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The Agricultural Era
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The agricultural era was humanities second economic era. It had succeeded the hunter-gatherer era which had featured survival via wild plants and animals. Their technology and worldview survives to us for the most part in images carved into stone and on cave walls. Lethal wild animals dominated every aspect of their worldview along with fertility figures of pregnant women (goddess images). They had synchronized their worldview for the unseen and inexplicable for birth, death and power as attributes from the these wild and lethal animals that were very much apart of the world they had lived within.
The start of the Agricultural Era - Inheritance Period 7675BCE
After the PPNA sites came and went the PPNB sites arrived. With these sites came fairly modern sized towns. The people of this time became more heavily dependant upon domesticated plants and animals. Below are two images of the earliest town yet found named Çatalhöyük (in present day Turkey).
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Çatalhöyük is extremely interesting because it tells us several critical facts. As you can see in the image, animals were still significant for the residents in terms of worldview. They also had images of female goddesses and therefore one can see the hunter-gatherer worldview has been inherited and left unchanged. On the right side a ladder is visible and this tells us that whoever entered one of the rooms they had to do so one by one. In other words the resident had the advantage if there was going to be a fight. Also there were small holes bored into the walls between the rooms large enough for a person to crawl through. Even the neighbors could not attack without being at the extreme disadvantage.
The significance for this is what will come later. Since these peoples were operating with the hunter-gatherer worldview they had no rules for interaction. As populations grew in the agricultural era this problem would continue to grow and would be addressed by the major update in worldview later in the era. However for now during the Inheritance Period these people were operating as their hunter-gatherers had relative to worldview.
Impact Period 4000BCE
The Impact Period around 4000BCE was a time in history when major technologies came together to change farming substantially through the inventions of the wheel, plow, writing and many others. Civilization at this juncture was creating towns which had turned into cities and city states. The Egyptian and Sumerian empires began in the 4th millennium BCE.
Worldview can also be seen very clearly at this time as well. In Egypt they had many animal based Gods. Horus was a central deity who was a man with a falcon head. Many Gods would start as local deities and then be elevated or discarded based on the fortunes of that town. In fact every town had their own animal God and even when they would be conquered their Gods would remain and the conquerors would worship them as well. The ancients understood the hunter-gatherer worldview and they did not seek to anger the Gods by stopping the worship for fear that the God from that town would seek vengeance on them. The large structures of the day were temples. In Sumer it was Ziggurats, where Gods were believed to live at the top of the structure. In Egypt the pyramids, which were after life machines for their pharaohs and were the largest structures they built. Nearby to the largest pyramid sits the Sphinx. A giant lions body with a mans head on it.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest recorded stories, one can see that people living in the Impact Period were aware that their way of life of was dramatically changing. In that story the human king Gilgamesh first fights with a half man half animal, named Enkidu and then teams up with him on a grand adventure. During the adventure the Gods have a choice to kill either Gilgamesh or Enkidu. They choose to kill Enkidu. These people understood that the life of their ancestors as hunter-gatherers was rapidly coming to an end.
In this way it can be seen that as humanity took greater control of their economy they began to update the hunter-gatherer worldview with a hybrid of half human half animal deities. This was occurring at this time all over civilized antiquity in the Far East and the West.
Update Period 2000BCE
In the Update period around 2000BCE the minor updates begin to gain steam. The Hebrews began oral traditions for their move to monthiesm at this time. In the tale of the Garden of Eden, one of the themes from the Epic of Gilgamesh is repeated accept this time much more poignantly to our modern eyes. Man is thrown out of the Garden of Eden, where man could eat as they pleased from the food just hanging from the trees. But the devil who was a snake tells Eve to break one of the rules. Humanity must now toil to make their own food.
Later in the story of Jacob's ladder, this theme is repeated again. Jacob steals his hairy Sheppard brother's Esau birthright by donning an animal skin and getting Abraham's blessing where on his deathbed Abraham mistakenly recognized Jacob for that of his eldest son, after having touched the hairy animal skin jacob was wearing. Esau was the symbolic hunter-gatherer and Jacob was the farmer. The early update to worldview is contained in this story as well as Jacob begs God to protect him as he flees Esau into the mountains. While sleeping he has a vision of angels on ladders ascending into heaven and descending into Earth. Clearly God was becoming a very human image in this updated conception.
