The transition to settled life and the formation of centralized empires. G

As has been shown, different types of early primitive economic and cultural systems implied different types, or rather, different qualities of human individuality. And the type and quality of a person as a subject of the historical process, along with objective factors of climate, animal and plant worlds etc., played an important, but, unfortunately, almost elusive role in the history of primitive society by the methods of scientific analysis.

We find the most favorable conditions for the development of personal qualities of people in consanguineous communities of the subtropical-temperate zone with its clearly defined gender and age division of labor (including within the family) and a developed reciprocal system (within which, as noted, everyone was interested in contributing to the social consumption fund as much as possible in order to get more, but already in the form of prestigious symbols and signs of public respect and recognition). Under these conditions, faster than in other places, there was an improvement in the tools of individual labor (bows and arrows appeared, the so-called "harvesting knives" and other things made in the microlithic insert technique), the development of individual ambitions (a powerful incentive for activity to satisfy them). ) and the individual sense of responsibility of both a person (primarily a male breadwinner) to the community, and members of the nuclear family to each other (wife and husband, parents and children). These trends, of course, should have been fixed in traditional culture, reflected in ritual practice and myths.

In this way, By the time of the catastrophic climatic and landscape shifts that took place at the turn of the Pleistocene and Holocene about 10 thousand years ago, a type of society had already developed on Earth, potentially capable of 190

the development of more complex, including productive, forms of life than hunting and gathering. Its representatives (thanks to a sufficient degree of individualization of economic and public life) were capable of relatively quick and effective adaptation to new conditions, and adaptation was multidirectional. The choice of forms of adaptation to the changing conditions of existence was determined by a complex interweaving of objective (landscape, climate, topography, size of the team) and subjective (the amount and nature of people's knowledge, the presence among them of reputable innovative enthusiasts - the Toynbean "creative minority", the willingness of the rest to take risks and change forms of life) moments. Significant differences were observed in different regions.

Planetary catastrophe caused by the rapid melting of glaciers, shifting and changing borders climatic zones and landscape zones, the rise in the level of the world ocean and the flooding of colossal areas of coastal lowlands, the change in the coastline throughout the planet - led to the crisis of almost all life support systems of the Late Pleistocene. The only exceptions were the societies of tropical gatherers, since the climate remained almost unchanged near the equator, although vast expanses of land went under water, especially in the regions of Indochina - Indonesia - the Philippines. The former ecological balance was disturbed everywhere, a certain balance between the hunter-gatherer communities scattered around the planet and the environment. This, in turn, was associated with the crisis information support the livelihoods of people whose traditional knowledge did not meet the requirements of changed circumstances.

Humanity has found itself at a bifurcation point. In conditions when the degree of instability of traditional systems (based on the appropriating economy) has sharply increased, a crisis of the former forms of life has erupted. Accordingly, a rapid increase in spontaneous fluctuations began - in the form of experimental, so to speak, "blind", searches for effective "responses" to the "challenges" of changed circumstances.

Success in this fight against challenges external forces was associated not least with the active and creative potential of people who found themselves in a critical situation. And they depended to a decisive extent on the type of socio-cultural system they represented. The greatest flexibility and mobility (including in spiritually) showed among them those whose creative potentials of the individual were less constrained by the traditional regulation of life. The corresponding societies had (ceteris paribus) the best chances of success.

However, it should not be forgotten that the external conditions in different regions were very dissimilar. The optimal combination of the challenge of external forces, the socio-cultural type of society (with the corresponding nature of human individuality) and favorable for the transition to new species economic activity external conditions (mild climate, the presence of fish-rich reservoirs, as well as suitable for domestication of plant and animal species) was observed in the Middle East. Local proto-Neolithic societies at the turn of the Pleistocene and Holocene created for the first time in the history of mankind the prerequisites for the beginning of the implementation of the civilizational process. Formation of the productive economy and tribal organization 191

Here, in the _ East Mediterranean-Pearn Asian region, among communities that are quite individualized in terms of production and social hunters and gatherers of rugged coastal-foothill-forest subtropical landscapes, about 12 thousand years ago, we observe the formation of several lines of further evolution of primitive mankind. Among them, only one, connected with the agricultural and pastoral economy, led directly to civilization. Somewhat later, similar processes occur in other regions of the globe, in particular in East Asia, as well as Central and South America.

The planetary ecological shifts associated with the melting of the glacier led to a divergence in the development paths of hunting and gathering groups in the Mediterranean-Center Asian region. I will highlight two main areas. On the one hand, in the conditions of the spread of forests north of the Alps and the Carpathians, hunting-gathering groups from the Northern Mediterranean (from the Iberian and Apennine peninsulas, southern France and the Balkans) began to explore the vast expanses of Central and Eastern, and then Northern and North-Eastern Europe. The surplus population settled in new, already also forest areas, left by those who had gone to high latitudes for herds. reindeer hunters. On the other hand, with the intensification of the drying up of North Africa and Western Asia and the parallel advance of the seas, the population of many regions of the Middle East found itself in a critical situation. The number of game animals was rapidly declining, which was especially acute in Palestine, sandwiched between the sea, the spurs of Lebanon and the deserts approaching from the south (Sinai) and east (Arabia). Under these conditions, the "responses" to the "challenge" of external forces were, firstly, the reorientation to the intensive use of food resources of water bodies, which quickly led to the development of specialized fishing, and, secondly, the formation of an early agricultural and cattle breeding economic and cultural complex - the basis further civilizational process.

