Thom Harrison's Review Notes for Humanities 2155
How Ancient People Saw the World
Myceneans, Minoans, and the Trojan War
Western Music from Before the Beginning to After the End
Students of human evolution have long held that humans evolved in Africa, probably in the Great Rift Valley, at a date that keeps being pushed backward by millions of years. Hominids had radiated out from Africa into Asia at least as far back as Homo Erectus (1.7 million years). However, recent evidence from mitochondrial DNA (passed from mother to daughter) suggests that all modern humans everywhere are descended from a group migrating out of Africa about 100,000 years ago.
Humans would have made their living in the most primitive way known, as hunter-gatherers, until about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, when and where people learned to domesticate plants and animals, and agriculture was born.
Village agrculture led to food surpluses--nonexistent for hunter-gatherers--and eventually to cities, again in the Middle East, where the demands of administration led to writing and to written law.
The Hunter-Gatherer Lifestyle and the Ice Age
The easiest living people have ever had
It took 3-4 hours a day to make a living.
The rest could be devoted to thinking, sleeping, creating, fighting?
Historically, people have tended to revert to this lifestyle when it was a real possibility.
The hardest living people have ever had
A lifestyle accompanied by constant anxiety about having enough to eat.
If there was a change in game migration routes,
a climate shift,
a hard winter,
a bad day,
people starved.
People were subject to the same population rules that govern what we now call wildlife. Until about 10,000 years ago, everyone was wildlife.
Prehistoric Humanities
Prehistoric hunter-gatherers, at least in Europe, lived in organized social groups, as we see from their remaining campsites.
They buried their dead, sometimes apparently tied, perhaps to keep them from rising to harrass the living.
All known peoples have had music--at least singing and chanting--and dance as part of ritual, religion, and hunting magic. Early humans must have had these things, too.
From about 30,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago, people made paintings, mostly of animals, in the caves of Europe.
Along with decorations, needles, and some well-developed stone weapons and tools, they produced some obese--perhaps pregnant--female figurines called "Venuses" by their modern discoverers.
We have no further idea as to what their stories were, what their music was like, or why they made it, or any details of their religious beliefs.
Did they worship a "mother goddess" depicted ty the "Venus" figures? Was she a fertility goddess?
Did they hold religious rituals in the caves where they painted pictures of horses, bison, and ibex? Were their rituals hunting magic? Initiation? Worship?
There are children's footprints preserved at some sites.
However, the primary game animal, known from the boneheaps at camps, was the reindeer, and animal rarely depicted in the cave paintings.
One real bit of evidence is Richard Leakey's observation that the cave paintings seem to be located at the positions of greatest resonance in the caves.
The rest is speculation based on study of hunter-gatherer societies like the Australian Aborigines and the Kalahari Kung, and on what can be gleaned of the prehistoric past from the stories, myths, and legends that survived to be written down.
Is, for example, the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis--before death, before pain, before work--an ancient memory of the hunter-gatherer life before the agriculture?
The Neolithic
About 10,000 years ago, people learned to cultivate the ground and domesticate animals, and, from that time, they were no longer wildlife, no longer subject to the old laws and economies of nature. They had gained stability in the form of food surplus. Barring large-scale land depletion or serious draught, they need never be hungry again, but they had sold their souls to the land. for a food surplus, they had back-breaking work all day, every day. And they had a new social group- -aristocrats.
Some families got the best land and became the landlords. The others worked for them. The Haves and the Have-Nots came into the world.
Sometimes the families of the Haves convened in a "primitive democracy" to work out problems of government. This happened in Mesopotamia at Sumer. More frequently, and finally everywhere except Athens in the fifth century BCE, the less cumbersome institution of kingship prevailed, where the powers and responsibilities of government were invested in one man selected from the aristocratic families.
The neolithic revolution began in the Middle East, with surviving city sites at Jericho (which Joshua fit the battle of) and Çatal Hüyük in what is now Turkey. Farming made it necessary and desirable that people begin living in larger communities to pool their labor and defend their territories, and farming led to the food surplus.
