The journey I have planned is still very long; after the development of agriculture and ceramics, as the historical era drew nearer, the horizon widened and the reports coming from archaeology grew abundant. Moreover, the appearance around the 4th millennium BC of cuneiform texts in Mesopotamia and of hieroglyphs in Egypt, and the birth in the 8th century BC of alphabetic writing in Classical Greece, enormously increased the material to be set out, making it incompatible with the limited space reserved for this account. I hope, therefore, to be forgiven if, for the sake of brevity, I recount only a small part of what Homo Sapiens developed from the 5th millennium BC up to the creation of the Persian Empire, the first state authority of the East that initiated contacts and conflicts with the city-states of Classical Greece. I will speak of the material and cultural achievements and of the innovations that took place in Mesopotamia and the surrounding territories, from the post-ceramic period up to the creation of the empire of Cyrus the Great and the appearance of metallurgical techniques, with a mention of the beginning of Greece’s revival at the start of the 8th century BC.

Mesopotamia

In examining the innovations introduced by Homo Sapiens from 10,000 BC until the appearance of the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great (6th century BC) in the region watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates, one could say that a fortunate combination came about: the right men, in the right places, at the right moment for the birth of civilization; indeed, some scholars call this region the “Cradle of Civilization”. What happened elsewhere, even in a country such as Egypt, where an extraordinary civilization arose that lasted three millennia, came, according to historians, after the developments that had taken place in Mesopotamia. That I do not extend my historical and cultural analysis to what happened in Egypt is due solely to the limits of my space. In Mesopotamia, a region in the north-east of the “Fertile Crescent”, which also takes in Lebanon, Palestine and the Nile delta, extraordinary ceramic cultures appeared two millennia after the introduction of agriculture and stock-raising. In the localities of Halaf, Hassuna and Samarra, in northern Mesopotamia, there appeared the craft production of painted pottery that Olivier Nieuwenhuyse called the second Neolithic revolution. In the following millennia the region was the base for further technical developments. Through a slow and peaceful process the Ubaid culture arrived, developing between the 6th and 4th millennium BC; pottery continued to be an important activity and was perfected by the invention of the slow wheel, used to create fine objects for the decoration of the temples, the palaces of the kings and the dwellings of the people. In the 5th millennium, moreover, a new “industry” began in Mesopotamia: metallurgy. In that region, in fact, the Copper Age, the Chalcolithic, began; the craftsmen grew skilled at building furnaces to smelt copper and at producing objects by pouring the molten metal into suitable moulds.

The Ubaid culture spread southward, reaching the territory where, around 4000 BC, the Sumerians arrived, a new people who came from the mountains of the north-east according to some scholars and from the Persian Gulf according to others. They mingled, apparently without conflict, with the pre-existing Semitic populations and brought innovations fundamental to the evolution of humankind. The culture the Sumerians set in motion takes its name from their first capital, Uruk; this is the first city in the world to be planned and built. Urbanization, in fact, is the new revolution brought about by this people, one that would change the human way of life forever. The Sumerians were aware of what was happening in that moment, and their cuneiform texts give us the equation: civilization = city = kingship; the words of one of their deities let us grasp what their plan for progress was: “I wish to put an end to the confusion of my human race; for Nintu I wish to halt the debasement of my creatures; I wish the people to come out of their caves, that their cities be built; I wish the shade within them to be pleasant” (1). Nintu is the mother goddess of the Sumerians. All scholars agree that Uruk was the first great city to appear on the planet, around 3500 BC (2). It grew quickly and, around 2900 BC, its size was double that of the Athens of 500 BC and half that of imperial Rome; its ring of walls, about 9 km long, enclosed an area of 5.5 km² (1). Later, in southern Mesopotamia, a region called Sumer after the people who lived there, other cities arose that would go on to hold administrative importance and became, in turn, the seat of “kingship”: for example Kish, Lagash, Eridu, Ur and Isin.

