ماذا حدث في التاريخ

by Vere Gordon Childe

A study of the rise and decline of cultural and moral values in The Old World up to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Archaeology, World History, Anthropology, Ancient History, Classics

275 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

Vere Gordon Childe, better known as V. Gordon Childe, was an Australian archaeologist and philologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. A vocal socialist, Childe accepted the socio-economic theory of Marxism and was an early, though unorthodox, proponent of Marxist archaeology. Childe worked for most of his life as an academic in the United Kingdom, initially at the University of Edinburgh, and later at the Institute of Archaeology, London. He also wrote a number of groundbreaking books on the subject of archaeology and prehistory, most notably Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942).

Reviews

[Neama · Rating 5 out of 5]

الكتاب بيجاوب على أسئلة زي: إزاي نشأت الحضارة/المجتمعات وإيه كان قبلها؟ إيه مراحل تطورنا من الوحشية إلى البربرية؟ فين؟ إيه العوامل البيئية اللي ساعدتها للوصول لما آلت عليه؟ إيه أقدم المجتمعات/الحضارات؟ إزاي كان بيتواصل الإنسان القديم وإزاي بدأت الكتابة واللغة وليه احتاجنالهم؟ إزاي بدأت الطبقات الاجتماعية في الظهور؟ إيه عوامل بدء النظام الأبوي؟ إزاي بدأت السلطة السياسية واختلفت من مكان لآخر؟ مع التركيز على الحضارة المصرية القديمة والبابلية والهندية. إيه أدي لانتشار الحضارات والعادات من مكان للتاني وإزاي؟ التجارة بين الامبراطوريات القديمة كيف كانت؟ إيه أسباب النزاعات والحروب اللي قامت في الوقت دا -العصور القديمة- وإيه نتايجها؟ والأهم من دا كله، إيه الأدلة اللي أدت لاستنتاجاتنا خاصة قبل اختراع الكتابة؟
جوردون تشايلد بعد كدا بينتقل لعصور حديثة أكتر نسبيًا وبيتكلم عن الأنظمة الاقتصادية، العلوم والديانات وإزاي أثروا على بعض من أول التقدم لحد الانهيار. الكتاب دسم جدًا ومليان تفاصيل وأكيد محتاج قراءة تانية، بس في نفس الوقت الأسلوب كويس جدًا ومش محتاج أي خلفية تاريخية لإنه باديء من الصفر أصلُا. الكتاب مش بس تاريخ وسرد أحداث بس كمان نقدر نصنفه تحت عنوان الانثروبولوجي، الاتنين مرتبطين ببعض إلى حد ما whatsoever. أرشحه لأي حد عنده فضول تجاه البدايات، بس لو حد بيملّ بسرعة أو محتاج حاجة أكثر تشويقًا أو خفيفة بدون تفاصيل كتير كبداية يبقى من رأيي يأجله شوية.
الكتاب فيه معلومات قليلة -في حدود علمي واطلاعي يعني إنها قليلة- مذكورة تم التعديل عليها لظهور أدلة حديثة زي أول إنسان استخدم النار وغيره.

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I am sure there have been books written about the same basic subject that include recently attained or intuitive information, this is a great introductory survey of the rise of civilization and the birth of human culture. I recommend it highly.

I am not sure how many copies exist (need to check Amazon, etc.), but I imagine it might be a difficult find, especially in hard cover.

This is not a book I would lend out. I have experienced a long history of lending books and never getting them back.

[YaSSeR · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب رائع يتناول التاريخ منذ ظهورالإنسان إلى ميلاد الحضارات الأولى. أنصح به بشده.

