CULTURAL CHANGE

In Mindanao

John Hansel

Page

1 Beginning of Culture
30 Early Child Development
32 The Child’s Conception of the World
37 Personality Development
39 Thinking, Fast and Slow
43 Early Philippine History
44 The Bagobos
46 History of the Arabs
99 Testament as History
156 History of Philosophy
201 Social and Political Development
213 Columbus, Magellan, Legazpi
215 19th Century Philippines
216 Three Ilustrados
223 Impact of Foreign Trade upon Local Societies
244 Appendix
John Hansel 2015
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253 pages
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CULTURAL CHANGE
In Mindanao

John Hansel
Microsoft Word 2003
1,538 KB
253 pages
johnhansel41@yahoo.com

CULTURAL CHANGE
 In Mindanao

From Perspectives of:

Early Childhood Development

Personal Psychological Development
Cultural Development Worldwide
Social and Political Development Worldwide
History of the Arabs
Testament as History
History of Philosophy
Early Philippine History
19th and 20th Century History in Philippines

The various sections of this book were written by individuals who

dedicated their lives to scientific thinking and comprehensive historical
understanding of designated time periods and locations.

John Hansel

CULTURAL CHANGE In Mindanao

I PREFACE

Contents

1 Beginning of Culture
30 Early Child Development
32 The Child’s Conception of the World
37 Personality Development
39 Thinking, Fast and Slow
43 Early Philippine History
44 The Bagobos
46 History of the Arabs
99 Testament as History
156 History of Philosophy
201 Social and Political Development
213 Columbus, Magellan, Legazpi
215 19th Century Philippines
216 Three Ilustrados
Joaquin Pardo de Tavera (1829-84)
Jose Rizal (1861-96)
Isabelo de los Reyes (1864-1938)
223 Impact of Foreign Trade upon Local Societies
Tagalog Region
Central Luzon Plain, Nueva Ecija
Abaca in Bicol
Cebu
Bukidnon Plateau
Magindanao
The Sulu Sultanate
243 Appendix
245 Intercultural Dialog

John Hansel 2015

PREFACE

By the 16th century the people of today’s Philippines still lived primarily as shifting cultivators,
hunters and fishers. They were illiterate and had pagan and animistic beliefs. Among the
common people the newer religions of Islam and Christianity were layered on previous beliefs
and practices.
They lived in diverse kinship groups with little contact with each other even within islands, each
clan formed an independent community under a datu.
In the 15th century Islam was introduced in Mindanao and Sulu.
Miguel Legazpi came from Mexico to Cebu in 1565 and in 1571 he founded the Spanish city of
Manila. The Spanish held a trade monopoly with their galleon trade between Manila and
Acapulco, Mexico until 1815. They basically traded luxury goods the Chinese brought to Manila
for silver from Spanish silver mines in Mexico and South America.
Manila was the center of political authority and the Roman Catholic religious orders with their
churches, hospitals and schools. Spain had nominal authority over Luzon and the Visayan islands
and shorelines of Mindanao.
Agricultural technology changed slowly from shifting cultivation to intensive sedentary farming
in the later 18th century; when the absolute ownership of land was also introduced.
When Spain lost its colonies in Mexico and South America (with the silver mines) the galleon
trade also stopped in 1815. Then Manila became open to foreign merchants without restrictions.
Sugar, abaca, coffee… were grown for export to the world, and the demand became even
stronger after the Suez Canal opening in 1869. The economy became monetized. A new class of
commercial agriculturists, traders, financiers, expansion of government services, and newspapers
arose. Roads, bridges, railroads, electric lights, shipping facilities, steam boats, shopping centers,
schools and new cities were built. New trades and skills were needed and people moved to places
of greater opportunities. More land was cleared for the growing population and the expanded
agricultural production demands. By 1880 wealthy people could go to Europe for further study,
also raising convictions of nationalism and liberal reforms.
In 1896 Jose Rizal was executed and the Revolution for independence began. The Americans
came into Manila in August 1898 and the Civil government was established in July 1901. The
high priority of public education led to a literacy rate of 50% by the 1930s. The Commonwealth
government took over in November 1935.
From the beginning of the 20th century Mindanao was recognized as the “Land of Promise” with
large forests and grasslands and few people. The migration from the more densly populated
northern islands increased the population of Mindanao 27 times between 1903 and 2000.
The native population of Mindanao still lived according to the old ways: small independent
communities, land owned communally, subsistence shifting cultivation, local trading by barter,
mainly illiterate people government by local chiefs.
When the Commonwealth government came to Mindanao also, the natives felt overpowered, and
overcrowded by the migrants and their descendants.
This is very similar to other parts of the world: the population is increasing; land and living
spaces are getting more crowded; loss of resources and fertile land; people of different cultures
and ideologies now moving into closer proximity of each other; expectations of modern life
conveniences.

John Hansel 2015

CULTURAL CHANGE In Mindanao

CULTURE: How a community copes with and solves basic practical problems.
Includes values (beliefs, morals, customs), laws, knowledge, art and other
capabilities and habits by members of society.

THE BEGINNING OF CULTURE

Our world started about 4.5 billion years ago. Fossils from about 3.5 billion years ago indicate
one cell organisms with genes that could transmit instructions to survive and reproduce; they
were ancestors of today’s bacteria. Around 1 billion years ago the first multicellular organisms
appeared, simple creatures like today’s sponges; and 0.5 billion years after, the first animals with
arms and legs would rise up out of the sea and walk on land. These land animals would in turn
evolve for yet another 0.5 billion years before the evolutionary lineage called the “hominins”
came on the scene, 7 million years ago. Within this line evolved the “humanoid” 160 – 200
thousand years ago, when culture first appeared on earth; the ability to learn from one another, to
copy, to imitate, use languages, develop beliefs, songs, art and technology. Culture behaved like
genes, capable of transmitting to others and to reproduce. These elements of culture could jump
directly from one mind to another, shortcutting the normal genetic routes of transmission. This
shared culture allowed the humans to access a vast store of information, technologies, wisdom
and good luck. The other organisms on earth could only exchange genes among individuals and
even among different species, granting them access to vast stores of genetic technology; sharing
great inventiveness and versatility, occupying nearly every environment on earth.
Our cultural inheritance altered our course of evolution and our world forever. Knowledge could
accumulate as good ideas were retained, combined, and improved upon; and others were
discarded. Our cultures outstripped our genes in providing solutions to the problems of our
existence. They provide the instructions for what to eat, how to live, the gods we believe in, the
tools we make and use, the language we speak, the people we cooperate with and marry, and
whom we may fight or even kill in war. We are newcomers in the world, having only ventured
out of Africa sometime in the last 60,000 to 70,000 years. Our genes are extraordinary, similar
with all people around the world indicating that we share a recent common ancestry. Genetic
studies reveal that our ancestors may have dwindled to as few as 10,000 individuals 80,000 years
ago. Then our numbers began to grow and human culture began to flourish as our species
reached a point of no return. Our minds were now firmly in executive control of our fates, and
were showing the adaptability and producing the artifacts and culture that would propel us out of
Africa, and then around the world – specialized stone tools, spear points, carved fish hooks,
clothes, shaped blades and instruments; also sculpted figures, ceremonial burials, musical
instruments and cave art.
The world is now remarkably different; almost everything around us in our bustling everyday
lives is owed to the new evolutionary world in which ideas could accumulate on top of ideas,
possibly by someone distant to our time and place; building soaring cathedrals and motor
transports. In contrast to our close genetic relatives the chimpanzees sit in the forest as they have
for millions of years cracking the same old nuts with the same old stones. We are continually
learning new sets of instructions form our individual cultures. At birth we start out with a
cultural blank slate, a compliant mind, ready to embrace the culture we happened to be born into:

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on the Arctic ice, the Russian steppes, sailing across Polynesia, the deserts of Arabia, the prairies
of North America or fishing along the rich tropical coasts of Papua New Guinea. We have no
choice to allowing our culture to occupy our minds, writing its language and story into our
consciousness. We are primed to learn languages, to comprehend shapes and movement, to
expect causation, to manipulate numerical quantities, to be afraid of heights, to mimic others, and
to favor our relatives.
But we are not primed to acquire any particular culture. The one we inherit is arbitrary, an
accident of birth, yet we show a surprising and sometimes alarming devotion to it. People will
risk their health and well-being, even their lives for their culture. They will treat others well or
badly merely as an accident of their cultural inheritance. What we inherit from our families we
will pass on to our children: our religious beliefs, a particular language and also hold certain
beliefs about other people in the rest of the world. Human culture has been a development of
revolutionary social genetic effect, the most potent trait in the world for converting new lands
and resources into more humans. Culture became our species’ strategy for survival, a biological
strategy to trump all the wonderful wings and feathers, shells, claws, poisons, acts of camouflage
or deception, odors, feats of running speed, long necks or beaks, powerful jaws, and spectacular
colors and displays of the rest of the animal kingdom. We seem to have followed our ancient
genetic instinct for survival, and culture has been obliging.
Evolutionary biology teaches that most animals adapted to areas of physical environment on
earth, be it in trees, water or air. But for the last 160,000 to 200,000 years, humans have roamed
all over the earth conquering its many environments, traveling by inventive and cooperative
tribal societies that are their cultures. So instead of adapting to the demands of any one
environment, our genes have evolved to use the new social environment of human society to
further their survival and reproduction, programmed our minds and bodies for culture. Our
possession of culture is responsible for our art, music, and religion, our unmatched acts of
charity, empathy, cooperation, our sense of justice, fairness, altruism, and even self-sacrifice; but
also for an undeniable self-interest, our tendency to favor people from our own ethnic or racial
groups, weariness of strangers, xenophobia, and predilection to war. We alone as a species have
language, we can show kindness to strangers and even to animals, but can also be callous and
murderous; and apply our morality capriciously to suit our needs. Culture equips us with envy,
jealousy, spite, indignation and contempt, but also with friendship, forgiveness and affection; and
a conscience that is divided between reason and passion.
There have also been adaptations in people in response to their geographic environments since
they came out of Africa: people living above 4,000 m in the high Tibetan plateau acquired
physiological adaptation to cope with reduced oxygen at these altitudes, the Dinka tribespeople
of Sudan are tall and slim giving them large surface area for shedding heat, while the Inuit
people of northern North America are shorter, of stocky build, have reduced surface area to
conserve heat.
Many people believe that natural selection consigns us to having a selfish agenda, one in which
our genes single-mindedly promote their existence. The history of biological evolution teaches
us that most can be achieved for its genes by building cooperation that avoids debilitating
conflict or a solitary existence.
We have a tendency to form into small “tribal” societies, a group of people organized around an
identity. Most people have a sense of which group they belong to, and just as importantly who
doesn’t. These tribal groups can be called “cultural survival vehicles”, “vehicles” described as
structures that carry “replicators”. A vehicle is our individual body; a replicator can make copies