Inspite of the fact that God was becoming more caring and human focused, was still only a trend within the educated and upper classes. Hosea an ancient Hebrew prophet living in the Update Period was taken to Babylon after Israel had been conquered. The educated, religious leaders, soldiers and rulers were taken out of Israel when the Babylonians exiled the upper 25% of the population. When Hosea was permitted a visit back to Israel, he had noted that the temple had become repellent with writhing animal figures painted on the walls of the temple. This tells us the update in worldview required further refinement before the common man would embrace the evolving more human survival guide.
The major religions of the day were all focusing on the problems which increased population into crowded cities were creating. Older religions were under update pressures as well as the powerful and mercurial Gods were abandoned to a variety of more caring variations of the hunter-gatherer survival guide. The The Eleusinian mysteries, which for almost 1000 years was the most popular religion in the Mediterranean basin featured rituals centered on a Bull and the consumption of substances which created altered states so that the participants could interact with the unseen world. The mysteries participants had at times numbered over 15,000 for their annual ceremony. The cult of Mithras, who was worshiped because as a human he had killed the Bull God was also worshiped in Europe and the Mediterranean region widely. The ancient cult of Isis, a mother goddess who was caring and gained in popularity as a result was associated with a wide variety of animals. Humanity was in process of updating the hunter-gatherer worldview to a more caring and human centric based view adapted for greater populations living in towns and amongst strangers.
Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism show just how much the Far East had surpassed the Near East and West in civilization as they would adopt the Golden rule of do unto other as you would have them do onto you, much sooner then the West would. They had taken the worldwide lead in technological development. This can also be seen as the result of far larger populations which required this updated worldview. The speed of the adoption in the Fareast was as the result not only of the increase in problems from growing human populations but also because communication was faster as well.
The technologies in this period are becoming quite complex. Currency is invented. Tin which does not occur naturally is created and used with copper to make it a stronger and more malleable material. War chariots and globalization first steps are taken via every larger sailing ships.
Transmission Period 200BCE
In the Transmission Periods very delicate creations via glass blowing are made as well as Archimedes inventing the compound pulley. The farming economy has taken full control of the civilized world via heavy plows which could plow the land with almost modern efficiency relative to that time.
By 200BCE worldview had been essentially updated and was now in the process of transmission. In an often misinterpreted* scene from the New Testament, Christ throws the animals out of the courtyard of the temple in an angry fit. He does so because he is frustrated and angry with people still performing ancient rituals of animal sacrifice instead of simply praying to God. Christianity and later Islam would bring the update in worldview throughout the West and Near East.
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*Note: The misunderstanding was and still remains with many people that Christ was against commerce and that's why the story is referred to as Christ and the moneychangers. However these were vendors selling animals for sacrifice and that's why Christ did not attack the vendors either verbally or physically but rather angrily threw the animals out of the temple courtyard.
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The remainder of the transmission period would see Gods law refined and then translated into man's law in the West and Near East. This would also be true for the Far East as well. In the West this would culminate by the end of the Middle Ages where all of man's law had been tied directly to God's law. Thinking outside of these parameters was simply prohibited.
Undercurrents Period 1300CE
The Undercurrents Period would be initiated in the Renaissance for Europe. Science is going through a process where it becomes a standardized methodology and the yield would be in setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution. Updated humanistic and rationalistic thinking relative to worldview were not embraced. After having gone through the lengthy process in redefining worldview, humanity was in no mood to allow updates.
The Far East and the West took different approaches in their instantiations of worldview through the agricultural era. In the Far East they permitted the animals to stay as symbols even though they had completely changed the core message to the one of the golden rule. If you doubt this look at a Chinese calendar or go to a Chinese New Year celebration. In both cases the animals are symbolically still represented. In the West they had taken a blackboard approach and erased even the animal symbols by the end of the transmission period. I think this seemingly superficial reason is why Westerners and Far Easterners view one another as being so very different.
