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History 104A, September 12: Contributions of the Ancients!

I wanted to do a sort of review of the contributions of the

various Mesopotamian middle eastern groups in a sense of, we've gone

through at least the history through to the Persians, obviously very

scantly, more specifically, kinds of history you would prefer to do in

a more advanced class at the upper division level. This was the only

nice part I enjoyed about a four year school. You could take some of

those strange classes as a freshman or a sophomore, but we can't offer

them here because the universities tend to not want to transfer them

because they see them as upper division.

In any case, we identified that the Sumerians were the first to

create basically a code of law. They developed the wheel from the

pottery wheel that they used. They developed canals, waterway

irrigation ditches. The Sumerians also developed weights and

measures, cuneiform, and of course something I did mention, military

strategies that called phalanxes, which is sort of like a web-shaped

cuneiform. These are sort of groups of soldiers marching together in

groupings where we can envelope people or enclose around them. And

this was used throughout the Middle East and of course into Roman

times. The ziggurat, that temple that was built up for storage and

perhaps earlier sacrifice. They were also famous for the square root,

which I give them a hell of a lot of credit for. How many of you know

how to do that square root still?

A With a calculator.

THE PROFESSOR: With the nice little -- how many raised your

hand. You know how to do a square root? Six more without the

calculator. With the calculator, yeah, I can figure it out.

The Sumerians also began the development of a calendar with the

study of the heavens. And of course that was important to try and

realize the growing seasons the flooding, et cetera, that were

important. Obviously we're dealing with Sumerians as the major

source of most of the information that was to be built up by later

groups such as the Akkadians.

However, the Babylonians added a little different to it in that

the early Babylonians in their study of the stars, were much more

calculating on them, really developed both astronomy and astrology.

And so much of what we know as astrology and perhaps the hat of

Merlin, certainly the outfits came from the Babylonians, which put a

lot of emphasis on the stars. And of course the codification which

we're going to deal with further of the law codes of a Samarians, but

posting them, creating a unified law throughout the Fertile Crescent

reasons for the Babylonians.

The Hittites comes out of the Anatolian peninsula, the mountains

that were there. I'm sorry, my mind just wanders as it does into a

movie I saw the other day about the Armenian massacre by the Turks

coming out of that area and out of those mountains. I think the was

Arafat. I don't know how many have seen that. It was a very

interesting film. I don't know how many of you are aware of what's

often called the Armenian genocide after World War 1 in the

unification of Turkey. Millions of Armenians were killed by the

Turkish government or so claimed. And this has caused Armenian

terrorism, even in California, against Turks. Again, popping off into

areas.

But the area of the Hittites, iron and the use of iron as

obviously a strong metal. And the Hittites were the first to use the

horse-drawn chariot. Chariots were used earlier, but the horse-drawn

chariot and the fast mobility comes out of that Hittite area as well

as despite the rocky of the mountains.

The Phoenicians the purple dye, the royal purple from the

mollusks, the shellfish that we mentioned. The alphabet formalized

that we know from the Greeks and passed onto the Greeks. The

Phoenicians were famous for blown glass and colorful glass. And we

have found a number of Phoenician ships with some of that class

intact. And of course, as I indicated, trade, perhaps with their

ships not only going to England, which we're sure of, but perhaps

reaching the coast of America and perhaps hitting the New England

area. And there is some good argument that they may have gone that

far, easy enough to be blown off track as well.

The Hebrews, code of law, the mosaic law as well as of course the

old testament that was perhaps passed down to us as well.

The Assyrians, well, theirs may not be as positive, terror in

warfare and an organized warrior using, the term blitz kriek, what the

Nazis used for rapid movement of troops and people. The blitz kriek

B-L-I-T-Z K-R-I-E-K, and the use of spoked wheels on their chariots.

The Assyrians, as I mentioned, the library at Nineveh also known as

the library of Assurbanipal A-S-S-U-R-B-A-N-I-P-A-L. And the nice

part again is, if you don't get my rapid spelling, Connie does. And

so it gets posted. And if it doesn't, she e-mails me some strange

words and I have to figure out what she's asking for. We try to

straighten it out as best we can.

The Chaldeans or the new Babylonians for the hanging gardens,

once of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

And of course with the Persians, we deal with a form of

government very structured, very organized, bringing together an

empire. I also mentioned pants as a contribution and the concern with

beauty in the sense of oils and baths and that as well. We had again

a society that lasted for many years and perhaps 3,000 year history.

