National Geographic: The Birth of Religion

[Jimmie Higgins]

Despite the title of this National Geographic article, I think this is more of a theory topic than a religion one since it's more about the development of complex human societies (class societies) than it is about religion.

The Birth of Religion (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/mann-text)

Ok, so I'm open to archeological finds challenging the general ideas among radicals about how humans or human society developed. Marx and Engels weren't archeologists after all and reliable excavation of ancient sites was very thin in their times and so I always kind of looked at their ideas as sort of educated guesses or a framework for developments among pre-class humans.

So I saw the above article in an issue on the store shelves and was interested and ready to be challenged. But after reading the article, am I alone in thinking that this is a flimsy argument for civilization leading to agriculture! I feel like you could take the same evidence they cite in the article to argue the exact opposite, that this site also could point to agriculture leading to settlements.

The most rediculious thing from a materialist's perspective is the last line which sums up the weak speculation in the article:


"Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces," Schmidt says. "I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind."

[Jose Gracchus]

Idiotic. Did the human mind airly build cities outside of river valleys and fertile zones through force of will? Fuck idealism.

[Olentzero]

Of course sites like Göbekli Tepe are gonna raise some serious questions about human history and the development of civilization, but one indisputable fact remains: Whoever put those temples together needed copious amounts of leisure time to do it. Which means that, whatever they were, the means of production had to be efficient enough for people to not need to devote all, or even a majority, of their waking hours reproducing their own existence (i.e., getting food).

Of course agriculture and domestication of animals still appears to be the best way to get that done, but I don't think it's ever been ruled out that climatic and geological conditions could make food plentiful enough for a foraging community not to need to work too hard to grab dinner and thus have enough time to settle down and build shit.

Also note that though the archeologists say they haven't found any evidence of settlements at GT, the article also states that they haven't excavated everything yet - only about 10% of the entire site. It's not clear whether the geomagnetic surveys that found 20 or so rings were entirely comprehensive, either, so I think it's too early to claim nobody actually settled there.

In any case, even the most religiously minded Neolithic peoples wouldn't have had the time or energy to put those kinds of things together if they were out on the hunt for 8 hours or so a day. They had to have been surrounded by food, if not figuratively drowning in it. Only then - and this is what Engels argues in Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, among other works - would people have enough time, energy, and inclination to build such a frankly amazing site as Göbekli Tepe. Sheer force of will or "the gods want us to" isn't enough of a motivation to build it if you're far too busy trying to put food on your plate.

[Rowan Duffy]

Of course agriculture and domestication of animals still appears to be the best way to get that done, but I don't think it's ever been ruled out that climatic and geological conditions could make food plentiful enough for a foraging community not to need to work too hard to grab dinner and thus have enough time to settle down and build shit.

The North West Native Americans such as the Tlingit had lots of spare time from fishing and the use of slave labour.

[Jose Gracchus]

I think the latter there is key. At some point warmaking could accumulate enough surplus labor and that the slave-economies would be able to supplant the primitive communist economy. Murray Bookchin, for whatever his other drawbacks, developed these themes extensively in The Ecology of Freedom.

[Olentzero]

The North West Native Americans such as the Tlingit had lots of spare time from fishing and the use of slave labour.On the surface of it, the first question that pops up is "Then where is the PNW equivalent of Göbekli Tepe?" Not that I'm saying a hunter-gatherer society that made use of slave labor couldn't have done something like GT, it's just that the societies that did have slave labor and achieved some impressive architectural feats (Rome, Egypt, the Mayans) were agriculturally based. You had to have a steady supply of food to keep all the slaves fed, and a hunter-gatherer economy is severely limited in that respect. Again, not that slave labor is impossible in a hunter-gatherer society - the Tlingit culture, among many others, proves otherwise - but that it seems to be impossible to sustain the number of slaves necessary to build even something like Göbekli Tepe in a hunter-gatherer society.

This is all wild speculation, of course. I have even less of an idea who built GT - and how - than the people actually on site do. Just thinking out loud in response to your argument. In any case, I still think the assertion that civilization came out of the human mind is junk. Material conditions allowed for people to come together and build civilization, and the best minds of the time couldn't have built civilization if the conditions weren't right.

[Rowan Duffy]

Salmon runs are pretty consistent - you can't really change the carrying capacity by employing additional labour, but it also doesn't take much labour at all to acquire the fish. I'm not sure about the Tlingit, but some Yupik would save enough food from the salmon runs which last only a month to be the staple for the rest of the year. That leaves a lot of leisure time.

[Rocky Rococo]

A few years back I read a book entitled Inside the Neolithic Mind that explores both these Turkish/Syrian sites and others such as Catalhoyuk, as well as slightly later sites in Ireland and Brittany. While I certainly don't accept all the authors' conclusions or inferences, this National Geographic barely grazes the surface of the very extensive and solid archaeological findings that are driving this emerging "revisionist" theory. Very provocative and interesting stuff, and well worth reading, even the parts that I found particularly annoying. Perhaps especially them.

What I found particularly fascinating was that the authors turned to recently developing scientific fields such as cognitive psychology and neuroscience for explanation of recurring phenomena that are manifested at sites separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years. We should be willing to recognize that just because certain fields of science did not exist in the 19th century doesn't mean they aren't good science.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I think the argument that either material culture or religion came before the other is a false dilemma. It is just as probable that they are mutually dependent. Groups such as Native American tribes all had religious institutions though they may have not had the kinds of large temple structures found in Turkey. One good example is the pueblo people. Even though they didn't benefit from material abundance and tons of surplus labor, because of the dry climate and the permanence of their settlements they were able to build permanent religious structures which still exist. We see then that they were limited by their material conditions, but that these structures seem to exist in even the oldest Puebla settlements so they seem to have been a part of their culture from when they started settling down. Likewise, we know that their religious traditions share many similarities with nomadic hunting tribes in the Americas. Seeing whether their material culture or their religious ideas predated the other seems to be a case of the chicken and the egg in this case.