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of itself, such as a gene. The body is a temporary structure built by its genes to promote their
survival and reproduction. The body is not replicated in the offspring; rather the genes are, over
and over again.
The “cultural survival vehicle” is the form of our societies, tribes or cultures that go along with
our physical bodies. Our cultural body protects us not with muscles and skin, but with
knowledge and technologies, languages, cooperation and shared identities. This vehicle is
moving and changing, and whose members may come and go. It is like the ants’ nest or a herd of
wildebeests that are also vehicles to promote the survival and reproduction of their membership.
There is a fundamental difference between our cultures as survival vehicles and our physical
bodies. Our genes are in complete agreement most of the time to seamlessly build our bodies, not
going off in different directions. Our societal vehicles are not so, each of us is free to reproduce
on our own. The essential balancing act of human society will normally work best when
everybody pulls together, but at any given moment what is best for you may not be best for the
group. Our psychology is the outcome of this balancing act.
Our cultural identity is much like a trait we might have acquired from genes – surprisingly stable
and robust to outside influence, likely to be passed on to our children, and to theirs. Instincts are
programmed responses that protect us from dangerous influences, like our genetic immune
system. Culture is the software collection of ideas, routines, ritual, and behaviors written in our
brain – the most successful ways to make more people we rely on, the accumulated knowledge
of our ancestors to survive and prosper. Humans have a theory of mind, they are copying and
understand the reason and purpose – they can choose among alternatives and even improve on
them.
The Rise of Genus Homo (human)
Homo habilis (handy), fossils of 2.25 million years ago were found in Central–East
Africa, with small brain and short legs
Homo erectus, 800,000 years ago, fully upright, 5.5 to 6 feet tall, found with chipped
stone hand axes
Homo ergaster, 800,000 years ago, remained in Africa
Homo antecessor
Homo heidelbergensis, 500,000 years ago
Homo denisovan, still living 30,000 years ago.
Neanderthals, protruding brow, robust, muscular, large brain.
300,000 years ago lived in Europe, Middle East, Southern Siberia; true social
learning, sewing, weaving, bow and arrow, died out 28,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens (wise man), fully modern human; slender, less robust, high forehead;
80,000 years ago in Africa; jewelry, small stone tools, spear throwers,
?bows and nets? Signs of symbolic thinking, art and adornments.
60,000 years ago some left Africa -> Indonesia -> Papua New Guinea ->
Australia 45,000 years ago.
Others -> Middle East -> Eurasia -> Europe 45,000 years ago.
Displaced the Neanderthals ?some inbreeding?
18,000 years ago Siberian people ->north +east -> Alaska -> spanned North
America, Central America, South America 15,000 years ago.
6,000 years ago Siberian people -> China +Taiwan ->Philippines -> sailed east,
vast Pacific (with star maps) ->South America, Chile.
Occupation of world complete!

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Cumulative Adaptation and Cultural Survival Vehicles
Our cultural survival vehicles were built not from coalitions of genes but from coalitions of ideas
tied together by cultural evolution. This means that for the first time a single species was able to
spread out and occupy every corner of the world. Where all those species that had gone before us
were confined to the particular genetic corner their genes adapted them to, humans had acquired
the ability to transform the environment to suit them, by making shelters, or clothing and
working out how to exploit its resources.
Genetic evolution brings together the sets of genes that produce a successful biological species or
vehicle for a particular environment; cultural evolution brings together the sets of ideas,
technologies, dispositions, beliefs and skills that over the millennia have produced successful
societies, good at competing with others like them, and well adapted culturally to their particular
locale.
 Cultures Carve up the Landscape – Linguistically
We have the tendency to keep to ourselves in our cultural survival vehicles and speak 7,000
mutually unintelligible languages. The inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, an island of 312,000
square miles (slightly larger than the state of Texas), speak over 800 different languages. On the
tiny Polynesian island of Gaua, northwest of Australia, area of 132 square miles, five languages
are spoken.
Language diversity fosters group identity. People prefer their “natural” language. This is already
noticeable with 5 to 6 months old infants, they prefer to look at people whom they have heard
speaking their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language
speakers, at preschool age they accept toys from native–language speakers, at preschool age they
select native–language speakers as friends. This serves as a foundation for later–developing
preferences and conflicts among social groups.
Neighboring communities also distinguish themselves in customs, beliefs, art, dance, weapons,
costumes, singing, music and architecture.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans in North America there were over 500 distinct Native American
languages spoken in the present territory of Canada and the United States. It seems that when
people are closely packed together, greater number of different societies form. By comparison in
the northern regions of Northern America in spare landscapes where people need to move over
large areas to eke out a living; as people continually trade, marry and talk to each other it tends to
blend cultures and languages. Human culture groups have historically positioned the landscapes
among themselves almost as if they were separate biological species.
Cultures Restrict the Flow of Genes
Even in our modern world with highways, people often differ culturally and linguistically, such
as the Shires of England and the Swiss Cantons. In Manhattan of New York City there is Little
Italy and Chinatown with the third- or fourth–generation descendants speaking the original
languages of the immigrants. In Europe 33 genetic markers have been identified over boundaries
of sharp differences, many of them are not divided by physical or political barriers. All over the
world we are in the habit of maintaining our differences.
Cultures Slow the Flow of Information from “Outside”
The Normans from France conquered England in 1066 and ruled England for about 300 years.
French was the official language at the English court, leading to the use of introduced words like
“parliament”, “legislature”, “executive”, “judicial” and “bureaucracy”. But the English language,
like its people, stubbornly refused to be overrun. About half of its words derive from Romance
and Latinate languages, including French; the other half shows off its Germanic ancestry. They

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have the freedom and use a mixed vocabulary when they sit down to dine and use words of
French or German origin: “beef” or “cow”, “pork” or “swine”, “mutton” or “sheep”. At present
France is very sensitive to imported English and American words and customs into their
language and culture, and have a government ministry for slowing and banning these incursions.
The British also are alert and often piqued by the perceived Americanism invading their
language.
Isolation and small populations can even lead societies to lose traits directly related to survival
and prosperity. When 18th century European explorers came to Australia and Tasmania, they
found many technologies originally taken form Australia lost in Tasmania. Humans reached
Tasmania from Australia 34,000 years ago, but were completely separated by the time sea levels
began to rise around 24,000 years ago. The explorers found that the Tasmanians had no bone
tools, no fish hooks, no shafted tools or spears. They even lost their appetite for fish. Without
bone tools they could not sew clothes, instead they smeared their bodies with marine mammal
body fat to preserve their own body heat.
Demography and the “Rule of Two”
Our species uses social learning to acquire the skills to move into most of the environments on
the planet; and the psychological disposition to protect and keep intact our cultural survival
vehicles. For our species to occupy the entire globe, our population would have to be expanding.
In combining human culture and social learning we have repeatedly produced an excess of
people, to occupy the entire world. We have broken the hallowed rule of demography, the “rule
of two”, over long periods of time. The rule gets its name from the long history of plant and
animal species; the females have left on the average, just two offsprings that will survive long
enough to do the same. This holds true for bacteria, rats, elephants and even oak trees.
Occasionally a species will break the rule of two for short periods of time. If this happens two
things would follow. One is that at some point it would reach its “carrying capacity” and the
excess of the individuals would die of starvation. The other is that this species’ increased
numbers would lead to increased number of predators. This would reduce the average number of
surviving offsprings back to two. This balance of nature was working for billions of years. That
is until a species came along that discovered how to break this rule for over long periods of time.
That species is human beings and for the last 80,000 years or so we have covered the planet with
our excess offsprings. Our discovery for breaking the rule of two was our cultural survival
vehicles; a force that deployed such technologies as fire, clothes, and shelters to adapt to
different environments, and then continued with innovations that reset the world’s carrying
capacity to hold more people in an area. Plagues, wars, and droughts, and the occasional collapse
of civilization have at times slowed our march, but not stopped it. Population growth in areas
would lead to intense competition with other human groups doing the same with their cultural
survival vehicles throughout our history, and just as is true of our genes, those who have
survived acquired traits to promote their descendants’ survival.
Sociability and the Cultural Survival Vehicle
Our acquisition of social learning led to a social and evolutionary crisis, leading to the
foundation of our psychology and social behavior. The capacity for social learning began about
200,000 years ago and confronted the fledgling species for managing the conflicts of interest that
social learning would bring. One was to fragment into small family groups so that the benefits of
knowledge would flow only to one’s relatives, and live like Neanderthals when our species first
entered Europe.
The other option was for the species to acquire systems of cooperation that would make our

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knowledge available to other members of our tribe or society, even not closely related to us, to
work out the rules for sharing goods and ideas cooperatively. This option would lead to vastly
accumulated wisdom and talent available, more than any one individual or family they could
ever produce. This option developed our cultural survival vehicles that traveled around the world
with us. The hallmark of modern human tribal society was that they were not limited to relatives;
this meant that evolution had to confront the problem of having a potentially unruly mob of
individuals on its hands, each looking out for their own well-being. Once people started living
together in groups, natural selection would favor a raft of “selfish” psychological plays for taking
advantage of others’ good nature, there would be continual conflict between what was best for
you and what was best for your group. To prevent the collapse of our societies, we had to acquire
the social and psychological systems that could overcome and tame selfish instincts born of
million of years of evolution by natural selection to cheat, exploit, dupe, and even murder one’s
rivals. The solution was simple in principle but profound, to align their interest with that of their
group. To shift from pure self-interest to cooperation even with non-relatives, so the apparent
altruism is really a case of enlightened self-interest. By unlocking the psychological means to
pool our efforts and skills, would help in the survival of their group against other groups
competing for the same territories. That sense is the emotion natural selection has kindled in us
to behave as a group of shared purpose to engage in costly altruistic acts that rival those of social
insects – ants, bees, wasps and termites. Like the fabled Japanese World War II Kamikaze pilots
or the warriors of World War I streaming out of the trenches “over the top” to die in battle, no
other animal does that. Now we see a troubling feature of this disposition to treat people from
other societies, sometimes from even our own, crudely and violently. Evolutionary biology has
explained how entities that would usually compete can be tamed or domesticated to form
alliances that serve both. Living longer would give this joint vehicle more chance to replicate
itself. We can then give up some of our freedom and to cooperate with a former competitor: our
joint enterprise can work, if the payoffs more than offset the freedom to act alone. The fates
become linked, and this linkage can tame the instincts to compete with or exploit each other.
Once fates are linked, replicators acquire new incentives to become stronger because they have
less reason for betrayal. They can then specialize in ways that promote partnership even more.
Just like the collections of individual cells come together in the big multicellular bodies such as
our own that are very good at surviving, often living for many years. These large bodies were
partnerships of billions of cells, all clones of each other and specialized into different roles as
hearts or muscles or kidneys, livers or brains. These large cooperative vehicles were a success,
on their own nearly all the individual cells would have died.
Tribal Minds
For at least the last 160,000 to 200,000 years humans have resided in small, close-knit cultural
societies that developed strong identities, often around their common language, and restricted the
flow of people, ideas and technology. They created conditions that allowed altruists and
surrounded themselves with other altruists. Then something of a mutual aid society arose, where
everyone was better off than had they tried to go it alone. We have the emotions that encourage
us to treat others in our societies as if they were “honorary relatives”. This is a special and
limited form of nepotism where we target our aid toward others maybe not even related to us
save that they are members of the same cultural group. We call these emotions “nationalism” or
“patriotism” or when directed against us from other groups “jingoism”, “bigotry” or “prejudice”.
These feelings are spontaneously emotional in nature, and very easy to teach to the young. The
principle of attracting benefits is still fulfilled in parent-offspring relationship because most of