The food surplus led to the possibility that some people might not be involved in the direct work of raising and gathering food. That is, specialization of labor developed.
With specialization, social classes began to separate, with the ruling aristocrats who were also the great landholders at the top, supported by the priests, descending through the levels of specialized craftsmen and perhaps small landholders, ending with the landless masses, those who worked the land but did not own it, the fellahin, the peasants.
This was the social structure of the ancient world, the social structure in place when history began in Sumer and in Egypt.
Now we can know at least some of the stories they told, the songs they sang, their thoughts about the world, and the gods they worshipped (for they all worshipped gods). And their building and art survive, if only in fragments and ruins, to this day.
Readings: Books in MSC Library
Michael H. Brown. The Search for Eve. New York: Harper, 1990.
H. and H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jakobsen. Before Philosophy. Baltimore: Penguin, 1949.
Evan Hadingham. Secrets of the Ice Age. New York: Walker, 1979.
Richard Leakey. The Origin of Humankind. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Robert Myron. Prehistoric Art. New York: Pitman, 1964.
Colin Renfrew. Before Civilization: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe. New York: Knopf, 1973
Mario Ruspoli. The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs. New York: Abrams, 1986.
How Ancient People Saw the World
Ancient people--historic and no doubt prehistoric--were always and everywhere religious. They saw the non-human world as a living entity, like the human world. Their interaction with the world was like a dialogue with another person or another group of people. Nothing was dead unless it had first been killed.
One way of indicating this relationship was to say that the ancients saw the world as a "thou," not as an "it." We in the late twentieth century have been trained by science to see the world as an object (an "it") to be analyzed, manipulated, and exploited. The ancients saw the world as another creature, or collection of creatures, to be dealt with as they might deal with their human neighbors. They might be abject and servile in their relationship, or they might be domineering and commanding, but they related to the world as a living, conscious thing, a "thou."
If the world was conscious, it also had a will. The world could reward you, with good crops, for example, or it could kill you. If it hurt or killed you, it did so because it meant to kill you, just as your neighbor or your enemy might. If your neighbor tries to kill or harm you, you might reasonably ask, "What have I done to make her angry? Is there some mistake that makes her attack me? A misunderstanding?" And you might try to open up a dialogue, as we now say, to find out if you have offended your neighbor and, if so, how you can set things right.
Even so with the non-human world for the ancients. To put it another way, in the ancient world, everything was personal--attacks from neighbors, storms, floods, wars.
Originally, people saw powers in the forces of nature, in the wind, in the rain, in the water, earth, and sky, powers that could nurture or destroy. Eventually, these powers were personified and named, and the gods came into being. Gradually the gods took on human personalities, so that particular gods have particular human characteristics. The goddess of love--Aphrodite for the Greeks, Ishtar for the Assyrians--is always pictured as sexually promiscuous, perhaps because she survives from the prehistoric "mother goddesses" of fertility. The storm god--Enlil in Assyria--is always bad tempered. And, at least outside Egypt, all the gods are always quarrelsome and vindictive, and they bear grudges forever. Just like their human models.
So, as best we can tell, religion is born, and, with the food surplus of agriculture, a specially trained social class whose special job is to know how to deal with the gods, to command, to manipulate, to appease--the priests. Also coming with religion in the historical period is the concept of sacrifice, including, for all ancient peoples at some stage, human sacrifice. Human sacrifice had passed out of practice in most of the societies that we consider civilized, but its echoes remain in the story of Jephthah's daughter from Judges, the sacrifice of the hero in Greek Tragedy, and the public execution of criminals that continues in many places now.
On a Vietnam-era bumper sticker: "Kill 'Em All, And Let God Sort 'Em Out."
Reading:
Frankfort, Wilson, and Jakobsen. Before Philosophy.
Writing seems to have originated as a means of keeping lists, no doubt first as pictures of the things listed. But it developed into something like this:
This is a rebus, the kind often presented in children's magazines, but it has made the transition from pictures to sound. The pictures are not used to represent the things pictured, but to indicate things named by the same (or almost the same) sounds as the names of the things pictured.