I did not mention the Lydians and perhaps should have, at perhaps

600 BCE. Lydia was basically a Greek center in Turkey. And they are

famous or having the first development in 600 BCE of formalized coins.

They did weigh out gold and silver in the exchange, but they did not

formally stamp an equal amount with coinage. So that they would have

to weigh it out, even some of it being stamped with pictures or

symbols. But the fact was that it was the Lydians who created what we

today know of coins made out of gold or silver. And of course that

passes onto the Greeks and the Romans. And of course some of you

probably have even the replicas of the Greek or Roman coins. And

Roman coins are easy to come about because there were so many of them

during the period of time.

In any case, those I think give us a little run down of the

contributions that came through the middle eastern area. And of

course much of same coming out of Egypt, only Egypt was consistent for

3,000 years, and that of course included weights and measures and

canals. And it included irrigation ditches. It included a calendar

and a solar calendar. That if you read Velikovsky, when the sun gives

you the time?

A Sun dial.

THE PROFESSOR: The thing that goes in the back yard.

A It's a sun dial.

THE PROFESSOR: I don't know why in the world I'm talking too

fast, the sun dials. Velikovsky says that they work if you use the

tilt of the axis of the earth. And if the Earth tilted since that

period of time, it would explain why they don't give correct time

today from ancient Egypt, verifying in his mind, the position that the

Earth has tilted on its axis. Certainly the telling of time was

important to the ancient Egyptians as well.

The Sumerians actually built with an arch. And they actually

built and used the arch as support. Again, that got lost during the

early part of the middle ages, but the arch was certainly one of their

contributions historically.

Well, I'm going to try this again and see if I get somebody

beside the nerd that I used last time. The Egyptians had very heavy

eye makeup and I didn't understand it until I watched baseball. That

went over with the thought to reflect on the sun coming in and the

reflection that was thrown off your eyes. Never mind.

Q Is that really why they wore a lot of eye makeup?

THE PROFESSOR: Yeah in part, yeah.

One interesting -- civilizations, generally men, are always drawn

darker than women. And I'm not sure why that fully was, but we have

the sense that women are supposed to be light and men dark. Maybe

that's why women are identified with purity and piousness and men are

identified with evil, leading women astray.

A Could it be that men work outside.

THE PROFESSOR: I think it probably started out that way.

Although women were the gatherers while men were hunting.

A Maybe in the higher class society.

THE PROFESSOR: It had something to do perhaps with class status.

Also with Egyptian stylization, the higher caste, the wealthier

mobiles were drawn larger and the pharaohs drawn larger than all.

Common people were smaller in their appearance on the drawings not

necessarily obviously in reality and a sense of giving the imaging

that you could best identify people. So we saw the side view because

that's what you think of. Of the female, you saw the front view of

the body because that's generally what we visualize. And this was to

help the Gods identify you, help you go to the afterlife. When people

were born, they were born with two souls, not one. See, in our sense

of Christianity, we have one God and only one soul; but Egyptians had

multiple Gods and at least two souls. One soul left the body and

floated in the heavens. The other stayed with the body. Souls were

called the ba and the ka, B-A and K-A. When an Egyptian died, the

souls were to unite. The ba had to find the ka or the ka could not go

to heaven, or not heaven, to the afterlife. Once they united in their

death, they would then meet the Gods that would direct them and

determine whether they would enter the afterlife.

Q Was it the God, Sheera (phonetic), would come down and suck the

ka out of people that were murdered or died unjust deaths, or am I

completely throwing something out --

THE PROFESSOR: Sucking out the ka when people were murdered et

cetera? I don't know. Again, you've been studying or reading more of

the ancient stuff from the book of the dead elsewhere, but that does

not stick in my memory banks at all. I'll just go with that, you

know, standard traditionalists say.

In the waiting room for the afterlife, you were presided over by

the God Osiris. Osiris was the God of the afterlife in the

underworld. Osiris, like the Egyptian pharaohs, married his sister

Isis. Apparently before we got married, another brother of them, of

Isis and Osiris, a man or a God -- this is not California -- wanted to

Mary Isis. And Isis loved Osiris. And he was very jealous, so one

day he captured Osiris, tricked him into getting within a sarcophagus

made out of the cedars of Lenin, and floated him down the Nile, and he

went off into the horse. But Isis, with her undying love, searched

for him and found him. But that wasn't the end of it. He did not

give up easily. He was impulsive. He once again captured Osiris and

he cut him up into little pieces this time. And he spread the pieces

all around Egypt, each city had a little piece of Osiris. And Isis

went around and collected all the pieces except one that had been

eaten by a big fish. The one piece that was eaten by a fish is really

interesting, I guess, because it's the sexual organ that disappeared.