As one example of how material culture can benefit from having a religious culture coexisting with it is the development of agriculture. Ancient religions focus much more on things like time cycles, seasons, etc, which are obviously necessary for agriculture. With that in mind, religion serves a function in primitive communist and early agricultural societies as a way of teaching the next generation about when to grow, where the hunts are, etc, and impart important "morals" about not over-exploiting particular resources, etc. So it's plausible to think that their religion made their means of production more efficient at the same time that their more efficient means of production allowed them to think up more sophisticated religious practices.


Perhaps the temple in Turkey was built at the same time as the increasing material development of early nomadic societies, and that one reinforced the other. The problem is that we don't really know anything about the people who built the Turkish temple, what they hunted, how their economy worked, etc.

[agnixie]

Of course sites like Göbekli Tepe are gonna raise some serious questions about human history and the development of civilization, but one indisputable fact remains: Whoever put those temples together needed copious amounts of leisure time to do it. Which means that, whatever they were, the means of production had to be efficient enough for people to not need to devote all, or even a majority, of their waking hours reproducing their own existence (i.e., getting food).

Of course agriculture and domestication of animals still appears to be the best way to get that done, but I don't think it's ever been ruled out that climatic and geological conditions could make food plentiful enough for a foraging community not to need to work too hard to grab dinner and thus have enough time to settle down and build shit.

Also note that though the archeologists say they haven't found any evidence of settlements at GT, the article also states that they haven't excavated everything yet - only about 10% of the entire site. It's not clear whether the geomagnetic surveys that found 20 or so rings were entirely comprehensive, either, so I think it's too early to claim nobody actually settled there.

In any case, even the most religiously minded Neolithic peoples wouldn't have had the time or energy to put those kinds of things together if they were out on the hunt for 8 hours or so a day. They had to have been surrounded by food, if not figuratively drowning in it. Only then - and this is what Engels argues in Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, among other works - would people have enough time, energy, and inclination to build such a frankly amazing site as Göbekli Tepe. Sheer force of will or "the gods want us to" isn't enough of a motivation to build it if you're far too busy trying to put food on your plate.

American archaeology is a good guide for that - west coast native groups seem to have developed a settled civilization based around foraging because the region was so damn rich in everything, and there's a theory that the clovisian period in palaeo-indian may indicate a period of extremely rich megafauna, to the point where one theory I know of is that american archaic and formative phases basically start to appear after over hunting has made the continent poorer and harder to survive in as pure hunters. That said, a high density makes such environments surviving very unlikely (to the point where at the extreme, you get chinampas, rice culture and western european four field rotations, among many examples of extreme high yield pre-industrial techniques)

[Olentzero]

You lost me after the first sentence, and I fully admit that's because my knowledge of American archaeology (well, archaeology in general) is pretty limited. Would you expand on your thoughts a bit?

[ckaihatsu]

---





As one example of how material culture can benefit from having a religious culture coexisting with it is the development of agriculture. Ancient religions focus much more on things like time cycles, seasons, etc, which are obviously necessary for agriculture. With that in mind, religion serves a function in primitive communist and early agricultural societies as a way of teaching the next generation about when to grow, where the hunts are, etc, and impart important "morals" about not over-exploiting particular resources, etc. So it's plausible to think that their religion made their means of production more efficient at the same time that their more efficient means of production allowed them to think up more sophisticated religious practices.





It was not just the sense of community that attracted them. The central religious idea of Judaism, monotheism—the belief in the one invisible god—fitted the situation of the urban dwellers. The pagan religions in which there were many gods, each associated with a particular locality or force of nature, made sense to the country dweller for whom the local village or clan was the centre of social existence. But the urban traders, artisans and beggars had repeated contact with a very large number of people from different localities and in different occupations. An anonymous, all-embracing deity could seem to provide support and protection in such multiple encounters. That is why there were trends towards monotheism in all the great civilisations of antiquity—the rise of Buddhism in India and China, and the worship of a single ‘good’ god (involved in an eternal battle with evil) in Persia.117 Even Roman Paganism tended to worship a sun-god more powerful than the others. Furthermore, in its Pharisaical form, Judaism combined monotheism with the promise to its adherents that however hard their suffering in this life, they had something to look forward to in the next.

Such was the popularity of Judaism that it bound together millions of believers in all the trading centres of the Roman Empire, providing a network of contacts and communication stretching across thousands of miles.118 All the religious disputes and messianic speculations occasioned by the situation in Jerusalem were transmitted along this network. To people in each Roman city they would not have seemed distant arguments about the situation in Palestine, since the suffering of Palestine was just one example of the suffering of the lower classes and the conquered provinces right across the empire.

Judaism was thus on its way to becoming the universal religion of the urban masses of the empire.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 6, The rise of Christianity, pp. 90-91

[Olentzero]

Two different time frames here. Judaism, at least as I understand its history, extends to maybe 1000-1500 BCE, and that's being generous. Göbekli Tepe predates that by some 10,000 years. There were no urban dwellers at the time, so it cannot be argued that the social factors that led to the rise of Judaism - and hence Christianity - are the same social factors that led to the rise of the religion practiced at Göbekli Tepe, Harman's excellent analysis notwithstanding.