The first, Western Mediterranean-Central European line of development of hunter-gatherer societies in closed landscapes during the first millennia of the Holocene is represented by the materials of numerous Mesolithic cultures of the forest and forest-steppe spaces of Europe. They were characterized by adaptation to the existing natural conditions and resettlement within the corresponding landscape zone familiar to them. Possessing a bow and arrow, being well adapted to life in the water-rich forest zone of Europe, small, from several families, consanguineous communities formed, as before in the Mediterranean, groups of related protoethnoi. Within the framework of such inter-communal arrays, information circulated and there was an exchange of marriage partners, useful experiences and achievements.

Constantly living near water, such people, without leaving hunting and gathering, paid more and more attention over time to the use of food resources of water bodies. The first stationary settlements of specialized fishermen appear in Europe (near the Dnieper rapids, in the area of ​​the Iron Gates on the Danube, along the southern coast of the North Sea, in the Southern Baltic, etc.) around the 8th-7th millennium BC. e., while in the Eastern Mediterranean they date back at least one or two millennia earlier. Therefore, it is difficult to say whether the shuttle-net fishing industry is being formed. 192 ________________________________________

in the most convenient places in Europe on their own, or by borrowing the relevant economic and technical achievements from the Middle East, from where groups of fishermen through the Mediterranean and the Aegean could get to the Black Sea and Danube regions quite early.

Under the conditions of a balanced hunting-fishing-gathering (with an increasingly greater focus on fishing) economic system, the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic protoethnoi were distinguished by a low population density and its very slow growth. With an increase in the number of people, it was possible to resettle several young families down or up the river, since the spaces suitable for conducting an integrated appropriating economy in Europe, as in North America, Siberia or the Far East, for many millennia there was plenty.

As in the Paleolithic times, such consanguineous communities organically fit into the landscape, becoming the highest link of the corresponding biocenoses. But the consumer attitude to the environment, which presupposed the already conscious "(as evidenced by ethnographic data) maintaining a balance between the number of people and the natural food base, blocked the possibility of further evolution. Therefore, significant economic and sociocultural changes in the forest belt of Neolithic Europe were caused, before most of all, the spread of other ethnic, more developed groups of the population from the south, mainly from the Middle East through the Balkan-Danube-Carpathian region and the Caucasus.

In the Near East, however, during the first millennia of the Holocene, a fundamentally different picture was observed, determined by the "Neolithic revolution" that swept the region. Researchers, in particular V.A. Shnirelman, managed to connect the areas of the most ancient agricultural crops with the centers of origin of cultivated plants N.I. Vavilov.

The emergence of agriculture was preceded by a rather effective gathering, thanks to which a person recognized the vegetative properties of plants and created the appropriate tools. However, the undoubted origin of agriculture based on gathering does not yet answer the question: why do people, instead of harvesting ready-made crops in areas of natural growth of edible plants (as was the case in Paleolithic times), begin to cultivate the land in other places? Such places of land cultivation have always been plots located near the places of permanent residence of people. Consequently, the origin of agriculture presupposed the presence of at least early forms of settled life, which should have appeared somewhat earlier than the cultivation of cultivated plants. According to the well-founded conclusion of V.F. Gening, sedentism arises primarily as a result of the reorientation of hunting-gathering communities towards the specialized use of aquatic food resources. This was due (particularly in the Middle East) to a catastrophic decrease in the number of game animals.

Orientation to the active use of food resources of water bodies contributed to the concentration of the population along the banks of rivers, lakes and seas. Here the first stationary settlements appeared, known in Palestine from the 10th-9th millennium BC. e. - on Lake Hule (settlement Einan) and near the Mediterranean Sea near Mount Carmel. In both cases, evidence of sufficient Formation of the producing economy and breeding organization ___________________________193

but developed net-boat fishing (weights from nets, deep-sea bones marine fish etc.).

The reduction in the number of game animals and the success of fishing thus contributed to the concentration of people around water bodies, creating conditions for the transition to settled life. Fishing provided constant food without the need to move all members of the community. The men could sail for a day or more, while the women and children remained in the communal settlement. Such changes in lifestyle contributed to the beginning of a rapid increase in the number and density of the population. They facilitated (compared to the mobile lifestyle of hunters and gatherers) the fate of pregnant and lactating women, contributed to a decrease in the number of cases of death or injury of men (more frequent in hunting than in fishing).

Since fishing settlements were usually located at a considerable distance from fields of wild cereals and other edible plants, it was natural to want such fields to be closer to communal settlements, especially since the conditions for growing plants (well-manured soils around settlements located near water, protection from wild animals and bird flocks) were very favorable here. In other words, For the emergence of agriculture, it was necessary the presence of at least three conditions (not taking into account the very fact of the crisis of the appropriating economy):

1) the presence in the environment of plant species that are fundamentally suitable for domestication;

2) the emergence as a result of thousands of years of practice of specialized collection of sufficient knowledge about vegetative properties plants and tools necessary for agricultural work (at first, little different from those used by gatherers);

3) the transition to a sedentary lifestyle near water bodies due to the long-term intensive use of their food resources, primarily through the development of fishing.

