Ideas

Since 1835 workmen quarrying gravel from the river on the outskirts of Abbeville had been turning up ancient animal bones alongside different types of stone implements. These stone tools had convinced Boucher de Perthes that mankind was much more ancient than it said in the Bible.

It is from these events that the modern conception of time dates, with a sense of the hitherto unimagined antiquity of mankind gradually replacing the traditional chronology laid down in the Bible.4

The discoveries of the actual names in cuneiform of biblical kings like Sennacherib, and kings of Judah, like Hezekiah, fitted with the Old Testament chronology and added greatly to the credibility of the Bible as a historical document. As the museums of London and Paris began to fill with these relics, people started to refer to ‘scriptural geology’.

A final consequence of bipedalism was that females could only give birth to relatively small-brained offspring–because mothers needed relatively narrow pelvises to be able to walk efficiently. From this it followed that the infants would be dependent on their mothers for a considerable period, which in turn stimulated the division of labour between males and females, males being required to bring back food for their mates and offspring.

Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin, of the California Academy of Sciences, have suggested that the real reason humans became bipedal was as a way to appear bigger and more threatening in contests with other animals, and in so doing avoid punishing conflicts and gain access to food. The idea behind this is taken from observations of gorilla and chimpanzee behaviour in the wild. Both types of ape stand upright, swagger, wave their arms about and beat their chests when threatening others in contests over food or sexual partners.

palaeontologists recognise two important ways in which early hominid stone tools differ from the tools produced by other primates. The first is that some of the stone tools were produced to manufacture other tools–such as flakes to sharpen a stick. And second, the early hominids needed to be able to ‘see’ that a certain type of tool could be ‘extracted’ from a certain type of rough rock lying around.

Nicholas Toth of Indiana University spent many hours trying to teach a very bright bonobo (a form of pygmy chimpanzee), called Kanzi, to make stone tools. Kanzi did manage it, but not in the typical human fashion, by striking one stone against another. Instead, Kanzi would hurl the stones against the concrete floor of his cage. He just didn’t possess the mental equipment to ‘see’ the tool ‘inside’ the stone.

C. K. Brain advanced the idea that it was man’s control of fire which helped convert him from being the prey of the big cats to being a predator–fire offered protection that earlier man lacked. And in Spain there is evidence of the use of fire as a way to corral elephants into a bog, where they were butchered. Later, keeping a fire alive continuously would have encouraged social organisation.

After this, apart from the use of fire, only one thing seems to have happened for nearly a million years. This was the ‘standardisation’ of the hand-axe,

H. erectus spread out over much of Eurasia(i.e., not the northern latitudes, Australia or the Americas)–and therefore had to deal with very different forms of stone–hand-axes everywhere nevertheless began to show an extraordinary degree of uniformity. Thousands of hand-axes have now been examined by palaeontologists from all over the world, and they have shown that, although of different sizes, most axes are constructed in almost identical proportions.

archaeologists first recognised that, instead of relying on chance, which involved striking a stone to produce a flake, early man of 250,000 years ago knew enough about stone fracture dynamics (‘early physics’) to be able to predict the shape of the tool he was producing

it is quite possible that the Neanderthals did bury their dead with an associated ritual that implies some form of early religion. Certainly, at this time there is a sudden increase in the recovery of complete or nearly complete skeletons, which is also suggestive.

A second–and more controversial–climatic explanation is that the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano at 71,000 years ago led to a worldwide volcanic winter, lasting ten thousand years and drastically reducing both the human and animal population. This would have been followed by a period of severe competition for resources, resulting in rapid development among very disparate groups, fuelling innovation.

many contemporary tribes who create rock paintings have no word for art in their language.

Randall White, professor of anthropology at New York University, adds the intriguing thought that these figures date from a time (and such a time must surely have existed) when early man had yet to make the link between sexual intercourse and birth. At that time, birth would have been truly miraculous, and early man may have thought that, in order to give birth, women received some spirit, say from animals (hence the animal heads). Until the link was made between sexual intercourse and birth, woman would have seemed mysterious and miraculous creatures, far more so than men.

The figures were adorned with, respectively, 2,936, 4,903 and 5,274 beads plus, in the case of the adult, a beaded cap with fox teeth and twenty-five mammoth-ivory bracelets. Each bead, according to experiments White carried out, would have taken between an hour and three hours to produce–13,000–39,000 hours in total (somewhere between eighteen and fifty-four months). So the word ‘decoration’ hardly applies and we need to ask whether these beads are evidence of something more important–social distinctions, maybe, or even primitive religion.

White certainly thinks social divisions were already in existence 28,000 years ago; for one thing, it is unlikely that at Sungir everyone was buried with thousands of beads that took so long to make–there would hardly have been time for real work. It is possible, therefore, that the people who were buried with beads were themselves religious figures of some kind. The differences in decoration between individuals also imply that early humans were acquiring a sense of ‘self’.

Siberia is important because the conquest of cold was man’s greatest achievement before the invention of agriculture

In 2004 it was reported by biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, in Germany, that body lice are different from hair lice. Mark Stoneking and his colleagues infer that body lice ‘probably evolved from hair lice when a new ecological niche–clothing–became available’. Based on the rate of mutation, they date this to 75,000 BP.5

(apes), who lack Broca’s area, cannot produce any human speech sounds and they further appear to lack intentional voluntary control of vocal signals: for example, they cannot suppress food-barks even when it is in their best interest to do so.28

several experiments in the late twentieth century show that chimps possess a nascent language ability in that, although they couldn’t speak, they could learn American Sign Language. This suggests (to some) that language ability is very old.

Neanderthal ear bones recovered in 2004 from excavations in Spain showed that ‘their hearing was attuned to pick up the same frequency as those used in human speech’.

For archaeologists, the term ‘civilisation’ generally implies four characteristics–writing, cities with monumental architecture, organised religion and specialised occupations.

Comparison of the DNA of the various wheats all over the fertile crescent shows that they are fundamentally identical, much less varied than the DNA of wild wheats. This suggests that in each case domestication occurred only once.

A number of specific sites have been identified where domestication may have first occurred. Among these are Tell Abu Hureyra and Tell Aswad in Syria, which date back to 10,000 years ago, Karacada(gcirck) in Turkey, Netiv Hagdud, Gilgal and Jericho, in the Jordan valley, and Aswan in the Damascus basin, also in Syria, which date back even further, to 12,000–10,500 BP. An

A number of specific sites have been identified where domestication may have first occurred. Among these are Tell Abu Hureyra and Tell Aswad in Syria, which date back to 10,000 years ago, Karacada(gcirck) in Turkey, Netiv Hagdud, Gilgal and Jericho, in the Jordan valley, and Aswan in the Damascus basin, also in Syria, which date back even further, to 12,000–10,500 BP.

the chronology of animal domestication appears to begin shortly after 9000 BP–that is, about 1,000 years after plant domestication.

Pigs do not adjust to the nomadic way of life, so their domestication implies sedentism.9

‘The transformation from a hunting and collecting economy, perhaps beginning with the cultivation of wild cereals, to the establishment of permanent villages and a mixed agricultural economy with fully domesticated races of plants and animals, took place over at least 3,000 years.’ There was no radical break; for many years people simply tended ‘wild gardens’ rather than neat smallholdings or farms as we would recognise them.

there is a general agreement among palaeobiologists that domestication was invented only once and then spread to western Europe and India. Whether it also spread as far afield as south-east Asia and central Africa is still a moot point, and the most recent genetic evidence of farmers (as opposed to their plants) is not as conclusive as it might be. It shows that modern-day Greeks share 85–100 per cent of their (relevant) genes with Middle Easterners (from Baghdad, Ankara and Damascus), whereas Parisians share only 15–30 per cent. Some archaeologists have suggested that this means that it wasn’t the idea that spread, but people practising the idea,

It is also an even more interesting question than it looks when you consider the fact that the hunter-gathering mode is actually quite an efficient way of leading one’s life. Ethnographic evidence among hunter-gatherer tribes still in existence shows that they typically need to ‘work’ only three or four or five hours a day in order to provide for themselves and their kin. Skeletal remains of Stone Age farmers reveal more signs of malnutrition, infectious diseases and dental decay than those of their hunter-gatherer predecessors.

it is quite clear that sedentism, the transfer from a hunter-gathering lifestyle to villages, was already well under way by the time the agricultural revolution took place.

It is easier to see why the female should be chosen rather than the male. The female form is a symbol of fertility. At a time when child mortality was high, true fertility would have been highly prized. Such worship was designed to ensure the well-being of the tribe or family unit.

we may infer that early man, roughly 12,000–10,000 years ago, underwent a profound psychological change, essentially a religious revolution, and that this preceded domestication of animals and plants.

He points to carvings of this period in which the ‘faithful’ have their arms raised, as if in prayer or supplication. For the first time, he says, there is ‘an entirely new relationship of subordination between god and man’.22 From now on, says Cauvin, there is a divine force, with the gods ‘above’ and everyday humanity ‘below’.

bovine symbolism diffused throughout the Levant and Anatolia and at ’Ain Ghazal we see the first explicit allusions, around 8000 BC, to the bull-fighting act, in which man himself features.

It was sedentism which allowed the interval between births to be reduced, boosting population, as a result of which villages grew, social organisation became more complicated and, perhaps, a new concept of religion was invented, which in some ways reflected the village situation, where leaders and subordinates would have emerged. Once these changes were set in train, domesticated plants at least would have developed almost unconsciously as people ‘selected’ wild cereals which were amenable to this new lifestyle.