And then she wrapped Osiris back together so that he was put back

together in a mummified form. And then she had a virgin birth because

the piece wasn't there. And so she gave birth to Horus H-O-R-U-S.

Harus became identified with the sun, Isis with the moon, and Osiris,

I guess, with the afterlife. Now, Osiris would sit there, the jackal

headed God Anubis would weigh the heart of the dead departed soul now

that ba and ka had come together on a scale of justice -- perhaps this

is where our first scales of justice appear. And the heart was

weighed against a feather. If the heart was a heavy heart and it

unbalanced that feather, the heart was then given to this creature

which I call the hearty eater because he ate up the heart with a mouth

of a crocodile and the body of a -- oh well, there were three

different animals that made up this quote/unquote hardy heart eater.

However, if the heart was light or balanced, then you would go on to

the river Nile that traveled under the earth to the afterlife. Of

course you had to have a coin with you to bribe the boatman to get you

there, to pay you to get you there. And that was all spelled out in

call it the Bible, if you will, of ancient Egypt called The Book of

the Dead. So that again, all of these drawings had to reflect what

you look like, what your life was like, what your servants were like,

so that you could continue the good life in the afterlife. Just

again, sort of an interesting relationship to the development of life

in Egypt.

Now, as I indicated earlier, in the old kingdom, it was believed

that only the pharaohs could go on to the afterlife. In the middle

kingdom, nobles bought their way in as well. And by the new kingdom,

every common person accepted the fate. And The Book of the Dead and

people could continue in life after death as well. And so

mummification took place for everyone, not just for the pharaohs. I'm

just trying to find what's in here and the development. The reason

for wigs. Anybody know why they shaved their heads?

A Lice.

THE PROFESSOR: Yeah. Both men and women shaved their heads.

Lice was part of the problem so that wigs became very ornate. Wigs

are still worn by Jewish women who are orthodox. They shave their

head upon marriage and keep their heads closed or shaved and they wear

wigs once they're married, for whatever reason, but that the tradition

perhaps has come down from the Jews in Egypt. I'm not sure where it

comes from.

Clothing -- clothing is not change dramatically in ancient Egypt.

As I said, men wore skirts. However, these loincloths, full leather,

generally varied in size from below the knees to mini skirts from time

to time as the generations changed. So style became -- it changes

just like of course it has in our own days. We see changes. We come

back and ties get wider and get narrower and lapels get bigger. I

don't know what happened to color. You don't wear much color anymore

like back when I started with Ohlone and everybody wore flowered

shirts, tie-dyed shirts. You people are dull now. Some professor was

saying the students have gone downhill since the Roman empire.

They're stupid. They can't write. I think you've been stupid and

dumb all along. I don't say that there's a real difference in

students but there has been in the clothing.

With women, the dresses that they wore became, what's the word?

Shear or more translucent. In other words, sometimes you could see

through them and sometimes you could not, depends on the era of time.

I know which time most of you guys would want to live in but that's

another story. That basically transferred through 3,000 years of

Egyptian history without dramatic change in the style of clothing or

the style of art, except during one period when, even then, it was not

that traumatic. And that was the period of the pharaoh Akhenaton who

was originally Amenhotep IV I believe, and he

changed his name to Akhenaton. Akhenaton means God is satisfied. At

around 1350 BCE -- rays of light. All right. He set up a capitol in

between Memphis and Thebes down here, T-H-E-B-E-S. And at this

capital (AKHETON) of today it's called Tel-El-Amarna. He created a new religion, a

monotheistic religion and the new art style. The art style became far

more realistic. It showed him with this tremendous beer belly even

though he was skinny. I've got a friend like that. The guy is as

skinny as hell but he's got this stomach sticking out. It showed him

with some distortion of the head and his appearance. And there's

belief that it was from the interbreeding between brothers and sisters

throughout Egyptian history. He married a woman named Nefertiti, one

of many of his wives. She was not his sister directly. But again,

they were allowed to sometimes marry as well as their sisters. Her

name means the beautiful one comeeth, which my history teacher in

college said that's why Akhenaton took the name God was satisfied. I

had a bad history teacher.