However, it is noteworthy that the primary cells of agriculture everywhere appear near water bodies with limited food resources, while on the sea coasts, in the floodplains and estuaries of great rivers, fishing is still for a long time retains a leading role. Thus, in the Middle East, the oldest forms of agriculture are found in the Jordan Valley, as well as along the tributaries of the Tigris in the foothills of the Zagros and near the lakes of Central Anatolia (where they apparently came from Palestine and Syria), in areas where there were wild ancestors of many domestic plants, and the food resources of the reservoirs were limited, but not in the swampy at that time the Nile Valley, the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, or on the Syro-Cilikian coast.

In the same way, the lakeside terrain of the Mexico Valley, located among the dry plateau of Central Mexico, and the coasts of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, lakes and river valleys of the Andean plateau, are contrasted with the Peruvian coast. The same, it seems, can be said about the correlation of economic development trends in the deep regions of Indochina with the eastern foothills of Tibet - and the coast of Southeast Asia, China and Japan.

Opportunities for the emergence of agriculture probably existed in a much wider area than where it first appeared. 194 Primitive foundations of civilization

But under conditions of rather productive fishing, people, leading a settled life and even having the necessary knowledge in the field of agriculture, quite consciously preserve their traditional way of life.

The reorientation of the economy to the cultivation of edible plants occurs only when the declining food resources of water bodies were no longer able to satisfy the needs of the growing population. Only the crisis of the traditional appropriating economy forces people to switch to agriculture and animal husbandry. As R. Carneiro showed on the ethnographic materials of the Amazon, hunters and fishermen do not reorient themselves to agriculture without extreme necessity.

That is why the Neolithic population of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the coasts of Syria and Cilicia, Persian Gulf and Japan, the Caspian and the Aral Sea, Yucatan and Peru, and many other regions, for a long time, maintaining direct relations with neighboring agricultural and pastoral societies and being familiar with the basics of their economic structure, remained committed to the fishing way of life, only partially and to a low extent supplementing it with hunting and gathering, and then early forms of agriculture and pastoralism.

During the IX-VI millennium BC. e. specialized fishing societies in thin chains from the Middle East spread throughout the Mediterranean, rise to the middle reaches of the Nile, master the coasts of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. Groups similar to them at the same time become the leading ethnocultural force in the Caspian and Aral regions, the lower reaches of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Such communities left traces of Neolithic settlements in the area of ​​the Kerch Strait, on the Dnieper and Danube, along the coasts of the Baltic and North seas etc. But, being strictly tied to their ecological niches, fishing groups, on the whole, have little effect on the hunting societies of neighboring, inland, regions. In addition, the possibilities of their development were fundamentally limited by natural resources, which a person could only deplete, but not restore. Therefore, the line of evolution based on specialized fishing leads to a dead end, the only way out of which can be a reorientation to agricultural and pastoral activities. As G. Child rightly noted in his time. if the societies of the appropriating economy live at the expense of nature, then those oriented towards the reproducing economy enter into cooperation with it. The latter provides further development towards civilization.

Thus, in areas with limited food resources of water bodies, in the presence of favorable external factors, in the context of increasing demographic pressure, there is a relatively rapid transition from fishing, hunting, and gathering forms of economy to an early agricultural, cattle-breeding economy. However, in areas rich in fish resources, society can exist for quite a long time on the basis of specialized fishing and sea hunting. Over a sufficiently long period, both marked lines of evolution provide approximately equal opportunities for improvement - on the basis of regular surplus food products and sedentary lifestyle - demographic potential, the effectiveness of the system of social organization, the accumulation and movement of cultural information, the development of religious and mythological ideas, ritual and magical practices, various types of formation of a productive economy and tribal organization

art, etc. Among the early farmers and higher fishermen we equally see large stationary settlements and tribal cults, a system of age and sex stratification with the first elements of dominance within the communities of individual noble clans and families. Ethnographically, this is well illustrated by the materials of New Guinea and Melanesia.

At the same time, it is important to emphasize that, as V.F. Gening, actually tribal relations, based on the idea of ​​a vertical relationship connected with the count of tribes and genealogical lines, going into the depths of the past relationship, appear only with the transition to a settled way of life. They have a certain socio-economic content: the justification (through the continuity of generations) of the right of the living to permanent fishing grounds (primarily fish) and used (for agricultural crops or pastures) land. Tribal settled communities own their territories on the grounds that these lands belonged to their ancestors, whose spirits keep their supreme patronage over them.

It was in the Neolithic, with the transition to settled life on the basis of higher forms fishing and early agriculture, the genus appears as social institution with a clear knowledge of its members of the levels of kinship, as well as rituals of honoring the founder of the clan and other ancestors, including those that none of the living have seen, but heard about them from representatives of older generations. This is reflected in the veneration of graves and the cult of ancestral skulls, in the practice of creating ancestral burial grounds and the appearance of totem poles with images of ancestors symbolically represented on them, often endowed with expressive totemic features. Such pillars are well known, for example, among the Polynesians or the Indians of the northwestern coast of North America.

Meanwhile, as the food resources of reservoirs are depleted and the crisis of fishing societies begins, especially with an increase in the population, when some people were forced to settle far from reservoirs rich in fish, we observe a constant increase in the role of agriculture and animal husbandry (naturally, where it was possible ).

Moreover, in many places, previously inhabited by collectives wholly focused on fishing, there are rapid rates of outpacing (in relation to neighboring territories with more ancient agricultural traditions) development. What has been said applies to both Egypt, Sumer and the valley of the river. Indus (compared to Palestine and Syria, Zagros and Central Anatolia) starting from the 5th millennium BC. e., and to the coasts of Yucatan and Peru (compared to the plateau of Central Mexico and the valleys of the Andes) from, respectively, II and I millennium BC. e.

