As farmers learned to raise more food than they themselves needed, other men were able to spend all their time in making useful things, which they exchanged for surplus foods. Thus specialization arose.

  Human society had long known a couple of specialists: the tribal priest or wizard and the tribal chief or war leader. As specialization increased, merchants, physicians, poets, smiths, and craftsmen of many kinds came into being. Instead of making their own houses, carts, wells, and boats, men began to buy them from workmen skilled in these arts. Soon the arts advanced to the point where even a wise and experienced workman could not know all that had to be known about his craft.

  As the chiefs evolved into kings and the wizards into high priests, they waxed rich and powerful. They acquired helpers, messengers, bodyguards, and other servants, who outranked the simple peasants. Slavery— at first a humane invention, which made it no longer necessary to slaughter one's prisoners of war—introduced still another class. Thus society became seamed and fissured into a multitude of specialized occupations.

  Wealth and experience piled up. Men undertook projects too large for a single craftsman, even with the help of his sons and apprentices. These projects called for the work of hundreds or even thousands of men, organized and directed towards a common goal. Hence arose a new class of men: the technicians or engineers, who could negotiate with a king or a priesthood for building a public work, plan the details, and direct the workmen. These men combined practical experience with knowledge of general, theoretical principles. Sometimes they were inventors as well as contractors, designers, and foremen, but all were men who could imagine something new and transform a mental picture into physical reality.

  Invention has been going on ever since our apish ancestors learned to feed a fire and flake a flint. But the conditions under which invention takes place, and the pace of invention, have changed greatly since the beginning of historic times.

  Some primitive inventions, like the manioc squeezer of the South American Indians, the Australian boomerang, and the Eskimo toggle-joint harpoon, are extremely ingenious. They point to inventive talents as keen as anything the civilized world can show.

  Nevertheless, during nearly all of the last million years, invention progressed with glacial slowness. Men chopped with ax heads held in the fist for hundreds of thousands of years before they learned to fasten handles to their axes. During the earlier part of the Pleistocene Period, it is possible that men were too stupid to be very inventive. By 100,000 years ago, however, men had probably become quite as intelligent as we are—but still technology advanced at a crawl.

  The reasons for the sloth of invention in primitive societies are not hard to understand. For one thing, primitive peoples live a hand-to-mouth existence. Most of their foods cannot be stored, so that they have no economic surplus. Therefore they can less well afford to risk experiment than more advanced peoples. If an experiment fails, they die.

  As a result, primitive societies are very conservative. Tribal customs prescribe exactly how everything shall be done, on pain of the gods' displeasure. An inventor is likely to be liquidated as a dangerous deviationist.

  Peasant farmers are almost equally conservative. Man's inventive faculties are stimulated by the breakdown of established custom that takes place in the urban environment; hence most inventions have been made by city dwellers.

  Another cause of the slowness of primitive invention is the scarcity of inventors. A hunting and food-gathering technology can support only a very small population for a given area. Thus the few hundred thousand members of the human species living at any time before the Agricultural Revolution were divided into many isolated little hunting bands.

  Such a band seldom exceeds fifty or a hundred people, counting the many but short-lived children. Because the radius of action of the hunters is limited to the distance they can walk to kill their game and carry it back to camp, an increase in numbers does not enlarge the area that can be hunted at one time. It merely causes the same area to be hunted more intensively. So, if the band grows too large, game in the neighborhood becomes scarce; and the band must migrate or starve. Eventually it will have to split up. Perhaps human factiousness—our tendency to divide up into factions on almost any pretext (racial, religious, cultural, political, economic, or sporting) and fight it out—is a survival mechanism evolved during man's hunting phase, to insure that hunting bands split up before they grew too large to feed themselves.

  Now, in any society, only a few human beings ever have original ideas or make inventions. Of these inventors, only a fraction have the courage, stubbornness, and energy to keep on bettering their inventions until they really work and to keep on promoting them until they persuade others to take them up.

  A rough idea of the percentage of inventors among modern Americans can be obtained from the statistics of the United States Patent Office. The Patent Office issues about 40,000 patents every year. So we can estimate that the mid-twentieth-century American population of 180,000,000 people produces about one patentable invention each year for every 4,500 citizens.

  Suppose, now, that all Americans were wiped out except one band of forty-five people. If this group continued to produce inventions at the same rate, it would turn out only one invention every century! This is of course a gross oversimplification. But it does indicate why a small tribal society, no matter how clever the tribesmen, cannot be expected to produce inventions rapidly.

  In actual fact, the rate of inventions among Stone Age hunters was enormously slower than among our imaginary band of forty-five Americans. For modern Americans are encouraged to invent in ways that primitive folk are not. We are used to the thought that men can improve their lot by inventing things, and that invention is a worthy act. On the contrary, primitive people, who have all they can do to keep alive and who cannot afford to support a fellow tribesman in idleness while he dreams up new ideas, regard inventors with glowering suspicion.