6
us have received similar help from our own parents; the familial mutual aid society is a
generational one.
War, Parochialism and Moralistic Aggression
Having a conscience keeps us from straying into selfish territory; feeling guilt puts a brake on
our appetites; empathy, by getting us to feel what others feel, helps us to be helpful to them, and
also reduces any tendency to harm others because we can feel their pain; shame motivates us to
behave right; and disposition to be kind and generous builds reputations and attracts allies. There
are also situations in our everyday lives in which humans can act with such explosive violence
toward others to raise the question if it is ever safe to trust people; these are also related to
protecting our societies.
One is when trust unravels between two tribal or ethnic groups and uncontrolled slaughter breaks
out. In a period of one hundred days in 1994, Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda massacred around
800,000 Tutsi tribal people in a spasm of violence. There were no weapons of mass destruction,
mostly just with clubs and machetes. Some of the people the Hutus killed were other Hutus, their
crime was to be committed to peace with the Tutsis. Our societies reserve their greatest moral
sanctions against murder, but it can earn someone the society’s highest honor, if directed at the
right kind of person in war.
Our tendency toward “parochialism”, a disposition to be hostile toward people outside our group,
is part of leaving Africa around 60,000 years ago. Not only were the premodern populations of
“Homo erectus” and the Neanderthals replaced, and soon we encountered other modern human
populations like themselves, looking to occupy the same territories. Holding parochial or hostile
views toward outsiders makes it easier to kill them in battle.
“Moralistic aggression” is rebuking people deviating from norms, punishing them for not sharing
our altruistic dispositions that are the basis for cooperation. It means our society is worthy of our
protection, even with violence against members of our own group.
Hutus are agriculturalists or farmers and Tutsis are pastoralists who herd cows. Both need land,
and with growing populations competition became desperate. So it seems humans tend to fill up
their environments to their carrying capacities over and over again.
Anthropologists have found that rates of homicide are higher among hunter–gatherers than in
industrialized democracies. Also among roving hunter–gatherer bands where most days everyone
is hungry, aggression and neglect is practiced toward unproductive members of society such as
orphans, diseased, frail and just old people.
Target of our Altruistic Disposition
The history of our species has been the competition of groups for the same territories, resources,
and potential mates; where we have also been programmed for group thinking. This emotion is
expressed in acts for the good of the group, such as in the sports field and the battle front. When
the choice is to fight or be killed, fighting with coordinated gusto is often the best option for
staying alive and the spoils of victory can be great. Cooperative altruism ranges from where we
unite in acts of kindness and self–sacrifice to our xenophobia, parochialism and predilections to
war.
Domestication of our Talents
In just a few thousand years humans created breeds of dogs ranging from Chihuahuas to Great
Danes. They are all the same species; they can all interbreed, if with care in some cases – and the
differences among the breeds are genetic. There are genes for longer legs, shorter ears, fluffier
fur, or wider snouts. Others are for particular behaviors, intellectual abilities, and temperament.
Some have been bred for special tasks such as for: herding animals, hunting, guarding,

7
companions to children and adults, sled dogs for physical stamina. These genetic varieties have
been selected for and maintained by humans.
From the standpoint of our own genes, human culture also constitutes social environments that
present many different ways to solve the problems of surviving and prospering. Only humans
have broad choices that favor various outcomes because of the opportunities that culture
provides. Opportunities for task sharing and specializing were very limited in our hunter–
gatherer past; including foodstuffs and local technologies, and some required specialized skills to
produce. By about 10,000 years ago, humans invented agriculture and animal domestication.
These practices can produce surpluses for food, and some people were freed from having to hunt
and forage. Almost immediately after - by 7,000 to 8,000 years BC – first stirrings of “urban”
life arose at towns built at places like Jericho, in now modern-day Israel, and Cata Huyuk in
Turkey, with populations of several thousand people. The settlements at these sites supported
people who specialized at pottery making, metal working, and jewelry, and a merchant class
arose. There was even enough surplus food to support armies and religious and political elite. By
the Middle Ages the pace of cultural change had produced a much more specialized range of
professions and tradesmen. In 1238 the Italian city of Siena had seventeen trade associations
called “contrade” such as: notaries, silk workers, canners, cobblers, bankers, painters, smiths and
goldsmiths, bakers, potters, dyers, carpenters, apothecaries, weavers, stonemasons, wool carders,
and silk merchants. In our modern world the varieties of specialists has more greatly expanded to
lawyers, engineers, medical doctors, hedge fund managers, mechanics, accountants, etc. Once
you become one of these specialists, that is about “all” you do, acquiring everything else you
need from others. But, unlike the domesticated dogs, we have a choice as to what we do, so why
is the cultural current pushing us to greater specialization, why can’t we do a little bit of
everything? Once the species works out the rules of cooperation that allows individuals to
exchange goods and services, it doesn’t pay to be good at everything, it comes down to a law
(19th century economist David Ricardo) “do what you do best, and do only that”. Some are better
at producing food, some are better at producing clothing or anything else that can be exchanged.
Even our bodies are built like this, some of our cells build hearts, and others make livers, or
muscles, eyes or brain cells. Also the teeming communities of ants, bees and termites function
this way. When you win - you stay put, when you lose you shift and move on.
Discovering Our Latent Abilities
Our societies have always required good analytical skills, particular physical abilities, manual
dexterity, musical, artistic or linguistic talents, social skills or features of personality. The society
that encourages specialization will be the most efficient and will return the greatest benefits to
their inhabitants. Human culture produces innovations that tend to attract those who possess the
skills best suited to them.
Made or Born?
Cave paintings have been found in limestone caverns in France in 1994 that are 32,000 to 36,000
years old that show clear pictures of rhinoceroses, mammoths, panthers, bears, horses and owls.
Some even give a sense of three dimensions. Anthropologists have compared these paintings
favorably to the sophistications of Greek and Roman antiquity, even to the 14th century
Renaissance.
Examples of musical instruments of flutes and percussion devices dating to around 36,000 years
ago have been found in Germany. Stone tools that were ground flat about 78,000 years ago have
been found in caves in South Africa.
Human culture has left a remarkable trail of artifacts showing artistic, sculptural and musical

8
abilities. Was this human culture due to genetic inheritance or due to environmental influence of
upbringing and opportunities that arise by chance? It seems that people came to their various
stations in life by good or bad luck, social immobility and long-lived cultural influence, and
teaching and training. Modern genetic and behavior studies reveal that we are neither made nor
born; rather, we are born with our genetic endowment, and this influences to what environment
we are attracted to: someone good at kicking balls is attracted to sports, someone good at music
is attracted to music, and someone good at mathematics is attracted to working with numbers. So
human culture provides a range of opportunities that may encourage genetic varieties that would
otherwise lay dormant, and then by providing the outlets that attract those with differing talents
and skills.
Identical twin (carry identical genes) studies that were reared apart owing to adoptions show
often striking similarities on measures of intelligence, aptitudes, spatial reasoning and features of
personality. These studies were conducted since beginning in 1970s.
Alternative But Equally Good Strategies
Promotion of evolutionary survival and reproduction is by adopting strategies in your encounters
with others. Stable alternative strategies – genetic variety can exist and be maintained for good
adaptive reasons because NO ONE tactic, strategy, or role is always best; and to combine with
benefits of specialization to how societies can maintain variety in their ranks. The abundance for
example of carpenters and bakers can be maintained over the LONG RUN by a variety of
strategies as long as there is some demand for different services. Success of particular
professions can also be promoted by parental experience, temperament, encouragement; and by
individual persistence in hard work.
Aspects of personality that are drawn to culture: Aesthetic (creative culture), Cerebral
(informational), Communal (relationships and emotions), Dark (intense and hedonistic pursuits),
Thrill Seekers.
How likely to take risks and with a view to the future; focusing on planning horizons, for short
and long term.
Sociopaths make about five percent of the population. They lack a sense of guilt or shame, and
have no remorse for action taken. They can engage in unscrupulous and manipulative behavior
and in emotional and physical cruelty. They conceal these qualities to others and may even be
unaware of these themselves. Most of them are chief executives, in positions of power in
organizations; they have no nagging conscience and don’t feel the need to “say sorry”. Human
society is generally based on cooperation and trust based on fairness; this also becomes target for
others to exploit. Sociopaths are good in attacking enemies and being tough dictators. They are
in limited numbers because when two sociopaths come together there will be trouble.
“Equality of opportunities” tends to lead to genetic meritocracy, where everyone has a fair
chance for a job or role in society; but does not assure that everyone has a chance to be good at
these roles. Competition by genetic predispositions will then sort out for the most desirable,
responsible; and the most able and committed to succeed will attain the position.
Religion and Other Cultural “Enhancers”
Culture to many people is art, music and religion; to move, uplift, entertain or console us. These
cultural forms can lodge in our brains and exert a grip on us sometimes beyond our control. They
can affect our emotions, to make us believe things that are false, cause us to steal, fight, even die
for them, bring us to rapture, get us to build monuments, beguile and intrigue us and get us to lay
down large sums of money. Unlike other aspects of culture, arts, music and religion affect us
without feeding, clothing or provide shelter.

9
Why do they command our attention and allegiance? Human societies have for thousands of
years supported entire classes of people – priesthoods or knowledge elites, artists and musicians,
poets and magicians, storytellers and shamans. Their existence derives from appealing to our
appetites of mind, whims and aesthetic tastes.
These “cultural enhancers” enlist or motivate emotions to strengthen beliefs or resolve, to
transmit information, to increase cohesion or remind people of shared history and interests;
maybe to gain courage before battle or seek hope in the face of uncertainty. Arts, music and
religion are like performance-enhancing drugs that have access to our emotional and pleasure
centers to motivate us to behave.
Brain Candy
Arts and music are aesthetic forms, whereas religion is doctrinal; they are linked to recruit and
shape us in the role as cultural enhancers. Maybe these cultural elements evolved just to serve
their transmission; even by using manipulation, exploitation or taking advantage. Most of what
we think of our accumulated knowledge and technology take the form of culturally transmitted
ideas and instructions that help us to survive and prosper. We retain them and share them with
others. There is no necessary reason that they have to help us. Perhaps the arts and religion are
more like hedonistic or exploitative “mind drugs” or “brain candy”. We like them, or suffer from
them, because we can’t help it. Thus, we make paintings, songs, and stories, and we invent
religions. We pass these elements of culture on to others by word of mouth or by producing
objects. At each stage of retelling, singing, or drawing or sculpting of some objects, changes
creep in – some by accident, others by design. Some of these changes work against existing
cultural forms; but others will make the items more visually attractive, memorable,
psychologically compelling or even irresistible.
Elements that fail to compete for our attention will be cast off, but the survivors will be those
whose allure overcomes our minds’ defenses, bypassing our normal filters, and grab our
attention or even control our emotions – similar to crack cocaine. Religions are also good at
aiding their transmission when they compel us to teach them to others, especially our children.
They are like chain letters we have received promising good luck if sent on, but warning or even
threatening bad luck if not; they play on our hopes and fears.
Other aspects of culture get us to aid their survival and reproduction, often without our being
even aware of them. Old Master paintings are treasured in art galleries; also classical music and
literature still hold our attention and emotions. It is not that everything was better long ago, just
that the survivors we see today were the best of their time. Because the arts, music, and religion
are not bound by the usual constraints of physics and nature that constrain objects with some
overt function – such as a toaster or bicycle – the range of forms can expand without limit.
A Psychological Predisposition to Religion?
We have biases in the ways our minds work, and we have likes and dislikes. Most musicians
play a limited range of instruments, and most singers have limited song styles. We find the tones
of certain musical instruments more pleasing and emotionally resonant; we retained our
preferences thruout our history. Even when we create music electronically on computers they
tend to imitate musical instruments. Most artists paint the same range of subjects, and most
fiction follows a small number of plots, and most of these include sex, love, money, betrayal or
death.
Our biases extend to religion, they draw on a restricted range of typical human forms with
magical powers, such as the ability to be everywhere at once; they can subvert causation, pass
thru physical barriers, or create something out of nothing. They promise things we can never