The construction of these vast cities, brought to light by the archaeological excavations of the second half of the 1900s, is naturally linked to a marked demographic increase made possible by a growth in agricultural production. Mesopotamia, then as now, was an arid land and therefore not very productive from an agricultural point of view. The overproduction of barley and other cereals in that region in the 4th millennium BC was due to the introduction of irrigation by the Sumerians; the “engineers” of this people brought water throughout the region, drawing it from the Tigris and the Euphrates. The design and construction of irrigation canals was the second extraordinary innovation introduced by the Sumerians (3). All the lands between and around the two great rivers were furrowed by long canals that carried water to the crops; the newcomers introduced the “long-field” method, which consisted of cultivated ground laid out alongside the irrigation canals; the archaeologists tell us that these fields could reach a length of 900 m with a width of 20. The field workers could be “direct cultivators” or “dependents” of the Palace (of the king) or of the Temple (of the priests); by cultivating this land with a supply of water, a surplus of foodstuffs was achieved that could be stored or exchanged with the neighbouring peoples of the Iranian plateau. A Sumerian epic poem tells that the king of Uruk sent a messenger to king Aratta in Iran to exchange foodstuffs for gold, silver, lapis lazuli and precious stones to embellish the temples of Uruk and to build a new temple to the god Enki of Eridu. An analysis carried out by M. Liverani on the importance of priestly power in Sumerian civilization shows that the resources allotted to the deities and to the building of temples underwent a considerable increase precisely in step with urbanization and the creation of agricultural surpluses. Urbanization and the need to keep irrigation working also created the need for a supreme authority with the power to coordinate the works across the whole region: and so the deity sent down to earth “kingship”. The names and deeds of the kings of Kish, Uruk, Ur and so on were written down by the scribes of the Sumerians and can be found in the “Sumerian King List” (1). The appearance of the term scribe recalls the third great innovation introduced by the Sumerians around 3000 BC: cuneiform writing. Starting from ideograms able to certify the nature and quantities of the goods of commercial exchange, they devised a way of expressing ideas and words through signs made with a reed stylus on a tablet of raw clay. This too, according to the Sumerian texts, was a gift of the gods, and it swiftly pervaded the whole of society. Commercial exchanges, the buying and selling of land and houses, the diplomatic relations between the various kingdoms were all certified by the tablets. Naturally, the people who could write were few and came from the wealthier families, who could send their sons to the “house of the tablets”, the Sumerian school for scribes. The masters were very strict, and one pupil-scribe has told posterity of his fear when he stood before the master. Cuneiform writing became the means of communication for different languages, those of the Sumerians, the Hittites, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, and the discovery of an enormous number of written tablets scattered across space and time, together with the archaeologists’ work of translation, has allowed part of the history of these peoples to be known from 5,000 years before the present. Taking into account, however, the great number of texts still unread, it is conceivable that every month history is enriched by some new piece. The last document written in cuneiform and dated by the archaeologists is from about a decade AD, and so man used cuneiform writing for a full three millennia, even after the advent of alphabetic scripts.