  Suppose now that there are two bands of forty-five Americans. If they are isolated from each other, each band will produce one invention a century, so that each progresses at the same rate as before. Their cultures will diverge somewhat, as they will hit upon the same inventions only rarely, by chance. But each group will plod along at the same old rate of one invention a century.

  However, if they meet and join forces, then all ninety persons will take advantage of the inventions produced by any one of them. The combined group will produce inventions twice a century instead of once. In other words, they will progress technologically twice as fast.

  To sum up: Progress in civilization depends upon invention, and a rapid rate of invention in turn depends upon the sizable populations that are only possible under civilization. The crucial inventions that made such progress possible—knowledge of raising domesticated, edible animals and plants—took place in Syria and Iraq about —8000.

  Once the Agricultural Revolution had taken place, much denser and more numerous populations than had ever before existed could and did live in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus. As the

  Reverend Thomas Malthus pointed out a hundred and sixty years ago, people quickly breed up to the greatest density the land will support at the current technological level. At that point the population levels off, because excess people are destroyed by starvation, pestilence, or war.

  The mere fact of having large interconnected populations, then, meant that inventions took place at a faster rate than before, and these inventions in turn made denser and more widely interconnected populations possible. Hence civilized men tended to draw farther and farther ahead of their primitive fellows.

  Moreover, the inventions on which civilization was founded tended to spread. These inventions did not spread out evenly in all directions. They spread along trade routes, and they spread to lands where these ideas could be profitably applied. They were stopped by strong natural barriers, such as deserts and oceans; and they died out where conditions made them useless.

  Thus the idea of raising cotton or dates could not spread to Europe, because the cotton tree and the date palm will not grow there. The wheel failed to spread from Iraq to neighboring Arabia, because there was no place in the wastes of the Arabian desert where wheeled vehicles would have been very useful.

  As a result of this speed-up and spread of technology, a high level of civilization had been achieved a thousand years before Christ in a broad belt stretching from the lands around the Mediterranean through the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia to China. Any new invention, originating at one end of this Main Civilized Belt, traveled in a few centuries to the other. China, partly isolated at one end of the Belt by the Mongolian deserts, the Tibetan mountains, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, was a thousand years late in getting started but soon became as civilized as the rest.

  Some of these advances in technics spread to Central Asia and Central Europe as well. Civilization had little effect on northern Europe and northern Asia, however, because the population of these lands was very thinly scattered and conditions of life were so different from those of the Belt that most inventions made in warmer lands were of little use there.

  Civilization also failed to penetrate Negro Africa, being stopped by the barrier of the Sahara Desert, the swamps of the White Nile, and the mountains of Abyssinia. This barrier isolated sub-Saharan Africa as effectively as if it had been an island. Furthermore, Old World civilization failed to leap the watery barriers to reach the Pacific Islands, Australia, or the Americas. In another millennium, however, the peoples of Central and South America began independently to develop their own civilizations.

  It would seem, then, that the main factor in determining whether any particular people took part in the technological adventure that followed the Agricultural Revolution was neither race, nor climate, nor local resources. The main factor was simply a matter of geography—where the people lived with respect to the river valleys in which this revolution took place. Those lucky enough to dwell along the cultural highways from China to Spain received the benefits of the speed-up; those who lived elsewhere did not, or did so only tardily.

  I have spoken of the spread of inventions through the Main Civilized Belt and into lands outside this area. A few decades ago, a tremendous dispute on the spread of inventions arose among anthropologists. This dispute is called the Diffusionist Controversy.

  The basis of the argument is this: If you find the same culture trait —such as a blowgun or a flood legend—in two widely separated groups of people, and the intermediate peoples lack this trait altogether, did the two groups invent it independently, or did they somehow get it from the same source?

  Certain Britons—the psychologist Rivers, the anatomist Elliot Smith, and the anthropologist W. J. Perry—developed the extreme diffusionist or dispersionist theory. According to this hypothesis, all civilization came from one (or at most a few) Old World centers. The diffusionists deemed invention so rare that the same invention could never have been made independently by different peoples. Wherever close similarity was found, even on opposite sides of the globe, they averred that the trait had been spread by trade or migration.

  Hence the diffusionists inferred, for instance, that the Mayas and Aztecs must have learned to build pyramids from the ancient Egyptians —despite the fact that, when the Mayas and Aztecs began to erect these structures, Egypt was already thousands of years old and had long since stopped building pyramids. They argued that all human civilization must have originated in one spot on the earth. Elliot Smith named Egypt, but others found their source of illumination in Brazil, the Ohio Valley, India, the Arctic, or Plato's fictional Atlantis.

  Diffusionism became a cult. This cult attracted people of the sort who seek arcane wisdom in the measurements of King Khufu's pyramid or hunt for the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel among the Irish, the Iroquois, the Japanese, or the Zulus. By insisting that the same invention could never have been made twice over, the cult appealed to people who, never having had an original idea themselves, find it impossible to imagine anybody's else having one.