We have here then not so much a renaissance as a naissance, a highly innovative time–relatively short–when three of our most basic ideas were laid down: agriculture, religion, the rectangular house. The mix of abstract and practical down-to-earth ideas would not have been recognised by early humans. Religion would have suffused the other two ideas as each activity spilled over into the other.

The first use of clay in the Middle East is documented at Jericho (ninth millennium BC),

We may now conclude…that some accidental firing, due to the proximity of the various acts of preparing-cooking-baking the ground wheat or barley in the immovable basins and the oven, was the cause of the transformation of the mud clay into pottery.’

Johan Goudsblom speculates as to whether the preservation of fire became a specialisation in early villages, giving the specialists a particular power.

this ‘testifies to a very important cult of the dead’: the houses where the peasants of this culture lived have not stood the test of time, whereas the chamber tombs are the longest-surviving structures in the history of the world.

From about 1930 onwards, modern dowsers have explored megalithic sites and picked up very powerful reactions in their vicinity. One dowser, Guy Underwood, published in 1969 a map of primary dowsing lines under Stonehenge which showed that twenty lines converged on the site.

Although archaeologists now order the ‘ages’ of man into the Stone, Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, in that order, the first use of a metallic substance was almost certainly iron, around 300,000 years ago, when ochre found favour as decoration.

One mystery lies in the fact that tin, the alloy with copper that makes it much harder, as bronze, is relatively rare in nature. How did this particular alloy, therefore, come to be made for the first time? And second, why, despite this, were advances so rapid, with the result that, between about 3000 BC and 2600 BC, all the important advances in metallurgical history, save for the hardening of steel, were introduced

hardly any metallic tin has ever been found in excavations by archaeologists. (In fact, only one piece of pure tin older than 1500 BC has ever been found.)’

Though the exact origins of bronze are obscure, its attractions over copper were real enough, once its method of production could be stabilised, and its increasing popularity brought about considerable changes in the economy of the ancient world.

Whereas copper was found in a fairly large number of localities, this was not the case with bronze for, as was said above, in neither Asia nor Europe is tin ore widely distributed. This limitation meant that the places where tin was mined grew considerably in importance and, since they were situated almost entirely in Europe, that continent had advantages denied to Asia and Africa.

The sheer hardness of bronze meant that the edges of daggers became as important as their points, encouraging the development of swords. Moreover, this development coincided with the domestication of the horse in the steppe countries of Europe, and the wheel in Sumer. Warfare was therefore suddenly transformed

the success of bronze, the rarity of tin and the abundance of iron induced the Hittites to experiment.

The technique appears to have been a closely-guarded secret for several hundred years, with the craftsmen keeping the vital details within their families and charging a very high price for their wares. To begin with it was looked upon as a truly precious metal, more valuable than gold according to ancient records; only ornaments were made of it and the secrets of iron were probably not known outside the Hittite sphere of influence before 1400 BC.

The Iron Age truly dates from when the metal ceased to be precious

In terms of ideas, three uses to which metals were put seem to have been most profound. These were the dagger, as was mentioned earlier, the mirror, and coins.

The English word ‘salary’ derives from the Latin salarius, meaning ‘of salt’. (Roman soldiers were perhaps paid in salt, to flavour their otherwise bland food.

The as, a Roman coin, represented the value of one hundredth of a cow. The English word ‘cattle’ is derived from the same Latin root as the word ‘capital

The transition from proto-money to coins proper took place in Lydia, in what is now Turkey, some time between 640 and 630 BC.

It was in a Lydian city, Sardis, that the first retail market was introduced, when anyone could come to the market and sell, for money, whatever they had.

all sorts of new activities were sparked by the invention of money. At Sardis, for instance, the first known brothels were built, and gambling was also born.

More fundamentally, the advent of money enabled people to break out from their kin group. Money became the link between people, creating a nexus that had not been possible under the barter system. In the same way, money weakened traditional ties and that, in time, had profound political implications. Work and human labour became a commodity, with a coin-related value attached, and therefore time too could be measured in the same way.

Democracy arose in cities with market economies and strong currencies. Furthermore, the wealth generated by such commerce allowed for greater leisure time, out of which the Greek elite built its pre-eminence in philosophy, sport, the arts, in politics itself.

Counting had existed before money, but the emergence of the market, and a money economy, encouraged rational and logical thinking,

Money also vastly promoted international trade. This, more than anything, helped the spread of ideas around the globe. After Sardis, the great urban centres of the world were as likely to be market towns as places of worship, or the homes of kings.

Woolley also discovered a practice that royalty in Babylon was not buried alone. Alongside the king and queen, in one chamber, lay a company of soldiers (copper helmets and spears were found next to their bones) and in another chamber were the skeletons of nine ladies of the court, still wearing their elaborate headdresses. Now these were very grisly practices, and quite important enough in themselves, for what they revealed about ancient beliefs. But what particularly attracted Woolley’s attention was that no text had ever hinted at this collective burial. He therefore drew the conclusion that the interment had taken place before writing had been invented to record the event.

in 1946 the American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer began to publish his translations of Sumerian clay tablets and in doing so he identified no fewer than twenty-seven ‘historical firsts’ discovered or achieved or recorded by the early Iraqis. Among them were the first schools, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first clocks, the first arch, the first legal code, the first library, the first farmer’s almanac, and the first bicameral congress.

The reason for this remarkable burst of creativity is not hard to find: civilisation, as we now call it, occurred only after early man had begun to live in cities. Cities were far more competitive, experimental environments than anything that had gone before. The city is the cradle of culture, the birthplace of nearly all our most cherished ideas.

Sometime in the late fourth millennium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience for the new conditions required men and women to cooperate in ways they never had before. It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together–writing, law, bureaucracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures.

By the end of the third millennium BC, 90 per cent of southern Mesopotamia was living in urban areas.3

This was an exciting advance: for the first time people could become involved in activities not directly linked with food production. Yet this development would have raised anxiety levels: citizens had to rely on others, not their kin, for essentials. This underlying anxiety may well explain the vast, unprecedented schemes and projects which fostered a community spirit–monumental, labour-intensive architectural undertakings. For these same reasons, religion may well have become more important in cities than in previous configurations.

The first city is generally held to have been Eridu, a site just over a hundred miles inland from the Persian Gulf and now called Aby Shahrein.

Rome at the time of Hadrian was only twice as large as Uruk had been three thousand years earlier.

The achievements of these cities and city-states were astonishing and endured for some twenty-six centuries, with a remarkable number of innovations being introduced which created much of the world as we know it and live it. It was in Babylonia that music, medicine and mathematics were developed, where the first libraries were created, the first maps drawn, where chemistry, botany and zoology were conceived. At least, we assume that is so. Babylon is the home of so many ‘firsts’ because it is also the place where writing was invented and therefore we know about Babylon in a way that we do not know history before then.

these early urban areas were usually divided into three. There was an inner city with its own walls, inside which were found the temples of the city’s gods, plus the palace of the ruler/administrator/religious leader and a number of private houses. The suburbs consisted of much smaller houses, communal gardens and cattle pens, providing day-to-day produce and support for the citizens. Finally, there was a commercial centre. Though called the ‘harbour’, this area was where overland commerce was handled and where foreign as well as native merchants lived.

In addition to the new specialisations already mentioned, we may include the barber, the jeweller or metal-worker, the costumier and cloth merchant, the laundryman, the brick makers, the ornamental gardener, the ferryman, the ‘sellers of songs’ and the artist. From our point of view the most important specialist was the scribe.

For the next fifteen years she examined more than 10,000 tokens, and came to the conclusion that they comprised a primitive accounting system and one which led to the creation of writing. Words, in a sense, began with numbers. This is, after all, what writing is, a form of communication which allows the two communicating parties to be spatially and temporally separated.

Personal identification was a problem and a necessity from the moment that economic organisation went beyond the extended family, where everyone knew each other and property was owned communally. Certain names would have been easy, ‘Lionheart’ say.39 But how would one render an abstract name, such as ‘Loved-by-God’? Pictographs would have been developed, much as the heart shape, , has come to mean ‘love’ in our time. In this way, multiple meanings overlapped: the sun, , for example, might mean ‘day’, ‘bright’, or ‘white’, while a star, , might mean ‘god’ or ‘sky’, depending on context. The ‘doctrine of the name’ was important in Babylon, where thought worked mainly by analogy, rather than by inductive or deductive processes as we use in the modern world.

a ‘good’ name would produce a ‘good’ person. For the same reason, people were named after the gods and that was also the case with streets (‘May the enemy never tread it’) and canals and city walls and gates (‘Bel hath built it, Bel hath shown it favour’).

Writing and reading as we know it appears to have been developed at Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia, and the language was Sumerian. No one knows who the Sumerians were, or where they originated,

Trade was still the main reason for writing but it was now that its use was extended to religion, politics and history/myth–the beginnings of imaginative literature. Such a transformation didn’t happen overnight. In the early schools for scribes, we find lexical lists–lists of words–and lists of proverbs. This is probably how they were taught to write, and it was through well-known proverbs and incantations, even magic spells, that abstract signs for syntactical and grammatical elements became established (the proverbs had a simple, familiar form). And it was in this way that writing changed from being a purely symbolic system of information-recording and exchange, to a representation of speech.

People–in the Bible and elsewhere–were described as ‘knowing the words’ for things, such as birds or fishes, which meant they could, to that extent, read.

