Religion and Civilization

Abstract

The ancient Near East, later the Islamic Middle East, was the origin of our modern written civilizations. “Modernity” started with the Age of Metals that we call the Bronze Age. The fertile valleys of Mesopotamia were farmed with the newly invented plow, using animal traction, to produce enough surplus food to allow for the development of specialist activity in the towns. These civilizations of the Bronze Age had very few metal sources of their own. To get metal they had to exchange their food and manufactured products (such as wool) with the hill peoples around them, the “barbarians” who were ignorant of the urban arts but were the suppliers of the metals used for the plow as well as for crafts. This fundamental exchange gave birth to the first writing system that possibly developed from the earlier use of tokens that has been described as an accountant’s script, recording the amount and later the items that were transferred. Inscription led to a more comprehensive system of writing, which in turn crystallized, in a permanent form, speculations about man, gods, and nature and took the written form of “philosophy,” of natural as well as moral science, of thoughts that could be laid out and thought about. In this way a “tradition” of philosophy grew up that could be handed down (traditio), considered, and disputed.