Myceneans, Minoans, and the Trojan War
Greek-speaking people were in the Peloponnese from about 2,000 BCE, and their civilization reached its high point in the 13th century (1300-1200) BCE. What we know of their lives apart from the literary traces in works like the Iliad and the Odyssey we owe to the archeologists, starting with Heinrich Schliemann in the late 19th century (CE).
It was Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated Knossos in Crete in the 1930s who gave the civilization there the name Minoan, after the legendary king Minos. Evans also discovered large numbers of clay tablets inscribed with two undeciphered scripts. One of the scripts, called Linear A, remains largely undeciphered, at least partly because there are relatively few samples. Tablets inscribed in the other script, Linear B, were found not only on Crete, but in large numbers on the Greek mainland as well. Operating on the assumption that the language represented was Greek, Michael Ventris succeeded in cracking the code in the 1950s.
A possible scenario runs like this: A peaceful civilization that we call Minoan flourished on Crete until about 1500 BCE, when it was destroyed, perhaps by the consequences of the enormous volcanic explosion of Thera, an island to the northeast of Crete. Later, the island seems to have been overrun by warlike, Greek-speaking invaders from the mainland, the Mycenean Greeks, and Crete was part of Mycenean civilization at its high point.
At any rate, archeological finds indicate a close relationship between the civilization of Mycenae and Tiryns, and Pylos--cities on the mainland--and that on Crete. There is evidence of Egyptian influence as well. It is possible, in fact, that the Myceneans early in their history may have served as mercenaries in Egypt, passing through Crete on their way to and from their employment.
The Greeks were always a sea power, and their warlike proclivities no doubt made them feared raiders. Greek cities like Miletus on the Anatolian peninsula (modern Turkey) seem to have been established very early. Perhaps their depredations brought them in contact with a great land power in that part of the world, the people who fought the Egyptians to a standstill at the Battle of Kadesh in 1285 BCE, the Hittites.
The Hittite capital, Hatusas, was discovered in Turkey in the 1920s, and with it another trove of tablets inscribed with writing. Among the tablets is a letter known as the Tawagalawas letter, written to a king of the Ahhiyawa (Homer's Achaians?) that mentions some trouble between the Hittites and that king in a place called Wilusa. Homer's word for Troy was Ilios--the early Greek form would have been Wilios. Is this a mention in a historical document of the Trojan War, something long considered by European scholars to be fictitious? Was the Trojan War a conflict, or one event in a longer conflict, between the sea power of the Greeks and the land power of the Hittites, the people who ushered in the iron age?
Readings:
Paul J. Alexander, ed. The Ancient World to A. D. 300. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1963. Readings.
Michael Woods. In Search of the Trojan War. New York and Oxford: Facts on File Publications, 1985. This book accompanies a documentary film series of the same name.
Before the Roman Empire Europe was populated by an iron-age people of no particular ethnic identity whom we call the Celts. The Greeks called them the Keltoi, and they seem to have assumed their identity as a people by about 500 BCE. They seem to have spread from eastern Europe (Bohemia in current Chekoslovakia and Hungary takes its name from one of their tribes, the Boii) westward until they settled what is currently France and Spain and Britain. Their languages were Indo-European, so they shared ultimate origins with the Romans and the Greeks, as well as the Germanic tribes to the north.
These were the impulsive warriors conquered by Julius Caesar in Gaul and elsewhere. The Celts became Romanized very early in Gaul and eventually in Britain (after the Claudian invasion of ca. 60 BCE). The Romans were tolerant of the Celtic religion as well as of other religions of the empire. But they outlawed the Celtic priestly class, the Druids, ostensibly because they practiced human sacrifice. The Celts did practice human sacrifice, as well as being head hunters, but it seems unlikely that people who executed criminals by crucifixion would turn squeamish at the prospect of killing human victims by burning, hanging, or drowning, the methods favored by the Celts. More likely they feared the inter-tribal political power of the Druids, whom they would have seen as a kind of fifth column of subversives in the empire.