10
attain on our own, such as salvation, redemption, or immortality, and for which the demand is
unquestionable. Usually religions are headed up by God who has a purpose.
Psychologists have found that children are prone to a “dualist” view of minds; this view was
expressed by the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes, who wondered how the “incorporeal”
substance of our mind interacted with our “corporeal” brain. This dualism predisposes us to
allow other things, like rocks, trees, the sky, or even clouds to have minds; and children believe
they can communicate with us. We are also psychologically predisposed to see purpose in things.
We have a taste for “teleology”, the expectation that things happen and exist for a reason. Thus,
children might say that clouds are “for raining” or lions are there so we will “go to the zoo”. This
predisposes us to be creationists at heart, because if things have a purpose our naturalistic minds
consider that something – a “creator” perhaps - gave them that purpose. In an adult mind, these
tendencies turn for religious explanations of what can otherwise be a mysterious world.
In the 1940’s the psychologist B.F. Skinner demonstrated how easily animals acquired
superstitions or magical thoughts that connect some action to some outcomes. Animals will
generally do more of the things they come to associate with rewards, and less of the things they
have been punished for in the past. Skinner conducted experiments with rewards on “fixed”,
“variable”, and “random” intervals after the desirable behavior was performed (the reward with
pigeons were food pellets dropped into a food hopper). Random means no direct relation
between rewards and behavior. The surprise to experimenters was that any behavior that the
pigeons performed before the moments the food arrived (twirl in circles, raise and lower their
heads, swing their bodies from side to side, or prance around the cage), they would perform
frequently over and over again in the future. They would somehow associate their behavior with
getting food; as if the pigeons came to “believe” its behavior would make more food appear. So
the tendency is to look for causes and attribute agency to things where no cause exists, or the true
causes are beyond our grasp, where we are vulnerable to finding a false one. To a thirsty person,
unable to predict when the next rain will fall on their parched landscape, whatever they happen
to be doing just before it does finally come, might come to be associated with “making” it
happen, and a religious or superstitions belief would be born.
People are more sophisticated than pigeons and can perform many more and varied rituals such
as bowing, burning incense, chanting and singing in special buildings (churches, temples…) in
the hope of bringing about things we want to happen, but which are utterly out of our control.
Our capacity for languages puts us at even greater risks for developing false beliefs, where we
don’t have to witness an event to know about it. Outcomes are publicized as miracles to advertise
to a connection between beliefs and outcomes. A true law of nature is still present when
supernatural, magical, or superstitious explanations are concluded. The phenomenon of
“regression to the mean” explains extreme circumstances are likely to return spontaneously to
less extreme circumstances over time. Thus, when you roll two dice and get two sixes it is
unlikely to happen twice in a row. The possible outcome for this to happen on the second roll is
one in 1,296 (36x36) possible outcomes. The same principles are true of other extreme
phenomena, even if it is difficult to calculate their probability exactly. So, regression is also why
praying for a hurricane to end, a flood to recede, or for rains to end a drought is more likely to
work, the longer your desired outcome hasn’t come. If you happen to think of a supernatural
explanation just before some extreme event spontaneously returns to “baseline”, you might just
attribute it to your belief rather then to regression.
All doctors know most common illnesses spontaneously get better within about two weeks.
If a shaman-doctor proposes some sort of ritual or ceremonial treatment in that time, even if

11
ineffective, it can come to our minds to be connected to the improvement, just as Skinner’s
pigeons associated their twirls with getting food.
Religion, art, and music become part of being human that others tend to compete against. If they
somehow promote our survival and reproduction, it is to our advantage to adopt them, whether or
not they are true, frivolous, or hedonistic.
Consolidation, Hope and Optimism in Religious Beliefs
Religion in prehistoric times would not even have had to be very good at providing solutions.
We have seen how little it takes for us to acquire false beliefs. Even today, the natural
environment can brutally remind us of the impotence of our best medical treatments, engineering
solutions, or resources for staying alive and prospering in the world. No matter how good one’s
scientific knowledge, there is little we can do in the face of epidemics, tsunamis and earthquakes,
floods, many cancers and inherited disorders, or even tomorrow’s weather. So we look for
something stronger than our rational human best, and that means often looking to supernatural
powers.
The contemporary economist Rodney Stark maintains that when we are driven to desperate
circumstances, we often enter into straightforward exchanges with the gods, seeking to purchase
commodities only they can offer – such as better weather, more plentiful game, and immortality
– in return for prayer, ritual, offerings, ceremonies, and sacrifices. This was Pascal’s (1623-1662)
famous wager for a belief in God: “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager
then without hesitation that He is.” Because regression effects will often cause extreme situations
to improve anyway, the wager will frequently appear to have worked. If you pray long enough
for rain, it will eventually come, and if your god predicts an earthquake is coming it eventually
will come. In this harsh world, merely holding the view that things can be made better by belief,
effort, or hard work – whether or not they can – improves your hope, motivation or confidence,
and eventually your performance or wellbeing. Bioscientist Robert Trivers points to the tendency
for humans to “consciously see what they want to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things
with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive.”
Religion and Group Conflict
Beliefs take hold because they promote survival. Belief becomes part of the environment that
others have to adapt to. Up against a group in battle who consider you despicable, it might be
useful for you to acquire your own brand of motivational bigotry. Any tendency to adopt
religious or other precepts that make you and your group more formidable foes can bring real
advantages to those who hold them. Even dispositions that put your life at risk can nevertheless
bring you benefits if enough people around you share that disposition. It is then easy for a
fledgling tradition of false beliefs to grow as it acquires a collection of different beliefs that get
woven together, and all of which motivate people to action.
Religion as a Way to Advertise Commitment
The importance of the cultural survival vehicle in our history means that groups will want to
know whom they can and cannot trust within their ranks, and religious beliefs may be one of the
best ways to advertise your commitment to your group. Faith is about believing things that by all
known rules cannot possibly be true or verified, and could even get you killed. It is about acting
without evidence, participating in its rituals, fasting (a form of starvation), memorizing scripture,
scarification, crucifixion, and paying of tithes. It is the utter recklessness and costliness of
adhering to religious beliefs that makes them a believable way of advertising your commitment
to a group, and thereby of attracting altruism from others (maybe by feeding malnourished
children).

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Religious Exploitation Revisited
Natural selection does not wear moral glasses; it promotes collections of genes and ideas that
triumph in competition with other collections of genes and ideas. Religion may have evolved
because they have proven to be good at giving us courage and hope, at coordination of our
actions, uniting us against common foes, controlling weaker people, or suppressing those we
think challenge the norms that glue society together, even if the norms are arbitrary. So it looks
more like we created religions and their gods in our image, not the other way around; as we see
that violence and hatred are all too human characteristics that transcend any one religion or
culture. It is too dangerous to blame all this on religion; religion is just one aspect of culture. The
simpler explanation is that it is our neighbors that we will often be in competition for the same
territories and resources. The most terrible violence of the twentieth century in terms of lives lost
– World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the many millions who died in
Stalin’s 1930s purges in Russia, Pol Pot’s Year of slaughter in Cambodia or Mao’s Great Leap
Forward, to name just a few – have little or nothing to do with religion per se.
Human children rely for their successes on the accumulated knowledge of past generations; the
rule is to believe and to obey their elders. Many people use or rely on religion in genuine and
selfless attempts to help other people. The purveyors of religion are very similar to anyone else
who tries to manipulate social systems for their own gain. Religious indoctrination is very
similar to Maoist style political reeducation. In the hands of a skilled politician, nationalist
rhetoric devoid of religious connotations can also be a powerfully motivating tool.
Roles for Music and Visual Art
Just as with religions, our early ancestors’ art and music may have started out as little more than
simple acts. The first art may have been a map or an image of an animal, scratched into the earth
as Australia’s Aborigines and some native American tribes still do, or maybe sketches on the
wall of a cave using a piece of charcoal showing images of animals; as we take photographs
today.
Similarly the origins of music could have been the songs or calls or vocalizations of animals’
attractions of prospective mates, warning off competitors and marking out territories. Our brains
include the “limbic system”, the powerful emotion-charged center for responding to sights,
sounds, and odors. Singing seems to naturally enhance the cohesion of groups: when people sing
the same song, they recognize that they are feeling the same emotion. This shared feeling will
enhance the sense of cultural relatedness that can drive cooperation within groups. Layered on
top of the pure emotion of music, the words to hymns often have a military quality to them or
extol the benefits of cooperation. A national anthem is an emotive and historically charged
symbol of an entire nation’s collective cultural nepotism; reminding us of our shared destinies
and our common histories. The ability to read written work is important in modern society,
similarly to our nonliterate ancestors the capacity to read visual art for its information and
emotion was just as relevant. The early cave art from the South of France depict game animals
that would have been important for food to the early hunter-gatherer humans, or of predatory
animals whose dispositions one might benefit from understanding, for teaching, or for religious
ceremonies. These images would have made their effects available to wide audiences and could
be consulted and re-consulted. That is why we keep photo albums; to help us remember our
friends and family members and making more vivid our emotional memories. Emotions are
instruments of motivation, and so here is another enhancing role for art.
Cooperation and Our Cultural Nature
Culture has produced riches beyond the imagination of any other species, and it has propelled us

13
around the world in mobile survival vehicles in which individuals cooperate to defend each other
and their jointly held assets – their technology and know-how, and their lands. Next we need to
understand how we have contained our appetites to exploit these riches for our own personal
gain, how we have avoided spiraling down a vortex of treachery matched by further and more
ingenious countertreachery.
We have avoided this outcome by developing a set of rules and dispositions that allow us to
cooperate with people who are otherwise our competitors. Evolutionary thinking explains that
we cooperate with relatives because they are more likely to share copies of our genes. We have
escaped the Kamikaze charge of bees defending their hive; they were only too willing to give
their life to protect the nest because it houses their brothers and sisters, and their mother the
queen. Some of our immune system cells do this when they find and attach themselves to a
foreign invader. They then put up little chemical flags that summon others of our immune cells
to come and eat them, thereby giving their lives to have the invader destroyed.
But human cooperation is not limited to helping relatives, and this makes it a risky proposition,
not being bound by the usual constraints of family ties.
Conflict as a Source of Cooperation in Society
We are less likely to take advantage of relatives, because to do so is to exploit a little bit of
ourselves. Nepotism doesn’t erase rivalries among relatives; it just makes these rivalries less
likely. We expect nepotism to fall away rapidly as our kin become more distantly related. We
don’t expect kin selection on its own to produce the complex social arrangements we recognize
as human culture – the alliances and coalitions, pacts and agreements – and we don’t expect it to
produce the psychological dispositions and emotions we use to control, forgive, bait, and take
advantage of our rivals.
Our cooperating with other members of our societies is based on the idea of a social contract:
when I do a favor for you, it is in the expectation that you will pay back either immediately or at
some future time. This requires a level of psychological sophistication that surpasses acts of
nepotism. If I do something for you, how can I know you will pay me back, and what should I do
if you don’t, or if you return with something of less value? We can accept that conflicts of
interest can create opportunities for agreements that provide better returns than endless cycles of
betrayal and revenge. Our conflicts of interest become the source of our truces, pacts, and
agreements, and over long periods of time, they are the sources of our institutions, laws and
morality. If we both want the same thing, we can fight for it, or we can strike up an agreement to
parcel it out equitably. The savings we make in not fighting, or in not having to devote time and
effort to defending the resource against each other’s depredations, can more than pay for the
reduced income of dividing the riches between us. Together, the institutions and the norms that
emerge from interdependence can reach to the highest level of worldwide cooperation. In 2010,
the nation of Greece was bailed out of a financial crisis by the alliance of nations known as the
European Union, followed by a similar bailout of Ireland in 2011. These nations are all economic
competitors but they recognize that financial instability of Greece and Ireland is bad for
everyone’s economy, for the simple reason that all of the economies of the European Union trade
with each other – their fates are interdependent. Looking into the twenty-first century and the rise
of India and China as economic powers, it will be the interdependence of everyone’s economies
on trade that will act as the best brake on conflict.
Four Ways to be Social and the Shadow of the Future
Outside of our own species, cooperation beyond the family is comparatively rare in nature. There
are really just four kinds of social behaviors or ways that two or more parties might behave