It should also be noted that at a time when the population of the centers of advanced development, based on more and more improved forms of agriculture, intensified its development, on their periphery the rates of evolution and population growth were much lower. Therefore, the excess human mass from such centers increasingly settled in the surrounding lands, where natural conditions were favorable for farming.

The demographic potential of the early farmers was always much greater than that of their neighbors, and the economic and cultural type was higher and more perfect. Therefore, when interacting with their neighbors, they, as a rule, either forced them out or assimilated them. However, in some cases, if

Primitive foundations of civilization

fishermen came into contact with the advancing farmers, the latter, perceiving the basis of a reproducing economy, could preserve their ethno-linguistic identity. So, obviously, it happened in Lower Mesopotamia in the process of forming a community of ancient Sumerians.

I love history very much, and this event is in development human society couldn't help but interest me. I am happy to share my knowledge about what is settledness, and talk about the consequences that were caused by a change in lifestyle.

What does the term "settled" mean?

This term means the transition of nomadic peoples to living in one place or within a small area. Indeed, the ancient tribes were very dependent on where their prey was going, and this was quite a natural phenomenon. However, over time, people moved to production of the desired product, which means that there is no need to move after the herds. This was accompanied by the construction of dwellings, housekeeping, which required the creation of things necessary in everyday life. Simply put, the tribe equipped a certain territory, while considering it their own, and therefore was forced to protect it from uninvited guests.

Consequences of the transition to settled life

The transition to this way of life and the domestication of animals radically changed the lives of people, and we still feel some of the consequences today. Settlement is not only a change in lifestyle, but also significant changes in the very worldview of a person. In fact, the land began to be valued, ceasing to be a common property, which led to the beginnings of property. At the same time, everything acquired, as it were, tied a person to one place of residence, which could not but affect the environment- plowing fields, building defensive structures and much more.

In general, among the many consequences of the transition to settled life, one can single out the most bright examples:

• increase in the birth rate- as a result of increased fertility;
• drop in food quality- according to research, the transition from animal to plant foods has led to a decrease in the average height of mankind;
• increase in incidence- as a rule, the higher the population density, the higher this indicator;
• Negative influence on the environment - clogging of soils, rivers, deforestation and so on;
• load increase- Maintenance of the economy requires more labor than just hunting or gathering.

One of the paradoxes of the transition to a settled way of life is the fact that with an increase in productivity, the population increased and dependence on agricultural crops. As a result, this began to present a certain problem: in the case of a poor supply of food, the load on all spheres of life increases.

