Excerpt: CHAPTER 11

The Influence and Impact of Ancient Babylonia

The old Paleolithic Era gave way to what some have dubbed “The Neolithic Urban Revolution” that took place roughly between 10,000 to 4000B.C. This “urban revolution” was marked by the development of mass production grain-based agriculture, the use of metals in the forging of tools, the introduction of the master builders, and the movement of people to small villages and cities, whose economies revolved around agriculture. The earliest and most impressive advances were made along and near the Mediterranean coastline, particularly that land which lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the region of Mesopotamia then dominated by the Sumerians and known as Babylonia.

It was from this time and place that sprang what is considered to be the greatest of the Babylonian tales, the epic stories of Gilgamesh, legendary king of Uruk, c2750B.C. Interestingly, the famed Babylonian Epics which drew upon the Gilgamesh Legends contain stories markedly similar to those found in the Old Testament. At about that time, Europe was to languish far behind this “urban revolution” until around 2000B.C. - when they too began to learn how to smelt and forge metals and develop a feudal system by which peasants and serfs could provide necessary labor in the fields, in the building of monuments - and in wars of conquest. In the college textbook Western Civilization to 1600 Professor J. Kelley Sowards writes of this transitional “Urban Revolution” period as follows:

Neolithic man also became, for the first time, economic man in the modern sense. Problems of ownership, distribution, expansion – and greed – were created by the agricultural revolution which brought about a new social order. . . After agriculture brought an abundance of food, the human population began to swell, and waves of people went out from the original villages of southwest Asia. Taking their techniques with them, they overwhelmed and absorbed their less advanced neighbors until population began to outstrip productivity. Land was soon overcrowded and quickly exhausted by the crude and wasteful methods of primitive agriculture [which it might be said is exactly what is happening today, but we call it modern or industrial agriculture] as Neolithic culture spread into the steppes of Eurasia, the wooded Danube valley and the north of Europe, the Near East and North Africa. . .

It is noteworthy to mention here that modern day archaeologists and anthropologists have been able to identify the approximate dates marking any given culture's adoption of mass production, grain-based agriculture through careful examination of skeletal remains found in various geographic locations throughout the world. The skeletal remains of those cultures which adopted agriculture, or more specifically mass production grain farming, exhibited more malnutrition and disease, lesser bone density, more tooth decay and overall smaller skeletal size as compared to the skeletal remains of Paleolithic Era hunter-gathers AND herdsmen, both of which had preceded the grain farms of the “Neolithic Urban Revolution” by tens of thousands of years.

Further, and quite unlike grazing animals which can be kept on any kind of land from rocky mountainsides to seaweed strewn coast lines, mass production of grain requires rich flat lands such as the flood plains in which the “Neolithic Urban Revolution” first developed. Mass production of grain also exhausts the soil as alluded to by Professor Soward above, forcing land owners to continually increase their land holdings.

But perhaps most significant of all is the fact that mass production, grain-based agriculture required prodigious amounts of labor, particularly before the McCormick reaper came into existence in the mid 1800's. This labor, more often than not, then had to be supplied by slaves. And of course the more slaves you had, the more grain you could produce, and the more grain you could produce the more wealth - and land - you could accumulate.

In other words, mass-production, grain-based agriculture degraded the land, degraded human health (even as it increased the population), AND created both the incentive for war and the institution of slavery as an essential adjunct to food production. In short and as Professor Sowards said, the agricultural revolution brought about a new social order. Thus began a system of wealth accumulation based on the cheap – or even free - labor of others.