14
toward one another, but only one of them benefits both parties: altruism, selfishness, spite, and
cooperation. We don’t expect altruism to flourish on its own, because one party benefits at the
expense of another. Selfishness is when one party takes advantage of the other party’s altruism.
Selfish behavior is tantalizing because of its immediate benefits; but if everyone behaves
selfishly, it will lead to conflict. Sometimes people behave spitefully, as when they do something
that might be costly to themselves, in an attempt to hurt someone else even more.
This leaves the fourth social behavior – cooperation – as when two parties exchange favors; but
even this is difficult to get established, since it is easy for one of the parties not to return the
favor. If two people are only going to meet once, it will pay them to act selfishly, unless you are
going to see the person again. It may pay to cooperate, in hopes that your partner will remember
this and cooperate with you. This idea is called “reciprocal altruism” a sort of promise of
exchange between two unrelated parties; you help now in exchange for help you anticipate at a
later time. The risk is that the help may not be returned.
For reciprocal altruism to work means that the person you decide to cooperate with also wants
genuinely to cooperate with you. This involves an entirely involved psychology of traits and
emotions surrounding every exchange. These include friendship, gratitude, sympathy, guilt, a
heightened sensitivity to cheaters, generosity, withholding of help to people who do not
reciprocate, a sense of justice or fairness, and even forgiveness. Each of these either encourages
us to enter into cooperative relationships, or protect us once we do. The fragility of reciprocal
altruism and the psychological complexity even in simple acts are surprisingly difficult to find in
nature outside of humans. Stable cooperation depends upon extended and durable interactions
with no known end point. The future reaches back in time to influence our present behavior.
Many of our dispositions are those we expect of a species that has evolved to live for long
periods of time, around sets of people we might expect to see over and over again, a powerful
source for promoting cooperation.
A sense of shortening of “the shadow of the future” causes us almost immediately to withdraw,
even if imperceptibly, from friends who announce their intention to move away, or from work
colleagues who might change jobs. It is also why lame-duck political figures are so weak.
Even with a long shadow of the future, the prospect of a defection looms large in any cooperative
relationship. Someone may “forget” to return your favor, or simply make a mistake and fail to
return your kindness. What should you do? If you do nothing, they may get the idea they can
cheat you every now and then. A simple strategy of repaying kindness with kindness and
betrayal with revenge is surprisingly effective. If your partner betrays you, you punish him, this
may lead to cycles of revenge and counterrevenge. On the other hand, if cooperation has been
valuable in our past, then we might expect it to have given us strategies of forgiveness as a way
of avoiding these cycles. One strategy is of ignoring the first act of betrayal, then waiting before
resuming cooperation. Assuming the betrayal was a mistake in judgment, a moment of weakness,
or maybe just a slipup. This allows groups of generous and forgiving cooperators to overcome
the occasional bout of moral weakness or mere mistake from someone within their ranks.
An even better strategy may be a mild form of sulking, but with an added twist. Confronted by a
betrayal, you don’t respond with punishment; rather you simply withhold cooperation. On the
next exchange, though, you switch back to cooperation and continue to cooperate so long as the
other person cooperates. We can also follow this policy when we have a brief argument and
make up. It gives people a second chance, and if they take that chance, cooperation is
maintained. If they don’t and continue to betray you, again switch back to withholding
cooperation. It makes it clear to cheaters and others who might “free-ride” on your goodwill that

15
their behavior won’t work. And it offers incentives for insights of cooperation.
Natural selection is not about goodness and light; it is about strategies that promote replicators,
even by taking advantage of the weak or gullible.
Expectation for Fairness
Of all the emotions associated with getting acts of reciprocity to work, our expectation for
fairness is perhaps the most intriguing and explosive. If forgiveness and generosity are like
investments in keeping a cooperative relationship going, our sense of fairness is more like a
police force. It is the emotion behind our belief that it is wrong for others to take advantage of us
and that it is equally wrong to take advantage of others. It is capable of producing violence on
the one hand, and startling altruism on the other. Its violent side inclines us to punish people
(“moralistic aggression”) whose actions reveal them as selfish. Examples are honking of horns at
people who cut into traffic, or heckling people who cut into lines.
On the other hand, the altruistic side of our sense of fairness can produce surprising acts of
human kindness. In an experiment conducted in New York City with “lost” wallets, people were
found to return half of the wallets. Taxi drivers report that taxi riders pay faithfully.
Trust and the Diffusion of Cooperation
On a day-to-day basis, we act in ways that cannot possibly be directly reciprocated, such as when
we routinely and unselfconsciously hold doors for people, form lines obediently and admonish
those who don’t, help the weak, elderly or the disabled, return items of value, aid people in
distress, pay taxes, and give to charities. The most vivid and bizarre form of altruism comes to us
in battlefield accounts of soldiers who fall on a grenade to help others to safety under fire, or fly
an airplane Kamikaze-style into an enemy ship.
Cultural Altruism
For most people the sight of seeing their nation’s flag raised, or the sound of their national
anthem being played, watching their nation compete against others in international events, or the
loss of one of their soldiers in battle cause a familiar emotion. We often call it “nationalism”, a
diffuse and warm pride in one’s country or people; and a tendency to feel an affinity toward
them that we do not always extend to others from different nations or societies. It can get us
unwittingly to practice a kind of cultural nepotism that disposes us in the right circumstances to
treat other members of our nation or group as special and limited kind of relatives, willing to be
more helpful and trusting, than we would normally be toward others. But it is also the emotion
that gets the people of one nation to cheer while those of another suffer from a deadly act of
terrorism.
These are descriptions of our ultra-social nature, where we act altruistically toward others,
especially other member of our societies, without expecting that help to be directly returned.
That altruism ranges from simple acts such as holding doors and giving up seats on trains, to
volunteering your time and contributing to charities, but also to risking your life in war for
people you might not know and are not even related to. None of these acts is directly
reciprocated, and the risks of exploitation by others who do not share your altruism far exceed
those of simple reciprocal exchanges between two people. Our altruistic dispositions are so
strong that they even extend to helping other species; to adopt an abandoned dog or to call for
help to rescue a cat up a tree.
Venture Capitalists and Good Samaritans
Where does this disposition to behave altruistically toward others come from?
To see how a disposition toward cooperation might evolve in a group, consider that a gene, an
idea, or just an emotion arose in one, or even a few of them, that caused them to help people

16
whom they thought were ”helpers” like themselves. It is not a disposition to help any one
individual in particular, or even to expect him or her to help you in return.
The value of the help an altruist provides may far exceed the cost to him of providing it. An
example would be by allowing someone to shelter in your house during a lightning storm. It
costs you almost nothing, but could save that person’s life. If people with this disposition can
identify each other and then behave as we have assumed, two things will follow. One is that
people carrying the disposition will be more likely to survive and prosper from the mutual help
they provide, and this will make it more likely that the gene or idea survives and can get passed
on to someone else. If it is a gene, it will spread in the usual way as people who carry it will
produce more offsprings. If it is an idea, it could spread by people observing others and then
copying this successful strategy – it would then spread by social learning. The second thing we
can expect is that, as this tendency to help becomes widespread in this group, cooperation will
come to take on the diffused character that we recognize in some of our own actions. We could
even think of the emotion as something akin to modern feelings of nationalism but at this stage
we might think of it as a kind of tribalism; a partiality toward others in your group, or others like
you.
Our social lives are complicated: we miss things or mistakenly help selfish people, we blunder
into situations not knowing what to do, and people try to deceive us – impostors, con men, liars,
and other tricksters are always lurking around looking to take advantage of someone’s good
nature. The altruism gene will prosper so long as two things are true. One is that the altruists
need to help each other at least some of the time; and the second is that altruists help other
altruists more often than they help selfish or non-cooperative people.
Another guide in our cooperative behaviors toward others is the use of the “principle of
information”, which if followed makes altruism possible and also more profitable to the altruists.
It says that if we know enough about someone we can make a decision about whether to
cooperate; but if we don’t, it is better not to cooperate, because you might just be helping a
selfish person. The principle of information can be seen as a psychological disposition that puts
great emphasis on identifying traits in others that we think tell us something about the likelihood
that they are a fellow cooperator. It might be why we are so sensitive to such things as how
people dress or speak, and what manners they exhibit. Our simple model tells us we don’t even
have to be accurate; we just have to be more likely to help someone who is an altruist than
someone who is not. Good Samaritans might even do slightly better by virtue of not wasting time
and effort trying to work out who is a cooperator and who is not. When it comes to cooperation
we are far more like venture capitalists than Good Samaritans. We are willing to invest in other
altruists like ourselves because we derive returns from having them around. Our investment is in
the society of cooperators, not in anyone in particular. Cooperation itself becomes something like
a “common good”, which everyone benefits from but that must continually be replenished to
avoid being used up. Our cultural setting will always strongly favor those who are vigilant about
and good at detecting selfish cheats because they continually deplete the common good of the
cooperative society.
The Reputation marketplace
Our social systems of cooperation and helping are revealed as sophisticated marketplaces,
capable of generating both individual returns and goods that benefit others. They work like a
monetary system, with our personal reputations acting as the currency we use to buy trust and
cooperation. We earn our reputations by engaging in altruistic acts, costly to us but beneficial to
others. A good reputation can then be used to buy cooperation from others, even people we have

17
never met - economists call this “transferability”. The transferability of our reputations occurs
routinely and without us being aware of it; when we describe someone to a third party for
example.
Like money, reputations get used up. They will decay as people’s memories fade; you might do
something to harm your reputation; you might encounter people who have never heard of you, or
someone might opportunistically attack your reputation for their gain. This means we need
continually to top them up, by regularly engaging in altruistic acts. Such a need might lie behind
much of our simple but overly polite behaviors.
Transferability of reputation is a way that altruism differs from acts of reciprocal cooperation.
Language plays a fundamental role in our system of cooperation; it unlocks the benefits of
cooperation by allowing precise exchanges to be negotiated. Language allows reputation to
encourage good deals or help to block bad ones from going thru. It increases the exposure of
your “enhancers” – making acts of philanthropy, friendliness, helpfulness, courage, and bravery
play to a far wider audience than those who merely witness your actions.
Morality, Shame, Honor Killings, and Self-Sacrifice
A measure of the value of cooperation is contained in what we are willing to give up to keep the
system working. Norms of behavior effectively ask us to give up the right to act as we please,
and some may require effort to master. Maybe it is customs in matters of dress and appearance or
even some rules about how to behave or what you can and cannot eat. Following such norms
becomes a signal of your commitment to the group. This is especially true when those norms are
arbitrary and have little obvious value, like holding your knife and fork a certain way, or
removing your hat upon meeting someone. The more arbitrary they are, the more your adherence
to them reveals your commitment because of the time you have had to spend to learn them. Their
arbitrariness also makes them useful for identifying outsiders. Conformity to arbitrary norms,
like the commitment to an unknowable religious proposition, demonstrates that you are the kind
of person who can be counted on to make a commitment, and the more so the more mysterious
or arbitrary is the norm that you follow. It might be in our adherence to some so-called morals
that we see the true value of our societies, at least to the cooperators. Morals are accorded a
special status that exceeds that of mere norms. They are seen as offences against reason, truth,
and good conscience. And usually include such things as adultery, stealing, and murder. Morals
are often things on which there is widespread and vigorous agreement, and then only perhaps
because we would not like the behaviors happen to us. Most people would agree that murder is
morally wrong, yet human beings kill each other regularly. We do so in brutal ways, often in
large numbers, and we even praise people who kill when it is done against someone we deem to
be an enemy.
So, morals are rules that society makes up to serve its interests; but what or whose interests?
Stealing and killing, far more than most acts, imperil the altruism that flows from mutual trust
and good reputation. Societies need to banish them from people’s minds so that trust can develop
and then flow. Elevating these actions to the level of morals is a way a society overtly advertises
with the loss of reputation and freedoms and being ostracized, punished, jailed, or even executed.
The ease with which most of us can be persuaded to give up the potential benefits that might
come from violating them – from stealing or killing - is a measure of just how valuable our
societies can be to us. It behooves our parents to transmit this valuable information to us. The
proof that morals are of local value and not some deeper metaphysical entity is that as soon as we
move outside that cultural wall of our own particular survival vehicles, the “morality” often
changes drastically.