Around 2300 BC the Akkadians, a Semitic people from central Mesopotamia, conquered Sumer and governed it for about a century. The Akkadians had formed an empire that ruled the whole of Mesopotamia and, according to M. Liverani (2), it was the first empire to appear on earth. The imperial capital was Akkad, whose exact position has not yet been identified; it was, in any case, north of Uruk, and its outstanding emperor was Sargon I, known as the Great. The empire was brought down by nomadic hordes of Gutians, who dominated Sumer for about a century and whom the Sumerians regarded as “barbarians”. It was Utu-hengal, king of Uruk, who freed the region from the invaders and gave rise to the first truly great Mesopotamian empire led by the Sumerians (1). Beyond Mesopotamia it extended toward Susa (Elam) in the east and toward Ebla in the west. He was succeeded by the kings of a dynasty of Ur, who remained in power until 2000 BC, when Sumerian hegemony came definitively to an end. The disappearance of Sumerian rule was due to an invasion of the Amorites, described by the Sumerians as people “who know no houses, who know no cities, the uncivilized who dwell in the mountains… and eat raw meat” (1). This people then left the field to the Assyrians and the Babylonians who, through various vicissitudes, struggling among themselves and against outside enemies, succumbing and rising again, governed the region for about fifteen centuries, until the arrival of Cyrus the Great, who founded the “universal” empire of the Fertile Crescent. The Assyrians lived in the north and had as their first capital Assur, then Nineveh, made great and resplendent by Sargon II, Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal at the end of the eighth century BC; it was destroyed for good in 609 BC by the Babylonians. This people, settled in the south, dominated Mesopotamia for about another century; some sovereigns of Babylon, Hammurabi the lawgiver, Nebuchadnezzar I and II, and the last, Nabonidus, defeated by Cyrus the Great, have ended up in our history books together with the Assyrian ones of Nineveh. The civilization built by the Sumerians, even after the fall of their empire, continued in forms that were even more grandiose, and its cultural legacy kept its vital force unchanged. The art and architecture of Babylon still fed on the earlier culture, albeit with the transformations introduced by the new rulers. The palaces that the great Assyrian sovereigns built at Nineveh shone with the reflections of the royal majesty born with the Sumerians. The Babylonians had great kings to speak of, yet when the scribes sought a figure to commemorate on their tablets, they chose Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king of Uruk, and so was born the epic cycle known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. One edition of the epic, held in the British Museum, was prepared for the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. The end of Babylonian rule was brought about by Cyrus, king of the Medes and Persians, who in 539 BC conquered Babylon for good; on the Cyrus Cylinder, which today is regarded as the first charter of human rights in the history of humankind, the king had his scribes add, to the titles inherited from his grandfather and father: “I am Cyrus, king of the universe, the great king, the mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four corners of the world”.

With the conquest of Babylon, Cyrus also took Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, and freed the Jews deported by Nebuchadnezzar II, inviting them to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. His son Cambyses II, at the start of his reign, conquered Egypt, and so the Fertile Crescent was unified within the Persian Empire, until the arrival of a new force that imposed itself in the Mediterranean: the Greece of Miltiades, of Leonidas and then of Alexander the Great, who created an empire that took in Greece, Egypt and the Asian territories of the Persians as far as the Indus.

The Age of Metals

I have not spoken so far of the age of metals in Mesopotamia, but it is historically established that by 500 BC their use had taken hold throughout the known world and had been the engine of the growth of technologies and of knowledge about materials. Like the other practical innovations, this use began in the territories of the east, but within about a millennium it spread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. I will therefore treat the subject as a whole, referring to the use of metals in all the regions known at that time. The dating used for the age of metals refers to the moment in which Homo Sapiens attained the technological ability to smelt them and thus to produce tools or weapons from the molten metal. The dates fall within the range 4000-2500 BC for copper, 3000-1200 BC for bronze, and 1200–800 BC for iron. The first date is approximately the one relating to the Middle East, and the other the one in which the technology reached the more distant shores of the Mediterranean and northern Europe.

Some metals, however, in particular gold, silver and copper, present in the earth’s crust in the form of native metal, were used by man much earlier; they are, in fact, ductile and malleable, easily reduced to wires or sheets and therefore suited to producing tools and above all ornamental objects. Gold, on account of its yellow colour, which recalls the light of the sun, was the first metal to draw man’s attention, and it very soon became the symbol of wealth, prestige and power. Compared with the other metals, it has the peculiar characteristic of being chemically extremely stable; it has very little affinity with other elements and can be attacked only with “aqua regia”, a mixture made of strong and dangerous acids (25% nitric acid and 75% hydrochloric acid), to be used only in the laboratory. Be careful, though, not to confuse aqua regia with acquaragia, the turpentine used to thin paints, because the results would be disastrous. Gold was found, and is still found, in the form of flakes, sheets or granules in the parent rocks, which as they decompose release the particles of metal, allowing water to carry them into the sands of the rivers, where the “prospectors”, with buckets, sieves and sluices, go to collect it. One place where the oldest gold objects were found, dating to roughly 4500 BC, is the necropolis of Varna, a Bulgarian city on the Black Sea. The archaeological excavations, carried out toward the end of the last century, brought to light about 300 tombs with three thousand ornamental gold objects weighing around 6 kg.