[ckaihatsu]

---





Two different time frames here. Judaism, at least as I understand its history, extends to maybe 1000-1500 BCE, and that's being generous. Göbekli Tepe predates that by some 10,000 years. There were no urban dwellers at the time, so it cannot be argued that the social factors that led to the rise of Judaism - and hence Christianity - are the same social factors that led to the rise of the religion practiced at Göbekli Tepe, Harman's excellent analysis notwithstanding.





The first form of agriculture (often called ‘horticulture’) involved clearing the land by cutting away at woodland and brush with axes and burning off the rest, then planting and harvesting seeds using a hoe or a digging stick. After a couple of years the land would usually be exhausted. So it would be allowed to return to the wild and a new area would be cleared for cultivation.

Obtaining a livelihood in this way involved radical changes in patterns of working and living together. People became more firmly rooted to their village settlements than ever before. They had to tend the crops between planting and harvesting and so could not wander off for months at a time. They also had to work out ways of cooperating with each other to clear the land, to ensure the regular tending of crops (weeding, watering and so on), the storing of harvests, the sharing of stocks, and the rearing of children. Whole new patterns of social life developed and, with them, new ways of viewing the world, expressed in various myths, ceremonies and rituals.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 3, Neolithic revolution, p. 11

[Olentzero]

Are you just going to keep quoting Harman or actually provide some analysis and arguments as to why you think such quotes are relevant? I mean, if I wanted to read the book you're quoting from, I could just go to my bookshelf.

[ckaihatsu]

Are you just going to keep quoting Harman or actually provide some analysis and arguments as to why you think such quotes are relevant? I mean, if I wanted to read the book you're quoting from, I could just go to my bookshelf.





This was not the first attempt to make such a break, despite the claims of some history books. There had been an earlier breakthrough two centuries before, with the translation of works from Latin, Greek and Arabic in Toledo, the efforts of thinkers like Abelard and Roger Bacon, and the writings of Bocaccio, Chaucer and Dante. But it had ground to a halt with the great crisis of the 14th century, as church and state worked to extirpate ideas that might link with the class struggle in town and country. The universities, from being centres of intellectual exploration, were increasingly characterised by scholastic disputes which seemed to have no practical relevance.





Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 6, Renaissance to Reformation, p. 176


Heh -- just kidding. Kinda weird, isn't it?

No, if I had something to say myself I would say it. In a more scholarly thread like this one I find more utility in using reference material, particularly Harman's.

[Franz Fanonipants]

harman is a p. shitty historian hth guys

[Jimmie Higgins]

harman is a p. shitty historian hth guysWhat sections of the book do you disagree with? I found it to be a really useful survey from a Marxist perspective that helped me connect many historical dots from separate, more in depth, books I've read.

[Olentzero]

In a more scholarly thread like this one I find more utility in using reference material, particularly Harman's.No argument here, friend - like Jimmie and I said, we both find A People's History of the World a very useful reference book. It just helps, in my opinion, to throw a little bit of your own understanding and how you think the material you quote applies to the subject of discussion. Otherwise - and I mean this constructively - you come off sounding pretty pretentious.

[ckaihatsu]

No argument here, friend - like Jimmie and I said, we both find A People's History of the World a very useful reference book. It just helps, in my opinion, to throw a little bit of your own understanding and how you think the material you quote applies to the subject of discussion. Otherwise - and I mean this constructively - you come off sounding pretty pretentious.


Constructively pretentious, huh?!

= )


It's okay, I've been called worse than that...!

x D


Seriously, though, I think the juxtaposition of select reference quotes serves its purpose just fine without my own rehashing of it.

I hope that will suffice -- please don't cross me off of your holiday season greeting card recipient list...!


= )

[Jimmie Higgins]

Constructively pretentious, huh?!

= )


It's okay, I've been called worse than that...!

x D


Seriously, though, I think the juxtaposition of select reference quotes serves its purpose just fine without my own rehashing of it.

I hope that will suffice -- please don't cross me off of your holiday season greeting card recipient list...!


= )
I mean this constructively... but you're kind of a jerk. :lol:

Ha, but seriously, I got that you were simply citing examples from the book but I did wonder if there was something extra specific you were trying to point out.

Transition sentences man, transition sentences! LOL

[ckaihatsu]

I mean this constructively... but you're kind of a jerk. :lol:


Ha-ha....

I mean *this* constructively: You're not at all funny saying that, and yet you're not really being serious, either -- what does that leave you with -- ?!





Ha, but seriously, I got that you were simply citing examples from the book but I did wonder if there was something extra specific you were trying to point out.


No, as I mentioned.





Transition sentences man, transition sentences! LOL


= )

[agnixie]

You lost me after the first sentence, and I fully admit that's because my knowledge of American archaeology (well, archaeology in general) is pretty limited. Would you expand on your thoughts a bit?

Sure (I completely missed that this thread was still going on).

Basically, there are archaeological indications that some of the earlier civilizations in America may have started before agriculture, or even without it, and it's actually quite puzzling to some people.

So instead of a productive mode, food production in these communities was still a predatory mode - the pacific northwest (British columbia, the Alaskan southern coast, Oregon, Washington) had a number of peoples living in settled societies with organizations close to states as found in the more classical civilizations around the Andes, Mesoamerica, the Mississippi, the Pueblo regions (and possibly the Amazon), but their food production was almost entirely based on fishing, with no agriculture and no herding whatsoever. They still had a lot of leisure time thanks to the immense wealth of the region, and had developed copper metallurgy (they traded a lot with the inuit for that copper).