The thoroughness of the Roman suppression, combined with the fact that, even after they became literate, the Druids seem to have kept all their teachings oral, memorized and passed on by word of mouth, means that there is almost no record of who and what the Druids were. What we know comes from sometimes hostile eyewitnesses like Julius Caesar himself and from what archeology can tell us.
With the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, the Celts became Christians along with the rest of the empire. St. Patrick carried Christianity and literacy to Ireland in the fifth century, and the Irish remained Christian and literate throughout the difficulty that followed the final collapse of the empire.
The Dark Ages
The Roman Empire undoubtedly burned out in the same way previous empires had done, as well as being threatened by enemies from without, as other empires had been. The administration of a vast area from which the plunder of conquest was no longer being extracted became increasingly expensive, and Roman taxes, negligible at first, became more and more burdensome to subject peoples. The vision of the Pax Romana as a time when people were left to enjoy the protection of Roman law and the Roman legions, transporting their goods over Roman roads in peace and prosperity has some basis in fact, but even by the first century of the Christian era, the period in which the letters of Paul, the book of Acts, and the Gospels were written, there is ample evidence of the buden of Roman taxation and a large underclass in the cities to whom Christianity particularly appealed. Already the arisocratic owners of the Roman villas, the great landowners of the late ancient world, were annexing the farms of more and more small landowners, leaving the former owners landless and homeless, with nothing to do but go to the cities and make a living the best way they could.
This situation in Europe was only codified after the fall of Rome into a system in which the great landowner parcelled out land for military service from a second tier of men, and a hierarchy extended down to the landless poor, the serfs, who were nevertheless obligated to work the land of the lord. The feudal system. Finally the king, the great landowner, legally owned all the land and granted it in fiefdoms to his knights, barons, or earls. Europe was filled with little kingdoms engaged in almost perpetual warfare, complicated by the tribal identity of certain groups like the Franks.
In the meanwhile, beginning in the sixth and seventh centuries, Mohammed had his visions in Arabia, and Islam became a force in the world. Mohammed was familiar with the teachings of Judaism and Christianity, and he recognized them as predecessors and as sister religions. Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet, but proclaims Mohammed as the last prophet.
While Europe was undergoing the Dark Ages, the Arabs were having a period of unprecedented expansion, a veritable renaissance. Their military advance took them across north Africa and into Spain, whose culture still displays the Arabian stamp. And the Arabs of Spain were certainly more civilized than the previously Romanized Christians with whom they came in conflict.
It was one of the Germanic tribes, the Franks, who stopped the Arab advance at Tours in 732. The king of the Franks was Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne.
Readings:
Thomas Cahill. How the Irish Saved Civilization. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Nora Chadwick. The Celts. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1970.
J. G. Davies. The Early Christian Church. New York: Holt, 1965.
Anne Ross and Don Robins. The Life and Death of a Druid Prince. New York: Summit, 1989.
Western Music from Before the Beginning to After the End
These notes were made originally for the use of a friend and colleague. I hope that fact helps to explain their peculiar tone. I give them here with minimal changes.
This is really about tonal harmony, which arrives in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, is especially designed into the system by tempered tuning, is expanded through the Classical and Romantic periods, is stretched to its utmost by Wagner, and falls off the edge with Schönberg about 1910.
The AVs you'll need are records (tapes, CDs) and something to play them on, a keyboard (preferably in tune), and a piece of paper marked off with eight numbered, piano- key-size sections. A sheet of typing paper can be marked with a ruler. This gives you an octave.
Start by mentioning the Greek modes and as much of Pythagoras's theory as you care to put in. Position the marked paper so that the 1 and 8 are over Cs one octave apart (middle C and the one above work best for me). Play a C scale, 12345678, as an example of one of the seven modes which just happens to be a MAJOR SCALE. Move the paper so that 1 and 8 are over As an octave apart, and play the mode that happens to be a MINOR SCALE. Move the paper so that 1 and 8 are over Fs. This is the Lydian Mode (the only one whose name I can remember), and it works well to show a scale which is neither major nor minor.