The reason for the transition of a person to a settled life.
To take up the coverage of this topic, I was prompted by a false, as it seems to me, understanding by historical science of the processes that led people to a settled life, and the emergence Agriculture and animal husbandry. It is currently considered main reason transition of people to a settled life, there was a development ancient society to such a level at which a person has already begun to understand that food production is more promising than hunting and gathering. Some authors even call this period the first intellectual revolution of the Stone Age, which allowed our ancestors to rise to a higher level of development. Yes, of course, at first glance it seems that this is so, because during a settled life, people had to invent more and more new, necessary tools and devices for farming or animal husbandry. From scratch, come up with ways to preserve and process the harvest and build long-term housing. But at the very main question, which made the ancient people radically change their lives, scientists do not give an answer. But this is the most important question that needs to be answered, because only then will it become clear why people began to live in one place, engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry? To understand the root cause that prompted people to change their lives, it is necessary to return to a very distant past, when a reasonable person began to use the first tools of labor. The people of that time were still not much different from wild animals, therefore, as an example of the beginning of the use of tools by ancient man, one can cite modern Chimpanzees, who are also still at this initial stage of development. As is known, Chimpanzees use smooth water-rolled stones to break hard nut shells, and they carry suitable tools found on the shore of a reservoir for considerable distances to the place of their use. Usually it is a larger stone that is an anvil and a smaller pebble that they use as a hammer. Sometimes a third stone is also used, which serves as a support to securely hold the anvil in the ground. It is clear that in this case, the use of stone tools by the monkeys was caused by the inability to crack the strong shell of nuts with their teeth. Apparently, the first people began to use tools in the same way, looking for suitable stones created by nature itself for this. The first people lived, most likely also like Chimpanzees, in small family groups, in a certain territory and did not yet lead a nomadic lifestyle. So when, and why, did ancient people switch to a nomadic lifestyle? Most likely, this happened due to a change in the diet of an ancient person, and his transition, from using mainly plant foods, to eating meat. This switch to meat eating most likely occurred as a result of fairly rapid climate change in the habitats of ancient man, and as a result, led to a decrease in traditional plant food sources. natural changes, forced the ancient man to the fact that initially eating mainly plant foods, they were forced to turn into omnivorous predators. It is likely that initially people who did not have sharp fangs and claws hunted small herbivorous animals, constantly moving from one pasture to another in search of food. Apparently already at this stage of the first human migrations, following the migration of animals, individual families began to unite in groups, because this way it was possible to hunt animals more successfully. The desire to include, among the hunting prey, larger and stronger animals, which it was impossible to cope with with bare hands, led to the fact that people were forced to invent new tools specially adapted for this. This is how the first weapon created by a man of the Stone Age, the so-called pointed, or stone ax, appeared, which allowed him to hunt larger animals. Then people invented a stone axe, a knife, a scraper, a spear with a bone or stone tip. Following the herds of migrating animals, people began to develop territories where summer heat was replaced by winter cold, and this required the invention of clothing to protect against the cold. Over time, man figured out how to make fire and use it for cooking, protection from the cold and hunting wild animals. Some of the people who roamed near the reservoirs mastered a new source of food, meaning fish, all kinds of mollusks, algae, bird eggs, and even waterfowl. To do this, they had to invent such a tool as a spear with a serrated end for catching fish and a bow that made it possible to hit prey at a considerable distance. The man had to figure out how to make a boat from a single tree trunk. Observation of the work of a spider weaving a web, apparently told people how to make a net, or weave a trap for catching fish from thin rods. Having mastered such a near-aquatic lifestyle, people naturally lost the opportunity to roam freely on the ground, as they were tied to a specific reservoir, due to the a large number devices that are difficult to carry from one place to another. Over time, all the tribes of hunters and gatherers who roamed after the herds of wild animals found themselves in exactly the same position. If at first, people could move freely, from one place to another armed only with a stone ax or an ax, then over time, when they had a lot material assets making it much more difficult. Now they had to drag with them several types of weapons, various tools, earthenware and wooden utensils, a stone grinder for grinding wild grains, acorns or nuts. It was necessary to move to a new parking place, valuable in the opinion of people, the skins of animals that served them as a bed, clothes, a supply of water and food, if the path lay through an unfamiliar area. Among things necessary for a person you can also call figures of gods, or totemic animals that people worshiped and many other things. For these purposes, people invented, and apparently wove, special shoulder baskets from thin rods, such as a backpack, and also used stretchers, or drags, made of two poles, on which the transported load was attached. A clear example of how it looked in antiquity can serve as the current tribes from the Amazon basin, living in the Stone Age, but have already lost the opportunity to roam freely, from place to place, due to the large number of used items and built by them long-term dwellings. Having occupied a certain niche, and without changing their life in any way, these tribes stopped in their development at the level of people of the Stone Age, who still did not conduct agriculture, and so far limited themselves to only the beginnings of animal husbandry. Approximately, the living Australian aborigines found themselves in the same situation, only the latter, continuing to live in the Stone Age, and due to the small number of tools, did not even switch to a settled way of life. At some stage of evolution, people increasingly began to face the question of what to do next in this situation, because it became more and more difficult to move all your belongings from place to place. From that moment on, the development of the tribes went in two different ways. Some tribes that managed to tame a horse or a camel were able to remain nomadic, because the use of the power of these animals allowed them to transport all their belongings from one place to another. The later invention of the wheel and the appearance of carts were the result of the evolution of the nomadic way of life. In approximately the same way, all the nomadic peoples of antiquity known to us appeared. Of course, it should be noted that the technical development of such peoples was limited by how much payload they could move from place to place. The tribes, unable to tame large pack animals, began to lead a sedentary lifestyle, so they had to look for ways to feed themselves, living in one place. Such tribes were forced to look for more and more new ways of obtaining food, engaging in agriculture, or raising small livestock. Nomadic peoples, moving over long distances, could only engage in breeding small living creatures driven from one pasture to another. But the nomads had additional opportunity also engage in trade at the same time. But on the other hand, they were limited in further technical development, due to their specific way of life. The peoples leading a settled way of life, on the contrary, had more opportunities in terms of technical development. They could build large houses, various outbuildings, improve the tools they needed for cultivating the land. Find ways to preserve or process harvested crops, invent and produce increasingly sophisticated household items. A person settled on the ground was not creatively limited by the number of beasts of burden, or the size of a wagon capable of holding only a certain amount of cargo. Therefore, it seems quite logical that over time, nomadic peoples, such as the Polovtsy, or Scythians, simply disappeared from the historical arena, giving way to more technically advanced agricultural cultures. Concluding the review this issue, it should be noted that in the development of human society, several separate stages are visible at once, through which the ancient man had to go. The first such stage can be considered the period when our ancestors did not yet make tools, but used, like modern Chimpanzees, stones created by nature as tools. During this very long period, people were still sedentary, occupying one specific forage area. The next stage began when people were forced to master a new food source. This refers to the transition from eating mainly plant foods in favor of a meat diet. It was during this period that people began to roam following the migration of herbivores. This way of life led to the fact that small groups of people began to unite in tribes for more successful hunting for herd animals. At the same time, people mastered the manufacture of stone tools, which they needed to successfully hunt larger prey. Thanks to this nomadic way of life, people, following their potential food, at this stage, managed to populate all livable plots of land. Then, as a result of technological progress, when people began to produce more and more items they needed for life, it became increasingly difficult for tribes burdened with household belongings to lead their former nomadic lifestyle, following herds of wild animals. As a result of this, people were forced to switch to the so-called semi-nomadic lifestyle. Now they built temporary hunting camps, and continued to live in them until surrounding nature could feed the entire tribe. With the depletion of food resources in the former place of residence, the tribe moved to new plot, transferring there all the things they need and equipping a new camp there. Apparently at this stage in the life of the ancient society, for the first time attempts were made to cultivate plants and domesticate wild animals. Some tribes who managed to domesticate wild horses, camels, or reindeer, again got the opportunity to lead their former nomadic lifestyle. As we see from further history, many tribes took advantage of this opportunity, later turning into nomadic peoples. The rest of the tribes, who achieved results in agriculture and cattle breeding, but burdened with a large number of tools, and tied to a certain piece of land, had to stop regular migrations and live a settled life. Apparently something like this, for several tens of thousands of years, there was a gradual transition of people,
from nomadic to sedentary lifestyle. Each modern man, having read this article, can look around him, and see what a huge number of different things surround him. It is clear that it is no longer realistic to move with such a large pile of goods to a new place. After all, even moving from one apartment to another is considered by the people almost a disaster, comparable only to a flood or a fire.