Similarly, northern California had semi-settled populations that lived off forests and coasts, but with more plants in their diet (esp. acorns). They don't seem to have practiced horticulture much, although they may have a bit.

There is also a period in the record where the americas seems to have experienced slight declines. The paleo-indians have a pattern of having a rich arrival, then a period of increased difficulties, followed by an arrival of new modes of productions or settling more stably in a richer region. "Clovisian" is a nickname for what archaeologists think would probably be the palaeolithic ancestors of the various amerind groups (i.e. all american natives except the inuit, the aleut, the athabaskans, the apache and the navajo) if the material and social cultures actually match. There's little to no indications that they ate much in the way of plants at all early on, and the continent had huge amounts of megafauna for everyone in addition to various good places to do trapping. A lot of the earliest settlements as this period ends seem to indicate that agriculture was small scale and concentrated on producing sources of sugar.

That's when you start to see "archaic"* cultures, and when the first traces of monumental architecture appear, although specialization in architecture is still rare. Also, I forgot - hunter gatherers do have a lot of free time in general, as gathering food, while it can't provide for large populations, requires a relatively small part of the day, so they had time to ponder these things.

The short version is basically - it's possible to find such a bountiful region that foraging can support a fixed settled population, but at the same time, population increases eventually make it get over the carrying capacity of even the richest region. And nomadic hunter gatherer life is rife with free time but admittedly doesn't tend to leave much permanent traces behind.

*The phases in american archaeology aren't based around metallurgy because metallurgy is rather rare due to poor sources of useful metal and obsidian replacing metal in mesoamerica while bronze is found a bit in Inca digs - they're paleo-indian (nomadic hunter gatherers), archaic (semi nomadic, still mostly hunter gatherers but with limited agro and horticulture), formative (chiefdoms and early states, settled, etc), and classical (your classical civilizations with some debate as to whether the Amazonian, Mississippian and Pueblo civilizations were classical or formative before they collapsed)

[Olentzero]

The short version is basically - it's possible to find such a bountiful region that foraging can support a fixed settled population, but at the same time, population increases eventually make it get over the carrying capacity of even the richest region. And nomadic hunter gatherer life is rife with free time but admittedly doesn't tend to leave much permanent traces behind.Thanks for your reply, agnixie. This particular bit makes me think we're on the same page, more or less - that the material circumstances had to be favorable first before any striving to connect with the divine could lead to architectural achievements like Göbekli Tepe. It would seem to explain the phenomenon that successive constructions were of poorer quality; as the population increased and began to overtax the local ecology, they had to devote more time to feeding themselves and less time to building temples.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Thanks for your reply, agnixie. This particular bit makes me think we're on the same page, more or less - that the material circumstances had to be favorable first before any striving to connect with the divine could lead to architectural achievements like Göbekli Tepe. It would seem to explain the phenomenon that successive constructions were of poorer quality; as the population increased and began to overtax the local ecology, they had to devote more time to feeding themselves and less time to building temples.

Right, I think one of the mistaken assumptions about the materialist theory of development in the NG article is that it seems to present this materialist theory in a sort of deterministic or mathematical manner. No doubt some supporters of this theory also held a deterministic view of it.

Anyway, I think it would still be perfectly in keeping with a materialist view of human development if people developed differently or in fits and starts or in a "combined and uneven" way where nomadic people coming into contact with settled people and adopting some of their beliefs and being incorporated into a more agricultural society via trade while still being primarily pre-agricultural themselves.

What I think is totally unconvincing is the idea that people just "thought-up" agriculture out of nothing more than a willful desire to settle as the magazine article argues.

[Olentzero]

What I think is totally unconvincing is the idea that people just "thought-up" agriculture out of nothing more than a willful desire to settle as the magazine article argues.Exactly.

[Lynx]

Agriculture giving rise to religion vs. religion giving rise to agriculture. I think this is a question of which preceded the other. Precedence does not necessarily imply causation, but the article suggests it does. I'm unconvinced.

[ckaihatsu]

Agriculture giving rise to religion vs. religion giving rise to agriculture. I think this is a question of which preceded the other. Precedence does not necessarily imply causation, but the article suggests it does. I'm unconvinced.


Material conditions precede consciousness, so, per post #14, the static location that agricultural cultivation requires would *precede* and *give rise to* ideological (mythical) justifications for why a population's derived social order was / is the way it was / is. (It's the same as the ideology of racism used to justify the labor system and social order of slavery.)

[Lynx]

Material conditions precede consciousness, so, per post #14, the static location that agricultural cultivation requires would *precede* and *give rise to* ideological (mythical) justifications for why a population's derived social order was / is the way it was / is. (It's the same as the ideology of racism used to justify the labor system and social order of slavery.)
Couldn't I just claim that religion evolved, from simple rituals to more elaborate ones? From non-monument building to monument building as those endeavours became feasible?
There is no evidence that religion motivated anyone to develop agriculture. Hunger, opportunity and pragmatism are plausible enough motives.

[ckaihatsu]

Couldn't I just claim that religion evolved, from simple rituals to more elaborate ones? From non-monument building to monument building as those endeavours became feasible?
There is no evidence that religion motivated anyone to develop agriculture. Hunger, opportunity and pragmatism are plausible enough motives.


You can do anything you like, since I'm not the Permissions Guy.