Lists made possible new kinds of intellectual activity. They encouraged comparison and criticism. The items in a list were removed from the context that gave them meaning in the oral world and in that sense became abstractions. They could be separated and sorted in ways never conceived before, giving rise to questions never asked in an oral culture. For example, the astronomical lists made clear the intricate patterns of the celestial bodies, marking the beginning of mathematical astronomy and astrology.

The very first idea, apart from economic tablets and proper names, that we can decipher among the earliest writing is that of the battle between ‘kings’ and ‘priests’. At one stage it was believed that all of a city’s inhabitants and all of its land ‘belonged’ to the supreme city god and that the high priest or priestess administered the city on behalf of this deity, but such a view is no longer tenable: land holding was much more complex than this. The high priest or priestess was known as the en, or ensi. Normally, and to begin with, the en or ensi was the most powerful figure, but there was another, the lugal–literally speaking, the ‘great man’. He was in effect the military commander, the fortress commander, who ran the city in its disputes with foreign powers. It does not take much imagination to envisage conflict between these two sources of power.

The view preferred now is that Mesopotamian cities are better understood not as religious but as corporate entities–municipalities–in which people were treated equally.

What made the Semitic languages suitable for alphabetisation was that most nouns and verbs were composed of three consonants, fleshed out by vowels which vary according to the context, but which are generally self-evident.

Cuneiform extracts have been found in several cities which show that there were already ‘standard texts’ used in instruction.

Papyrus was the most expensive writing material of all and was available only to the most accomplished, and therefore least wasteful, scribes. Scribal training could take as long as for a modern PhD.

There was in the first place a number of stories that prefigured narratives which appeared later in the Bible. Given the influence of that book, its origins are important. For example, Sargon, king of Akkad, emerged from complete obscurity to become ‘king of the world’. His ancestry was elaborated from popular tales, which tell of his mother, a priestess, concealing the fact that she had given birth to him by placing him in a wicker basket, sealed with bitumen, and casting him adrift on a river. He was later found by a water drawer who brought Sargon up as his adopted son. Sargon first became a gardener…and then king. The parallels with the Moses story are plain.

Sumerian literature also boasts a number of ‘primal kings’ with improbably long reigns. This too anticipates the Old Testament. In the Bible, for example, Adam begot his son Seth at age 130 and is said to have lived for 800 more years. Between Adam and the Deluge there were ten kings who lived to very great ages. In Sumer, there were eight such kings, who between them reigned for 241,200 years, an average of 30,400 years per king.

There, he meets Utnapishtim’s boatman, who agrees to ferry him over the waters of death, ‘a single drop of which means certain destruction’.73 When, finally, Gilgamesh reaches Utnapishtim he is disappointed. The ancestor’s immortality, he tells Gilgamesh, is due to unique circumstances that will never be repeated. He confides that, in an earlier age, the gods had decided to destroy mankind and had caused a flood. Utnapishtim and his wife were the only ones allowed to survive: they were forewarned and built a large boat, in which they stored pairs of all living things.

The ordering of the list was still pretty haphazard, however, for alphabetisation was not introduced for more than 1,500 years.

A curse was inscribed on many Assyrian tablets to deter people from stealing them.

Thus the more-or-less modern idea of kingship grew up in Mesopotamia and, parallel with it, the idea of the state. Lugals who became kings administered more than one city, and the territory in between.

Kingship, then, was forged in part by war. War, or the institutionalisation of war, was the crucible or the forcing house for a number of other ideas.

the king was always the court of appeal, and intervened whenever he wanted to. The Babylonians were less concerned with an abstract theory of justice, and more with finding an acceptable solution that did not disrupt society.

The court first examined any relevant documents and then heard statements by the accuser, the accused and any witnesses. Anyone giving evidence took an oath by the gods and if a conflict of testimony arose, it was settled by recourse to the ordeal–that is, the rival witnesses were forced to jump into the river, the idea being that the fear of divine wrath would pressure the lying party to confess.

even earlier laws were discovered, deriving from Ur-Nammu, who founded the Third Dynasty of Ur at about 2100 BC. The fragment discovered deals with abuses in taxation and setting up standard weights and measures, but it also has a strong statement of principle, in this case to block the exploitation of the economically weak by the strong:

In the Hittite laws (c. 1700–1600 BC), for example, the penalty for stealing a beehive was ‘exposure to a bee sting’, but this was replaced later by a fine.110 But again, all this may make ancient justice

In the Hittite laws (c. 1700–1600 BC), for example, the penalty for stealing a beehive was ‘exposure to a bee sting’, but this was replaced later by a fine.

There is evidence of a development in abstract thought in the Mesopotamian cities. To begin with, for example, early counting systems applied only to specific commodities–i.e., the symbol for ‘three sheep’ applied only to sheep and was different from that for ‘three cows’.

It was thus in these first cities that LU, human beings, discovered a genius for art, literature, trade, law–and many other new things. We call it civilisation and we are apt to think of it as reflected in the physical remains of temples, castles and palaces that we see about us. But it was far more than that. It was a great experiment in living together, which sparked a whole new psychological experience, one that, even today, continues to excite many more of us than the alternatives. Cities have been the forcing houses of ideas, of thought, of innovation, in almost all the ways that have pushed life forward.

sacrifice dates from an era when the rhythms of the world were observed but not understood.

there was also a widespread feeling that the soul is an alternative version of the self.27 Anthropologists such as Tylor put this down to primitive man’s experience of dreams, ‘that in sleep they seemed to be able to leave their bodies and go on journeys and sometimes see those who were dead.’28 Reflecting on such things, primitive peoples would naturally have concluded that a kind of inner self or soul dwelt in the body during life, departing from it temporarily during sleep and permanently at death.

Paradise–the word, at least–is much better documented. It is based on an old Median word, pari = around, and daeza = wall. (The Medes were a civilisation in Iran in the sixth century BC.) The word paridaeza came variously to mean a vineyard, a grove of date palms, a place were bricks were made and even, on one occasion, the ‘red-light’ quarter of Samos.

only kings and aristocrats could go to paradise, and all others went to hell. There are some indications in Pythagoras’ writings that his idea of the afterlife, and the immortal soul, was reserved for the aristocracy, so this may have been an idea that was born as a way of preserving upper-class privileges at a time when that class was being marginalised, as cities (and merchants) grew more important.

There was the concept of Sheol, but this is more akin to the English word ‘grave’ than Hades, which is how it was often translated. ‘Sheol was located beneath the earth (Psalm 63.10), filled with worms and dust (Isaiah, 14.11) and impossible to escape from (Job, 7.9f.).’ It was only after the exile in Babylon that good and bad departments of Sheol were envisaged, and it became associated with Gehenna, a valley south of Jerusalem where it was at first believed that punishments would be handed out after the Last Judgement. Soon after, it became the name for the fiery hell.

Analysis of early religions can seem at times like numerology. There are so many of them, and they are so varied, that they can be made to fit any theory. Nevertheless, insofar as the world’s religions can be reduced to core elements, then those elements are: a belief in the Great Goddess, in the Bull, in the main sky gods (the sun and the moon), in sacred stones, in the efficacy of sacrifice, in an afterlife, and in a soul of some sort which survives death and inhabits a blessed spot. These elements describe many religions in some of the less developed parts of the world even today.

until a relatively late period of Jewish history the Israelites had a ‘considerable’ number of divinities. ‘According to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,’ says the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the sixth century BC.59 When Israelite religion first appears, in the Hebrew scriptures, we find no fewer than three main forms of worship. There is the worship of teraphim or family gods, the worship of sacred stones, and the worship of certain great gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed. Some of these gods take the form of animals, others of sky gods, the sun in particular. There are many biblical references to these gods. For example, when Jacob flees from Laban, we hear how Rachel stole her father’s teraphim: when the furious chieftain finally catches up with the fugitives, one of his first questions is to ask why they stole his domestic gods.60 Hosea refers to teraphim as ‘stocks of wood’, while Zechariah dismisses them as ‘idols that speak lies to the people’.61 It is clear that the teraphim were preserved in each household with reverential care, that they were sacrificed to by the family at stated intervals, and that they were consulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty by ‘a domestic priest “clad in an ephod”. In all this the Israelites were little different from the surrounding peoples.’

Stone-worship also played an important part in the primitive Semitic religion. For the early Hebrews a sacred stone was a ‘Beth-el’, a place where gods dwelt.63 In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get an example where the sacred stone is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s substance as an offering. In other places women pray to phallic-shaped stones so that they might be blessed with children.64 Yahweh is referred to as a rock in Deuteronomy, and in the second book of Samuel.

the Hebrew scriptures which, far from being the divinely-inspired word of God, are, like all holy writings, clearly a set of documents produced by human hands with a specific aim.

To a man, the prophets were opposed to sacrifice, idolatry and to the traditional priesthood, not so much on principle as for the fact that ‘men were going through the motions of formally honouring God while their everyday action proved they had none of the love of God that alone gives sacrifice a meaning’.

The prophets’ main concern was Israel’s internal spirituality. Their aim was to turn Yahweh-worship away from idolatry (the idol in the ark), so that the faithful would reflect instead on their own behaviour, their feelings and failings. This concentration on the inner life suggests that the prophets were concerned with an urban religion, that they were faced with the problem of living together in close proximity. This may explain why, in their efforts to shock the Israelites into improving their morality, the prophets built up the idea of revelation.

the idea of a Judgement became a major feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, life after death, resurrection, judgement, heaven and paradise were all Zoroastrian ideas first, as were hell and the devil.

