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Origins

TO 1200 B.C.E.

What is history? That seemingly simple question hides great complexities. If history is the story of humans, what does it mean to be human? As they have in the past, philosophers, religious leaders, politicians, physicians, and others wrestle with this question every day, as do scientists using technologies that were unavailable until very recently, such as DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating. Is all of the human past “history”? Previous generations of historians would generally have answered no, that history only began when writing began and everything before that was “prehistory.” This leaves out most of the human story, however, and today historians no longer see writing as such a sharp dividing line. They explore all eras of the human past using many different types of sources, although they do still tend to pay more attention to written sources.

For most of their history, humans were foragers moving through the landscape, inventing ever more specialized tools. About 11,000 years ago, people in some places domesticated plants and animals, which many scholars describe as the most significant change in human history. They began to live in permanent villages, some of which grew into cities. They created structures of governance to control their more complex societies, along with military forces and taxation systems. Some invented writing to record taxes, inventories, and payments, and they later put writing to other uses, including the preservation of stories, traditions, and history. The first places where these new technologies and systems were introduced were the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys of southwest Asia and the Nile Valley of northeast Africa, areas whose history became linked through trade connections, military conquests, and migrations.

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