In terms of how beliefs systems developed, though, there's a difference between a blithe liberal "point A to point B" answer, and a materialist one that looks at the underlying material and social conditions that give rise to such belief systems.

As this thread of discussion has noted, even wanton opportunity is not always enough to spur a change in a population's lifestyle, and thus a shift to a new form of subsistence like agriculture. And, as I just mentioned, it wouldn't be the case that *religious ideas* provided the motivation -- rather, they would be the consequence.

[Lynx]

You can do anything you like, since I'm not the Permissions Guy.
Cool, I can be an archaeologist :D

In terms of how beliefs systems developed, though, there's a difference between a blithe liberal "point A to point B" answer, and a materialist one that looks at the underlying material and social conditions that give rise to such belief systems.
Well, I'm sifting through ash pits and refuse piles of ancient neolithic settlements, but I'm not getting much data on material and social conditions of that time. Those people were right stingy in leaving clues for their descendents.

As this thread of discussion has noted, even wanton opportunity is not always enough to spur a change in a population's lifestyle, and thus a shift to a new form of subsistence like agriculture. And, as I just mentioned, it wouldn't be the case that *religious ideas* provided the motivation -- rather, they would be the consequence.
Neither motivation nor consequence. No one knows why they built those monuments. No one knows what purpose they were meant to serve. There's no evidence.

Contrast this with the birth of Islam, which is claimed to have inspired a renaissance in scientific exploration and the development of mathematics.

[ckaihatsu]

---





Cool, I can be an archaeologist :D

Well, I'm sifting through ash pits and refuse piles of ancient neolithic settlements, but I'm not getting much data on material and social conditions of that time. Those people were right stingy in leaving clues for their descendents.





The first big changes in people’s lives and ideas began to occur only about 10,000 years ago. People took up a new way of making a livelihood in certain parts of the world, notably the ‘Fertile Crescent’ region of the Middle East.25 They learned to cultivate crops instead of relying upon nature to provide them with vegetable foodstuffs, and to domesticate animals instead of simply hunting them. It was an innovation which was to transform their whole way of living.

The transformation did not necessarily lead these people to have an easier life than their forebears. But climatic changes gave some of them a very limited choice.26 They had grown accustomed, over two or three millennia, to life in areas where conditions had been such as to provide bountiful supplies of wild plant food and animals to hunt—in one area in south east Turkey, for instance, a ‘family group’ could, ‘without working very hard’, gather enough grain from wild cereals in three weeks to keep them alive for a year. They did not need to be continually on the move like other peoples.27 They had been able to live in the same places year after year, transforming their former rough camps into permanent village settlements numbering hundreds rather than dozens of people, storing foodstuffs in stone or baked clay pots, and accumulating a range of sophisticated stone tools. For a period of time greater than from the foundation of ancient Rome to the present day, they had been able to combine the low workloads typical of foraging societies with the advantages of fixed village life.

But then changes in the global climate prevented people obtaining an adequate livelihood in this way. As conditions in the Fertile Crescent region became drier and cooler, there was a decline in the availability of naturally occurring wild grains and a fall in the size of the antelope and deer herds. The hunter-gatherer villages faced a crisis. They could no longer live as they had been living. If they were not to starve they either had to break up into small groups and return to a long-forgotten nomadic way of life, or find some way to make up for the deficiencies of nature by their own labour.

This path led to agriculture.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 1, The neolithic ‘revolution’, pp. 10-11





Neither motivation nor consequence. No one knows why they built those monuments. No one knows what purpose they were meant to serve. There's no evidence.





Civilisation, in the strict sense of people living in cities, goes back just over 5,000 years. The first indications of it are the great edifices found in very different parts of the world—the pyramids of Egypt and Central America, the ziggurats (staged tower temples) of Iraq, the palace of Knossos in Crete, the fortress at Mycenae in mainland Greece, and the grid-planned 4,000 year old cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-dero on the Indus. For this reason the archaeologist Gordon Childe baptised the change ‘the urban revolution’.44 The remains are stunning enough in themselves. Even more amazing is the fact that they were built by peoples who a few generations previously had known nothing but a purely rural life based on fairly rudimentary agriculture. Now they were in possession of elaborate construction skills, capable of quarrying, transporting, erecting and carving huge chunks of rock, and then decorating them with elaborate artistic works—even, in certain cases (the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, the Ethiopian, the Chinese and the Meso-American), of developing scripts with which to describe how they behaved and felt. In Eurasia and Africa they also learnt at this stage to obtain copper and tin from rock oxides, and some time afterwards to fuse them into a harder metal, bronze, for making ornaments and weapons—hence the often used terms for the period, the ‘Copper’ and ‘Bronze’ Ages.

None of this could have happened without a prior change in the way in which people made their livelihood, a change that was initially centred on agriculture.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 2, The first civilisations, p. 17








Contrast this with the birth of Islam, which is claimed to have inspired a renaissance in scientific exploration and the development of mathematics.





In his history of Islam, Bernard Lewis goes so far as to claim it was ‘a revolution in the history of Islam as important...as the French or Russian revolutions in the history of Europe’.64 Some historians even refer to it as a ‘bourgeois revolution’.64a




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 4, The Islamic revolutions, p. 129





Overall this was one of those periods of history in which the clashes of values produced by rapid changes in society led to a flourishing of intellectual inquiry. There was not yet a single orthodox interpretation of Islam, and rival schools battled for people’s minds. The lower classes of the towns were attracted to the various Shia heresies—views which repeatedly led to attempted revolts against the empire.