Since gold was a mark of prestige and power, many objects of this metal were found in the tombs of the kings of the Mesopotamian dynasties and in those of the Egyptian pharaohs. As regards Mesopotamia, I report the archaeologist Sir L. Woolley’s description of the discovery of the tomb of the Sumerian king of Ur Meskalamdug, 2500 BC (some will recall Ur of the Chaldees, but this people settled in the city only in the 1st millennium BC): “But it was when we removed the earth from inside the coffin itself that we had the great surprise…..Around the waist there was a broad silver belt, in an advanced state of decay, from which hung a gold dagger and a lapis lazuli whetstone fixed to a gold ring: at the front there was a compact mass of gold and lapis lazuli beads, in their hundreds; the hands held a heavy gold bowl, another gold bowl, oval this time, lay beside it, and near the elbow there was a gold lamp in the shape of a shell, while a third gold bowl stood behind the head. Resting against the right shoulder was a double-edged axe-head of a gold and silver alloy…… behind the body were heaped…a gold diadem, bracelets, loose beads, amulets, crescent-shaped earrings and spiral rings of gold wire… (1). Woolley goes on with the description of the tomb of queen Pu-abi and of those of five court officials, and all were full of gold, silver and lapis lazuli. So too all the other royal tombs of Ur.

After the discovery of these tombs, Europe and the United States realized that rich objects for their museums could come not only from the pyramids and tombs of Egypt but also from the sands of the Babylonian deserts. Indeed, the precious finds from those tombs are now to be found essentially in the museums of London and Philadelphia. We must bear in mind that the alluvial lands of Mesopotamia were poor in metals, and so gold, silver, lapis lazuli, copper and later iron were imported products, coming in particular from the Iranian plateau. Another country rich in gold was Egypt; already in antiquity it was known that the pharaohs had at their disposal huge quantities of gold, which then ended up in their tombs. These began to be plundered immediately after they were built, despite being protected and safeguarded in many ways. Egypt’s gold came from Nubia (this very name derives from an ancient Egyptian word meaning gold), and the mines remained active until the Hellenistic age, when a city arose nearby called Berenice Panchrysos, in honour of the mother of a Hellenistic king of Egypt. The city was later covered by the sand and reappeared in 1989 thanks to an Italian expedition led by Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni. In Egypt too, gold accumulated in the tombs of the pharaohs and was then dispersed among the museums of the whole world. An example of the beauty and technical precision of the gold artefacts that accompanied the pharaohs into the kingdom of the dead is given by the objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun on display in the Cairo Museum.

While the gold of Ur and of the pharaohs has come down to us unaltered, silver and copper, in the presence of atmospheric agents, undergo over time inevitable chemical reactions, as anyone who keeps copper and silver objects in the kitchen and the sitting room knows well; compared with gold, these metals have, in fact, a greater chemical reactivity toward oxygen and sulphur compounds.

The quantity of native copper and silver that the peoples of the 5th millennium BC managed to find and work was less than they needed. So, already at that time, Homo Sapiens had to learn to procure the material he required; he invented an extractive metallurgy, digging mines, and obtained the metal from its ores by roasting them in fire. Copper in particular soon became scarce, because it became the basis for producing bronze, a very hard and resistant alloy that for about two millennia was widely used in the East, in Egypt and in Europe. Copper-bearing minerals have striking colourings and readily drew the attention of man, who obtained the metal by fire. They used chalcopyrite (copper iron sulphide, brass yellow), the most widespread copper ore in the earth’s crust; cuprite (copper oxide, red) and malachite (copper carbonate, green). In the Middle East the copper ores came for the most part from the Iranian plateau. Silver too was soon extracted from mines and traded in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean. They began to obtain silver from mixed lead and silver ores, developing a treatment for separating the two metals; the ores were galena and cerussite, respectively a sulphide and a carbonate of lead containing fair quantities of silver. The main sources of silver were Anatolia, northern Greece and Spain.

