The A to Z of Ancient Inventions

They say a city in the desert lies, the vanity of ancient king
The city lies in broken pieces, where the wolf howls and the vultures sing
These are the works of man–this is the sum of our ambition…

Sting, “Mad About You”

April is nearly upon us, once again time for me to embark on the April A to Z blogging challenge. It’s my sixth year; where were you in April 2020? Like me, probably stuck in COVID lock-down, thinking it would only be a few weeks, but already going stir crazy. I loved having the opportunity to write–the Olympics was my first topic–nearly every day for a month. It lets me explore a few rabbit holes, but in a disciplined way. As it happens, I’m recovering from shoulder surgery right now, which again limits my activities, so I’m also glad to have a task to occupy my attention.

This year my topic is Ancient Inventions, at the cusp of prehistory and history. Although I now call myself a historian, my knowledge about the cultures of early humans is pretty thin, so I’m thrilled to delved into something I know a little but not enough about. I hope you’ll feel the same!

I gave you a sneak peek a few days ago, when I wrote about the importance of perhaps the very first invention: the baby sling. Today, I want to define the scope of my subject, describe how it stands apart as an approach to history, and clarify the when and where.

The Rules of Engagement

The rules for the challenge are straightforward. Write 26 posts on a single theme, one for each letter of the alphabet, in order, during the month of April. That gives me a few weekend days off, but otherwise, it’s go-go-go, starting tomorrow and finishing by Wednesday the 30th.

If you’ve read my stuff, you know these will be a little longer than the average post. Be prepared! I make no apologies for having readers work a little. I spent much of March doing some research in advance, so I already have more to write about than I could possibly write about! It’s an obsession; it’s a disease!

Definitions first. What do I mean by “ancient” and “invention”? Let’s start with the second word first. “Invention” means a basic thing created by early humans. Simple as that. Think of Fire, Art, Beer, or Soap–those happen to be topics covered in Who Ate the First Oyster? by Cody Cassidy, a book that inspired this theme. But I’ve taken pains to avoid overlap with the book, although after thoroughly researching the Wheel, I had to tear up my notes because he already covered it. Doh! Overall, these are inventions so universal they were created in different forms in different places at different times: in fact, hold that thought!

“Ancient” means different things to different people. To your teenager, you might be ancient, and ancient inventions could include the rotary phone, the VCR, even the iPhone 1! In my posts, Ancient ranges from the Prehistoric Paleolithic to right before the Middle Ages. Prehistoric by definition means before writing because things like art and the wheel predated even language. Other inventions we take for granted might have required Mesopotamian technology, MesoAmerican knowhow, or Greek science. Most inventions I cover are BCE–Before Common Era (used to be called Before Christ), though I might mention some that go past year “zero.”

To help keep my posts focused, I’ll cover three basic topics each time.

1. A core definition of the “thing”
2. Where and when it happened first “around the world”
3. How it influenced human development

Everything, Everywhere, Early On

Item #2 on that list is what I hope will set this approach apart. Because I’m not into “firsts” but instead fascinated with parallel inventions.

In fact, the obsession with “firsts” annoys me. Who ate the first oyster? Who was the first to paint a cave? Who invented calculus? We are a culture obsessed with winning, and you can see it in the scholarship. Archaeologists and anthropologists twist into pretzels using microscopes, lasers, and radiocarbon dating to prove that their discovery was the earliest, and deploy withering sarcasm to criticize the dating of rival finds. Yet, since we’re talking about thousands or millions of years ago, there’s a lot of speculation involved. Everybody’s guessing–educated guessing–but it’s still guessing.

Moreover, even recent history is full of examples of simultaneous inventions, where the guy with the bigger megaphone got credit. Edison and Tesla. Newton and Leibniz. Singer and Howe. Lots of people can claim to be first for different reasons. I will give dates, which will imply a first, but I will also discuss other examples.

Instead, I’m much more interested in the idea of simultaneous invention, like the biological term “convergent evolution.” Convergent evolution is when different species develop the same capability using different approaches, such how birds, bats, and pterodactyls all developed flight. In the same vein, I want to explore how, where, and when different early cultures invented the same thing.