[Liam Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I think the title of this book is very memorable (just like the author's previous book, "Man Makes Himself"), it is perhaps misleading. The book is specifically a concise primer on the known history of state and pre-state societies leading up until roughly the begging of the new common era. That said, the title hints at the book's more ambitious moods, in which it abstracts general patterns of social and economic organization and a loose sense of "evolution" of such schemas. I personally was strongly reminded of Jared Diamond's picture of civilized progress in this regard. The first chapter begins by considering mankind as an animal which has "history" in the first place - above and before questions of the manner in which the technology of writing was developed (which is discussed in detail later) Childe first pursues an interesting line of thought which anticipates later cognitive science:

Faced with a banana midway up a tube, open at both ends but too long to reach up, a chimpanzee discovered how to push the banana with a stick from one end and then grab it from the other, without going through a number of futile movements, by sitting and "reasoning." The ape must have imagined the banana in various non-existent positions before it hit upon the trick. But it did not have to go very far from the concrete situation with which it was actually confronted. What is distinctive of human reasoning is that it can go imensely farther from the actual present situation than any other animal's reasoning ever seems to get it. In this distinctive advantage language has surely been a very great help. Reasoning and all that we call thinking, including the chimpanzee's, must involve mental operations with what psychologists call images. A visual image, a mental picture of say a banana is always liable to be a picture of a particular banana in a particular setting. A word on the contrary is, as explained, more general and abstract, having elimated just those accidental features that give individuality to any real banana.[...]Men can think, as well as talk, about the class of objects called "bananas," the chimpanzee never gets further than "that banana in that tube." In this way the social instrument termed language has contributed to what is grandiloquently described as "man's emancipation from bondage to the concrete." p.13-4

And he applies this insight to the practical interpretation of history. He says that we should not handwave the immaterial thoughts that socieities of the past strongly believed in, and puts the "spiritual environment" as equal to the material environment:

Without going in for any metaphysical subtleties, socially approved and sustained ideas that inspire such action must be treated by history as just as real as those which stand for the more substantial objects of archaeological study. In practice ideas form as effective an element in the environment of any human society as do mountains, trees, animals, the weather and the rest of external nature. Societies, that is, behave as if they were reacting to a spiritual environment as well as to a material environment. To deal with this spiritual environment they behave as if they needed a spiritual equipment just as much as they need a material equipment of tools. p.14-15

Nevertheless, Childe does not deny the profoundly economic base of societies and even chooses the phrase "biological success" to describe the manifestation of economic activity into distinct periods of sudden surges of material well-being:

If the whole long process disclosed in the archaeological and literary records be surveryed, a single directional trend is most obvious in the economic sphere in the methods whereby the most progressive societies secure a livlihood. In this domain it will be possible to recognize radical and indeed revolutionary innovations, each followed by such increases in population that, were reliable statistic available, each would be reflected by a conspicuous kink in the population graph [...] [Lastly,] The sharp upward bend of the population graph in England between 1750 and 1800 not only testifies to the biological success of the new bourgeois capitalist economy, but also justifies applying the term industrial revolution to its first phases. p.23-6

In the chapter "neolithic barbarism" Childe explains the hidden limitations that the pre-civilized self-sufficient tribes, whom he terms "argricultural nomads," in spite of their sustainability, suffered from. He uses an intriguing biological metaphor for these extinct ways of life:

When fully explored these [villages] have been found to cover areas from 1.5 to 6.5 acres. The community that lived at Skara Brae in Orkney comprised not more than eight households, in Central Europe and Southern Russia twenty-five to thirty-five households seem to have been a not uncommon number. Such spatial aggregates formed socail organisms whose members all co-operated for collective tasks. In the the western villages on Alpine moors the several houses are connected up by corduroy streets, at Skara Brae in Orkney by covered alleys. Such public ways must be communal and not individual works [...]

There is no need to assume any industrial specialization within the village apart from a division of labour between the sexes [...] the women would till the plots, grind and cook the grain, spin, weave and manufacture clothes, build and bake the pots and prepare some ornaments and magic articles. Men on the other hand may have cleared the plots, built the huts, tended the live-stock, hunted and manufactured the needful tools and weapons. Moreover each village could be self-sufficing. It grew its own food and could make all essential equipment from materials locally available - stone, bone, wood, clay and so on. This potential self-sufficiency of the territorial community and the absence of specialisation within it may be taken as the differentiae of neolithic barbarism to distinguish it from civilization and the higher barbarisms of the Metal Ages. A Corollary therefrom is that a neolithic economy offers no material inducement to the peasant to produce more than he needs to support himself and his family and provide for the next harvest. If each household does that, the community can survive without a surplus. [...However] even in the earliest neolithic villages and graves archaeologists have found materials brought from long distances. Shells from the Mediterranean and from the Red Sea were strung on necklaces by the Fayumis. p.59-60

