Early Civilizations of the Old World Quotes

“Experiment has conclusively demonstrated that bronze casting was by the piece-mould method (which uses a pottery intermediate mould) and not by cire perdue, i.e. lost wax (”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“The branching lineage system (z ngf ) provided the perfect framework for feudal land-holding, since each state-forming bequest (fengjian) was in exchange for personal loyalty to the king. Individuals from elite lineages were enfeoffed by being granted a subordinate population already settled in the area to be ruled, plus from the core area lineages of specialists (the renli) in ritual and crafts, attached to the new courts for their immediate household and garrison functions. This vassalage of the recipients was marked by conferring ritual articles upon the newly created ruler, notably clothing, flags, horses and chariots. The Zuo-zhuan classic text records (in the Fourth year of Duke Ding) the establishment of the state of Lu. The Duke of Lu was given the above regalia, plus a great bow from an ancient state and six zu of Yin (the Shang population) as followers. Their clan heads were ordered ‘to lead the chiefs of their kin, to collect their branches in the remote as well as the near (land), to conduct the multitude of their connection’, in following the Duke to his new state (ibid.: 188). Here the ramifications of the zu are of such extent as to refer to a clan.”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Clans and [their component] lineages, as shown both in inscriptions, when available, and in the layout of cemeteries and the association of emblems on vessels buried in the graves, not only continued to serve as primary groups governing social interaction but also provided a genealogical basis for the differentiation of their members into political and economic classes through the mechanism of hierarchical segmentation. Within each clan there were major and minor lineages determined by genealogical distance, and the lineage hierarchy was coupled with the hierarchy of the settlements. (”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“However, each lineage has its members buried by minimal lineage, that is, by family. There are no indicators of social stratification present. There is, however, evidence of differential prestige or ranking, and for once this does not attach to men. Out of 10 men’s single or collective tombs there are 6 tombs with less than four pieces of burial pottery in each; there are only four tombs which have more than six pieces, and the owners of those tombs were males over 40 years old. In 10 women’s tombs, single and collective, there are nine graves with more than six pieces of burial pottery in each. It is thus clear to me that women’s positions were generally higher than men’s.”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“China’s population in the first state period, that of the Xia, was an amazing 13.55 million in the twenty-first century BC. Ostensibly4 this level had not increased even by Zhou times in the eleventh century BC (when the Zhou themselves were but a small fraction of the population). By the Warring States period (475–221 BC), population was estimated at 40 million, with millions of casualties per generation in the unceasing warfare.”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Indeed, circumstantially, one could even postulate (though Ewald does not) that the later obsession with ritual purity as defining the place of a caste in the hierarchy, was a hypostatized recognition of the connection between impurities (waste) and devastating disease, something most visible in the tropics. This”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“If, however, we accept that Indus Civilization was not one in which the state as a controlling centre acted in the interests of a dominant class, but one in which there were very strong normative controls underpinning economic integration (organic solidarity), then the subsequent emergence of caste in particular, and historical Hindu society in general, becomes more readily explicable. If there was no tradition of the state in Harappan and post-Harappan society (as there manifestly was in post-Roman European society), then the forms of social integration that caste represents—namely of occupationally based and metaphysically sanctioned stratification without an encompassing state and state religion—simultaneously explain the uniqueness of caste and the ‘churchlessness’ of Hindu religion. A”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“As far as I am aware, no one has suggested that the ‘skull-cult’ was an attempt at chiefly or, risibly, ‘state-control’.”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Second, he stresses that ‘the rather impressive urban developments of the south of the Kachi Plain, adjoining the Indus Valley and the region of Mohenjo-daro, are linked to a continuous cultural tradition starting at least as early as the Period III of Mehrgarh around 4000 BC’. The craft specialization and its accompanying socio-political organization are the key to the type of urbanization seen in the third millennium (ibid.: 27–8).”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Indeed, Edens (1992:121) sums it up well when he says that ‘to analyze precapitalist complex societies, and the place of long-distance trade in those societies, as economic configurations is to misplace basic social forces in these societies’.”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“MUL.APIN, written in about 1000 B.C., summarizes the astronomical knowledge that had accumulated in Mesopotamia in the previous half millennium, but whose roots presumably lie in the civilization of Sumer, since so much of the technical vocabulary of MUL.APIN and other Akkadian astronomical texts is, in fact, Sumerian.”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Temples as large institutional landowners had their origins in the ‘community reserve’ for a cluster of oikos households as they expanded from a township to become a town and then a city. Presumably their role became more critical in the ‘deep south’ of the alluvium, where the earliest pioneers established the first true cities. This would also account for the temples’ location (there was usually more than one) at the centre of southern cities, most visibly at Uruk and Ur”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Kudurrus (almost certainly placed in temples) publicized the alienations, while sale documents in clay were the buyers’ receipt. The most comprehensive and authoritative work on kudurrus is the product of the great scholarship of I.J.Gelb, supplemented by Gelb et al. (1991). They provide the invaluable summary of Table 3.3.”