The document discusses the state of civilization in different regions of the world before 1000 BC. It notes that most information was known about the Middle East, India, China, and the Mediterranean, while less was documented about places like Africa, Europe, and the Americas. It provides historical context on the rise and fall of early civilizations and kingdoms in these regions. It also examines how contact and knowledge spread gradually over time between different peoples, with major transformations occurring after 1000 BC with the rise of new empires like Persia.

1. The Rest of the World
• We do not have that much information about
the rest of the world. The story of civilization
were the Middle East and Aegean, India and
China.
• The Story of Africa or central Eurasia, of the
Pacific peoples, of the Americas and western
Europe is not history but still prehistory.
• none of them had achieved levels of civilization
comparable to those already reached in the
Mediterranean and Asia by 1000 BC .

2. Africa
• That is where the human story first began.
• In several waves of migration, Africans
influenced Europe and Asia. Around 50000
years ago, the period of its greatest influence on
the rest of the world was long over.
• We don’t exactly know why. Maybe climate.
Sahara desert was not actually a desert even in
3000 years ago.
• European met African in Sahara based on cave
paintings. European had horses. Horses need
grazing.
• Today, the Sahara is the fastest growing desert
in the world.

3. Africa
• Rock painting and engraving very
different from the earlier cave art
of Europe which depicted little
but animal life and only an
occasional human.
(~2000 people)

4. Berbers
Amazigh (Berbers)
~10000 BC
Saint Augustine
Tauregs
~10000 BC
Saint Augustine

5. Herodotus
It is climate which drives us back upon Egypt as the beginning of African history.
~500 BC Herodotus came to write about Africa, he found little to say about what went on outside Egypt.
His Africa (which he called Libya) was a land defined by the Nile.
He could obtain no information about it, though a travelers' tale spoke of a dwarfish people who were sorcerers.

6. Africa
• Africa is a mosaic of genetic
diversity.
• Hamitic or proto-Hamitic peoples
seem at most times to have been
the most advanced in Africa before
the coming of farming.
• This was, except in Egypt, a slow
evolution and in Africa the hunting
and gathering cultures of prehistory
have coexisted with agriculture
right down to modern times.

7. Kush
• The kingdom of Kush, high up the
Nile, in the region of what is now
Sudan.
• was garrisoned by the Egyptians,
but in about 1000 BC it emerged
as an independent kingdom.
• By 730 BC Kush was strong
enough to conquer Egypt, and
five of its kings ruled as the
Pharaohs known to history as the
Twenty-Fifth or ‘Ethiopian’
Dynasty.

8. Kush
• None the less, they could not
arrest the Egyptian decline.
• When the Assyrians fell on
Egypt, the Kushite dynasty
ended.
• Two Changes:
• 1. It became more African
• 2. Iron (Kushite capital at
Meroe became the
metallurgical center of
Africa.)

9. Aksumite Kingdom
• Ethiopia and Eritrea
• 300 AD overthrew the
Mereo Kingdom
• They were Christian

10. Great Zimbabwe
• 1000 AD

11. Mali Empire
• 1200 AD

12. Ghana Empire
• 750 AD to 1076 AD

13. Americas
• Asian went t America 20000 BC
• 15000 BC cave dwellers in Andes in
Peru
• some of these cultures arrived at the
invention of agriculture independently
of the Old World. It happened later
than Fertile Crescent.
• 2700 Maize (Corn) in Mesoamerica
• Further south potato (40 types)
• It was slow. Not an agricultural
revolution like in Middle East
• Farming, villages, weaving and pottery
all appear in Central America before
the second millennium BC

14. Olmec
• first recognized American civilization
• For several centuries
• after 800 BC it seems to have
prevailed right across Central
America as far south as what is now
El Salvador
• Why civilization should in America
have sprung from such unpromising
soil.
• It may also be that the early
hieroglyphic systems of Central
America originate in Olmec times.
• Disappeared in about 400 BC

15. Chavin
• Peru
• When the Spanish landed in the New
World nearly 2 , 000 years after the
disappearance of Olmec culture they
would still find most of its inhabitants
working with stone tools.