Without schematizing the entirity of the ascent of man, Child does a good job of hinting at how a roughly egalitarian village can become, via the economic niche of plunder through war victories, a chiefdom with hereditable wealth:

In [a patriarchal] society personal property may extend from ornaments and clothes, implements and weapons, to flocks and herds - and slaves - capital goods which can increase. And now a man who has distinguished himself as a "war chief" (in matriarchal society often a temporary and elective office), has a chance of consolidating his authority on an economic basis by wealth in cattle or servants. As this wealth will pass onto his sons, so the authority it gives may become hereditary [...]

or become a more complex economy with craft guilds (initially peopled by "part timers" who have other means of income):

...Among barbarians of [the copper age] on this sort of technical and economic development some of the fertility and other rituals that had been performed comunally by all clansmen in savagery are often found to have been monopolized by "secret societies," initiation into which must be purchased by feasts and presents. Within such a society there are generally grades; advancement up this ladder of rank is, like initiation, a sacramental rite, but it must be none the less purchased. The members of such a society normally remain fishers or hunters or herdsmen or farmers. If they became specialists and were exempted like craftsmen from these productive avocations, they would become professional priests. And if rank be hierarchical, the richest and highest will be very like kings. The archaeological material just described gives some hints that this sort of development had been going on in the Copper Age in Syria. p.86-7

Childe describes with awe the great archetectural achievements of the ancient sumerians, and without denying that it is dubious how "voltunary" the labour that created these feats were, he is inclined to stand in awe of the ability for a society to feed and cloth its workers (who were completely removed from the production of bare necessities) through such prolonged and ambitious feats of construction. This was thanks to advances in social oranization and food production technology:

Before the end of the Uruk phase at Erech, the ruins of successive settlements had already formed a tell some sixty feet high. At the top one is no longer standing in a village green but in the square of a cathedral city. In the foreground lie the ruins of a gigantic temple measuring over all 245 feet by 100 feet dedicated to the goddess Inanna. Behind, attached to the temple of Anu rises an artificial mountain or ziggurat, thirty-five feet high. It is built of mud and sundried bricks, but its steeply sloping walls have been consolidated by hammering into the brickwork while still wet thousands of pottery goblets. A flight of steps leads up to the summit - a platform covered with asphalt. On it stands a minature temple measuring over all 73 feet by 57 feet 6ins., containing a long cult room with narrow chambers on either side and an altar or an idol at one end. The walls of white-washed brick and imported timbers ere embellished with niches and buttresses and pierced with cleerestory windows; the doors were framed with imported pinewood and closed with mats [...] The artizans, labourers and transport workers may have been "volunteers" inspired by religious enthusiasm. But if they were not paid for their labour, they must at least have been nourished while at work. [...] The fertility of the soil that enabled the farmer to produce far more than he could consume supplied this. But its expenditure on temples suggests what later records confirm, that "gods" concentrated it and made it available for distribution among their working servants. Perhaps these gods were projections of ancestral society and were regarded as the creators, and therefore the eniment owners, of the soil that society itself had reclaimed from deser and marsh by the collective laour of ancestral generations.

[...] So the temple appears as a sort of divine household, an enormously enlarged version of the patriarchal household of barbarism. But in this household the several tasks which were performed collectively by the members of a neolithic household have been differentiated and divided between specialists, each of whom concentrates on performing one of the functions which in a neolithic economy would be only one item in the daily toil. So the several operations of the textile industry, all of which would habe neem completed by the barbarian housewife, have been allotted to three distinct groups of craftswomen. The specialists thus withdrawn from direct food production are nourished by the surplus produced by the god's tenants and concentrated in his granaries. p.91-5

And later in Egypt, the great surpluses of the land, combined with functioning top-down social organization, allowed for the utter affrontery of great artictectural feats:

The union of Egypt had put an end to deadly feuds between villages; the Pharaohs' frontier policy protected the cultivator from the depredations of raiding nomads; public works had added to the arable land; the calender permitted rural operations to be rationally planned; the surplus grain stored in the royal granaries might provide relief in time of famine.