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Shaming people is a way of taking their reputations away, and again shows us how powerfully
motivating the desire to cling to a good reputation can be. During World War I, some older
women in English villages used a threatened loss of reputation to shame young men to go to the
deadly trenches of that war. What these reluctant young men feared nearly as much as going to
war was the white feather of cowardice these women dispensed when they encountered young
men in their villages. This was a form of moralistic aggression, a rebuke for a perceived shirking
of a young man’s cooperative duties.
So-called honor killings are common in several societies around the world. Young women are
especially vulnerable if it is deemed that they have done something to dishonor their family.
Here is a profoundly uncomfortable illustration of both the power of (perceived) reputation in
human society, the value of our societies to us, and our tendency to treat reputation as if it is
heritable and runs in families: we are willing to kill our offspring to pay off the reputation debt of
their perceived transgressions and therefore keep our own reputations intact. A reputation is
worth a human life.
Self-sacrifice is the most costly and therefore most believable signal of one’s commitment to a
cause – be it family, nation, tribe, religion, or some abstract political idea. Self-sacrifice can
therefore send large benefits toward one’s relatives. This means that once a system of reputation
has evolved and established itself in our psychology, the thought that thousands or millions of
people are watching or listening must be enough to drive some people to extreme acts. This
could be the same psychology as in suicidal terrorism; or self-sacrifice in World War II, when
highest honor would be bestowed on Japanese Kamikaze pilots, and equally no greater shame for
failing to do so. In the mind of the terrorist or pilot, their action could be broadcast to an entire
nation, and then the transferability of reputation would ensure that its effects could flow back to
his family.
Similarly, why do we honor our war dead so highly, especially as it is too late for them to
benefit? They deserve our highest respect for their sacrifice, but somehow in doing so we
acknowledge that some form of payback – reputation enhancement – is needed to keep families
willing to send their sons off to battle. No ant, bee, or wasp would make such a request.

Common and Public Goods: Competing to Cooperate

Economists define a “common good” as something like common land for grazing. Everyone is
allowed to use it, but use by one person reduces the amount left for others. Public goods are the
same but don’t get used up. Air to breathe is a public good, as are radio and television signals, or
streetlights at night, also police forces and fire brigades. All of these can be used and in most
instances have only negligible effect on what is available to others. Getting people to contribute
to public or common goods poses the problem of how to get people to behave selflessly or
altruistically. When I pay my taxes but you don’t, I am helping to create a common or public
good that you might benefit from as much as or more than me. You are cheating or free-riding on
our social contract.
Economics also identifies something called a “second-order” public goods problem. Sometimes
people will punish others they suspect of being free riders when they honk their horns at people
or shout at those who might cut a line. Economists see punishing free riders like contributions to
a public good as an act of altruism. When I punish a free rider, everyone else enjoys any benefits
that might flow from my actions. Maybe the person becomes less likely to free-ride, or maybe
others witnessing my action will decide not to cut a line themselves. Either way, everyone
benefits. When we allow our flock of sheep to overgraze the common land, or don’t recycle as

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much of our garbage as we might, or we cheat on our taxes, lie about how much food we found
from a day’s foraging, or cut lines, we are part of the problem of controlling and maintaining
commons and public goods. Global warming is looming as our most daunting exploitation of a
vital commons and one that most of us cheat on extensively by using far more resources than are
sustainable. There is an incentive to cheat, and many of us do or have done at some time in our
lives, yet we are to some extent self-policing and engaging in altruism.
Contributing to public goods might also in some circumstances be a way to earn reputation
points as your reward. If reputation is the currency we use to buy others’ trust, then we might
even be expected to compete to cooperate on public goods as a way of demonstrating our
commitment to the group. The wider picture of this public-spirited behavior is that our
psychology has been shaped by our cultures that acted as units for our survival in a way that
strongly linked our fates, and these are the conditions that favor public-spirited dispositions.
Human Language – and The Voice of Our Genes
Language is the functioning of the apparatus of the brain and vocal cords and the medium of
sound waves traveling through the air. Our training in the arts of using this powerful instrument
starts early on; when we discover by making the right sound or sequence of sounds, we can get
objects and special attention.
All animals communicate, but only humans have language. We alone communicate in sentences
composed of discrete words that take the roles of subjects, objects and verbs. This makes our
language a digital form of communication as compared to the continuously varying signals of
grunts, whistles, barks, chest-thumping, bleating, odors, colors, chemical signals, chirping, or
roars for the rest of life. Those familiar sights, sounds and smells can be varied in intensity or
persistency. They might signal an animal’s status, or intentions, or indicate its physical prowess;
they might tell a predator it has been spotted, or sends a message to nearby relatives of imminent
danger. But lacking subjects, verbs, and objects, these acts of communication do not combine
and recombine to produce an endless variety of different messages.
By comparison we can use our language to look into the future, share the thoughts of others, and
benefit from the wisdom of the past. We can make plans, cut deals, and reach agreements. We
can woo prospective mates and warn off our enemies. We can describe who did what to whom,
when they did it, and for what reason. We can describe how to do things, and what things to
avoid. We can express irony, surprise, and glee, worry, pessimism, love, and hate or desire, we
can be witty or grave, we can be precise or deliberately vague.
No one knows when the capacity to communicate with language evolved, but we can narrow the
range of possibilities. There is no evidence to suggest that the early “Homo” had anything even
remotely close to the complex societies, tools, or other artifacts that we recognize as fully
human.
Our capacity for language was almost certainly present in our common ancestor because today
all humans speak and speak equally well. There are no languages that are superior to others, and
no human groups that speak primitive as opposed to advanced languages. This would make
language no more than around 160,000 to 200,000 years old; although some anthropologists
think language arose even later than this, pointing to the sharp increase beginning around 70,000
to 100,000 years ago of evidence of our symbolic thinking and the complexity of our societies.
Whenever language emerged, it probably built on what had been a series of developments in our
ancestors of what we might think of as “proto-languages”, backed up by the physical apparatus
to make languages like sounds.
Our social complexity depends on language. You and I can use language to arrange and negotiate
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the terms of an exchange of information, goods, or services that brings benefits to both of us.
These are reasons for me to speak and for you to listen. But words are cheap, so how can you
trust mine? Language also provides you with a trait that you can use to “police” my actions. If I
fail to keep up my end of the bargain, you can break off our partnership and quickly, widely and
“spitefully” spread the word that I am not to be trusted. On the other hand, you must exercise
your spite carefully lest you develop a reputation as someone who spreads false rumors. Actions
might speak louder than words but words travel faster and further.
The main function of language is not merely to communicate, say like two computers sending
information back and forth. Rather, language evolved as a self-interested piece of social
technology for enhancing the returns we get from cooperation inside the survival vehicles of our
cultures.
 Language, DNA, and Regulation
There is a remarkable similarity between the nature of human language and the unusual feature
of our genetic systems. Our genomes represent the sum total of the genetic information of our
twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. In our species, these chromosomes contain somewhere
around 21,000 genes. A one mm small worm living in the soil has 19,000 and the fruit fly has
15,000 genes. In spite of having similar numbers of genes to the two animals, our bodies are
almost unimaginably more complicated, comprising trillions of cells making an uncountable
number of connections, and building hundreds of different kinds of tissues, from eyes and
muscles, to hearts (a special kind of muscle), to kidneys. Our brains alone account for many
hundreds of billions of these cells, and counting the connections they make to each other is
something like trying to count all the stars in the universe. We share 98 percent of our genes with
chimpanzees but differ so utterly from them; we even have over 80 percent of our genes in
common with mice.
Our genes alone cannot possibly carry enough information to specify all the connections that
make up our bodies. Also the organism’s complexity seems not to be related in any obvious way
to how many genes it has. A mysterious feature of our genomes that we might think of as their
“dark matter” is emerging as a principal reason why we can share so many genes with these
other species and yet be so different. The common view of our genomes that they are packed
with genes that provide the instructions to make our bodies turn out to be only a small part of the
story.
Our genomes contain vast stretches of DNA that are not organized into genes, and are not used
for making the protein building blocks of our bodies. This is the dark matter, better known as
“junk DNA”, and it comprises a startling 99 percent of our genome, and the genomes of most
other “higher” organisms. It appears our genes use it to help them make our bodies. The
complexity of our bodies might be built then on the enormous expansion of “junk DNA” that
began hundreds of millions of years ago in our distant ancestors. This discovery has only been
made in the 1970s.
Like our genes, human language is also a “digital” communication system; it is built from
discrete entities we call “words”, and those words are made from simpler building blocks of
discrete sounds – the DNA of our language – called “phonemes”. The digital information that
forms a word is sent thru the air in pressure waves that we form with our tongues, mouth, and
breath. Your ear sends the signal to your brain, where it is decoded or your body decodes the
message in a gene. The system to a large extent “snaps back” into place or is self-correcting
when small errors are made; when a word is mispronounced or given an unusual accent or
emphasis, receivers can still normally work out what word was intended, and thus this alteration
is not retained in the next transmission of that word.
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Being digital, our language can easily transmit millions upon millions of different messages, not
– like most animal signals – limited to just a few dimensions such as bigger or smaller, louder or
softer, or more or less fierce. We rely on the great variety and vocabulary of language to share
ideas, to promote cooperation, to build alliances, and to enhance our reputations, just as genes
rely on the great vocabulary and variety of junk DNA to regulate how much, when, and where in
our bodies they are expressed.
We use our language to be deceptive or charming, kind and forgiving, or spiteful and vindictive.
We use it to manipulate or bewitch others, to collude with them, or to foster or diffuse factional
disputes. We alter our speech or dialect strategically – linguists call this code switching – to
signal our connection to a group or an individual.
Words, Languages, Adaptation, and Social Identity
How we use language indicates how elements of language evolved. There is a huge disparity
between how often different words get used, with some being used hundreds and even thousands
of times more often than others. Around 25 percent of all our speech is made up from a mere
twenty-five words. The top twenty-five most frequent words are used about 30,000 times in
every million utterances, whereas most of the remaining 200,000 or more words of the other
English words tend to be used only very infrequently; some only a few times in every million
utterances.
Another surprising coincident is that speakers of different languages all use more or less this
same subset of words frequently in their speech and a different set infrequently. It seems that
around the world we all talk about the same things and in roughly the same amounts. Because
this information comes from a worldwide sample of languages, it is a reasonable step from there
to guess that this will have been true thruout the history of human language usage.
Our languages demonstrate quite extraordinary degrees of stability over long periods of time; far
longer than is necessary for us to be able to communicate with each other thruout our lifetimes.
Here, for example, is 1,000 years of the evolution of the familiar Lord’s Prayer, spanning Old to
Modern English:
Faeder ure pu pe eart on heofonum; Si pin nama gehalgod to becume pin rice gewurpe din
willa on eordan swa swa on heofonum. Old English - 11th cent.
Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyndoom come to; be thi wille don
in erthe as in heuene. Middle English – 1380
Our father which art in heauen, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdome come. Thy will be
done, in earth, as it is in heauen. Early Modern English: King James Bible – 1611
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be
done, On earth as it is in heaven. Late Modern English: Book of Common Prayer – 1928
We see from one version of the Lord’s Prayer to the next is the gradual process that Darwin
called “descent with modification”. We saw this earlier as a description of how species, over
long periods of time, give rise to somewhat different daughter or descendant species. Ancestral
languages evolve to give rise to somewhat different daughter languages, which in turn do the
same. Each of the daughter languages retains some of the features of its ancestral or mother
tongue, but differences creep in as people fan out to occupy new areas.
The Indo-European language family includes the languages currently spoken all over Europe,
parts of Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Archaeologists have linked the spread of these
languages to the origin of agriculture sometime around 9,000-10,000 years ago in the region of
the world known as the Fertile Crescent (roughly present-day Turkey and Iraq). Farming reset