One verse of the Gathas says that the soul remains close to a person’s body after death, but after three days a wind arises. For the righteous it is a perfumed wind which quickly transports the soul to ‘the lights without beginning, paradise’, but for others it is a cold north wind, which drives the sinner to the zone of darkness.106 Note the delay of three days.

The fact that sacred fire was so important in their religion hints that they originally came from a northern (cold) region.

Gautama was about twenty-nine when, c. 538 BC, he suddenly left his wife, child and very well-to-do family and embarked on his search for enlightenment. It is said that he sneaked upstairs for one last look at his sleeping wife and son, but then left without saying goodbye. Part of him at least was not sorry to go: he had nicknamed the little boy Rahula, which means ‘fetter’, and the baby certainly symbolised the fact that Gautama felt shackled to a way of life he found abhorrent. He had a yearning for what he saw as a cleaner, more spiritual life, and so he did what many holy men did in India at the time: he turned his back on his family and possessions,

His main concern was an ethical life, facing the problem of how men can live together. This reflected China’s transition to an urban society. Like the Buddha, like Plato and like Aristotle, he looked beyond the gods, and taught that the answer to an ethical life lies within man himself, that universal order and harmony can only be achieved if people show a wider sense of community and obligation than their own and their family’s self-interest.130 He thought that scholarship and learning were the surest way to harmony and order and that the natural aristocrats in the sort of society he wanted were the sages.

To think one can improve on nature is a profanity. Desire is hell.133 God cannot be understood, only experienced. ‘The aim is to be like a drop of water in the ocean, complete and at one with the larger significant entity.’ Laotzu speaks of sages who have attained immortality and, like the Greeks, inhabit the Isles of the Blessed. Later, these ideas were ridiculed by Zhuangtzu, a great rationalist.

Allan Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, published his book The Closing of the American Mind

According to the New York Times, these academics saw Bloom’s book as an attempt to foist the ‘elitist views of dead, white, European males’ on a generation of students who were now living in a different world, where the preoccupations of small city-states 2,500 years ago were long out of date.

A new conception of what human life is for. The fountainhead. First in so many ways that have mattered. That is why ancient Greece is so important, even today.

the Greeks left us far more than any other comparable group. Their legacy is the greatest the world has yet known.4 There are two principal aspects to that legacy. One is that the Greeks were the first to truly understand that the world may be known, that knowledge can be acquired by systematic observation, without aid from the gods, that there is an order to the world and the universe which goes beyond the myths of our ancestors. And second, that there is a difference between nature–which operates according to invariable laws–and the affairs of men, which have no such order, but where order is imposed or agreed and can take various forms and is mutable.

Homer’s genius was recognised in Greece from the very beginning. Athenians referred to his books the way devout Christians nowadays refer to the Bible, or Muslims to the Qur’an. Socrates quoted lines from the Iliad when he was on trial for his life.8

in Homer the gods are not ‘unknowable’. They are in fact all too human, with human problems and failings. No less significantly, in Homer, the heroes’ enemies are themselves heroes, treated with sympathy at times, allowed their own dignity and honour.

Homer drew upon a vast number of poems and songs that had been transmitted orally for generations. They depended on myths and mythos, in Greek, from which the English word ‘myth’ derives, actually meant ‘word’, in the sense of ‘the last word’, a final pronouncement.

This gap opened up because land in Attica was poor, certainly so far as growing grain was concerned. Therefore, in bad years the poorer farmers had to borrow from their richer neighbours. With the invention of coins, however, instead of borrowing a sack of corn in the old way, to be repaid by a sack, the farmer now borrowed the price of a sack. But this sack was bought when corn was scarce–and therefore relatively expensive–and was generally repaid in times of plenty, in other words when corn was cheap. This caused debt to grow and in Attica the law allowed for creditors to seize an insolvent debtor and take him and his family into slavery. This ‘rich man’s law’ was bad enough, but the spread of writing, when the laws were set down, under the supervision of Dracon, made it worse, encouraging people to enforce their written rights. ‘Draconian law’, it was said, was written in blood.

what we regard as democracy in the twenty-first century is actually elective oligarchy.

how small–by modern standards–Greek city-states were. Both Plato and Aristotle thought that the ideal polis should have around 5,000 citizens and in fact very few had more than 20,000.

Greeks came to regard the polis as a form of life that enabled each individual to live life to the full, to realise his true potential. They tried hard not to forget what politics was for.

Democracy was introduced into Athens in 507 BC by Cleisthenes

There were no professional lawyers. ‘The principle was preserved that the aggrieved man appealed directly to his fellow citizens for justice.’

There was no appeal. If the offence did not carry a specific penalty then the prosecutor, if he won the case, would propose one penalty, while the accused proposed another. The jury then chose between the two. ‘To the Athenian, the responsibility of taking his own decisions, carrying them out, and accepting the consequences, was a necessary part of the life of a free man.’

there are three main reasons why science began there. First, the region did not belong to a powerful state, which are usually hostile to free thinking. Second, the Ionians were a seafaring people, interposed between East and West, with strong trading links. Mercantile exchange is always the principal force in the exchange of ideas, which often stem from the solving of practical problems–navigation, means of transport, water supply, handicraft techniques. Third, the area was not ‘priest-ridden’; there was not, as in Babylon or Egypt, a hereditary, privileged, priestly caste with a vested interest in the status quo.

the Greek philosopher/scientists enjoyed much less patronage than their contemporaries in China, who were employed by the emperor, and often charged with looking after the calendar, which was a state concern. This had the effect of making Chinese scientists much more circumspect in their views, and in embracing new concepts: they had much more to lose than in Greece, and they seldom argued as the Greeks argued.

What these Ionians grasped was that the world was something that could be understood, if one took the trouble to observe it properly.

The very first scientist, in the sixth century BC, was Thales of Miletus, a city on the Ionian coast.

Thales was not the first ancient figure to speculate about the origin and nature of the universe but he was the first ‘who expressed his ideas in logical and not mythological terms’.23 As a merchant who had travelled to Egypt, he had picked up enough mathematics and Babylonian astronomy to be able to predict a total eclipse of the sun in the year 585 BC, which duly occurred, on the day we call 29 May.

Thales is more often remembered for the basic scientific-philosophical question that he asked: what is the world made of ? The answer he gave–water–was wrong, but the very act of asking so fundamental a question was itself an innovation. His answer was also new because it implied that the world consists not of many things (as it so obviously does) but, underneath it all, of one thing. In other words, the universe is not only rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple.

it is difficult to overstate the epochal change in thinking that was taking place–the rejection of gods and myths as ways to explain everything (or anything) and the beginnings of observation as a basis for reason. That man should be descended from other animals, not gods, was as great a break with past thinking as could be imagined.

He did not have Herodotus’ eye for anecdote but–and this was his second innovation–he allowed little or no place for the gods in war. ‘Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides attached primary importance in military affairs to intelligence. The word gnome, meaning understanding or judgement, appears more than three hundred times in the book and intelligent men are singled out for praise time and again, notably Themistocles, Pericles and Theramenes.’

temple of Apollo at Bassae, but above all in Athens the Odeon

Martin Bernal, a professor of government at Columbia University in New York, has argued, in Black Athena, that northern Africa, in particular ancient Egypt–several dynasties of whom were black–was the predominant influence on classical Greece.

Bernal was even more heavily criticised than Allan Bloom was, for poor scholarship and faulty interpretation of dates and data, and for not delivering later volumes as promised.

Aristotle died in 322 BC. In 1962 Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford historian of ideas, gave a series of lectures at Yale, later published in book form, in which he noted that a great change came over Greece in the wake of Aristotle’s death. ‘Some sixteen years or so later, Epicurus began to teach in Athens, and after him Zeno, a Phoenician from Kition in Cyprus. Within a few years theirs are the dominant philosophical schools in Athens. It is as if political philosophy had suddenly vanished away.

There is nothing about the city, the education of citizens to perform their tasks within it…[T]he notion of fulfilment as necessarily social and public disappears without a trace. Within twenty years or less we find, in place of hierarchy, equality; in place of emphasis on the superiority of specialists, the doctrine that any man can discover the truth for himself and live the good life as well as any other man; in place of emphasis on intellectual gifts…there is now stress upon the will, moral qualities, character;…in the place of the outer life, the inner life; in place of political commitment…we now have a notion of individual self-sufficiency, praise of austerity, a puritanical emphasis on duty…stress on the fact that the highest of all values is peace of soul, individual salvation, obtained not by knowledge of the accumulating kind, not by the gradual increase of scientific information (as Aristotle taught)…but by sudden conversion–a shining of the inner light. Men are distinguished into the converted and the unconverted.’

This is, says Berlin, the birth of Greek individualism, one of the three great turning points in Western political theory

Berlin thought that the consequences of this break in thought were immense. ‘For the first time the idea gains ground that politics is a squalid occupation, not worthy of the wise and the good. The division of ethics and politics is made absolute;…Not public order but personal salvation is all that matters.’101 Most historians, he acknowledged, agree that this change came about because of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great’s destruction of so many city-states in their conquests, as a result of which the polis became insignificant.

politics was degraded, as unworthy of a truly gifted man.

