Mesopotamia
The first great advances in human technology were in the use
of stone, bone, ivory, and wood that occurred in the Paleolithic Age. The
development of fire and of human communication were two other fundamental
technological developments whose origins are obscured by the distant past. TheNeolithic Revolution after 10,000 BCE led to signal developments in agriculture
and early attempts to construct shelters of mud brick. The fire drill, a means
of creating fire artificially by friction, was developed perhaps initially in
ancient India. The Mesopotamians, discovering that clay is vastly more workable
than stone, developed pottery as early as 6000 BCE. The kind of pottery
produced required kilns hosting temperatures up to 1,000 degrees centigrade. In
the same area of Mesopotamia, the potter's wheel was invented by unknown
craftsmen about 4000 BCE. Mesopotamia was the region where two other
technological and engineering discoveries were made. Remains of buildings
dating back to 2100 BCE show a pitched-brick vault of sun-dried bricks
narrowing in to form a conical enclosure. The Mesopotamians were perhaps also
responsible for the first monumental architecture: the ziggurat at Ur,
dedicated to the moon god Sin, which had four stories or huge platforms built
one upon another leading to a pinnacle and a rectangular enclosure.
Writing
At some point in the distant past, early humans developed
the means by which they communicated concepts, ideas, facts, and simple
observations by spoken words. Scholars think that the development of language
was an invention of a form of technology, a tool that could be used to generate
ideas, reflect upon the past, and anticipate the future. Language was the means
to conquer isolation of time and place. Names of things-natural, human,
physical-allowed for systematization and categorization of ideas. Cuneiform
symbols made with a stylus in wet clay developed in third millennium
Mesopotamia in response to the need to record agricultural surplus. In Egypt,
pictograph and ideogram hieroglyphics similarly allowed for human
communication, an analysis of the divine, and stories of men and gods to be not
just told but also recorded. Toward the end of the second millennium BCE, the
Phoenicians of the eastern Mediterranean developed a simple twenty-two-letter
alphabet that became the basis for the Greek and Latin alphabets. The
Phoenician alphabet allowed Greek philosophers and scientists to begin to develop
their conceptions of existence and analyses of reality.
Pyramids
Some scholars believe that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia
learned from the Egyptians how to make their step pyramids. The Egyptians most
certainly were the master pyramid builders. Pyramids were constructed in
several stages using ramps on which the large limestone blocks would be dragged
up to the level of building activity. The higher the pyramid got, the wider the
ramp had to be and the greater the number of ramps needed to accommodate the
increasing structural pressure. Ramps would doubtless have been built along the
sides of the pyramid. A step pyramid structure would have formed the inside of
the outer pyramid to bolster it. Pyramids like the Great Pyramid of Cheops were
built in the summer with the rising of the Nile so that water would bring
barges close to the construction sight. Some scholars hypothesize that the
Egyptians developed a working knowledge of pi [π] in building the pyramids.