In Mesopotamia the technology for smelting copper arrived with the beginning of the Chalcolithic period, around the 5th millennium BC. Previously this metal was worked by hammering and generally used to produce ornamental objects. Copper is malleable, though fairly hard, little damaged by corrosion and highly recyclable; because of these characteristics and its low melting temperature (1085°C), it was the first to be widely employed to produce tools for daily life and weapons of offence and defence. By chance, or perhaps through empirical experiments, man, mixing copper with tin (melting temperature 232°C), managed to obtain bronze, an alloy much harder and more resistant than the metals he started from. We can say that around 3000 BC there began the chemistry experiments of Homo Sapiens. The characteristics of bronze, in fact, depend on the relative percentages of the two components, and archaeological excavations have brought to light alloys with different percentages of tin, as well as alloys of copper with different metals such as lead, zinc and phosphorus. The copper alloy with the best qualities of hardness and resistance is the one made of 90% copper and 10% tin, and it was used until the end of the 2nd millennium. This alloy melts at a temperature lower than that of copper (around 1000 °C), a characteristic that eases casting and working. The tin to be mixed with the copper came in small quantities from present-day Afghanistan, while most of it was imported from Spain or central Europe.

As happened with the other innovations introduced in Mesopotamia, the working of copper too spread westward fairly quickly. In the 5th-4th millennium we find it in the Balkans, and about a millennium later it spread throughout the Mediterranean. Bronze reached Italy and Europe between 2000 and 1200 BC.

The last metallurgical technology discovered by man was that of iron; the first samples of this metal came from iron meteorites, but around 1200 BC the Hittites, a people of central Anatolia, developed furnaces that could reach the melting temperature of iron, 1,538 °C. As we see in figure 5, man discovered that to raise the temperature of the burning coals one had to blow air onto them forcefully, and so the furnaces, in particular those for iron, were connected to large bellows and were placed at sites where a strong wind usually blew.

Around 800 BC the metallurgy of iron and the trade of the blacksmith reached Italy (thanks to the Etruscans) and the Mediterranean areas of Europe, while in the northern regions they arrived some centuries later.

The Birth of the Culture of Classical Greece

Greece in the archaic age, at the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, entered a dark period (a dark age) that lasted roughly from the 12th to the 8th century BC. In this period the Greeks seemed to have lost the ability to write. Indeed, during Mycenaean rule they used a script known as Linear B, which was exported to Crete as well after its conquest, but no written text attributable to the time of the “dark age” has been found by the archaeologists. The light at the end of the tunnel reappeared at the start of the 8th century, when the Greeks, adapting an alphabet learned from the Phoenicians, with whom they kept up intense commercial relations, reintroduced writing. There then appeared texts of epic poems, in the new script, that recalled the earlier Mycenaean age. According to Prof. Alfred Heubeck, a German philologist, it is now established that such poems first arose in oral form and were only later fixed in writing for the use of the bards who sang at the symposia and at the religious ceremonies. Around 750 BC there appeared, in particular, two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which cast all the others into oblivion and which the Greeks attributed to a blind poet named Homer. They thought that civilization had begun with these poems, which were the first monuments of Greek alphabetic writing; two gems that, after 2,770 years, are still read, studied and used for teaching in schools throughout the world. Some decades later there appeared the works of Hesiod, which attested to a renewed interest of the Greeks in agriculture. In this period, precisely because of an increase in agricultural production, a notable demographic growth was recorded in Greece, which gave rise to the birth of the “city-states”, dated, by convention, to the year of the first Olympiad: 776 BC. These cities (poleis) were self-governed, with rules that differed from city to city, but in general with elected magistrates, a council of elders and an assembly of the citizens in which the problems of the community were discussed. When the cities became overpopulated, groups of young men were organized who emigrated with no possibility of return and founded colonies in the surrounding territories, in particular on the coasts of Asia Minor, in southern Italy and on the neighbouring islands. The colonies of Asia created the preconditions for the wars with the Persian Empire which, as we have seen, in the 6th century extended from the Iranian plateau to Egypt, as far as the borders with Greece. Twice the Persians trod Greek soil, twice they returned home defeated, and the end of the dispute with the Greeks was very different from what they had foreseen. Indeed, Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, pupil of Aristotle, appointed head of the “Hellenic League” by the Greek poleis to fight Persia, entered Asia Minor in 334 BC and in only twelve years conquered the whole Persian Empire. Persia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt began to speak Greek. The Hellenistic kingdoms created by Alexander’s generals after his death and the break-up of his empire nearly all survived until the Roman conquest.