‘Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence

confusion as to the real meaning of the scriptures. Many scrolls of scripture were regarded as sacred, especially

Many scrolls of scripture were regarded as sacred, especially the early ones that contained the name of God, YHWH. Later texts excluded this name, for fear that gentiles might use it in spells.

Yet, in Jesus’ lifetime, there appears to have been no idea that the canon of scriptures was closed, there was no ‘authorised version’ as we would say. The wording and the length could both vary (there were long and short versions of some books, such as Ezekiel), and great disagreement on what their meaning was.

According to archaeologists working in Israel (some of whom are Israelis, some of whom are not), there is no archaeological evidence that any of the patriarchs–Abraham, Noah, Moses or Joshua–ever existed, there was no exile of the Jews in Egypt, no heroic Exodus and no violent conquest of Canaan. For most biblical scholars, the issue now is not whether such figures as Abraham existed, but whether the customs and institutions found in their stories are historical; and not whether the Exodus or Conquest happened as it says in the Bible, but what kind of Exodus and Conquest they were.

most fundamental of all, Yahweh, the God of the Jews, was not to begin with a very different kind of supernatural being, as the Israelites always claimed, but just one of a variety of Middle Eastern deities who, until the seventh century BC at least, had a wife–Judaism was not always a monotheistic religion.

An even more serious undermining of the Bible’s authority has come, however, from the general realisation, as archaeology has developed, that a world that is supposed to be set in the Bronze Age–say, c. 1800 BC–is in fact set in the Iron Age, i.e., after 1200 BC. Place names in the Bible are Iron Age names, the Philistines (Palestinians) are not mentioned in other, extra-biblical texts, until around 1200 BC, and domesticated camels, though mentioned in the Bible as early as chapter 24 of Genesis, were not brought under human control until the end of the second millennium BC.21

The significance of these figurines lies in their date and the fact that there is no substantial difference between them and figurines in other countries. They appear to support the idea that full-blown Judaism did not emerge until the Babylonian exile. In short, the Israelites of the ‘second exile’ period converted Yahweh into a special, single God to justify their claims to the land.

(Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, and based on Aristotle’s principles for planning the ideal city, was built on a spit of land between the sea and a lake and was as near as practicable to the westernmost mouth of the Nile.

most of all the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha show how ideas were developing in Judaism in the years before Jesus was born. The idea of Satan emerges, the resurrection of the body is distinguished from the resurrection of the soul, and ideas about rewards and punishments beyond the grave emerge. ‘Sheol’, the underworld where hitherto the dead dwelt, in some discomfort, is now divided into two compartments, a form of heaven for the righteous and what was in effect hell for the unrighteous.

It is worth noting, once more, how different the Hebrew scriptures were from Greek literature, produced at more or less the same time. In particular, the Tanakh was narrow in outlook. As Robin Lane Fox has observed, there is no detailed concern with politics, or with the great forces–economic, scientific, even geographic–that shape the world. Certain comparisons highlight this difference. For example, the Song of Deborah in the Old Testament is, like Aeschylus’ The Persians, an examination of the impact of defeat in war on the enemy’s royal women. The Hebrew scriptures are a victory ode, they gloat over the changed circumstances of the women with the words: ‘So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord.’ In contrast, Aeschylus’ tragedy shows sympathy for the women: the gods may have fought on the side of Greece but that doesn’t stop their enemies being treated as full human beings in their own right.

An even bigger gulf existed between the history of Herodotus and Thucydides and the Hebrew scriptures. Herodotus does allow for miracles and Thucydides sees ‘the hand of fate’ behind events; however, whereas the Greeks researched their books, visited actual sites and interrogated eyewitnesses where they could, and whereas they regarded men as responsible for their actions, in both victory and defeat and, in Thucydides’ case certainly, allowed little or no role for the gods, the Hebrew Bible is almost the exact opposite. The writings are anonymous, they show no signs of research–no one has travelled to see anything for themselves, or made any attempt to compare the Hebrew stories with outside, independent authorities.

gymnasium near the Temple and took some of the Temple funds

The intellectual freedom that characterised Greece and the Greek world was unknown in Palestine, where a national system of local schools was installed in which all boys–and only boys–were taught the Torah and nothing else. All other forms of knowledge were rejected.’

In religious terms they were characterised by a literal interpretation of the Torah. This did not make them as conservative as it might have done, however, because their literal beliefs led them to oppose the extension of the Torah into areas not specified in scriptures.

The idea of resurrection seems to have first developed around 160 BC, during the time of religious martyrdom, and as a response to it (the martyrs were surely not dying for ever?).

‘They yearned for God to bring about the last days but did nothing to initiate the End themselves

Their most notable idea was that they were living ‘at the edge of time, in the very last days’, and they spent those days preparing for the coming of God, who would relieve them of the world’s bleak political realities and restore the Jews to glory. They believed that there would be a Messiah, who would lead them to Paradise (some even believed in two Messiahs, one priestly, the other military, a return to ancient Mesopotamian ideas).

This Messiah figure was not a supernatural phenomenon at first; in the Psalms of Solomon (Apocrypha), for instance, he is a man like other men–there is no doubt about his humanity.63 The Messiah only became supernatural because the political situation of the Jews deteriorated, became ‘so bleak that only a supernatural act could rescue them’.

In Greek the term Messiah is translated as Christos, which is how, in time, this became Jesus’ name, rather than his title.65 In this way, too, general prophecies about the Messiah came to be applied to Jesus Christ.

Herod agreed with many sophisticated people that Palestine was backward and could benefit from closer acquaintance with the Greek way of life. Accordingly he built new towns, new harbours, new theatres. But he headed off the kind of revolt that Antiochus Epiphanes had provoked by a massive rebuilding of the Temple. This began in 22 BC, and took forty-six years to complete

in Hebrew, the very name of Jesus (Ieshouah) means salvation. Allied to the word Christos–‘Messiah’, as was mentioned above, meaning king and redeemer–Jesus Christ, on this analysis, is less a historical personage than a ritual title.

The Gospel of Thomas has been dated to mid-second century and is a collection of sayings by Jesus, openly anti-women and turning some of the sayings of Jesus on their head.

Matthew and Luke have the birth of Jesus ten years apart.

Details surrounding the virgin birth are even less satisfactory. The uncomfortable truth is that, despite its singular nature, there is no mention of it in either Mark or John, or in any of Paul’s letters. Even in Matthew and Luke, according to Geza Vermes, the Oxford biblical scholar, it is treated ‘merely as a preface to the main story, and as neither of these two, nor the rest of the New Testament, ever allude to it again, it may be safely assumed that it is a secondary accretion.’

the word ‘virgin’ was used ‘elastically’ in both Greek and Hebrew. In one sense it was used for people in their first marriage. Greek and Latin inscriptions found in the catacombs in Rome show that the word ‘virgin’ could be applied to either a wife or husband after years of marriage. Thus ‘a virgin husband’ almost certainly meant a married man who had not been married before. Another meaning of the term was applied to women who could not conceive–i.e., had not menstruated. ‘This form of virginity ended with menstruation.’

there is the episode, mentioned in Matthew, where King Herod, worried about the birth of a ‘new king’, commands that all infants under two and living in Bethlehem should be killed. If such mass infanticide ever took place, it would surely have been mentioned in Josephus, who so carefully recorded Herod’s other brutalities. But he does not.

in Luke, the twelve-year-old Jesus amazes the learned men in the Temple with his understanding. But when his worried parents come to find him, he rebukes them: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in my father’s house?’ The gospel continues: ‘They understood not the saying which he spake unto them.’ In other words, they appear unaware of his divine mission. How can that be when Mary has experienced such a miraculous birth?

The writings of Philo of Alexandria (born about 20 BC, and therefore both contemporaneous with Jesus and earlier than the gospels) shows that ideas of virgin birth were common in the pagan world around the time that Christ lived.

the Aramaic word for carpenter or craftsman (naggar) also stands for ‘scholar’ or ‘learned man’. This might well account for the respect Jesus was held in from the start (and for the fact that he appears never to have had a job).

Caiaphas asks Jesus if he really does claim to be the Messiah and ‘Jesus replies with words that the high priest deems to be blasphemous’.101 What can this reply have been? Under Jewish law blasphemy was a capital crime but it was not blasphemous to claim to be the Messiah–Simon bar Cochba claimed to be the Messiah a hundred years after Jesus’ death and was even accepted as such by certain prominent Jews.

Finally, at the Crucifixion itself, we are told that the sun darkened and the earth shook. Is this supposed to be a real or a metaphorical event? There is no independent corroboration of this: Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23–79) devoted an entire chapter of his Natural History to eclipses and makes no mention of anything that would fit with the Crucifixion.

the language he uses to describe the appearance of the resurrected Christ to the disciples, ophthe, is the same as he used to describe his own vision on the road to Damascus. In other words, it appears that for Paul the resurrection was not a physical thing, ‘not the return to life of dead flesh and blood’, but rather a spiritual transformation, a different form of understanding.

It is perfectly possible that Jesus was both a religious and a political threat–the two were by no means incompatible. If Jesus did call himself the Messiah, or even if he allowed his followers to look upon him in that way, he was automatically a political threat because of the Jewish conception of the Messiah as military hero who would lead the Jews to revolt against Rome. He was a religious threat because the Sadducees would be undone by someone whose conception of Judaism was so at odds with theirs.