For instance, the famous cave paintings in Lascaux, France at the top of this post are some 20-30,000 years old. But so are paintings in Sulawesi, Indonesia, South Africa, and Australia. Which one was exactly first? Who has the best laser microscope? It’s not as if the Paleolithic French and Indonesians were texting ideas to each other. What is fascinating is the similarities and differences in their choices, developed independently.

Where & When: A Primer on Ancient “Civilization”

Here’s a quick reference guide with graphics that may help with time and place of these ancient cultures. Remember that hominids split off from primates and emerged out of Africa millions of years ago. By 30,000 BCE, give or take a few thousand, they had reached the Americas, much of Polynesia, and covered Africa, Asia, and Europe. What you see when you start looking at early development is the same topics and areas cropping up again and again, clustered by time or place.

The “Lithics”—lith means stone and paleo means earliest. The Paleolithic is the term for early civilizations, i.e. the Stone Age, because the tools humans used were pointed stones. That is, the earliest tools humans used which were later found by archaeologists. Wood and leaves rarely survive thousands of years, but they were probably also used. Wherever and whenever we look, we always have to talk about what evidence exists, whether it was first or not. Still, it may surprise you what some creative Paleolithic people were able to do before even the development of agriculture and writing.

The Fertile Crescent–the place where the rivers meet in modern-day Iran and Iraq was called Mesopotamia, and is referred to as the “cradle of civilization.” This is because large-scale cities, governments, and public works, like ziggurats, emerged here first. Civilization blossomed in several ways, so we’ll see references to Assyria, Sumeria, and Babylonia, places which invented accounting, pyramids, and the wheel. They had mathematics; they used base 60…but we’ll get to that in letter C.

Egypt and the Flood of Nile Cultures –While some core ideas like writing and the wheel came out of Mesopotamia, by 3000 BCE, a culture flourished along the Nile that would rival the cities along the Tigris and Euphrates. Maybe the Assyrians had it first, but the Egyptians took it often to higher levels, so it can be interesting to compare the visions of these parallel worlds.

The Cold North–Much of the scholarship available to me in English tends to focus first on European cultures: Spain, France, Scandinavia, Germany, and England. Type “Stone Age map” and, all of a sudden, it appears that Europeans were at the center of the universe, rather than emigrants out of the desert. Still, there were things created in the colder climates that were a unique take on invention, simply because humans were required to be creative in a different way in the wet and cold. There’s a reason so many of them lived in caves. Suffice it to say, that those who study Linear Pottery have their own intricate categorization scheme to add to the others.

The Sophisticated East —The world history taught when I was in school was Western Civilization, which meant Europe and the Mediterranean. Very rarely did someone mention China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, or any of the Pacific Islands, even though these cultures were often as robust. In China, even by 2000 BCE, the Zhou Dynasy had its own hierarchy of multiple states across hundreds of miles brought under an emperor’s wing, their own view of who counted at the time as belonging to the dyntasy and who were “barbarians.”

The New World Had Old Cultures–There’s still debate about how humans came to the Americas. Did they cross a land bridge at the Bering Strait or sail down the West Coast of British Columbia? We’ll leave the anthropologists to their bits of charred wood and radiocarbon; the fact is that Paleolithic humans arrived in the Americas independently and developed their thriving cultures separately. The Olmecs, Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs had geographic challenges that the Mesopotamians didn’t have, though they did have a number of crops that allowed them to build population centers in similar ways. That’s why I have been deliberate in my research to seek out the first examples of invention X in Mesoamerica, along with Polynesia, India, and elsewhere outside the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Europe. The results make for intriguing comparisons.

As I describe this approach, it seems a little crazy and frighteningly ambitious. Scout’s honor, I promise not to turn every post into a lengthy laundry list of every place where a bit of chipped stone turned into a spear. But I hope we can benefit by thinking about the inventiveness of humanity as a species, regardless of where they found themselves, rather than thinking of civilization as a dash to be first.

I start tomorrow. Take a deep breath…