improvement on the Phoenician system: they added vowels. This made reading easier to follow, as you didn't nd t fll n th cntrctns. They also added a few new letters to represent sounds that were in the Greek language but not in the Phoenician language. But they did nothing about putting spaces between words or punctuation; suchnicetiesapparentlyweretoomuchtrouble.
The Greeks also stole the use of papyrus from the Egyptians, and they added their own magic ingredient: the expectation that everybody who was anybody should be able to read and write. Illiterate merchants were at a huge disadvantage in the marketplace; hence, everybody quickly learned to read and write.
You must realize, of course, that "everybody" didn't mean what we mean by "everybody". In the Greek case, "everybody" meant "everybody who mattered", which didn't include women, laborers, or slaves. So in truth, the literate class consisted only of the moderately wealthy men. But that group was large enough to constitute a critical mass of readers. A letter from far-off Pontus might be sent to provide prices, supplies, and demands for various commodities, but the sender couldn't resist the temptation to describe the strange people of that distant land, their odd attire and curious customs. And the recipient would surely share such exotic information with his eager friends. Thus, the simple market report quickly became more like a travelogue. From there, writing blossomed into a hundred other fields. People reported on the political situations in various places, the natural wonders, the history of the people, and all manner of other wondrous curiousities.
What's important about this is that the literate class of Greece was much larger than the literate classes of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China. The morphemic writing of those cultures was so difficult to master that years of special training were required to become proficient. Since no society could afford to train that many people, the professional scribes were few in number. I have seen one estimate that the literacy rate in Pharaonic Egypt was 1%; it was 10% in Ptolomaic (Greek-ruled) Egypt. This suggests that the literacy rate in Greece itself was well above 10%. Indeed, many of their legal processes demanded literacy; it seems likely that most male citizens were literate.
Moreover, services of Egyptian or Mesopotamian scribes were required for all manner of official tasks, so they didn't have time to screw around writing travelogues or philosophical musings. But the Greeks had a simpler, more accessible writing system that most people could figure out with only a few years' education. The difference between the Greeks and the earlier writing cultures was rather like the difference between computer users today and programmers. You need years of training and practice to program a computer, but you can become a power user with only a few years' practice. That's why there are millions of people who can use computers, but only a narrow elite who can program them.
There's another aspect of this that I'm still tracking down: the Greek exaltation of reason. There's nothing like it in any previous civilization. The Greeks held the use of the mind in high esteem. This esteem for the intellect arose early; it shows up in Homer. The Greeks spend ten years besieging Troy to no effect. Achilles the mighty warrior slays all manner of people, but he accomplishes nothing. Lots of people beat their chests, hurl their mighty spears, mow down their enemies, and still Troy remains unbeaten. Then Odysseus comes up with a bright idea and Troy falls. Hint, hint, guys; perhaps all this might and brawn aren't as valuable as a good head on your shoulders. The fact that the followup to the Iliad is the Odyssey is itself instructive. Odysseus is the main character; he's what this is all about. And Odysseus is presented over and over as the quick-thinking fellow, the clever chap who always has a ruse up his sleeve. The Odyssey is an homage to the intellect -- and nothing like that appears in the Bible or Gilgamesh or any contemporary documents.
Let's talk about another communication system: email. Email is like writing letters, with several differences: the letter gets to the recipient a lot faster, it can't have any tangible contents, and the recipient must have an email account and a computer. The first difference makes it much better than writing letters, but the third difference can be crippling. Let's go back to the early days of email, when few people had email accounts. There really wasn't much value to email, because any person you might want to communicate with was not likely to have an email account. Let's imagine a time when there were just four owners of email accounts. For any individual, there were only three people to communicate with by email. The "net social utility" of the email system was the total number of social connections created by the email system: in this case, just six connections. Here's a diagram showing the group and its connections:
Now, suppose that they add one more person to the system so that there are now five users:
Suppose that they then add a sixth user to the group:
The point of all these diagrams is that adding just one more user increases the net social utility of the system by an increasing amount. Adding one to a four-person system increased the number of connections by 4; adding the next person increased the number of connections by 5. This process continues. When there are a million email users, adding just one more user adds a million new connections. Thus, as such networks get bigger, they don't just get better -- they get a lot better!
This "network effect" applied to early writing just as it applies to email. When the only writers were scribes, there just weren't that many connections and not that much social utility. But when the Greeks created a much larger literate group, the social utility of their letter-mail system exploded. Suddenly (well, it did take a few centuries), people were writing about all sorts of different things, sharing exotic information, arguing new ideas. Knowledge and intelligence mattered little in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures; what mattered was naked power. But in mercantile Greece, knowledge truly was power -- and that induced the Greeks to exalt knowledge and intelligence in a way that no previous society had done.
Writing had an even more profound effect on Greek thinking To understand this new development, I suggest that you contemplate one of those lovely drawings by M.C.Escher, such as Ascending and Descending. In this drawing, monks are walking up and down sets of stairs that are clevely drawn so that they appear to be endless. The monks are walking in circles, always going up (or down) but never getting anywhere. At small scale, the rules of proportion are followed exactly, but at large scale, they are violated. Your eye does not easily take this in, so you see a visual paradox.
Much the same thing happens with many of our attempts at extended sequential reasoning. When we try to string sentences together in a long logical sequence, it's all too easy for the meaning to drift slightly with each sentence, allowing us to arrive at paradoxical (or at least unreliable) results. Thus, we tend to treat oral arguments with skepticism. Sure, a fast-talking speaker can make an apparent case for almost anything, but we know from hard experience that oftimes that case unravels under careful inspection. But it's so difficult to carefully inspect the arguments when they're racing past you at the speed of speech!
That's where writing comes in. How many times have you responded to the fast-talker by offering to read whatever he has on paper? How many times have you deferred making a decision until you have had time to see it in writing? The reason for this is simple: a written version of the argument can be checked for the tightness of its logic. You can go back and precisely compare one sentence with an earlier one, to make sure that the logical connections are all tight. In other words, with writing you can precisely plot a logical path through a wilderness of confusion. Writing is a navigational instrument for thinking. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians had too few literate people to broaden the use of writing enough to realize its power for purposes of reasoning. But the Greeks stumbled upon it. And the transition is nowhere clearer than in Socrates and Plato.
But that was only the beginning. Next came Aristotle, perhaps the most important thinker in human history. Aristotle invented the syllogism and began the systematic exploration of its possibilities. This triggered an explosion of research into the possibilities of logical thinking. Unfortunately, the Greeks had such limited technology that their researches were necessarily confined to those areas in which results could be obtained with simple instruments: geometry and astronomy were the most prominent of these. Archimedes, Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Euclid, and many others applied rigorous sequential thinking to a wide variety of fields and established the groundwork for mathematics and science.
We must realize, however, that these researches were confined to a tiny elite, and that they did not penetrate the civilization as a whole. Despite the impressive advances in specialized fields, the civilization as a whole remained generally illogical. Law, commerce, agriculture, military science, and manufacturing continued to operate without the use of deliberate logical analysis.
Some References:
Collapse of the Bronze Age, Manuel Robbins, ISBN 0-595-13664-8