The two most eye-catching and controversial views that have emerged from these discoveries are, first, Burton Mack’s, that Jesus was ‘a historical footnote’, ‘a marginal personality who, through whatever series of accidents, was turned into a god’, and Paula Fredericksen’s, that ‘Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist who expected a cataclysmic intervention of God into history…and was devastatingly wrong. Christianity, then, amounts to a series of attempts to deal with this staggering error, most notably the doctrine of the Second Coming.’

After Jesus’ resurrection, and his ascension into heaven, his followers continued to worship in the Temple, expecting his return at any moment and with it their own redemption. To this end, they tried to prepare Israel, urging on their fellow Jews the changes Jesus had proposed. But this, of course, conflicted with the authority of the traditional priests and scribes and, the further they spread from Jerusalem, the more this resistance deepened, among Jews who had no direct, first-hand experience of Jesus. In turn, this caused a major shift in Christianity (a term first coined among the Jewish-Christian community at Antioch): Gentiles were less resistant to the message of the apostles, because their traditional beliefs were less threatened.

This is how Christianity as we know it started, as first a form of Judaism, steadily separating out (thanks mainly to Paul), as it moved away from Jerusalem.

There was, of course, no year 0, and for several reasons. One is that the zero had not yet been invented: that happened in India, probably in the seventh century AD. Another is that many people around the world, then as now, were not Christians, and conceived time in completely different ways. A third reason is that the conventional chronology, used for dating events in the West over several centuries–AD, for Anno Domini, the year of Our Lord, and BC, before Christ–was not introduced until the sixth century.

Jesus, as we have seen, never intended to start a new religion, and so people of his day, even if they had heard of him, never imagined that a new era was beginning. Use of the AD sequence did not in fact become widespread until the eighth century, when it was employed by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, and the BC system, though referred to by Bede, did not come into general use until the latter half of the seventeenth century.1

They divided these constellations into twelve, no doubt because there were, roughly, twelve lunations in a year, and gave them names. The origins of these names are obscure but many of them were animals (perhaps reflected in the arrangement of the stars) and the practice, inherited from the Babylonians by the Greeks, gave us the zodiac, derived from the Greek word zodion, meaning ‘little animal’. Just as the twelve months of the year are each divided into, roughly, thirty days, so the twelve regions of the zodiac were divided into thirty. This division of the sky eventually gave rise to our practice of dividing the complete circle around a point into 360 degrees.3

the basic division of the day into twenty-four hours seems to have arisen in Egypt. There it was noticed that at regular intervals throughout the night bright stars arose, and this is how, at first, the hours of darkness were divided into twelve.

The main problem in recording time was to reconcile the lunar cycle with the solar cycle. The sun governed the seasons–vital in agricultural societies–whereas the moon governed the tides and was an important deity, which appeared to change form in a regular rhythm. Most societies introduced extra months at certain times to overcome the discrepancy between the lunar and the solar year, but though such procedures often redressed the situation

This ‘Metonic’ cycle, as it is called, lasts for nineteen years. Each of these years lasts for twelve months but seven extra months were added, one each in the third, fifth, eighth, eleventh, thirteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth years, while some months were ‘full’ (thirty days) and others ‘deficient’ (twenty-nine days). This might seem excessively complicated but the fact that the Indians and the Chinese took over the practice shows how important it was.

The first Olympiad was reckoned to have been held in 776 BC and under this system, for example, the city of Alexandria was founded in the second year after the 112th Olympiad, written as 112.2

In the fifth century there were further reforms, when January became the first month. This was because Janus was the god of gateways and it was felt appropriate for the beginning of a new year, when office-holders took up their positions in the Roman government.

rich Romans had their own water clocks and would employ slaves to announce the time aloud to them, on the hour.

Officially, the Roman calendar began in the spring, on 1 March (which is reflected in the names for the months September to December)

caught up in the struggle between Rome and Carthage

Towards the middle of the third century BC, Aristarchus of Samos had proposed putting the earth in motion about the sun. Most other astronomers, Ptolemy included, discounted this because they thought that if the earth moved by so much, the ‘fixed’ stars in the heavens should change their positions relative to one another. But they didn’t.

We should not forget that the great age of Greek maths and science lasted from the sixth century BC to the beginning of the sixth century AD, representing more than a millennium of great productivity

Pythagorean and Platonic schools of thought had existed in Alexandria for some time, with educated Jews well aware of the parallels between Jewish and Hellenistic ideas, so much so that many of them thought that Orphism was no more than ‘an unrecorded emanation of the Torah’.

the pagan philosopher Celsus, who could not understand why so many Jews had left the Law of their fathers and converted to the new religion. Celsus turned his wrath on the Messiah, pointing out that he was born in a small village, to a poor woman whose husband had divorced her after she committed adultery with a soldier. This, he remarked sarcastically, was an unlikely beginning for a god. He then went on to compare Jesus’ so-called healing powers with the ‘wizards of Egypt’, who performed similar tricks to the Messiah ‘every day in the market place for a few obols’. ‘We do not call them the Sons of God. They are rogues and vagabonds.’

Celsus insisted that the universe was no more made for man than it was made for lions or dolphins, that the view among Christians that they alone had possession of divine knowledge was ludicrous, and that the ‘promise’ of salvation and bliss was a delusion. But Celsus was not only a clever polemicist–he was an able researcher too: he showed where the idea of Satan had originated, he showed that the story of Babel was a plagiarism of early Greek ideas, and he showed that heaven itself was derived from a Platonic notion. Christianity was a collection of ‘borrowed’ and intellectually bankrupt ideas.

There is a final Alexandrian idea to consider: empiricism

to our modern way of thinking, Erasistratus went further down the mathematical route than Herophilus, maintaining that the body was a form of machine–that all physiological processes are explicable in terms of their material properties and structures.

Despite its shocking nature and its astounding results, experimental medicine–experimental anything–does not seem to have caught on. It would be another 1,400 years before the experiment was taken seriously as a method.

certainly, the destruction of the library in Alexandria was one of the ways by which the ideas of antiquity were lost, and not recovered for many centuries.

the main change that occurred in Alexandria during the second and first centuries BC was that the dominant form of scholarship evolved. It became less concerned with natural knowledge (natural science, as we would say) and more concerned with literature, literary criticism and ‘custodial scholarship’.

By Kushan times–the middle of the first century AD–Indian coins were minted with a mixture of Greek, Persian and Indian gods.

there were pillars placed along the roads at regular intervals to indicate distances.

The god who is believed to be Vishnu’s principal incarnation is called Krishna and, as European missionaries discovered in the eighteenth century, in some Indian dialects Krishna is pronounced Krishta, much the same pronunciation as that given to Christ. As Jean Sedlar puts it, ‘the theoretical possibility exists that Krishnaism might be a corrupt form of Christianity’.

It was the custom for the students to nail their theses to the doors of the lecture halls. The public would gather, read the theses, and then hear the students defend their arguments in the hall.

he or she increasingly focuses on his or her own mental state, the aim being to ‘deconstruct the fabric of the mind’, learning a ‘transcendental loneliness’

Alteration-proof characters were given to numbers to prevent falsification.

(This curfew was strictly enforced in every kingdom and especially in towns, where its aim was to prevent fire as much as crime.)

They sold the books to Apellicon, a bibliophile who took them to Athens.

When we speak now of ‘the classics’, we mean–as often as not–Greek and Roman literature. But it was the Romans who invented the very notion of the classics,

Whereas the Greeks took an almost playful interest in ideas for their own sake, and explored the relationship between man and the gods, the Romans were much more interested in the relationships between man and man and in utilitas, the usefulness of ideas, the power that they could bring to affairs.

So far as our everyday lives are concerned, the two most important Roman ideas were republicanism, or representative democracy, and law.

In this way the administrative machinery of the republic took on its familiar form, of a body of magistrates, advised by a Senate (group of senes, or old men).8

Like all other magistrates they were entitled to wear a special toga and also held the auspicia, an elevated status which entitled them to consult the gods.

Such unfortunates were known as the proletarii on account of the fact that they were outside the active (useful) agricultural system and could only produce children (proles).

in theory the Senate’s decision was merely ‘advice’, in practice it was difficult for the consul to ignore a senatus consultum. Consuls held office for a year only and afterwards normally joined the Senate. Few consuls risked crossing colleagues with whom they would have to spend the rest of their working lives.

According to historians of the French Annales school, the fact that so many countries in Europe shared a common legal heritage is partly responsible for the rise of Europe from the twelfth century onwards.

Quite what women got out of these arrangements is hard to say, so it is important to add that there was an alternative. There was a third way by which a marriage could come into being and this was, as the Romans, in their inimitable style, called it, ‘by usage’. If a man and wife lived together for a year, it was enough: she passed into her husband’s control.

These customs had an effect on Romans’ ideas about love, and about joint marital property, an idea that, essentially, didn’t exist. If the couple had been married before witnesses, then the husband owned everything. If the marriage resulted from usage then a wife’s property remained hers and, in the case of divorce, left with her.24 It is therefore perhaps not surprising that divorce and remarriage were common in Rome.

In English, verse and poetry mean the same thing, but verse, properly, applies only to the form, whereas poetry, from a Greek verb meaning ‘I make’, covers both form and content.

We nowadays contrast both verse and poetry with ‘prose’. This word derives from prosa, a corruption of the Latin adjective prorsus, ‘straightforward, right on’.

Our word ‘culminate’, comes from culmen, reed, with which roofs were made, completing a building.

The spread of literacy in Rome was piecemeal but all-important. The existence of graffiti, and the fact that more or less average soldiers were able to write letters home, suggests that literacy extended well beyond senators and politicians.