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the world’s carrying capacity to a higher level, allowing a greater number of people to survive in
a given area. The growing populations led to migration from the Fertile Crescent. Those that
went north and west formed what we recognize today as the Greek, Germanic and Romance or
Latinate languages of Western Europe; those that went north and east produced the Slavic
languages; and those that went south gave rise to the languages of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan
and India. It is because of descent with modification within the separate branches of this family
that today we recognize similarities in the Romance languages of Spanish, French, Italian, and
Portuguese, just as we recognize similarities in the Germanic languages of German, Danish,
Dutch and English.
Certain particular words turn up over and over in different languages that get retained for the
longest periods of time. It is the small subset of words that we use most frequently in our
everyday speech – and especially those we have suggested are related to social relations - that
can show startling resistance to changing, sometimes being conserved in a related form across all
Indo-European languages; such as the words: two, five, who, I, and you. Linguists have proposed
twenty-seven words left over from our original or proto-language, found in many language
families from all over the world; including who, what, two, water and finger or one.
The more a word is used, the more likely it will be conserved. Infrequently used words are more
prone to change because they are somehow less important and so it doesn’t matter so much if
someone comes up with a new word. For words like: dirty and guts of something, there are at
least forty-five different words in the Indo-European languages.
Language Extinction
There are about 7,000 languages currently in use; and around fifteen to thirty languages go
extinct every year as small traditional societies dwindle in numbers, get overwhelmed by larger
neighbors and younger generations choose to learn the languages of larger and politically
dominant societies.
Currently, three languages are spoken by a far grater number of people than any of their
competitors. Somewhere around 1.2 billion people speak Mandarin, followed by around 400
million each for Spanish and English; and these are closely followed by Bengali and Hindi. It is
not that these languages are better than their rivals; it is that they have had the fortune of being
linked to demographically prosperous cultures. On these counts Mandarin might look like the
leader in the race to be the world’s language, but this ignores the fact that vastly more people
learn English as a second language – including many people in China – than any other. Already
it is apparent that if there is a worldwide lingua franca, it is English. Still English itself might be
transformed, as it is bombarded by the influences of such large members of non-native English
speakers who, when they use it, bring along their own accents, grammar, and words. On the
other hand, English’s willingness to take in so-called foreign words has – for at least the
millennium since the Norman conquest of the English in 1066 brought an influx of Norman
French vocabulary into the English language – been the key to its adaptability. Just as we have
seen how words must adapt to be competitive in the struggle to gain access to our minds,
languages have to adapt as a whole to remain useful to their speakers, and those that do so will
be the survivors.
Truth and Memories
We take it for granted that the most intelligent mind on Earth is designed to perceive the truth
and act on it. But an evolutionary perspective tells us to expect that our minds have evolved to be
good at promoting our survival and well-being and truth might only be part of what they use as
their currency. Increasingly, cognitive science teaches us that our perceptions and memories are

23
not just fallible; they are stories our brain concocts to prop up our egos, justify our decisions, and
condone our actions. They are the stories we want to see and hear and they often bear little
resemblance to what “really” happened.
John Locke came to the startling conclusion that, apart from our memories, we cannot even be
sure we are the same person we were in the past. But of course those memories are fallible.
The Co-Evolution of Intelligence and Deception
Our large brains probably evolved in a social arms race with other brains in which increases in
social intelligence in some were met by replies in others. Traits that allow you to outwit your
neighbors in this social competition will grant benefits and quickly spread to your children, and
then to theirs. This meant, among other things, developing the capacity to “get inside” our rivals’
minds to try to anticipate what they might do next. It became necessary to have a “theory of
mind” – a sense of knowing what you think another person knows, and being aware that he is
having similar thoughts about you. In these circumstances, one of the best ways to thwart
someone else’s theory of mind is to develop sophisticated abilities at deception. We expect that
deception is a normal feature of our societies. Our social organization, based on cooperation with
people we are not related to, means that we engage in a nearly continuous stream of exchanges of
favors, goods, and services.
Natural selection will have equipped us not only with the emotions to take advantage of others,
but with a bag of tricks to enhance those deceptions – charm, flattery, lack of empathy, self-
deprecation, and an ability to hide or fake emotions. It will also have favored an ability to hide
our emotions from ourselves, the better to deceive others.
On the other hand, if deception can return the rewards we think it does, then natural selection
will also have favored keen abilities for detecting it. Knowing that deception is part of our
nature, most of us are continually on guard against it, and other kinds of cheating, in others. If
our abilities to deceive others were good enough, they could undermine cooperating and even
cause our systems of reputation and exchange to collapse. That hasn’t happened because
cooperation is part of our social organization that has returned great riches. Given this, the best
way for deception to survive is probably to keep its ambitions in check, and generally not call too
much attention to itself - which indeed might be one of the roles of our consciences.
To Freud, your id is your impulsive and self-interested side, your superego is your moral and
ethical side, and your ego is left in the middle to arbitrate between these two opposing factions.
Since half of your genes come from your mother and half from your father, this sets in place the
potential for an enormous tug-of-war between opposing factions of genes.
Consciousness and Self-Awareness
The impression that we are able to choose freely between different possible courses of action is
fundamental to our self-image as beings with free will. But as we have seen, our obsession with
free will might be misplaced. Natural selection has created in us a tendency to do what is good
for our survival and reproduction, and not necessarily to do what we “want” to do. Our
subjective experience of freedom – or at least more of it than we might imagine – might be little
more than an illusion; there is growing evidence that our actions can be initiated by unconscious
mental processes that occur long before we become aware of them. We do not have the
privileged access or knowledge of our inner selves that we might imagine, and that most of us
simply take for granted.
Psychologists report that we arrive at inferences about ourselves from watching what we do and
from seeing how others react to us. Even our inventiveness might be largely unconscious, or at
least a non-verbal process. Creative people report that long unconscious work of their minds

24
incubating thoughts, which even once formulated, must pass thru a sort of aesthetic filter before
they reach consciousness.
There is a growing belief that many of our moral decisions might be made before we become
aware of them, as if we have an innate moral sense. Life in our complex social environment
requires us to make decisions about a fluid and constantly shifting situation. The role of
conscious mind might be to weigh up alternative courses of action sent to us from our
subconscious minds.
Truth and the Difficulty of Knowing What to Do
The simple meanings of truth are: knowing the right answer, knowing what really happened in
some situation, knowing the best course of action or the best solution to some problem.
For most of us, much of everyday life is a series of easy decisions that we think we know how to
make. But for many of the most important things we do, and most of the important decisions we
need to make, we don’t have and might not even be able to acquire the information we need to be
confident of making the right or best decision. It might also be that our best action depends on
what others do.
A potentially serious situation of not knowing what to do or how to behave is called “collective
ignorance”. Examples: You are stuck in a crowded elevator that comes to a halt between floors.
Maybe it is just a temporary problem, or maybe not. You look at others and they look at you for
clues; so you all stand there in silence. Stock markets can rise and fall with jarring urgency - few
investors know what to do so they just follow what others are doing. These are incidents about
whether we should copy others or try to figure out best solutions on our own.
“Innovators” will work out solutions for surviving and reproducing on their own. This takes time
and effort, and they occasionally make mistakes, but they can be expected to maintain a more or
less steady level of health and well-being as their innovations keep up with changes to their
environment.
Imitators or “social learners” would not have to spend the time and energy trying to work out
solutions to problems posed by the environment, and would not suffer the inevitable losses of
making the occasional error; they would just copy what others do. This is fine so long as it
works, but mistakes in copying will creep in, and the imitators will have no way to correct them.
The environment will also continue to change. So now the imitators will begin to suffer losses
and ill-health because they are employing obsolete solutions. Also deception, competition, and
exploitation are built into us because most of us rely on copying others most of the time. Another
trouble is that now we are often confronted with vastly more information about risks, from
newspapers and radio or the Internet, and yet we don’t always make the best use of it. We
calculate risk mainly from our small local group, because these were the people we spoke to or
heard from, and these were the people whose actions affected us. Or we are doing “bad
mathematics” in evaluating risk (likelihood or probability); the fraction of a numerator divided
by a denominator. A contagion could appear to me when I get overwhelming information say
from the Internet and compare it to my early small local group experiences.
A Dilemma
In cities all over the world millions of people live and work side by side ruled by a small elite,
under the rule of a few. We see this also with construction workers on large building sites and we
can imagine how laborers were building the pyramids in ancient Egypt. We attend sporting
events and musical performances in stadiums where tens of thousands of us remain for hours
only inches from each other, all following the actions of a few on the field or stage. There is

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something both strange and remarkable about this behavior: hyper-social and hyper-orderly.
Apart from the social insects no other animals can work together in such large numbers.
Until perhaps 10,000 years ago, all humans lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. The invention
of agriculture changed all that; by having the capacity to produce, rather than simply gather food,
meant larger numbers of people could reside in the place. Small bands of maybe ten or three
hundred people gradually came to be replaced by tribes that were effectively bands of bands.
Tribes gave way to chiefdoms, in which for the first time in our history societies became
centralized. There was stratification by class, and the chief sat at the top of a formal hierarchy of
authority. Chiefdoms eventually gave way in turn to large city-states such as Jericho (in modern-
day Israel) or the Mesopotamian cities of Ur and Babylon. These were later succeeded by
fledgling nation-states.
The three main forces propelling this growth were protection, economic well-being, and
reproductive output.
Also societies have been able to grow large because we have acquired the ability to trust
strangers. We buy things from strangers in the streets, walk by them and even allow them into
our homes without fear. We can do these things because we have evolved rules and dispositions
that allow us to exchange goods and services with people we have never met. The looming
shadow of future encounters with the same people softens our tendencies to cheat them; we
acquire reputations and learn those of others; and we count on the knowledge that you and those
you would do business with bring to every exchange a sense of fairness that protects you and
them from exploitation. There are also institutions such as the police, banks, or insurance
companies ready to protect us from strangers.
Our larger societies could naturally emerge by taking advantage of three properties they all seem
to share: one is that they emerge from “local rules”; the second is that there can be some
surprising “efficiencies” of larger groupings; and the third is “social viscosity”, our tendency to
maintain local ties within a larger society. The first of these allows larger societies simply to
emerge so long as they pay their way; the second tells us how they pay their way; and the third
shows us how our tribal psychology can still operate in a large society. It is also these three
features that oppressive and dictatorial regimes attack or exploit to break down a society and
hold it within their grip.
Local Rules and the Emergence of Self-Organization
Our societies naturally emerge with local rules; there is no final plan and specification from the
beginning. Say you want to go to a conference in Indonesia; there are hundreds of steps and
details to follow and to complete to reach that objective; including specific local rules along the
way. There are hundreds of strangers along the way who attend to you, direct you, advise you,
control you, and help you. Before you came along someone designed, built and maintained
roads, airports, and eating places, hired and is supervising staff, just for you and other people
around you. And most of the time everything turns out satisfactory.
Local rules and the complex interdependent systems that emerge from them have been with us
thruout the history of biological and cultural evolution. Again when we think of the human body,
the flowers, the bee hive, the animals near us, and the giant trees; they all start as single cells and
follow individual rules.
We acquire a language, customs, beliefs, and specializations as we go along, in response to local
circumstances. Some of us become lawyers, others artists or construction workers, farmers,
fishermen, or teachers. The local circumstances that influence our fates could be as simple as a
local shortage of a particular skill, something our parents told us, or a current demand. The