Meanwhile poets, scholars and philosophers flocked to Baghdad from all parts of the empire, hoping to receive the patronage of some wealthy courtier, landowner or merchant. They translated into Arabic the works of Greek, Persian, Syriac (the language of ancient Syria) and Indian philosophy, medicine and mathematics. Philosophers such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (usually known in the west as Avicenna) sought to provide a rational account of the world, building on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Mathematicians such as al-Khwarazmi, al-Buzjani and al-Biruni combined and developed the heritage of Greece and India. Astronomers constructed astrolabes and sextants and measured the circumference of the Earth.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 4, The Islamic revolutions, pp. 130-131

[Lynx]

Nice collection of just-so stories from prehistory. What do they have to say about the monuments featured in the NG article?

The birth of Islam, can be documented more accurately. What happened to the scientific renaissance as Islam spread across the middle east?

[Lynx]

I am now a historical editor. Here is my revised draft:



Civilisation, in the strict sense of people living in cities, goes back just over 11,600 years. The first indications of it are the great edifices found in very different parts of the world—the monument at Göbekli Tepe, the pyramids of Egypt and Central America, the ziggurats (staged tower temples) of Iraq, the palace of Knossos in Crete, the fortress at Mycenae in mainland Greece, and the grid-planned 4,000 year old cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-dero on the Indus.
Harman & Lynx, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 2, The first civilisations, p. 17

[ckaihatsu]

Nice collection of just-so stories from prehistory. What do they have to say about the monuments featured in the NG article?


So what are you contending here? -- That religion emerged from the efforts of disparate people who were gatherer-hunters, which then forced the need for more food for the social gatherings, necessitating the development of agriculture -- ?





The birth of Islam, can be documented more accurately. What happened to the scientific renaissance as Islam spread across the middle east?





By the 11th century the empire had fallen apart. Spain, Morocco and Tunisia had long been separate kingdoms. Eastern Persia was ruled by dynasties which owed no more than titular respect to the caliphs in Baghdad. Insurgents belonging to the Ismaili fragment of Shi’ism had established a rival caliphate over Egypt, Syria, western Arabia and the Sind region of India. Their newly built capital, Cairo, with its magnificent Al Azhar mosque, rivalled Baghdad as a centre of Islam in the 11th century, and their government was a focus for the revolutionary aspirations of dissident Muslims all the way from Egypt to Samarkand—although in time it faced a revolt by its own dissident Ismailis, which gave rise to the Druze sect that still survives in Lebanon. The fragmentation of the Islamic world did not, in itself, lead to immediate overall economic or cultural collapse. Baghdad declined and was eventually sacked by a Mongol army in 1258, but Egypt continued to prosper for two centuries, and Islamic culture flourished as scholars found rival courts competing to sponsor their efforts all the way from Cordoba in the west to Samarkand and Bukhara in the east.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 4, The Islamic revolutions, p. 133





The rise of Islamic civilisation in the 7th and 8th centuries was due to the way that the Arab armies and then the Abbasid revolution united an area from the Atlantic to the Indus behind a doctrine which made the trader and the artisan as important as the landowner and the general. It was this which had enabled products, technical innovations, artistic techniques and scientific knowledge to travel from one end of Eurasia to the other and real additions to be made to the heritage of the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, of classical India and of contemporary China. But by the same token, the decline of Islamic civilisation from the 10th century on was due to the limitations of the Abbasid revolution. In reality it was only a half-revolution. It allowed the traders and artisans to influence the state, but it did not give them control over it.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 4, The Islamic revolutions, pp. 134-135





I am now a historical editor. Here is my revised draft:




Civilisation, in the strict sense of people living in cities, goes back just over 11,600 years.


A (possibly religious) social center of monuments from the efforts of pre-agricultural gatherer-hunters does *not* make for an actual *city*...(!)

[ckaihatsu]

10 Comments

Bill Hughes
Apr 26, 2011, 8:37

Gobekli Tepe reminds me of a zoo with the stone pillars as walk way supports where they could look down on the animals. The reason I think it is a zoo because of the way the circles are laid out like exhibits and the animals carved on the pillars could let the observer know what to look for. If you look at the top of the pillars you will see little depressions about six inches deep with eight inch circumference. The holes may have something to do with joining boards together because the pillars resemble modern day highway supports.

http://grasptheuniverse.com/ancient-artifacts/gobekli-tepe/

[Lynx]

So what are you contending here? -- That religion emerged from the efforts of disparate people who were gatherer-hunters, which then forced the need for more food for the social gatherings, necessitating the development of agriculture -- ?
I would contend that a monument emerged from the efforts of disparate people who were hunter-gatherers or gatherer-hunters. This monument was built before the advent of agriculture.


By the 11th century the empire had fallen apart. Spain, Morocco and Tunisia had long been separate kingdoms. Eastern Persia was ruled by dynasties which owed no more than titular respect to the caliphs in Baghdad. Insurgents belonging to the Ismaili fragment of Shi’ism had established a rival caliphate over Egypt, Syria, western Arabia and the Sind region of India. Their newly built capital, Cairo, with its magnificent Al Azhar mosque, rivalled Baghdad as a centre of Islam in the 11th century, and their government was a focus for the revolutionary aspirations of dissident Muslims all the way from Egypt to Samarkand—although in time it faced a revolt by its own dissident Ismailis, which gave rise to the Druze sect that still survives in Lebanon. The fragmentation of the Islamic world did not, in itself, lead to immediate overall economic or cultural collapse. Baghdad declined and was eventually sacked by a Mongol army in 1258, but Egypt continued to prosper for two centuries, and Islamic culture flourished as scholars found rival courts competing to sponsor their efforts all the way from Cordoba in the west to Samarkand and Bukhara in the east.