Place the paper over C, for a major scale, and ask for a volunteer who neither reads music nor plays the piano. Write on the board, or somewhere else conspicuous, the following number sequence (with spaces):
135555585 3455421
Ask the volunteer to play these numbers on the piano (or other keyboard), with pauses for the spaces. It should come out sounding more or less like "The Halls of Motezuma," the U. S. Marines song.
Now place the paper over A, for a minor scale, and ask the volunteer (or another volunteer, or do it yourself) to play the same numbers with the same pauses. This will put it in a minor key. Ask the class, "Is that the same thing?" About half the musically naive will say "yes," about half will say "no." Well, you can say, that's what composers do when they develop a theme: they play the same numbers, so to speak, in different keys and in major and minor keys.
Place the paper over F, or any other note except C or A, and play--or have the volunteer play--the "same thing" in a mode.
Explain that harmony means playing or singing more than one note at the same time, and play some triads--135 note combinations--from different scales. The major triad (CEG) will sound immediately and obviously different from the minor triad (ACE). Plainly, any three white keys separated by white keys in between will render major, minor, or modal triads.
What makes the scales sound different is the spacing between the notes. Show how E and F are closer together in sound (a HALF STEP) than C and D (a WHOLE STEP). Using 1 for whole step and ½ for half step, the intervals (officially correct term) in a C major scale--CDEFGABC--are 11½111½. In an A minor scale--ABCDEFGA--the intervals are 1½111½1.
What if you want to play the Marines' Song above, but start on F instead of C, and make it really sound the same? If you just play the numbers, you've got the Lydian Mode, which is not really the same thing. The scale FGABCDEF has the intervals 111½11½. We need a major scale with the intervals 11½111½ to sound the same. To get the intervals the same, we need to lower the fourth note of the scale, B, ½ step to B flat. So the notes will be FGABflatCDEF, using the black note beneath the fourth note. This changes a mode into a major scale, and that's what the black notes are for.
Now if you play the Marines' Song starting on F, and you remember to play B flat, it will "sound the same" because it will be in a major key.
If a piece is in the key of C, at least originally, that means that every note played, melody or harmony, is C, D, E, F, G, A, or B. No sharps or flats. If you put in sharps or flats, they are called "accidentals." What happened in European music from the Baroque on was that composers "stretched" the tonal system by adding accidentals, changing keys, using dissonance, and other devices to make their music distinctive and interesting.
This ends the doodling-at-the-keyboard part of the presentation. The rest is examples.
I find the Music in Time videos with James Galway exceptionally useful, and, since I have to trade them with the music appreciation teachers, I assume that they do too.
Examples of MONODY: Gregorian Chant sung in unison or octaves.
Examples of early POLYPHONY: Leonin, Perotin, Ockeghem.
A Bach fugue. The C major from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier makes it easy to count off the four voices as they come in. Also make the point that this is definitely in a key, no ambiguity. Mention COUNTERPOINT.
Something Classical. I prefer Haydn because I like Mozart too much to use him as an example. Discussions of the Sonata Form should probably be kept to a minimum.
However much you can accommodate of the end of Beethoven's Ninth. Massive orchestra. Massive chorus. Massive soloists. Total orgy of music. Blowout. Turn to the class in their stunned silence at the end and ask, "Where do you go after that?"
Whatever Romantic you'd like, but not too much of it.
Wagner. I believe it's the Overture to Tristan that sloshes around in an ocean basin, all accidentals with no particular key to give it direction. "I can't breathe when I hear Wagner," one of the music teachers used to say. Where do you go after that?
Something atonal. Schönberg or Berg. Even the musically naive can hear that whatever was in there isn't there any more. At least Wagner's music always seemed about to fall into a key, like a marcher who is never in step or out of step, but always struggling, about to fall in. Atonal music makes a virtue of not having a key.
Comment that, although we live after the end, just as post- literate people do not have to stop reading, post-tonal composers do not have to give up tonal harmony. Each stage in the development of music only adds another color to the range available, and now tonal and atonal systems, polyphony and homophony, keys and modes, are all available and are being used. TCH 8/4/96