Word: mesopotamia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...useful, though not extenuating, to point out that Americans did not invent slavery. Their form of chattel slavery, however, was uniquely ugly. Still, slavery has a long, dishonorable history. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia kept slaves before 2000 B.C., and the Code of Hammurabi laid down rules governing the practice. In eight years, Caesar sent back some 500,000 slaves from Gaul to work mines, plantations and public projects; some, of course, became gladiators. The Domesday Book recorded 25,000 slaves in England. Races from the Mayans to the Muslims to, notably, black Africans have kept slaves for many centuries...
...cheered on charioteers as they raced in perilous Ben-Hur style. To supply those circuses, hunters fanned through the empire, caging behemoths and great wild cats. So many animals were rounded up that even then there were endangered species: the hippopotamus was made extinct in Nubia, the lion in Mesopotamia, the elephant in North Africa. Sport was the adult's amusement and the child's obsession. Rather like a querulous Harvard professor, Tacitus complained that few students of 1st century Rome "are to be found who talk of any other subjects in their homes, and whenever we enter...
Historians have long accepted the notion that the Bronze Age began between 3500 and 3000 B.C. in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia. It was during this period that man is believed to have developed advanced writing techniques, built the first true cities and brought metallurgy to the stage necessary to produce bronze. Now there is evidence to suggest that a cultural flowering may have occurred earlier-and thousands of miles farther east. Archaeologists excavating sites at Ban Chiang, a small farming village in northeastern Thailand, have found sophisticated bronze artifacts dating back to about...
Peaceful Life. While there is no evidence that the ancient inhabitants of Thailand built cities that could compare to those of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, their sophisticated implements suggest that they had a high standard of living. Artifacts unearthed at the dig show that the early settlers grew rice, raised animals such as pigs and chickens" and probably believed in an afterlife. The findings also suggest that Ban Chiang's residents lived a peaceful existence. The archaeologists found few weapons of war -and no arrow points in any of the 126 intact skeletons unearthed...
...forces driving man are often unconscious. In spite of the emphasis he puts on man's passions and unconscious drives, Fromm believes that the most important determinant of a man's character is society. Echoing arguments he has sprinkled throughout a score of earlier books, Fromm cites Mesopotamia's urban revolution in the third millennium B.C. as being the fall from Eden. At that point simple rural egalitarian society began giving way to cities, authoritarian rule and organized industrial and military power. Alienated from his work and no longer free, man needed new ways to express...