[...]

The rise of Islamic civilisation in the 7th and 8th centuries was due to the way that the Arab armies and then the Abbasid revolution united an area from the Atlantic to the Indus behind a doctrine which made the trader and the artisan as important as the landowner and the general. It was this which had enabled products, technical innovations, artistic techniques and scientific knowledge to travel from one end of Eurasia to the other and real additions to be made to the heritage of the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, of classical India and of contemporary China. But by the same token, the decline of Islamic civilisation from the 10th century on was due to the limitations of the Abbasid revolution. In reality it was only a half-revolution. It allowed the traders and artisans to influence the state, but it did not give them control over it.
From the above passages, what would best summarize the role played by religious doctrine in the scientific, cultural and mathematical renaissance of that geographical area and period?
Choices may include adjectives such as "crucial", "indispensable", "decisive", "significant", "modest", "unclear", "dialectical", "neutral", "nominal", "limited", "secondary", "incidental", "insignificant", "none".


A (possibly religious) social center of monuments from the efforts of pre-agricultural gatherer-hunters does *not* make for an actual *city*...(!)
Ooops! Okay, how about this:



Civilisation, in the strict sense of people erecting large monuments, goes back just over 11,600 years.
Harman, Lynx & ckaihatsu, _People's History of the World_, Chapter 2, The first civilisations, p. 17
We can argue the definition for 'civilisation' but the lack of cities and agriculture makes the following statement problematic:

None of this could have happened without a prior change in the way in which people made their livelihood, a change that was initially centred on agriculture.

[Lynx]

10 Comments

Bill Hughes
Apr 26, 2011, 8:37

Gobekli Tepe reminds me of a zoo with the stone pillars as walk way supports where they could look down on the animals. The reason I think it is a zoo because of the way the circles are laid out like exhibits and the animals carved on the pillars could let the observer know what to look for. If you look at the top of the pillars you will see little depressions about six inches deep with eight inch circumference. The holes may have something to do with joining boards together because the pillars resemble modern day highway supports.

http://grasptheuniverse.com/ancient-artifacts/gobekli-tepe/
Sounds reasonable. Did they charge for admissions?

[ckaihatsu]

I would contend that a monument emerged from the efforts of disparate people who were hunter-gatherers or gatherer-hunters. This monument was built before the advent of agriculture.


Okay, I'll agree with you here.





The rise of Islamic civilisation in the 7th and 8th centuries was due to the way that the Arab armies and then the Abbasid revolution united an area from the Atlantic to the Indus behind a doctrine which made the trader and the artisan as important as the landowner and the general. It was this which had enabled products, technical innovations, artistic techniques and scientific knowledge to travel from one end of Eurasia to the other and real additions to be made to the heritage of the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, of classical India and of contemporary China. But by the same token, the decline of Islamic civilisation from the 10th century on was due to the limitations of the Abbasid revolution. In reality it was only a half-revolution. It allowed the traders and artisans to influence the state, but it did not give them control over it.





From the above passages, what would best summarize the role played by religious doctrine in the scientific, cultural and mathematical renaissance of that geographical area and period?
Choices may include adjectives such as "crucial", "indispensable", "decisive", "significant", "modest", "unclear", "dialectical", "neutral", "nominal", "limited", "secondary", "incidental", "insignificant", "none".


The part above provides a fairly thorough explanation and I agree with it in its entirety.





Civilisation, in the strict sense of people erecting large monuments, goes back just over 11,600 years.


If your only requirement for 'civilization' is large monuments then I guess large monuments would satisfy your definition for 'civilization'.

[Lynx]

If your only requirement for 'civilization' is large monuments then I guess large monuments would satisfy your definition for 'civilization'.
It's the requirements for building large monuments that are of concern to me - and that is about the only point of interest in the NG article.

History writers can try to influence their readers opinions by adding 'weight' to the conclusions they wish to prevail. The whole Islamic Renaissance vs. Medieval Dark Ages is one example.

[ckaihatsu]

It's the requirements for building large monuments that are of concern to me - and that is about the only point of interest in the NG article.


It's also certainly debatable as to whether those stone works at Göbekli Tepe were *monuments* -- indicating ceremony and possibly religion -- or were *functional*, as pillars or supports of some sort, indicating cooperative planning and construction of some installation of usage.

[Lynx]

It's also certainly debatable as to whether those stone works at Göbekli Tepe were *monuments* -- indicating ceremony and possibly religion -- or were *functional*, as pillars or supports of some sort, indicating cooperative planning and construction of some installation of usage.
There are many types of monuments. Monoliths and megaliths are more closely associated with ceremony or religion.

I can't tell what function(s) it would serve by looking at it. It could simply have been a meeting place, with the arrangement of stones, etc being symbolic.

[agnixie]

As this thread of discussion has noted, even wanton opportunity is not always enough to spur a change in a population's lifestyle, and thus a shift to a new form of subsistence like agriculture. And, as I just mentioned, it wouldn't be the case that *religious ideas* provided the motivation -- rather, they would be the consequence.

They could also be neither - religion is known to precede settled societies and civilizations.

Also, I'll note that monumental structures are one of the indicators of a civilization, not the only one, as they indicate a capability to produce surpluses, to specialize, etc.