But let us now return to the Greece of the poleis, to the civic and cultural rebirth of the Greek people that lasted roughly from the 8th century BC to Alexander the Great and, in other forms, beyond as well. In that period there arose so great a number of poets, artists, tragedians, historians, philosophers, naturalists, mathematicians, astronomers, biologists, physicians and politicians that it is unthinkable to write of them all and to speak of their works within this account. I will therefore try, staying faithful to the title of my work, to follow the road that some philosophers took in the attempt to understand matter, the world, the universe, their becoming and the first principle of being, of all existing things (which in Greek sounds like “ta onta”). I will speak only of a few great Greek scientists, at the risk of errors and omissions. I will thus leave the completion of the Greek history of those centuries to the initiative of those interested; they may turn to good books or to modern technologies such as the Internet. At the beginning of the scientific development that seeks to explain the origin of matter we find Thales of Miletus, born around 640 BC, remembered by Plato as one of the seven sages of the archaic age. Thales was a philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, and his city lay at the end of a caravan route that linked it to Mesopotamia. Thales, his disciples and some other philosophers put forward a “monist” or “reductionist” philosophy to explain the origin of the world; they held, in fact, that all things had a single, unchanging “first principle”: for Thales it was water, for Anaximenes air, for Anaximander the apeiron, an indefinite and indefinable substance, for Heraclitus fire, and for Parmenides it was Being, infinite, invisible, ungenerated and eternal. The road forked in the 5th century with the first pluralist philosopher, Empedocles, for whom the first principles of things were four: earth, water, air and fire. Then came Anaxagoras who, in contrast to the monists, held that the first principles were indefinite in number. And finally came the intuition that history proved the best, that of Leucippus and Democritus, who gave rise to atomism, a “mechanistic corpuscular theory” according to which atoms, solid and impenetrable and indivisible, gave rise, by aggregating, to all existing things. The story that will be traced in the next and final part of this work will start from Thales, will pass through monism and pluralism, will speak of the atomism of Leucippus, of Democritus, of Epicurus, of Lucretius, and will arrive, in about 22 centuries, at Mendeleev’s periodic system, so dear to Primo Levi.

Bibliography

• Giovanni Pettinato, I Sumeri, Giunti Ed., 2017.
• Mario Liverani, Uruk, la prima città, Laterza Ed., 2017.
• Treccani, Vicino Oriente Antico. Agricoltura ed irrigazione. Mario Liverani. Storia della scienza (2001).

Gian Gaetano Aloisi was full professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Perugia. He is the author of numerous papers in international scientific journals. Much of his work sets out research concerning chemical reactions induced by the absorption of light. He also took an interest in the photo-induced reactivity of antimalarial drugs. For example: “DNA cleavage induced by photoexcited antimalarial drugs”, published in Photochemistry and Photobiology, 83, 664, 2007. Having retired in 2008, he then devoted himself to the study of ancient history and prehistory.