On the other hand, these reserves had been collected by force. Their producers had little left for the purchase of industrial products. Save when directly employed by a king or a noble they could not afford metal tools, but made shift with a neolithic equipment of stone hoes and wooden ploughs and mattocks [...] They were liable to compulsory labour, digging canals, towing barges upstream, quarrying and transporting stone, building pyramids and the like. When thus removed from [the land they worked] they were presumably fed and clothed by the State or the noble employer - perhaps better than a free neolithic cultivator. In any case, in the Second Millennium King Set I records that he provided each of the thousand labourers employed on building his temple with "4lb bread, 2 bundles of vegetables and a roast of meat daily, and a clean linen garment twice a month"! p.123

As civilization spread via colonies and the imitations of aspiring outsiders, dangers arose without even considering the threat of war. Not only of material shortages, but crucially of the loss of knowledge, and the altered consciousness of the civilized mind:

In Italy the conquering Etruscan landlords had supported, from their surplus luxury and armament industries, mining and reproductive engineering works. Their irrigation and draining channels show what could be done with iron tools towards the reclamation of stony land. But the Romans, when they had expelled their Etruscan overlords, the Tarquins, found themselves [to be] civilized farmers, blessed with money, morgages and debt-slavery, but with no outlet in an exporting industry. The dangers of their situation are revealed by the historian Livy who records famines in the years 490, 477, 456, 453, 440, 411 and 392 BC. p.201

Towards the end of the book, I felt on more familiar ground with the the ancient greeks, but Childe's focus is on the emergence of the broadest categories of social organization, and his explanation of the emergence of democracy helped me to demystify the notion. What was novel was, says childe, is that the wealthy traders, after achieving political influence through the newly invented coin money, began to team up with the ordinary free men (farmers, fishermen, artisans etc) against the landlord aristoracy for leverage. It was also possible to create an overwhelming military force, composed of merchant economic backing (liberated by the invention of coinage) and inexpensive iron-age weaponry.

Turned into cash, the proceeds of industry were no loess potent than rents from land, and the profits of trade appeared no less honorable than pirate's booty. First perhaps in Ionia, then in Peninsular Greece the new merchant class successfully challenged the prerogatives of the landed gentry. The qualifications for executive office, seats on the council and assembly votes were reckoned in money as well as, or instead of, in areas of land owned. Aristocracy gave place to oligarchy.

In their struggles the middle-class often sought allies among the poor - small freeholders in debt, tenants and share-farmers, even landless artizans and labourers. The development of tactics appropriate to Iron Age armament had given even these military value. Victory no longer depended upon the prowess of chariotry (the preserve of the rich landowner) but on the valour of an infantry recruited from yeoman farmers. Moreover, at sea - and in Greece sea-power was decisive - even a labourer, too poor to afford body armour, could serve his city in the fleer at an oar. In fact he could claim with justice and some hope of success a vote in the election of magistrates and in the legislative assembly. The concession of such claims would transform the State into what the Greeks called democracy (rule by the people).

[...]In Athens [...] after the expulsion of the local tyrants democracy was made completely effective. Industry was put on an equal footing with commerce and farming. The old clans were deprived of political influence. Property qualificiations for magistracies were abolished, and most offices were filled by lot instead of by election. Every citizen was expected to attend assemblies and to sit on juries. To make this effectively possible assemblymen and jurors as well as magistrates and councillors were paid, as we should say "for time lost." Democracy was not only politically coneded by also economically established. p.207-8

This last line ought to give us pause, especially given how much as we like to handwave the ancient greeks for their non-universality of democracy.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written from an economic and socialist perspective, this take on the emergence and evolution of civilisation in the Old World is refreshingly different. First published in 1942, it shows its age in its apparently (to contemporary ears) judgmental use of such terms as ‘Savagery’ and ‘Barbarism’ to define, not only stages in cultural development in the past, but present day societies sharing similar traits. Gordon Childe is not afraid to say what he believes in a way that will no doubt send current political correctors into fits of righteous outrage. Yet his condemnation of slavery, which he shows underpinned so many ancient societies and their artistic achievements, whilst stifling their economic development, strikes a chord with modern concerns. A masterly synthesis, this eclectic survey is a hugely interesting and accessible read, and is still relevant to our understanding of the past.