There is a term "neolithic revolution". When you hear him, you imagine a mass of bearded, disheveled people in skins, armed with primitive axes and spears. This mass runs with warlike cries to storm the cave, where a crowd of exactly the same people, bearded, disheveled, with primitive axes and spears in their hands, has settled. In fact, this term denotes a change in the forms of management - from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding. The Neolithic revolution was the result of the transition from nomadism to settled life. That's right, at first a person began to lead a sedentary lifestyle, then he mastered agriculture and domesticated some types of animals, he was simply forced to master it. Then the first cities, the first states appeared ... The current state of the world is a consequence of the fact that a person once switched to a settled way of life.

The first permanent human settlements appeared about 10-13 thousand years ago. Somewhere they appeared earlier, somewhere later, depending on the region of the world. The oldest, the first - in the Middle East - about 13 thousand years ago. One of the first of those found and excavated by archaeologists is Mureybet in Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates. It originated about 12,200 years ago. It was inhabited by hunter-gatherers. They built houses in the style of nomadic rented dwellings - round, 3-6 meters in diameter, but much more solid: they used pieces of limestone, fastened them with clay. The roof was covered with reed stalks. The reliability of dwellings is the only thing in which the inhabitants of the settled Mureybeta surpassed the nomads. The more important factor is food. They ate in Mureybet more poorly than nomads. Depended on the case - wild beans, acorns and pistachios will be born this season, or the harvest will be insignificant, there will not be enough tribe; whether a herd of gazelles will pass nearby or not, whether there will be enough fish in the river. Domestication (or "domestication", in scientific language) plant food in Mureybet occurred a thousand years after the settlement: they learned to grow wheat, rye and barley on their own. The domestication of animals happened even later.

In short, there was no food reason for establishing a settlement on the banks of the Euphrates. Permanent settlement, on the contrary, created regular food difficulties. The same in other regions - the inhabitants of the oldest settled villages ate more poorly than their nomadic contemporaries. If we take all the regions where the transition from nomadism to sedentism took place earlier than others - the Middle East, the regions on the Danube and in Japan - it turns out that from one to three thousand years passed between the appearance of settled settlements and the traces of the first domesticated plants (that is, in the Syrian Mureybet residents relatively quickly figured out how to grow their own grain). At present, most paleoanthropologists believe that the inhabitants of the first stationary settlements lived much poorer and ate less varied and plentiful than wandering hunters. And food security, food security is one of the main reasons for the movement of human civilizations. This means that food disappears - it is not because of it that people began to live settled.

An important point - the dead were buried in residential buildings of the most ancient settlements. Previously, the skeletons were cleaned - they left the corpses on the trees, they were pecked by birds, or they independently cleaned the meat, soft tissues from the bones, - after that they were buried under the floor. The skull is usually separated. Skulls were kept separately from other bones, but also in a dwelling. In Mureybet they were put on shelves in the walls. In Tell Ramada (Southern Syria) and Beysamun (Israel), the skulls were placed on clay figures - stands up to a quarter of a meter high. For people 10 thousand years ago, it was probably the skull that symbolized the personality of the deceased, which is why there is so much reverence, so much respect for him. Skulls were used in religious ceremonies. For example, they were “fed” - food was shared with them. That is, all the attention was given to the dead ancestors. Perhaps they were considered indispensable assistants in the affairs of the living, they always kept in touch with them, they were addressed with prayers, with requests.

Based on the finds of burials in the most ancient settlements, the religious historian Andrei Borisovich Zubov deduces the theory that humanity began to move to a settled way of life because of its religious beliefs. “Such attention to ancestors, ancestors who continue to help the living in their temporary, earthly, and eternal, heavenly needs, such a sense of interdependence of generations could not but be reflected in the organization of life. The graves of the ancestors, the sacred relics of the family, had to be brought as close as possible to the living, made part of the world of the living. The descendants had to be conceived and born literally "on the bones" of the forefathers. It is no coincidence that burials are often found under those adobe benches of Neolithic houses on which the living sat and slept.

The nomadic way of life, characteristic of the Paleolithic, clashed with new religious values. If the graves of the ancestors should be as close as possible to the house, then either the house should be immovable or the bones should be moved from place to place. But the veneration of the giving birth element of the earth required stationary burials - the embryo of a new life, the buried body, could not be removed from the womb as necessary. And so the only thing left for a man of the protoneolithic age was to settle down on the ground. New system life was difficult and unusual, but the spiritual upheaval that occurred in the minds of people about 12 thousand years ago required a choice - either to neglect the family, community with ancestors for the sake of a more well-fed and comfortable wandering life, or to bind oneself forever with the graves of ancestors with indissoluble bonds of unity earth. Some groups of people in Europe, in the Near East, in Indochina, on the Pacific coast South America made a choice in favor of the genus. It was they who laid the foundation for the civilizations of the new Stone Age,” concludes Zubov.