The oldest religions which came out of the agricultural era are Hinduism and Judaism. You can see this clearly in that they had many of the hunter-gatherer animal symbols contained within their rituals and text. Hindu's still revere the cow and have fire rituals whereas Judaism's animal sacrifice rituals became symbolized in the traditional foods they consume in holiday celebrations and are referenced throughout their ancient texts.
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In the chart I have used the "S" shaped curve as a form of notation for the discrete technology cycles within the agricultural era. We will go deeper into the technology waves in the next page on the industrial era where we have more data and the history is much better understood today. I am hopeful that you can now see why I chose the agricultural era to use as the model for the Transition Periods. They are very clear and that economic era is complete and therefore provides us insight which we can not get from the hunter-gatherer era or the current incomplete industrial era.
Additional discussion on technology lifecycles/waves
I recently read the history professor from Brandies University, David Hackett Fischer's book titled The Great Wave. What Fischer provides for us is an economic study of inflation from the Middle Ages up through modernity. Therefore we can utilize his data as another puzzle piece to validate what the model projects as to what happened economically prior to the industrial era. The last technology wave ran from just prior to 200BCE to 1768CE. In looking at the dates from that core technology wave, starting around 1100CE, the technology had reached the maturation phase and therefore we should expect to find signs of a stagnating economic environment at this juncture in European history. Professor Fischer, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, lays out the data to demonstrate that starting in 1180 and running till 1350 we see inflation on the rise. From the mid 1400s till late in the 1600s we see a much larger wave of inflation manifest itself. Inflation is the classic tell tale symptom of the maturity phase in the lifecycle of a technology wave. In talking with a specialist on the Bubonic Plague, I was told that it struck Europe starting in 1347CE which was the only break in inflation during the latter stages of the agricultural era. It's is of course very nice when the subject matter expert is your mother and you can get this kind of information with just a phone call. Dr. Christine Boeckl's book on the plague can reviewed from this link.
Europe not having experienced unbroken inflation running from 1180 through to the late 17th century was due to a decrease in population and therefore a decrease in demand from 1350CE to 1460CE, primarily as a result of the Bubonic Plague. Without the occurrence of the plague we very likely would have seen a continuous rise of inflation from the 1100s to the late 17th century. Once population had again returned to its pre-plague levels, Professor Fischer writes on Page 73 of his book: "As the demand for food increased, people began to bring marginal lands into cultivation, with large labor and small return. French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie described that process at work in Languedoc. That region had a thin and stony scrubland called the garrigue which had been abandoned since the Black Death. Now it began to plowed and planted once again." What this tells us is that the maturation cycle had been reached well before the Bubonic plaque because fields which were inefficient for farming were once again required to be put back into to production to meet the excess demand from population growth having outstripped the farming technologies output capacities.
The technology which had powered the final technology wave of the agricultural era had reached its maximum viability by 1100, which produces a flattening trajectory in the S curve representing the technologies lifecycle. That inference for the technology development provides validation for my proposed length and number of technology cycles in the agricultural era based on Professor Fischer's data. The dates may not be exact as they have been postulated above but they certainly provide solid fundamental approximations for the farming era technology cycles. Professor Fischer's data used in conjunction with transition periods serves to validate that these are not only primary factors but also that they are highly correlated throughout human history.
Malthus famously proposed that population growth would outstrip humanities food production capability but with the advent of the Industrial Revolution farming technologies would see new inventions which would increase output to meet the demand for food stuffs. Professor Oded Galor of Brown University has written a paper showing that Malthus was correct for the agriculture era but was incorrect for the industrial era as population growth began to decrease as that was in the self interest of industrial populations. Please see Appendix C for access to his paper and more discussion on the topic. In the reference section I will list examples for various other wave configurations which I did not choose for the agricultural era along with the logic as to why I felt each potential model did not fit the era.
The industrial era has much more recorded data which affords us a more detailed understanding of the technology lifecycles. Those lifecycles are the symmetry breakers which change the world around us so completely that worldview undergoes revision and updates in humanities survival guides. Next stop onto the industrial era.
Onto Section 2 - The industrial era or Model Index
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Overview Pages:
Agricultural:
Industrial:
Hunter-gatherer:
Reference:
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