[Dominic Muresan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un clasic al istoriei - valoros in modul in care autorul survoleaza evolutia civilizatiei universale din paleolitic pana la caderea imperiului roman. Nu doar intr-o maniera ce se vrea destul de completa (pentru vremea ei) ci si foarte extinsa - din Anglia pana in China si India.

Dar...
Unde decade: Odata cu reducerea sfarsitului fiecarei ere la lupta dintre clase - imbogatirea unei paturi capitaliste si inmultirea sclavilor - tradand astfel conformatia profund marxista a autorului.

[Özgür]

ilk 8 bölüm kendini yaratan insan kitabıyla neredeyse birebir aynı

[Masoud · Rating 4 out of 5]

این کتاب با دیدگاه اقتصادی و جامعه شناسانه به ظهور و تکامل تمدن ها در دنیای باستان تا اندکی بعد از تولد مسیح می پردازد. محور مطالب کتاب گذار بشر از بربریت به تمدن است و دلیل اصلی آن را رشد اقتصاد ناشی از خودکفایی می داند. به نظر نویسنده با افزایش تولید ناشی از بهبود ابزار آلات ( بهبود روشهای ذوب و کار با فلزات) و شروع تخصصی شدن حرفه ها، تقسیم نیروی کار، و گسترش تجارت و اقتصاد مبتنی بر پول این گذار در جوامع اولیه صورت پذیرفت . نثر کتاب قابل فهم بوده و نویسنده اندکی تفکرات چپ و سوسیالیستی خود را (استفاده از عبارتی نظیر بورژوا و پرولتاریا برای اشاره تلویحلی به بهره کشی سیستم های سیاسی و قدرتهای حاکم برای سرکوب امکان بهبود توده های مردم) چاشنی تحلیل موضوعات نموده است. با این حال تحلیل ها تا حد زیادی صادقانه و مبتنی بر واقعیت است.

[Michael David · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are many newer books that have a more comprehensive and exhaustive grasp on the evolution of history. As a panorama of history, however, this book still remains good, although a bit too banausic for my tastes.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب رائع

[Jonathan]

Un gran libro para acercarse a la Historia desde el surgimiento del ser humano hasta el nacimiento de las primeras sociedades esclavistas. Altamente recomendado.

[Hakan Fıçıcı · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biraz dağınık bir anlatım, Alaeddin Şenel'in Insanlık Tarihi kitabını daha çok tavsiye ederim.

[Faisal Jamal · Rating 4 out of 5]

بحث اولي مختصر في الجمع بين علم التاريخ وعلم الاثار في عصور ما قبل الميلاد

[Leyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un bàsic!

[Steve R · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quite interesting examination of history up to, and just a little bit after, the time of Christ. It essentially explains the transition of the human species from barbarism to civilization, and growth out of an economy based on self sufficiency into one in which, (having experienced the improvements in productivity due to the development of metals, especially in tools) the beginning of specialization, division of labour, trade and a money economy were possible.

Written in a fairly lucid manner, the author has a slightly leftist tinge to his writing. For example, he uses the terms 'bourgeois' and 'proletariat' to starkly imply the exploitation of the latter by the former and the manner in which political systems were used by the powers that be to suppress the aspirations and possibilities of improvement for the majority of the population. Yet his analysis is always factual and bluntly honest: When examining the manner in which farm labourers were transmuted into serfs with the beginning of feudalism, he explains that for such souls who found themselves at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, the only alternative to being tied down to their lord and their land were banditry or beggary.

The author certainly helped me understand basic terms of prehistory. The Paleolithic period lasted from the emergence of the first human-like beings about 500000 B.C. and involved hunter gatherers. The Neolithic period began around 10000 B.C. and lasted up to about 5000 B.C., during which agricultural activities of a pastoral nature as well as cultivation dominated. About seven thousand years ago urban 'civilization' was at first possible, with the adoption of writing.

