Agriculture
The transition happens slowly from tribal to BEAS
Agriculture:
planting
Tribes 100,000 to 10,000bc,
Agriculture 10,000 to 1800 bc
It is discovered by women
Big Early Agricultural State BEAS
THE STATE
Divide the board
Draw the many dot diagram of the agricultural
state. Describe the parts
Barbarians jobs are to raid trade or herd
The barbarian big goal is to kill the King.
BARBS AND HISTORY
Raiders
either STAY or GO
They sweep away the dead wood and keep countries
strong and on their toes.
They are like vaccines. These antigens.
The barbarians that sacked Rome were called the
vandals.
The chinese put up the wall of china to stop the
barbarian mongols.
Aztecs were barbarians that decided to stay.
FUN!!!
Agriculture is boring!!!! Who
would be ag in our society? Who would
be barbarians?
What’s better? Rob a liquor store or go to
school?
Morons who spray paint. Illiterate pigs. They
learn to read and write and then crap all over the school.
Divide the board. What is better? What is
wrong with or right with each side.
Who are the barbarians, and who are the army
people, who is the king? Men
Who are the army and barbarians? Young Men
They must write an Essay
on whether they would rather be
barbarians or Agriculture.
The BEAS exists on LAND
The security of the
state is in the mind.
Draw the triangle model
Peasants
90% of the people. Mud farmers. Their minds
are very important. Why?
The way that you got a job in these barrios was by birth.
One question a farmer wouldn’t understand is “What do you
want to be when you grow up?”
How do you get to become a peasant mud
farmer? Birth.
Army
What is the one thing that a BEAS needs? Land.
Army controls the land
What kind of people are in the army? Young men.
How do you get into the army? By birth.
Artisans
We’ve discussed these artisans.
One thing we didn’t discuss is that these folks
were considered very low.
Priests
All societies have religion. Tribal until very recently.
Part of the reason that artisans were considered
so low was that they worked in this world.
Priests almost never work in any religion. They serve no function that is economic.
The priests lived in their own part of town, inhabited more spacious buildings than their fellow citizens. None of the 200 priestly quarters in Catal Huyuk showed they did any work (cooking even). They admired themselves in obsidian mirrors.
Priests control the mind
They do this by providing a weltanschauung: a worldview. These binding worldviews go back to
tribalism when all was very tight and the priest told you what to wear to stop
all the sprits from harming you and controlled nature for you.
The peasant mudfarmer is very superstitious and
will believe almost anything.
To control the mind priests use religon and
science.
Most early priesthoods have a calandar. They use this to tell the people when to
plant, when solar eclipses are going to happen.
Goddess of the serpent
snake.
On all their wanderings
their chieftain priests carried a little idol of a terrible god
“Huitzilopochtli” who drove his “chosen people” relentlessly to their violent
destiny.
Here is his story,
As
they felt, after conquering, that their god wasn’t getting his due, they set
out to destroy the other’s history.
They then elevated their god to the sun god.
Their
myth stipulated that in the begining there had lived a Goddess of the Serpent
skirt. She was the mother of 400
gods. One day while sweeping in her temple,
a ball of fine feathers dropped down upon her.
She gathered them and placed them within her bosom., close to her
abdomen. After she had finished
sweeping , she wanted to take out the ball of feathers but it was gone. She
immediately became aware that she was with child.
When her children saw that their mother
was with child, they became suspicious and attempted to kill her. The young god, whose name was
Huitzilopochtli, still in his mother’s womb, tried to calm her. right before the birth, the 400 gods
resolved to kill her.
At the moment she was attacked by them the
child was born in warrior garb and defended his mother. This was the triumph of the sun which lights
the day over the stars. He chops the
siblings heads off just as the mission of the aztecs was to conquor the people
south of them.
As
the 400 gods were sacrificed to make the sun god powerful, the real sun and
universe required energy from blood to exist.
This miraculous substance keeps humans alive and gods too.
Another
theme of their religion was each age through which humanity passed ended in
widespread destruction. To stave this
off the sun must be kept alive and well and shining. For that the Sun must be fed the only food fit for divine
consumption: human blood.
Those
who were sacrificed lived in paradise after deathy.
They launched wars called “florid wars” toget
victims. All those that died in these
wars, and all women that died in childbirth, became attendants to the god.
The aztecs quickly gained a reputation for cruelty and
treachery and were unwelcome wherever they went.
The apex of their imperial triumph came in the year 1487 when
the great temple pyramid to their god was suitably dedicated by the sacrifice
of 20,000 prisoners of war.
This temple was tended to
by an organized body of religious professionals with a specialized
functions. They belonged to the
imperial temple and had knowledge of medicine astronomy, calender writing,
history, literature and philosophy and government and miliary strategy.
They went up the stairs,
had their chests ripped open , their hearts taken out and were thrown into
flames.
They stayed in power
through one more king who maxed out at 12,000 sacrifice victims in one
ceremony.
They were hated, but
their downfall was that Moctezuma was a slave to his astrologers, who found
grave portents in the stars, in comets in whispers of birds. The empire fill to an army of 600.
Quetzalcoatl came to stand for peace and
wisdom. Firtility gods.One of the most
highly revered of their deities, especially among the commoner peeasants, was
Tonatzin “our Mother” whose temple was on the hill and became the virgin of
guadalupe. There were also moon and
corn and rain and wind etc gods.
The gods spoke through
the priests , who know their secrets; and the people held the priests in
awesome regard.
He controls the land and the mind via the army
and the priests,
This is until very recently. Ex japans sun
emporer.
He is very powerful. He can have heads chopped off and temples built.
He is very rich.
Social Elements of BEAS
THE FAMILY
Tribes:
Agriculture:
In agricultural times the social unit of survival
is the family
In agriculture the tribe is replace by the
family.
BEAS Family is rooted in Agriculture
The education was done by the
familiesThe
more warlike, the more wives.
But as agriculture became more complex and
brought larger rewards, the stronger sex took more and more of it into its own
hands.
advance from the hoe to the plough and the need
for animals put a premium upon physical strenghth.
Wife must produce a son and be pure
What changed ? Individual marriage came through the desire of the male to have cheap slaves, and to avoid bequeathing his property to other men’s children. The rise of property brings monogomy and polygamy. In farming, children were economic assets and men invested in wives in order to draqw children from them. Today the man has less and marries late if he’s smart. Not then.
The
education is done by the schools
They write 5 fill in the blank and 5 true false questions. And write one short answer question