The weak point of Zubov's theory is again food impoverishment. It turns out that ancient people who stopped wandering believed that their ancestors and gods wished them a half-starved existence. To come to terms with their food disasters, food shortages, they had to believe. “Ancestors-skull-bones blessed us for starvation, for a thousand years of starvation,” parents taught their children. This is how it comes out of Zubov's theory. Yes, it could not be! After all, they prayed to the bones for the bestowal of great benefits: to save them from the attack of predators, from a thunderstorm, so that the upcoming fishing and hunting would be successful. Rock art of that period and earlier - a lot of wild animals on the walls and ceilings of caves - is interpreted as a prayer for successful hunting, plentiful prey.

"Paleolithic Venuses" - they were used to get the support of the forces of Life. It is unbelievable, impossible that in the most diverse regions of the world people would decide that the gods, higher powers want them to settle down and starve. Rather, on the contrary: a settled tribe, burying the bones of their ancestors under the floors of their dwellings, understands that their diet has decreased, and decides that this is punishment from their ancestors - because they violated the way of life, nomadism, adopted by their ancestors, thousands of generations of ancestors back in time. Not a single tribe would settle voluntarily if this led to food problems. Voluntarily - no. But if they were forced, forced - yes.

Violence. Forcibly, some tribes forced others to settle. For the vanquished to guard the sacred bones. One tribe won, beat another, forced the vanquished to guard the skulls and skeletons of their dead ancestors as an indemnity. Bones in the ground, skulls on the shelves - the defeated, the oppressed "feed" the skulls, spend holidays for them - so that the dead fathers would not be bored in the next world. Where is the safest place to store the most valuable? At home, yes. Therefore, bones under the floor, skulls on the shelves of round dwellings.

Probably, the winners of the vanquished were used not only to protect the dead. In the oldest settled settlement in Europe - Lepenski Vir, in Serbia, on the banks of the Danube, it appeared about 9 thousand years ago - oldest part settlements were seasonal. The beaten tribe, or the weakest of the tribe, were forced to settle for several months of the year in order to do some work in the interests of the strongest. They produced axes or spears, harvested wild plants. Worked in the interests of the strongest.

Over time, the winners, the strongest, also switched to settled life - most likely, when they realized that with the help of the vanquished, all their needs could be resolved in general. Of course, special dwellings were built for the owners of the settlement: larger in area, with altars, additional premises. Among the remains of one of the oldest settlements of Jericho, they found an 8-meter-high tower with a diameter of 9 meters. The age of the tower is about 11,500 thousand years. Ran Barkai, a senior lecturer in the Department of Archeology at Tel Aviv University, believes that it was built to intimidate. Professor of the Moscow Architectural Institute Vyacheslav Leonidovich Glazychev is of the same opinion: “The tower is still a kind of castle that dominates the entire town and opposes its ordinary inhabitants to the power that is isolated from them.” The Jericho Tower is an example of the fact that the strongest also began to move to settled life and control those whom they forced to work for themselves. The subordinates, the exploited, probably rebelled, tried to get rid of the rulers. And the rulers came up with the idea of ​​sitting in a powerful tower, hiding in it from an unexpected attack, from a night uprising.

Thus, coercion, violence - at the root of the origin of the settled way of life. A sedentary culture initially carries a charge of violence. And in its further development, this charge increased, its volumes grew: the first cities, states, slavery, more and more sophisticated destruction of some people by others, deformation of religious thinking in favor of submission to kings, priests, officials. At the root of settled life is the suppression of human nature, the natural need of man - nomadism.

“Without Coercion, no settlement could be founded. There would be no overseer over the workers. The rivers would not overflow,” a quote from a Sumerian text.

Feb 16, 2014 Alexander Rybin

The beginning of the evolution of Eurasian ancient civilizations

Ten millennia ago, people led an appropriating economy: they took (appropriated) the necessary things for life directly from nature - they were engaged in hunting, fishing, gathering wild plants.

Small groups of hunter-gatherers changed habitat, so there were few permanent settlements in the prehistoric era. Such a way of life excluded the possibility of accumulating property, and therefore it is impossible to talk about property relations (property is the relationship between people about the conditions of production and the results of their productive use; property is the appropriation of an economic good by some with the exception of others). Indeed, people treated the results of hunting as prey, and it did not become their property. The territory was also not fixed, because with the depletion of the necessary resources, the group left it. Even if a plot of the forest was later assigned to the family, it did not become her property. The family simply had to track potential prey in the forest.

Hunting and war significantly influenced the distribution of power relations within the community of ancient people. A successful hunt requires a leader who possesses the special qualities of an experienced hunter and a brave warrior. For these qualities, a person was respected and his word and opinion became obligatory for relatives (it became an authoritative decision). However, the leader was chosen by the hunter-gatherers and his status was not heritable.

The distribution of the extracted took place in accordance with the traditions. For example, a hunter, whose arrow overtook an animal first, received half the skin, whose arrow overtook the second - part of the entrails, etc.

