Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In Greece, near to Lydia, and therefore quickly influenced by this new development, money encouraged the democratisation of politics. Under Solon, the old privileges were abolished and eligibility for public office became based on (landed) wealth.⁹¹ 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, in particular the Greek advances in mathematics that we shall be exploring in a later chapter. The German economic historian Georg Simmel observed in his book The Philosophy of Money, ‘the idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy’.⁹² He added, ‘those professional classes whose productivity lies outside the economy proper have emerged only in the money economy – those concerned with specific intellectual activity such as teachers and literary people, artists, physicians, scholars and state officials’. This is overstating the case somewhat (teachers and doctors existed before money), but the point has validity.

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.

4

Cities of Wisdom

In 1927 the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig at Ur of Chaldea (Chaldea is an alternative name for Babylon). Ur, the home of Abraham according to the Bible, had first been identified in 1854–1855 but it was Woolley’s sensational excavations that revealed its wider importance in mankind’s history. Among his discoveries was the unearthing of the so-called mosaic standard of Ur, which featured a cluster of chariots, showing that it was the Sumerians (inhabiting what is now the southernmost reaches of Iraq from c. 3400 BC), who may well have conceived the wheel and introduced this device into warfare. 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.

According to the historian H. W. F. Saggs, ‘No invention has been more important for human progress than writing’, and Petr Charvát has called it ‘the invention of inventions’.¹ So here we have another major idea, to put alongside farming as ‘the greatest ever’. In fact, more important, more fundamental even than writing in the history of progress, is that happy coincidence that the Sumerians also invented the chariot. For once you start making a list of the ‘firsts’ achieved by this formidable people, it is difficult to know where to stop. For example, 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 Sumerians were the first to use gardens to provide shade, they recorded the first proverbs and fables, they had the first epic literature and the first love songs. 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.