  In later years this nonsense declined as sane anthropologists pointed out, over and over, that every invention contains some borrowing and every borrowing some invention. Where you draw the line between diffusion and original invention, then, is a matter of convenience.

  Furthermore, there are many well-known cases of independent invention. As we shall see, the crossbow was independently invented in the Far East and in the Mediterranean. In civilized countries, simultaneous invention occurs all the time. That is why the United States Patent Office has a special procedure called an "interference" to find out who in such a case is legally entitled to the patent.

  On the other hand, there are many cases of worldwide diffusion of an invention. Thus the bow reached the Americas from Asia, and later the tobacco pipe traveled around the world during the Age of Exploration. It is often hard to decide whether an invention traveled from one land to another or was independently created. Each case must be judged on its merits.

  A specimen or a working diagram of an invention need not make the journey. A man may hear a rumor of an invention practiced in some foreign land, and the mere idea is enough to set him to thinking and tinkering in order to develop a similar invention on his own. Several systems of writing, devised by West African natives in +XIX, furnish examples of this "stimulus diffusion" as the anthropologists call it.

  The first engineers were irrigators, architects, and military engineers. The same man was usually expected to be an expert at all three kinds of work. This was still the case thousands of years later, in the Renaissance, when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Durer were not only all-round engineers but outstanding artists as well. Specialization within the engineering profession has developed only in the last two or three centuries.

  Irrigators laid out the canal systems on which the early river-valley civilizations depended. The Babylonian gugallu or irrigation inspector was such an expert. Irrigation enabled farmers to raise so much more food that an increasing number of specialists, relieved of peasant's chores, were able to gather in cities to practice their specialities. Today's city is still essentially a place where specialists live and work, even though the farming class, once almost the whole population, has dwindled in industrial lands to a small minority.

  Soon the kings who ruled these early cities desired houses larger and more comfortable than the huts of stone, clay, and reeds wherein they had been living. So they called upon architects to build them palaces.

  Next, priests insisted that the gods would be offended if they were not housed at least as splendidly as the kings. So the architects put up temples, containing statues of the gods and other works of art.

  To protect the wealth of the gods and the kings, military engineers built walls and dug moats around cities. In the lower Euphrates Valley, where there is practically no stone, walls were made of brick. Elsewhere they were made of stone—preferably the largest stones that could be moved.

  Even before mortar was invented, men could build a good solid wall of small stones, which would stand up to the weather for years. However, all an enemy had to do to such a wall was to pry out a few stones with his spear, and the wall collapsed.

  Therefore, many early fortifiers made their walls of very large stones, trimmed to fit roughly together. The sheer weight of these stones prevented the foe from pulling them out, especially if defenders atop the wall were raining missiles upon him. Such walls are called "cyclopean" because the ancient Greeks, seeing the ruins of walls of that kind built several centuries earlier, thought they must have been made by the mythical one-eyed giants called Cyclopes.

  The hoards of metals, jewels, fine raiment, and foodstuffs in the temples and palaces also required men and means to keep track of them. Thus came about the invention of arithmetic and writing. Writing was done on the surfaces of some local material: in Egypt, on paper made of strips of papyrus reed; in Mesopotamia, on slabs of clay; in India, on paper made from palm fronds; in China, on strips of bamboo. Stone, wood and leather were also used as writing materials. In Mesopotamia, writing originated in the little clay tokens—spheres, disks, cones, and pyramids—used to keep accounts of property. Then it was found easier to draw pictures of the spheres and so forth on wet clay than to model them.

  Many ancient writings on stone and clay have survived; but those on perishable materials have disappeared, save where people were interested enough to copy and recopy them.

  As a result, the high school student of ancient history gets the curious impression that during the Golden Age of Greece, the Greeks were the only people in the world who were really alive. It seems as though the folk of all the other lands were standing around like waxen dummies in a state of suspended animation.

  Of course that is not true. During the Golden Age of Greece, all along the Main Civilized Belt from Spain to China, teeming multitudes toiled. Everywhere princes preened; politicians plotted; priests prayed; merchants haggled; warriors clashed; thinkers pondered; lovers sighed; drunkards reeled; poets declaimed; prophets ranted; sorcerers conjured; charlatans beguiled; slaves shirked; thieves filched; and people joked, quarreled, sang, wept, lusted, blundered, yearned, schemed, and carried on the business of living in quite as lively a fashion as the Greeks were doing.

  But, because the Greeks put their experiences down in writing, and because good luck has saved a small part of these writings for us, we know a lot about them. We know much, for instance, of the little up-country brawls of tiny Greek city-states. On the other hand, we know almost nothing about the score of thunderous battles by which Darius the Great and his generals defeated the many rival claimants to the Persian throne, although these battlefields may have seen quite as brilliant feats of generalship and as gallant deeds of dought as the fields of Koronea and Leuktra.

  For the same reason, we know quite a lot about Greek and Roman engineering, but very little about ancient Iranian, Indian, and Chinese engineering. In Iran, India, and China either the subject was not written about, or the writings have perished; or, where records have come down, many have never been published in European languages.

 

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