16. Western Europe
• To the great civilizations which rose and fell
in the river valleys of the Middle East,
Europe was largely an irrelevance.
• It was to be a very long time before men
would even be able to conceive that there
existed a geographical, let alone a cultural
unity corresponding to the later idea of
Europe.
• Two Europes:
• 1. Mediterranean (olive, literate, civilization
after Iron Age, contact)
• 2. North and West
• Europe has little of its own to offer the
world except its minerals
• The relative ease of simple agriculture in
Europe may have had a negative effect
on social evolution;  Western
Individualism
• Greece had farming communities a little
after 7000 BC .
• By 5000 BC others existed as far west as
northern France and the Netherlands,
and soon after appeared in the British
Isles.
• 4000 BC copper was being worked in the
Balkans.

17. Europe
• Celts: the most important of
prehistoric European peoples,
• a society of warriors rather than
traders or prospectors.
• 1800 BC
• The ancestors of the Celts then
occupied most of modern France,
Germany, the Low Countries and
upper Austria.
• Slavs, Scandinavians, Finns
• metallurgical world, Thousands of Megalithic monuments (up to 5000 BC)

18. Stonehenge
• The most complete and striking megalithic site
is Stonehenge
• Southern England,
• whose creation is now thought to have taken
about 900 years to its completion in about
2100 BC .
• about 50 tons apiece and they had to be
brought some 18 miles to the site
• There are some eighty pieces of stone there
weighing about 5 tons which came 150 miles
or so from the mountains of Wales.
• Like its agriculture and metallurgy, prehistoric
Europe’s engineering and architecture arose
independently of the outside world.

19. Villanovans
• 800 BC
• In the next 200 years they
adopted Greek characters for
writing their language.
• Etruscans … One of their cities
becomes Rome

20. How much did these people know about each
other?
• The Mediterranean and Middle Eastern peoples knew hardly
• Anything about China and India.
• Dim perception of a barbarian northern and north-western Europe.
• They knew nothing about what happened beyond Sahara and of the
existence of Americas.
Before 1000 BC

21. How do we know how much they knew?
• At Abu Simbel, sixth-century
Greek mercenaries in the
Egyptian army cut inscriptions
which recorded their pride in
coming that far.
After 1000 BC
• 2500 years later, English county
regiments would leave their
badges and names cut into the
rocks of the Khyber Pass.

22. Transformation
• No clear chronological line.
• Military, economic, iron, literacy, etc.
• An important boundary was crossed
somewhere early in the first
millennium BC .
• The Völkerwanderung in the ancient
Middle East was over (~1000 BC).
• Literally "wandering of peoples". The
term Völkerwanderungszeit is the
German for "Migration Period".
After 1000 BC
• The framework for this was provided
by the great political change of the
middle of the first millennium BC ,
the rise of a new power, Persia, and
the final collapse of the Egyptian and
Babylonian-Assyrian traditions.

23. Decline of Egypt
• Bronze Age Anachronism
• Kings and priests disputed power
• Kushite invaders established its dynasty
(800 BC)
• Ashurbanipal sacked Thebes (671 BC).
• Nebuchadnezzar (588 BC)
• Persians (525 BC)
• ~400 BC to ~20 AD ruled by foreigners

24. Iran
• Settlements in 5000 BC
• the word ‘Iran’ (which does not
appear until about AD 600 )
• Iran = Land of Aryans
• ~1000 BC Aryan tribe from the
north moves to the plateau
• Two tribes moved to the west :
Medes and Persians

25. Achaemendis
• Cyrus, the conqueror of Babylon
• In 540 BC, defeated Medes, Swallowed Babylon, Syria and Palestine, Hundu Kush in the east,
Gandhara
• killed fighting the Scythians

26. The Largest Empire
• Unlike Assyrians times, brutality was
not celebrated
• Cyrus respected the institutions and
ways of his new subjects.
• Protection of Marduk , and
rebuilding of the Temple
• Iron and horse, sheer personal ability
• Provincial governors (later called
satraps)
• Lasted nearly two centuries
• Herodotus: Persians loved flowers
• Cyrus’s Son added Egypt to the
empire

27. Daruis
• From 522 BC to 486 BC
• 20 satraps
• Aramaic, the old lingua franca
of the Assyrian empire, became
the administrative language
• not written in cuneiform but in
the Phoenician alphabet
• Bureaucracy
• Road building
• Persepolis

28. • Language and ideas
• Vedic and Persian
Religion from Gandhara

29. Diversity
• Zoroastrianism spread rapidly through western Asia with
Persian rule, even though it was probably never more than
the cult of a minority.
• It would influence Judaism.
• the angels of Christian tradition and the notion of the
hellfire which awaited the wicked both came from
Zoroaster.