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“So the sealings functioned not as badges of ownership or status, but kept with the calculi formed archives tracking exchanges. Sealings and other exchange devices originate in the Neolithic, not the Chalcolithic. Seals are known from Archaic Hassuna, Catal Huyuk and Amuq A and B (Buchanan 1967a:265–6), while clay tokens are known even earlier from Zagros sites including Jarmo, Asiab and Ganj Dareh (Jasim and Oates 1986: 355). Interestingly, those sites span the area that was later to become the Halafian oecumene. When we encounter the later Sumero-Akkadian accounting devices they are clearly aspects of social control and stratification, centred on the ‘great households’ known to have been the condition of Sumer from the Uruk Period of the fourth millennium onward (Maisels 1990; Crawford 1991; Postgate 1992). And the Late Uruk is the period of transition from stamp to cylinder seals (Buchanan 1967b:535). From the well-known historical situation, some might wrongly conclude that the Halaf accounting rationale would be less like that of an egalitarian credit-union and more akin either to the relationship between consumers and capitalists, or subordinates rendering dues to superiors. However, there are no indications of a Halafian social hierarchy, and the nature of the exchange process is too dispersed and reciprocal for it to be a matter of traders and purchasers. Prior to the discovery of the Burnt Village, Akkermans (1990: 290–3) suspected that ‘chiefdom’ was a misplaced description of Halaf social organization. On the basis of the wide variety of seals in use in a mere village and other considerations, he now (1995:25) states that”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Earlier houses could be as small as 10–12 square metres, consisting of a single rectangular room, though they coexisted with larger structures. The standard constructional technique throughout was of pisé on stone bases (usually surface) which are 60–80 centimetres wide and about the same high (see plan in Munchaev et al. 1984:48). Much use is made of gypsum plaster for lining bins and troughs (‘citerne’ water tanks?) and it is used throughout the largest structure so far excavated at the site, a dwelling in Level 4. Oriented, like the others, north-south along the river and, like them, rectangular and constructed of pisé on stone foundations, it has been excavated over 75 square metres, but is thought to cover around 100 square metres (Bader 1993a:32). This large structure, which contains an oven and storerooms less than a metre wide, is associated with the earliest phase of defensive building (ibid.).”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“The significance of the ancestor/skull cult during the PPNB under the conditions of egalitarianism obtaining, seems to have lain in the attempt to produce community cohesion by symbolic elaboration of ‘corporate belonging’ (McIntosh 1991), since integration by hierarchical assignment had not yet evolved. When intensification of the ideological domain would no longer suffice, due to demographic/ecological or political pressures, communities diminished and or/dispersed, marking either the failure of this mode of integration, or its irrelevance under changed conditions.17 Certainly, the ‘ancestor cult’ embodied in skull veneration, symbolizing rootedness and continuity, was no longer practised even during the PPNC:”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Despite belonging to the earliest Neolithic and still highly dependent on hunting gazelle, fowl and a wide range of other game, Netiv Hagdud is an archetypal Neolithic site to contrast with Natufian examples. It contains permanent architecture of mud-brick on limestone foundations, storage silos for gathered grains, and some of the very earliest examples of clay female figurines. The site was occupied only during the Early Neolithic, and was abandoned around 9500–9400 bp (ibid.: 407). Like”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“Not only the major subsistence categories present—grains, fruits, nuts, edible plants, game, fish, fowl and reptiles—but the diversity within each is striking. Even now, 19,000 years later in a period of climatic optimum, only a small minority of the world’s population have regular access to such a quality of diet. With such a diversity of high value resources available around the site, it is not surprising that Nadel and Hershkovitz (1991:633) and Kislev et al. (1992:164–5) suggest that the site was occupied at least during the spring and autumn (when, respectively, the grains and then the fruits/nuts become ripe).”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“The argument, which I have made previously for the Near East (1984, 1987, 1990, 1993a), is that the long-term post-Pleistocene trend was (despite zonal and temporal fluctuations) for raised biomass levels in the Near East, with higher temperatures and higher overall rainfall (though it diminished in northeastern Africa and the Negev). With this improvement in growing conditions, a wider variety of plants (certainly) and animals (almost certainly) became available to hunter-gatherer populations, especially the cereal grasses which spread from lowland refuges into upland areas ahead of expanding oak-pistacio woodland after about 15,000 bp, the period of Late Glacial warming. From a ratio of 20 per cent of tree to other pollens at the end of the pleniglacial (c. 17,000 bp), this had risen to a maximum of 75 per cent at 11,540 +—100 bp, according to the new pollen core extracted from Lake Huleh by Baruch and Bottema (1991). However, by 10,650 bp, tree pollen had fallen right back to 25 per cent, recovering to 50 per cent at 10,440 +-120 bp, but declining again over the next few centuries, to improve thereafter”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“More than this, at his principle sanctuary at Heliopolis, Ra took the name of Atum, ‘the All’, from whom all creation issued including the first nine deities, the Enead or Nine of Heliopolis”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China

“As mentioned earlier, Thomas Park (1992) has argued, on the basis of Chaos Theory and his own fieldwork amongst flood-recession agriculturalists on the Senegal River (which has a regime similar to that of the Nile), that where the height and duration of floods are crucial to agriculture, and where, as also on the Nile, the extent of flooding is unpredictable (‘chaotic’), with year-to-year fluctuations in flood crest elevation and flood duration (Butzer 1984:105), then the sort of flexibility required of the human population will involve hierarchy. This gives the ‘original’/best-established families or minimal lineages preferential access to village lands, such that in good years they have rights to the best, which here are the sectors of flood basin between the levees and the lowest depressions. These were the prime areas for cultivation of the single annual crop of barley, emmer wheat, beans, chickpeas and other vegetables’ (ibid.) In”
― Charles Keith Maisels, Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China