If the men were engaged in hunting, then the women were engaged in gathering. There is a gender and age (natural) division of labor. It should be emphasized that the skills of hunting and war, as well as the tools of hunting and war, did not differ from each other, i.e. these types of activity were not yet differentiated, they existed together (syncretically). Wars did not yet have an economic background (after all, the accumulation of property was not yet known) and were fought for the redistribution of territory, due to blood feud, for the abduction of women, the protection of territory, i.e. were not economically attractive, since foreign production was not yet the goal.

The transition to settled life and the formation of centralized empires

By the 3rd millennium BC. there is a transition to a productive economy through the development of slash-and-burn agriculture, which still left the possibility of migration. In fact, the development of the simplest technologies and an attempt to put the forces of nature at the service of man led to settled life. This transition to settled life was the essence of the Neolithic (agricultural) revolution, which involved the growth and improvement of plant and animal resources available to man.

Beyond the 3rd millennium BC human communities were forced to move on to the cultivation of the same plot of land, because. this resource is limited. This is how the settled way of life arose, and with it the agrarian civilization. Naturally, agrarian civilizations were formed in river valleys (they were also called river civilizations). It should be said that the spread of agrarian civilization falls on the period from 3000 BC. by 1500 c. AD This is the period of formation and development of empires and eastern kingdoms (agrarian states) in the Ancient East and America and feudalism in Europe.

Let us dwell on the following question: what is the significance of the system of withdrawals of surplus product for the formation of the type of economic system, because one system of withdrawals contributed to the growth of the power of agrarian states, the other to the flourishing of feudalism.

Settlement and centralization of withdrawals are the conditions for the formation of agrarian states.

Since land is the main and common factor of production for settled peoples, people need to know the boundaries of cultivated areas, what part of the crop they can claim, how the land is assigned to the user, inherited, etc. So there were land relations, which influenced the social and then property differentiation of the ancient sedentary communities and the emergence of power relations as a result. In its origins, power relations (order-subordination relations) are built around knowledge about agricultural production and the carriers of this knowledge: knowledge about the beginning and end of agricultural work, their sequence, etc. This information was presented in religious rites. It is no coincidence that the first ruling elites were the religious elites. And the first temples were located in river valleys. In accordance with the rite, the community members cultivated the land of the temple, the harvest from which provided for the needs of the clergy. That's how it came about temple economy - the totality economic types activities related to the needs of the temple and its servants.

The second privileged group is the chiefs of the tribes. They ruled according to traditional norms. Such norms also included gifts to the leader, which constituted a fund for the performance of public functions: protection, ransom. Over time, the leaders began to strive to make donations regular, for which they had to resort to violence, but then donations turned into taxes.

With the development of the settled way of life, a third privileged group appears - the bureaucratic apparatus. The fact is that agriculture needs water. And farmers are forced to build their relations not only about land, but also about water too: creating an irrigation (or drainage) system - building irrigation facilities and its subsequent distribution over the fields. For this, in turn, a special management apparatus is needed, which organizes the construction of facilities and control of water use. This is how centralization appears in the use of the most important resource - water, and at the same time - irrigated agriculture (Sumers, Egypt). The bureaucracy - the water and construction bureaucracy - specialized in the organization of construction, the operation of irrigation facilities and the withdrawal of surplus product. The usual and widespread method of seizure is violence, and this is already a transition from the temple economy to the ancient kingdoms, in which the most authoritative or strong headed the bureaucracy. Such economic and political systems are often called agrarian states. So settled way of life determined the power differentiation of the population.

Since the centralization of violence on the part of the bureaucracy took place early in the agrarian states, the relations between the bureaucracy and the population, and not the servant-master, which also exist, but they are secondary, turned out to be the main ones in the interaction of strata of society.

The stability of the withdrawals of the surplus product makes the agrarian state stable and prosperous, since the apparatus wants not only today, but also tomorrow to withdraw the product from its subjects, i.e. there were objective restrictions on withdrawals. At the same time, in the agrarian states, traditions of distributing the seized were taking shape. So, for example, in ancient India, half of the income should have been spent on the army, a twelfth on gifts and salaries of officials, a twentieth on the personal expenses of the emperor (sultan), and a sixth should have been reserved. Withdrawals gradually took the form of a head tax, then - a land tax.

In the ancient kingdoms, property inequality increased between the main part of the population and the elites, which actively used violence to seize part of the peasant product not only into the bins of the central government, but also into their own. Gradually, violence - robbery - spread to a foreign population, and raids with the aim of seizing someone else's product became the rule.

The stratified society of agrarian states differed in territorial distribution. The majority of the population lived in countryside where he worked in agriculture. The ruling elite - the emperor, his retinue, the main part of the bureaucracy, the religious elite lived in cities, from where the “tax web” stretched to the village. Therefore, the city for the peasant remained an alien formation.

Constant, systematic withdrawals of the surplus product gave rise to the need for accounting: the tax base must be taken into account, taxes must be calculated. This was a significant incentive for the development of writing and the spread of literacy, primarily among the bureaucracy.

Agrarian states were formed, as a rule, by conquering sedentary peoples by militant strangers (Persians, Lombards, etc.). If the intentions of the conquerors to stay in the conquered territory were long-term, they were forced to form a special apparatus to control the conquered population, collect tribute, taxes and other withdrawals, i.e. to restore the destroyed system of constant withdrawals of the surplus product.

Now we can formulate the most characteristics centralized empires of antiquity:

the presence of a minority that specializes in violence;

stratification of society into groups (stratified society);

Formed apparatus (bureaucracy) for collecting tribute and taxes (later - taxes);

spread of writing.