Nefertiti is often seen or projected as the most beautiful woman

in history. We have her bust -- I'm talking about the top part of the

head -- in the new in this particular museum. She looks much like, in

my mind, Jacqueline Kennedy. She had that Jacqueline Kennedy

realness. I never did like Jackie Kennedy's looks but that's another

story. Many years ago we used to have sisters from the convent take

classes here and they could come in before they entered to become

nuns. They were postulate. I always got it confused with

prostitutes. And there was this woman in class and funny as hell,

this nun or sister -- they're not nuns. There is a difference between

a nun and a sister? Sisters go out into the world. Nuns are

cloistered, meaning they live in a monastery or in a nunnery. And so

the Dominicans next door are a teaching order that goes into the

community. In any case, I was circulating one time this article from

Time magazine. They had found the temple of Nefertiti that had been

restructured after Akhenaton was removed. And within the tomb they

also showed some of the pictures or reliefs of her body. And as I

passed it around, it was Nefertiti, but this was her figure. And the

sister raised her hand and said, Isn't she supposed to have been the

most beautiful woman in history? Then she looks at me and she says,

We have better bodies than that in the convent -- just to let you know

how we get stereotypes about people, but even sisters and others have

quote/unquote sense of humor if you will.

Let's move on again. How about a little entertainment here?

Let's go on with the guided tour.

(playing tour)

When the treasury came here about 20 years ago, I had an

opportunity to go watch it in San Francisco to see it. I'll tell you,

I had been to many Egyptian exhibits and many Egyptian museums

including of course the one in San Jose, the Louvre in Paris, and the

one in Britain, but I had seen nothing as striking as the materials

that they brought out, the gold, the mummy, the sarcophagus, whatever

they brought here was just so spectacular my mouth was left watering

open. And so I really got a feel for the wealth that exhibited there.

I actually bought some slides that I used to use in class, but once

again, all of that stuff was dumped in the reserve section in the

library. They didn't tell me about it. Do any of you -- we have

about four or five minutes left, I think you get a picture of the

spender, shall we say, that was Egypt. I'm sure there are some

questions.

Q When Howard Carter discovered that was that considered all of his

property? Who's property was that?

THE PROFESSOR: Most of the time when the archaeologists worked

in these countries, they worked on their own through -- like National

Geographic, but all of the wealth, all of the discovers would go to

country itself. And that is why almost all of this remains in the

Egyptian museum in Cairo. We'll talk a little about a guy named

Sleeman who did the work on the City of Troy. He snuck some stuff out

that the Greeks refused to put in their museum, maybe because of a

fear of the Turkish invasion. They kicked him out after they found

out he was sneaking a few pieces out. You got the glory of the

discovery and you go down in history. And that's often more important

than the wealth for most of these archaeologists.

Any other question on ancient Egypt?

A How did he die so young?

THE PROFESSOR: The king? We're not sure how -- we believe he

was killed by the priests of Amen because they wanted to restore their

power. And even though he took the name Tutankhamen from -- he was

probably an Aton worshipper. There were also of course uprising at

times in the palace, rivalries that often created the assassination,

but there was a crack in the back of his skull. I mean, the fact that

he ascended the thrown at nine and died by the age of eighteen or

nineteen. People didn't last that long. They often took the thrown

early. Lafayette, who came here to help the American revolutionaries

from France as a full general, was only 19. If you're 19 and you

haven't become a general or conquered the world yet, you can feel like

a loser.

Q How come if he was so young and so little reign yet had the most

wealth?

THE PROFESSOR: He doesn't have most of the wealth. He's the

only wealth that we have found. A lot of the stuff that we found by

grave robbers were melted down. Some of it is still probably sitting

around in private collections. You've all seen those movies where

somebody has got this room with all these goodies. It's valid. We've

got a lot of things historically even in modern times when museums are

robbed. And for many years the Mona Lisa disappeared and was in a

private collection.

Q Someone had the Mona Lisa in their house?

THE PROFESSOR: Somebody had it sitting somewhere, yeah. People

have that need and they're collectors. Most of it is melted down.

There were actually some intrusions into King Tuts tomb, but they

never got into the main burial chambers. The tombs have fake doors

that look real, so you don't know where to go. And there are all

kinds of chambers that you can get lost in. And of course the tombs

cut in the south of Egypt in the upper kingdom at Karnak are cut into

the mountainside here. There's a copy of one if you go down to the

Egyptian museum, you can crawl through an actual tomb down there

similar to the ones that were cut into the mountain. Some elaborate

and some not so elaborate.

On Wednesday I'm going to read an article about the law code in

ancient Mesopotamia, the Hamurabi law code in the Bible.

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