In effect, then, people could be ‘literate’ (in the sense of ‘knowing books’) in a ‘second-hand’ way.

Martial’s first book of epigrams–some seven hundred lines long–was priced at 20 sestertii (= 5 denarii), and his thirteenth (276 lines) at 4 sestertii (= 1 denarius). To give some idea of value, Martial himself says that ‘you could get a chick-pea dinner and a woman for an as each’. Since an as was worth 1/18 of a denarius, then as John Barsby puts it, ‘You could have had forty-five chick-pea dinners plus forty-five nights of love for the price of a copy of Martial’s book of epigrams. It is a wonder he sold any copies at all.’

Probably, tens of thousands of people could read in Rome, where there was, for the first time, such a thing as a literate culture.

Our words ‘scholar’ and ‘scholarship’ actually come from the medieval practice of writing commentary and critical remarks in the margins of texts–these comments were known as scholia.

The reader would unroll the scroll gradually, using one hand to hold the top roll, which he had already read. This had the effect of making the roll reversed after a reading, so that it had to be rerolled before another reader could use it. With some scrolls being ten metres long, this was a serious inconvenience,

The inconvenience meant, too, that when one author decided to quote another, the chances were that he would rely on his memory rather than bother to unroll the relevant scroll. The copying of texts was therefore much more difficult than it sounds and it was not made easier by the fact that punctuation was rudimentary, even non-existent.

In Rome, by the end of the first century AD, education had been more or less standardised and the seven liberal arts identified. In turn, these would become the basis of medieval education, when they split into two, the more elementary trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the more advanced quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). As we shall see in a later chapter, this system formed the basis of modern educational systems, and was one of the elements leading to the birth of the West.

the discovery of concrete made all the difference. Invented towards the end of the third century, possibly via Africa, it was found that a mixture of water, lime and a gritty material like sand would set into a durable substance which could be used either to bond masonry or as a building material in its own right

this meant that monumental architecture could be practised on a much larger scale than before, which is one reason why Rome is the city of so many classical ruins today.

‘The best-known fact about the Roman Empire,’ says Arthur Ferrill, ‘is that it declined and fell.’1

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That work is dated now, as scholars have built on Gibbon’s

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

one emperor, Theodosius, still ruled over an empire larger than that of the great Augustus, and commanded a massive army. Fewer than eighty years later, both empire and army in the west had been wiped out. Or, as the French historian André Piganiol put it, ‘Roman civilization did not die a natural death. It was killed.’4

we need to show why Christianity proved so extraordinarily popular

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ Traditionally, Jesus’ answer is seen as neat footwork and that, implicitly at least, he condones the idea that the Jews pay the tax. The alternative scholarship, however, starts from the point that the gospel of St Mark is scarcely a long book, so this episode was clearly important to the author.

The suspicion now is, therefore, that what Jesus actually meant was the exact opposite of what the gospel of St Mark makes him say–namely, that the tribute should not be paid. That meaning was changed, because otherwise the situation of the early Christians in Rome would have been untenable.

it casts an interesting light on a second phrase in St Mark. This is when he names one of the twelve Apostles as ‘Simon the Canaanean’. Gentiles in Rome in the first century AD would have had no idea what this was supposed to mean without elaboration. In fact, Simon was also known in Judaea as ‘Simon the Zealot’. The gospel thus covers up the fact that one of the Apostles, chosen by Jesus, was a terrorist against Rome.

Because some of Paul’s ideas threatened the credibility and authority of the Jewish-Christian disciples in Israel he was denounced and, in 59 or thereabouts, arrested and taken to Rome (because he was a Roman citizen).13 Had the revolt in 66–70 never occurred, the chances are that history would have heard nothing more of Paul. But the revolt did occur, Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed and although vestiges of Jewish-Christianity lingered, for a century, it was never again the force it had been and eventually died out. Instead, Paul’s version survived, with the result that there was a massive change in the character of the religion. What had been a Jewish Messianic sect now became a universal salvation religion propagated in the Hellenistic world of the Mediterranean–in other words, among Gentiles.

They did not abandon their hopes of apocalypse,

Paul also provided early Christianity with much of its ‘colouring’ around the edges. He condemned idol worship, sexuality and, implicitly, the practice of philosophy.20 In Rome in the early years, Christians often paraded their ignorance and lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride.

no one in the pagan world expected religion to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People looked to philosophy for that kind of understanding.

The Christian god seemed to educated pagans as primitive. Whereas it made sense for a great emperor and warrior such as Alexander the Great to be a god, or the son of god, to worship a poor Jew who had died a criminal’s death in a remote corner of the empire made no sense.

The pagans had a tradition of free thought and citizens were free to vary in the literalness with which they viewed the emperor as god.

The feast day of Mithras was 25 December (this was a world without weekends, remember, when feast days were the only holidays).

heresy was a foreign notion. People were free in Rome to belong to as many cults as they liked, though atheism was frowned upon. (Atheism, as we mean it, didn’t exist. ‘Atheists’ were Epicureans, who denied the gods’ providence, though not their existence.

Of the twenty emperors between 235 and 284 all but three were assassinated

there were emperors who were very cruel in the number of martyrs they created. Given the apocalyptic view of the early Christians, this only added to their sense of mission and drama (virgins had sixty times the reward of ordinary Christians in heaven, it was affirmed, but martyrs received rewards a hundredfold

These ideas had great appeal, the more so for the poorer slaves and labourers of the Roman empire. The reasons were obvious enough: Christianity argued that ‘suffering is noble’ and offered a better world in the future, with the Second Coming imminent. This was most attractive for people at the bottom of the ladder and it was among the urban masses, rather than the Roman aristocracy, or the upper ranks of the army, for example, that the new religion caught on.

The emperor Maximin Daia introduced anti-Christian schoolbooks, which pictured Jesus as a slave and a criminal.

slowly, imperial policy turned against the Christians.39 First, the emperor Trajan made it a capital offence to fail to pay homage to the emperor.

By the third century, a curious cross-over time had been reached, when ‘the desire for martyrdom was almost out of control’.40 By now Christians deliberately flouted Roman practices–they insulted magistrates and destroyed effigies of the pagan gods, in an attempt to emulate the suffering of Jesus. Persecution was what they sought. ‘For suffering one hour of earthly torture, it was believed,

By the third century, a curious cross-over time had been reached, when ‘the desire for martyrdom was almost out of control’.40 By now Christians deliberately flouted Roman practices–they insulted magistrates and destroyed effigies of the pagan gods, in an attempt to emulate the suffering of Jesus. Persecution was what they sought.

The eventual “collapse of the gymnasia, the focal point of Hellenism, more than any other single event brought in the Middle Ages”.’

Constantine’s decision to grant to the Christian clergy the benefit that had been granted to pagan priests–freedom from taxation and conscription in the army. A later emperor, Gratian (375–383), also freed priests from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, placing them instead under the bishops’ courts in all cases except criminal matters. Given that bishops were also allowed to receive bequests, the priesthood had become, by the fifth century, a privileged class: they were rich, they were firmly in charge of church doctrine, and they were very largely a law unto themselves.

perfectly suited to the early Middle Ages. Amid and after the fall of the empire, when the cities declined and the world became less organised and more localised, when schools and other civic functions decayed, monasteries–located far from the cities–remained strong and offered a lead in education, economic, religious and even political matters

laity, who were no longer allowed to preach in the churches

his school was reopened by Origen (c. 185–254), teaching pagan subjects (rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, philosophy)

Just because the bishops had agreed didn’t mean the laity had to go along with it. In fact, many early Christians found the idea difficult to grasp (many still do).

The English word Easter was named after the old Scandinavian pagan goddess of dawn and spring, Eostre,

according to Hebrew tradition, is the day of the full moon that follows the spring equinox and, because it is based on a lunar calendar of 354 days, changes its date in the solar rotation (365¼ days) every year. This would have been a tricky enough calculation to do at the best of times but the early Christians made it even harder for themselves by adding a further twist. They decided that Easter should be always celebrated on a Sunday, since Christ’s resurrection had taken place on that day, and because it set them apart from the Jews, who celebrated their Sabbath on Saturday.

Dating, as we have noted, had not been of prime concern to the early Christians, for two reasons. In addition to the fact that they were convinced that the Second Coming of the Messiah was imminent, they tried to stress, in Rome at least, that Christianity was an old faith, not a new one, that it had grown organically out of Judaism and was therefore much more established than the rival pagan cults. This helped them avoid the derision of critics, so they kept new dates to a minimum. But, as time went by, and the Messiah failed to appear, the liturgical calendar took on a new urgency, highlighting points in the year when the faithful could rally.

the year that we call 532 was for Dionysius the year 247. But Exiguus didn’t see why time should start with a pagan emperor and it was during his Easter calculations that the abbot conceived the idea to divide time according to the birth of Christ.

here there befell Exiguus an extraordinary numerological coincidence. Victorius of Aquitaine, as we have seen, had come up with a 532-year cycle. As Exiguus worked back, in the year we call 532, he found that a Victorian cycle had begun in the very year in which he believed that Christ had been born–what we now call 1 BC. In other words, the sun and the moon, at the time he was working, were in exactly the same relation as they had been when Jesus was born.

it was not until the eighteenth century that it became customary to designate the preceding era ‘before Christ’.