[bcbm]

A (possibly religious) social center of monuments from the efforts of pre-agricultural gatherer-hunters does *not* make for an actual *city*...(!)

the earliest cities still date back several thousand years further than 5000 years ago though

[ckaihatsu]

[I'll] note that monumental structures are one of the indicators of a civilization, not the only one, as they indicate a capability to produce surpluses, to specialize, etc.




[R]eligion is known to precede settled societies and civilizations.


This is really the crux of the issue here -- would pre-agricultural, pre-surplus gatherer-hunters have spontaneously produced organized religion? Would they have cause and means enough to put in all the effort and organizing and planning to carve out heavy elaborate stone pieces for the sake of ceremony and religion -- ?

(As you're noting, usually such social contrivances are considered possible only *after* a population has attained a certain basis of surplus.)





the earliest cities still date back several thousand years further than 5000 years ago though


Would you mind naming one, please?

[Jose Gracchus]

One should remember that conurbations and settled civilization are firstly social in composition; the physical products and monuments they produce are secondary. If religious centers sometimes precede agriculture, it does not follow that urban culture and civilization in the social sense does. That's raising monuments to a fetish over the social content of the society.

[agnixie]

One should remember that conurbations and settled civilization are firstly social in composition; the physical products and monuments they produce are secondary. If religious centers sometimes precede agriculture, it does not follow that urban culture and civilization in the social sense does. That's raising monuments to a fetish over the social content of the society.

Except we do have cases where settled society predates agriculture, mostly because local overabundance makes agriculture superfluous at formative period densities.

[ckaihatsu]

Came across the following while browsing the web -- I make no claim as to its veracity.





http://www.humanresonance.org/gobekli_tepe.html


Piezoelectric Temples of Göbekli Tepe, Turkey


Representations of Standing Waves on the Megaliths of Göbekli Tepe

by Alex Putney for HumanResonance.org
May 4, 2011

[Olentzero]

Man, did you go to the home page there? Universal Om, God Light induces cellular regeneration, Earth's Chakras are opening... Suffice it to say I think seeing standing wave representation on the stones of Göbekli Tepe is a reach that would make Stretch Armstrong wince.

[Comrade-Z]

Let's distinguish between "organized religion" and isolated religious beliefs.

For example, some archaeologists have recently taken a second look at the paleolithic cave paintings in southern France and concluded that they may have symbolized the mystical beliefs and myths of shaman-artists under the influence of hallucinogenic plants.

So, in that sense, "religion" might have existed before agriculture, but organized religion capable of having more than a mythical/storytelling function might still be a different story. Either way, it's still a matter of interpretation as to what the role of those cave paintings were.

If you really want your mind blown with an audacious (but not necessarily convincing) thesis, read Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," which argues that mental modernity--the possession of an integrated ego function in humans--is as historically recent as 1000 B.C., and that before that time the subconscious actually communicated with people's conscious awareness as audible voices (somewhat like modern schizophrenia, but not necessarily always so incoherent, disturbing, or non-functional. It was not a case of an ego being weak and embattled--it was a case of ego not existing at all, so the voices were usually not felt as a stressful assault upon one's individual integrity, since one lacks any self-consciousness of one's self-hood in the first place).

So when you read in the Old Testament about all these people "hearing God speaking to them," Jaynes argues that these people literally heard voices!

Jaynes argues that the capability of developing this mental model in contemporary humans remains latent and largely depends on a certain type of child socialization where authoritarian relationships between the child and the parents, priest, and godking are simultaneously vigorously enforced and mystified, such that the child is put in a double-bind and cannot develop the ability to identify the meta-problem of why the problem of authority in the child's life is so difficult to identify or address. What the child is left with is the recurring re-visitations of the commandments of his/her parents, priests, and godkings echoing in his/her mind without the ability to question this authority or even identify these voices as "authority-as-such," such that the child, even into adulthood, simply obeys these voices as you would obey your own reasoned thoughts. Jaynes argues that the loftiest godkings themselves were imprisoned in this same mental framework, uncritically receiving the voices of their parents and godkings of the older generations echoing in their minds. In Jaynes' view, this was the original basis for ancestor worship.

Jaynes argues that this mental framework rapidly disintegrated around 1000 B.C. as the spread of writing and the increasing interaction with alien cultures with increased trade fundamentally changed child socialization by placing the authority of parents and local rulers in a much more relative light (as one encountered mention of other gods, other rulers, and other things that the "voices" of your ancestors in your audible subconscious were silent on or baffled by). Jaynes argues that this transition was rapidly re-capitulated each time Europeans came into contact with peoples from the Americas, and that the possession of integrated egos and self-consciousness (with a concomitant theory of mind and ability to engage in subterfuge and deceit) was an even greater weapon for Europeans than the firearm.

Assuming that Jaynes' audacious thesis is correct (admittedly a big assumption), then this would explain the cultural conservatism of human cultures pre-1000 B.C. (as people simply, almost hive-mind-like, did things the way their parents had taught them, from peasant all the way up to ruler), with only the most desperate situations forcing people to be "inspired" by some "Muse," which, Jaynes argues, did not have the metaphorical meaning we give to the term today, but actually signified a guiding voice (from the subconscious) giving insight to some problem, such as farming or tool-making or music. These Muses would have seemed magically intelligent (when, in fact, it was the person's own subconscious mind piecing it together all along).

Such a mental framework would have been ripe ground for the generation of religious ideas even before agriculture.

[ckaihatsu]

Here -- riffing off of that on a tangent, collective-subconscious style....


Consciousness, A Material Definition

http://postimage.org/image/35t4i1jc4/