Along the way, more than a few pithy and insightful observations are made. For example, the oldest labour saving device in history? Robbery! When the neolithic period began, one could say the human species evolved from savagery to barbarism: from being a parasite on nature to being an active participant with it. The development of iron smelting made possible the extensive trade practised across the Mediterranean, which allowed the Minoan, Greek and Roman powers to assume the status of empires. Horses didn't replace oxen at the front of plows until the ninth century since their yokes choked the horses due to the equine shoulders being more narrow. The fall of the Roman Empire in 450 A.D. had actually occurred about two hundred and fifty years previously, when rampant slavery, warfare, robber bands and piracy all provided symbols 'of social disorders which denied an adequate livelihood to peaceable peasants and artisans and extolled violence and slaughter in the name of patriotism as the highest expression of manly virtue. And by replenishing the slave market it exaggerated the evil.' This led the Roman Emperors to adopt Christianity to bolster their failing powers, and eventually led to the return to self-sufficient focus of earlier times in feudal manors as opposed to the trading villas of the previous imperial times. The 'Dark Ages' had begun.

Some of his historical hypotheses were, I feel, somewhat tenuous. For instance, he posits that developments in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China were so similar that 'China must have been receiving western traditions even before 2000 B.C.' I also raised an eyebrow at his link between the development of money economy (with small coins) and the atomic theory (with small atoms) developed by Democritus. Similarly, it was the development of trade networks and common interests which led to the replacement of polytheist religions with those, like Judaism and Christianity, which are monotheistic.

Some purely interesting facts included were that ancient men painted their dead with ochre, the colour of life. They collected cowrie shells because they resembled vulvas. The Nazis use of the term 'Aryan' was as far from historical accuracy as "a crusted Tory saying 'Bolshie' or 'Red'".

First published in 1940, this book is a well written, cogently argued and fairly engaging examination of our past as a species, documenting how we've tried to scratch out its living on this Earth and organize some semblance of political, economic, social and spiritual order to it all. As he concluded, the path is a generally upward one, with a series of crests and valleys, but at least each new high is higher than its predecessor while each depression is less low. That he could be so positive when the world was coming apart at its seams at that time (1940) is a testament to his faith in our species. I certainly hope he's right, but I have my doubts....

[Alper Atasoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gordon Childe'nin klasik kitabı, Alaeddin Şenel'in berbat çevirisiyle okunmayacak hale gelmiş. Onun dışında tarihöncesinden Roma'nın çöküşüne kadar medeniyetin doğuşunu ve gelişimini anlatan önemli bir eser.

[Sugus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Si bien a veces abruma con detalles que interesan a los arqueologos e historiadores solamente, realmente no se puede considerar como una falla. El libro esta bien estructurado, paseando por la totalidad de la prehistoria humana hasta la caída del imperio romano. Lo interesante es el uso de conceptos políticos modernos aplicados a tiempos antiguos. Es interesante como se pueden ver trazos de la lucha de clases (tan presente cuando el libro fue escrito) en los reinos de la mesopotámia, o el antiguo egipto. Sin embargo, es claro que hay una gran parte del libro, sobre todo la primera, cuyos fundamentos históricos son... imprecisos. Se basa mucho en la especulación, algo que imagino que no se puede evitar ya que se esta hablando sobre culturas y hechos de los cuales no hay ningún registro escrito.

[Ayse Sen · Rating 3 out of 5]

içinde sayfalar yanlış basılmıştı. zaten kitabın konusu ağır. çok faydalı olmasının yayında araştırmaya teşvik ediyor.

[Yasin Çetin · Rating 5 out of 5]

1952'de bir arkeolog ve kuramcı olan Gordon Childe intihar eder. Arkasında ise dolu dolu kitaplar bırakır. 1942'de yazdığı "Tarihte Neler Oldu" kitabı insanlığın başlangıcından Antik dönemin sonuna kadar geliştirdiği kuramın toplu bir özeti gibidir. Çin, Hindistan, İran, Mezopotamya, Mısır, Küçük Asya, Yunanistan, Roma yani Uzakdoğu'dan Avrupa'nın uçlarına ve hatta Afrika ve Amerika kıtasının hikayesi ticaret, sosyal hayat, siyaset, düşünce, teknoloji gibi geniş ölçekli bir bakış açısıyla ele alınmıştır.