Our view of the dark ages is now somewhat different. The densest of the medieval centuries, between AD 400 and AD 1000, are recognised as the true dark ages–and dark for two reasons. One, because comparatively few documents survive to illumine them. Two, because so few of those monuments of art and literature as do survive can be considered as major achievements.

Just how dark these dark ages were is instructive. The true medieval mind was very different from our own way of thinking. Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor and the greatest of medieval rulers, was illiterate.103 By 1500 the old Roman roads were still the best in Europe. Most of Europe’s major harbours were unusable until at least the eighth century.

Among the lost arts was bricklaying: ‘In all of Germany, England, Holland and Scandinavia,’ says William Manchester, ‘virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries.’

The records of the English coroners show that homicides in the dark ages were twice as frequent as death by accident and that only one in a hundred murderers was ever brought to justice.

‘The medieval mind had no ego.’ Noblemen had surnames but this was less than 1 per cent of the population. Because so few inhabitants ever left the village in which they were born, there was in any case no need. Most of the villages had no name either. With violence so common it is no surprise to learn that people huddled together in communal homes, married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects developed which were incomprehensible to people living only a few miles away.

Caesar observed that the Germans were less civilised even than the Celts, lived in smaller communities, in landscapes less transformed by cultivation and had less highly developed religious practices. They had no permanent leaders but elected temporary chiefs for military escapades. The further north these people lived, the more extreme they were. At other times, however, they were idealised as simple, noble people, unspoiled by sophisticated lifestyles.

Constantinople–a fortress protected by the sea–remained impregnable. This would have incalculable consequences for the preservation of ideas in the dark ages.2

Whereas paganism had imposed few restrictions on the intellectuals of Rome, Christianity actively rejected scientific inquiry.

the dialectical method–as epitomised by Aristotle, for example–was also outlawed: there can be no dialogue with God. It was largely as a result of this that, save for two works of logic, Aristotle vanished from the western world, preserved only because his works were hoarded by Arab interpreters.

Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens on the grounds that philosophical speculation had become an aid to heretics and an ‘inflamer’ of disputes among Christians. Many scholars headed east, first to Edessa, a Mesopotamian city housing several famous schools, then across the border with Persia to Nisibis, where the university was considered the best in Asia. This, says Richard Rubenstein, is how the Arabs inherited Aristotle and the treasures of Greek science.

‘After the third century it becomes more and more uncommon to find any educated man showing knowledge of texts that have not come down to the modern world.’

By the end of the sixth century the decline of learning and culture had become serious. The only vital educational institutions in the main part of the empire were the imperial university at Constantinople, founded around 425, and a clerical academy under the direction of the patriarchate.

a concerted effort was made to preserve the classics, in Byzantium. In an address to the Emperor Constantius on 1 January 357, the Byzantine scholar Themistius (c. 317–c. 388) outlined a plan ‘to guarantee the survival of ancient literature’.

Another reason for the eventual survival of classical ideas is that there was a set of writers who have become known as the ‘Latin transmitters’, men–encyclopaedists, mainly–who kept alive classical thought (or at least the texts of classical thought) and provided a crucial bridge between the fourth century and the Carolingian renaissance four hundred years later.

Where the Bibliotheca is of interest, in this context, however, is for the titles he mentions that are now lost–forty-two works in all. Among the lost works is a biography of Alexander, by one Amyntianus (a book dedicated to Marcus Aurelius

a guidebook of 760 depicts the city as ‘abandoned and ruined’.

for the early Christians visual art was much less important than scripture, and so they never developed a programme of symbols and images.

Some of these codices were sumptuous–St Jerome refers to them contemptuously as ‘purple codices’, which may not have been meant to be read, simply for use in ritual.

there was a tendency to reduce or remove action from the image, ‘which conveys the holy figure as if divine, perhaps awaiting the holder’s invocation to come alive.’57 (It is this ‘frozen’ quality that has lent itself to our use of the word ‘iconic’.)

The iconoclast controversy reminds us that cruelty and destruction and stupidity are as much the legacy of religious prejudice as are the finer things. That certain works of Cicero should survive only in one copy, and that the under-layer of a palimpsest, emphasises how fragile civilisation is.

‘The beauty of a man,’ says another proverb, ‘lies in the eloquence of his tongue.’4 The oldest written poetry dates from the sixth

‘The beauty of a man,’ says another proverb, ‘lies in the eloquence of his tongue.’4

Very little is known about Muhammad, despite the fact that writing, biography and scholarship were all well-developed by the sixth and seventh centuries. The first biography we know about was written in 767, well after the prophet’s death, and even that is known only through a later edition, compiled in 833.

the message Muhammad received was not new. It overlapped with Zoroastrian, Hebrew and Christian ideas. God is one and there is no other. There is a Judgement Day with eternal paradise for those who faithfully follow His instructions and worship Him, and there is everlasting punishment in hell for those who go against His will.

As a set of ideas, Islam is closer to Judaism than to Christianity. In the Middle Ages, however, it was so similar to both monotheisms that, to begin with, many Christians thought it was merely a heretical Christian sect rather than a completely new faith.

After the idea of God as a unity, and submission, the next-most important idea in Islam is that Muhammad was the true messenger of God ‘whose only miracle was the Qur’an’.16 This solitary miracle reflects the essentially simple nature of the new faith–it had no theological complexities, like the Resurrection, the Trinity or Transubstantiation.

pious Muslims, who believe that Arabic is the language of God and is the tongue spoken in Paradise. They believe that Adam originally spoke Arabic but forgot it and was punished by being made to learn other–inferior–languages.

In fact, Arabic is a fairly modern form of the Semitic languages, which include Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian), Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic (the language of Jesus), Syriac and Ethiopic. Chronologically, this group is divided into three. The languages of Mesopotamia date back to the third millennium BC, those from Syria-Palestine to the second millennium BC, whereas the languages of Arabia and Ethiopia date from only the eighth century BC.

Its attraction lay partly in the certainties it offered, in the fact that, in its early years, it was a tolerant religion, certainly so far as earlier forms of revelation were concerned (Judaism and Christianity), and partly for entirely practical reasons–for example, it taxed people less than the Byzantine empire.

When he was asked how he was to be addressed, he said he would take the title Khalifa, which in Arabic means both a successor and a deputy. This allowed for some ambiguity–did it mean that Abu Bakr was the deputy/successor of Muhammad or of God?

Muhammad is reported to have been hostile to the decoration of mosques and said that ‘the most unprofitable thing that eats up the wealth of a believer is building’.

There is no Arabic word for arabesque and, again, there is no elaborate theory about its use.

The Qur’an is to Muslims what Jesus (and not the Bible) is to Christians: it is the way God manifests himself to believers.

The Dome of the Rock was specifically built to outshine both the church of the Holy Sepulchre and the most sacred spot in Judaism, the place where, according to rabbinic tradition, Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son, and where the Ark of the Temple had rested. As the historian Bernard Lewis has put it: ‘This, ‘Abd al-Malik seemed to be saying, was the shrine of the final dispensation–the new temple, dedicated to the religion of Abraham, replacing the Temple of Solomon, continuing the revelations vouchsafed to the Jews and Christians and correcting the errors into which they had fallen.’

The Arabs did not interest themselves overmuch in Greek literature–poetry, drama, history. Their own literary tradition, they felt, was more than enough. But medicine, as represented by Galen, the mathematics of Euclid and Ptolemy, and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle were a different matter.

One of the most important poets of the seventh and early eighth centuries was a Christian, Ghiyath ibn-al-Salt, from near to Hirah, on the Euphrates, who was even taken to Mecca by his caliph. Though appointed court poet, he refused to convert, or to give up his ‘addiction’ to wine, or to stop wearing his cross. He divorced his wife, married a divorcée, was often seen with prostitutes and drank ‘to saturation’, claiming that was the only way he got ideas for his poetry.

hospitals as we understand them today were developed under Islam.

For example, there were separate wards for men and women, special wards were devoted to internal diseases, ophthalmic disorders, orthopaedic ailments, the mentally ill, and there were isolation wards for contagious cases. There were travelling clinics and dispensaries and armies were equipped with military hospitals. Mosques were attached to the bigger hospitals, with madrasas–colleges–where aspiring doctors from all over the world came to be trained.

It was also in the eighth century, in the Arab lands, that the idea of the pharmacy, or apothecary, was born. In Baghdad at least, pharmacists had to pass an exam before they were allowed to produce and prescribe drugs. The exam covered the correct composition of drugs, the proper dosage, and the therapeutic effects.

astronomy, though nearly half of what he produced was medical. He clearly had a sense of humour–two of his titles were On the Fact That Even Skilful Physicians Cannot Heal All Diseases and Why People Prefer Quacks and Charlatans to Skilful Physicians.

Even in the eleventh century, Arab scholars were still writing numbers out in full, in words.

he was known as Faylasuf al-Arab and he is often referred to as the first Arab philosopher. In fact, al-Kindi was more a transmitter of philosophy–an advocate of the Greek way of thought–rather than an original thinker. He insisted on the difference between philosophy and theology and in doing so risked the ire of orthodox Muslims, because he thought theology should be made subject to the rules of philosophy, such as logic. He also argued that philosophy was open to all, unlike theology, where there was a hierarchy of access to the truth.

his main contribution may be summed up by the story told about him, where he entered al-Mal‘mun’s salon and sat above a theologian. When challenged, he replied that he deserved his higher seat because ‘I know what you know and you don’t know what I know.’

Travel gave a pious man authority–for who could contradict what he had seen and learned?