26
societies that emerge from this process, like an old building, are potentially immortal as we come
and go, but the structure remains intact.
Like cells committed to a particular fate, once we have committed to a specialization in life, it
can be difficult to return us to an earlier time of our lives when we had more options. Programs
to teach people new trades or skills are like attempts to restore a cell’s earliest potential, and just
as its is difficult to reprogram cells, it becomes harder to learn a new trade or some new physical
skill, or even a second language later in life. Maybe we attribute this simply to getting old; surely
that is part of it, but this raises the question of why are we built this way? Maybe in our past our
social environments were so stable that once committed to some direction there was no need to
change. Our brains may have evolved from earlier times, when they would not be asked to start
over and do something new, such as learn a new language, or switch from being a herder to a
fisherman. Or maybe our brains were designed to crystallize by the time of adolescence because
in our past we would continue to do just those specific activities for the rest of life. As cultural
development changed entire trades vanished due to obsolescence or inefficiencies; such as
chimneysweeps, glass blowers, shoemakers, or textile dyers. So it is not possible to predetermine
the number of people in each of many different occupations.
The Economies of Scaling
Economies of scale arise when some things like the number of people change. Prior to the
invention of agriculture, all human groups were hunter-gatherers. There were few economies of
scale once the group got beyond some minimum size that made it viable to survive. Maybe as
their numbers increased, the groups spread out in an expanding circle. As the groups got very
large, the daily routes for hunting and foraging would get too long, and settlements would divide
and space them some distance from each other. Hunting and gathering does not lead to
centralized and enlarged social organization.
Once agriculture, horticulture, or perhaps fishing technology is invented, people can then
exchange the food they make for goods and services that others provide. With food production
industrialized this way, societies can benefit from other economies of scale that arise naturally
within larger groups. Modern cities are in many ways more efficient than collections of smaller
towns or villages. Wealth creation and inventions increase more rapidly, also attracting and
producing more creative people and industries. Economies of scale provide an incentive to
remain together, yielding more wealth and resources, and reducing important risks. A centralized
society can distribute food efficiently and it can devote resources to curb violence, maintain
order and protect people from fraud or theft. The society can now afford an army.
With the accumulation of wealth cities became targets for sacking and plundering. This led to
locating cities on protective locations such as hilltops and construction of defensive walls.
Another problem with higher densities of people is the occurrence of more and nastier diseases.
Living in large cities does not maximize well-being, but rather reproduction. As long as
technological innovations maintain economies of scale, it becomes a simple matter to grow the
group into a larger society, and eventually into the large metropolitan cities of the modern world.
People willingly allow themselves to be ruled by a small number of leaders who demand taxes
and who make claims to be connected to the gods.
Large societies don’t exist for the good of the masses, but because we as individuals get more out
of them than we would from a smaller grouping or even no grouping at all. The cooperative
enterprise of society is always finely balanced between the benefits that derive from cooperation
on the one hand and the benefits that derive from trying to subvert the system toward your own
gain without being caught or overpowered.

27
Dictators shrewdly surround themselves with sycophantic supporters - including their armies and
police – and reward them with homes, access to food, and better freedom of movement than is
available to others. Social institutions look after themselves because the people in them, like
everyone else, have their self- interest in mind.
But revolutions take lots of provocation, and you might just lose your life.
Viscosity and the Maintenance of Small Worlds
The fundamental feature of human societies is our cooperation and ability to work together as a
group. This cooperation depends upon meeting people repeatedly and on knowing others’
reputations. Both of these features fall away rapidly in large groups. This does not happen nearly
as fast as we might think, for two reasons. One is that even in large societies, individuals are
surprisingly well connected to each other; and the other is that people tend to move around far
less than we suspect. Our social networks can be loosely thought of as our circle of friends.
Studies of real social networks have shown this over and over, that two people chosen at random
will have some link – perhaps friendship or belonging to the same club – is greatly increased if
those two people have a mutual acquaintance. We expect this sort of clustering and connectivity
among people if they don’t move around too much. Even in our large societies we do not
naturally move very far in our every day lives; this is called social viscosity – the formation of
smaller clubs, cliques, and other sub groupings. This effectively reduces the size of those
societies. Our tendency to social viscosity means our knowledge of each other is accurate; it
makes it easier to trust in reciprocal exchanges; and we can be aware of each other’s reputations.
This is probably why we have this tendency toward making groups-within-groups in the first
place: it is a natural consequence of our ancient psychology for living in small groups. Even
large social networks often display a peculiar architecture in which a few popular individuals
have links to a large number of other people, while most people have far fewer links. These
gregarious people provide short routes that can link many pairs of people, and thereby effectively
reduce the size of the population, turning what is a wide world into a rather smaller one.
Authoritarian and dictatorial regimes have succeeded in controlling people by removing the
elements of the cooperative society on which these instincts act. They remove trust between
individuals and this destroys cooperation, returning people to a dependent and psychologically
infantile state. Once a secret police force or surveillance measures have penetrated the society so
deeply that even family members betray one another, the fabric of the cooperative society
collapses because reciprocity networks and personal reciprocity can no longer be relied on.
People have little choice but to fall in line, seeking rewards directly from the state because it is
the only source.
Dictatorial regimes also remove people’s social choices by reserving the right to direct them into
any occupation at any given time, thereby losing the efficiencies that might come from
specialization. These same regimes also skillfully play segments of society off against each other
by encouraging tribal rivalries, and thereby weakening any opposition that might arise from
widespread cooperation among people. Having abolished precisely those features of our social
lives that have motivated our cooperative societies throughout our history, it is no surprise that
authoritarian or planned states fail to flourish.
Otherness and the Dilution of Social Ties
The importance of the social group or cultural survival vehicle to our history, evolution, and
psychology can not be exaggerated. It is powerful, sometimes emotional, and often fragile force;
depending for its success on a sense of togetherness. This sense derives from two sources. One is
the genetic relatedness among family members that we and every other animal make use of, and

28
the uniquely human sense of social or cultural relatedness that makes our cooperation work.
When we perceive these sources to be adequate, we are prompted to behave well toward each
other; but even slight perceived differences in social relatedness can end in xenophobia, racism,
and extreme violence.
This leaves us with a dilemma. We live at an extraordinary time in the history of humanity, a
time in the twenty-first century when there are still people living a Stone Age existence in the
Amazonian rain forest, who have not been contacted by outsiders, and who know nothing about
the modern world. We could exchange one of our newborn children with theirs and happily raise
them in our respective societies because our social rules have remained the same even as our
technology has changed. It is these social rules that are being put under strain as globalizations
and ever more culturally differentiated societies disturb the average level of cultural relatedness
for much of their evolutionary history and even their own personal history. Large societies of
people will be brought together who have little common cultural identity of the sort that
historically has promoted our cultural altruism. The success of modern more heterogeneous
societies will increasingly depend on clear enforcement of cultural or democratically derived
rules to maintain stability, and will be threatened by smaller social groupings seeking to
disengage from the whole. Indicators of decline in social relatedness might be the increasing
tendencies of people to avoid risk, to expect safety, to be vigilant about fairness, to require and
be granted “rights”. These are symptoms of a greater sense of self-interest, brought about by the
declines in the “togetherness” we feel. This will lead effectively reverting to our earlier
evolutionary instincts, to a time when we relied on kin selection or cooperation among families
for our needs to be met. Humans evolved to live in small isolated groups and are finely tuned to
seek people of common values and allegiances.
The very feature of our social existence that makes us unique – our ability to cooperate with
others – makes us unique among the animals capable of moving beyond the divisive politics of
race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. Were we as mindless as apes, and ants, those would be
impossible: they are racists and xenophobes, and unlike us, this inflexibility is their genetic
character limitation. What our history has demonstrated is that we humans will get along with
anyone who wished to cooperate with us. The returns of cooperation, trade, and exchange that
derive from that part of our nature have historically won over guesswork based on markers of
ethnicity or other features; and they always will.
Our genes have crated in us a mechanism capable of greater inventiveness and common good
than any other on Earth. The key is to provide or somehow create among people stronger clues of
trust and common values that might otherwise be suggested by the highly imprecise markers of
ethnicity or cultural differences that we have used thruout our history, and then to encourage the
conditions that give people a sense of shared purpose and shared outcomes. That is the recipe
that carried us around the world beginning around 60,000 years ago, and is still works. Looking
around the great cosmopolitan cities of our world, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is
already happening.

Wired for Culture-The Natural History of Human Cooperation, Mark Pagel, Penguin Books,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York, 10014, USA, 2012

Mark Pagel, b. 1954 Seattle, Washington. 1980 PhD University of Washington. Research on
evolution and the development of languages. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011.
Professor of University of Reading UK, School of Biological Sciences

29
EARLY CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Major reflexes at birth:

Startle By loud noise, bumping, sudden loss of support Mostly lost at 3-6 months
Grasp Objects placed on palms or soles Reflex lost at 12 months
Sucking and Swallowing by touching lips Lost if not stimulated
Rooting Touch cheek, head will turn towards touch
Withdrawal Recoil from pain and cry
Swimming In Water 6-12 months can swim voluntary
Out of Water swimming reflex at any age

Tends to spend 18 to 20 hours a day in various states of sleep. Even when asleep, their mind is
active.
Each child is born with individual temperamental qualities, such as crying and movement.
Securely holding and stroking gently can calm fussy babies. Anxious mothers may even
aggravate colicky babies. Yet some lie quietly and seldom fuss.
The infant is born with 10 to 14 billion brain cells, but they are not developed yet. At 12 months
about 2/3 are already matured. During the first half-year of life, the motor and sensory-motor
areas of the brain develop first, then the visual and auditory. Physical activity also depends on
the development of the muscles and skeletal system.
The typical brain of a full term infant weighs 350 grams at birth. At the end of the first year the
weight is 1,000 grams. At puberty the weight is 1,300 grams. At adulthood the weight is 1,500
grams.
Eventually the human brain develops 100 billion brain cells, and each cell is connected to others
with 5,000 to 10,000 synapses, resulting with 500 to 1,000 trillion synapses or bits of
information. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alter the connections within
that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical body
changes, our brain does also. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep.
The human brain is not fully developed until about age 25. Even after that it continues to evolve,
depending on the focus and extend of use. Particularly the synapses are proportionally
strengthened and increased or lost.
Just as physical exercise strengthens the body, so the training and more intensive use of the brain
increases and strengthen the neurons, synapses and other parts of the neurotransmitters; up to the
genetic potential. For example, when people learn Braille or learn to play the violin. London
cabdrivers, who memorize the city’s 25,000 streets, have a larger posterior hippocampus (the
region that files spatial memories) than the average Londoner.
Continuing with infant development: their auditory, taste, smell, pain, temperature and visual
senses mature very quickly.
The infant develops locomotion by raising his chest at 2 months, sitting up with support at 4
months, standing with help at 8 months and walking when led at 11 months. Walking alone
usually appears between 13 and 15 months. At the same time the infant continues to explore and
investigate.
After the first year the infant begins scribbling; after he learns the pencil and crayon can be used
for other purposes than chewing. His first visual accomplishment and the first building block for
artistic expression.

30
Jean Piaget explains the cognitive developments of children in five-stages. During the first few
years, the child’s reasoning capacities; interpretations of the surroundings are frequently illogical
and unrealistic. His concepts and explanations seem often to be bewildering to adults. With time
and experience these misconceptions will be corrected.
Two important principles of intellectual growth depend on organization and adaptation.
As the child is exposed to new stimuli, the mind will construct a mental organization to
categorize and integrate these elements into regular frames of mind systems, to allow the mind to
adapt to the surrounding environment. This always depends on prior knowledge and
understanding. To make the unfamiliar familiar. This will lead to more restructuring of the
mental organization framework. The development of thinking relies on changes made in the
mental structure. This requires certain equilibrium in changing old ways of thinking to solve new
problems.
The concept of time slowly develops. To young children “later,” “in a few minutes,” or “next
week” just means “not now.” Usually they are able to associate daily activities with time; time to
eat, time to go to bed.
Closely related with language development are mental imagery and symbolization and speech.
The human brain is programmed to enable individuals to create and understand language; from
sounds, to words, to sentences, and correct grammar. Children acquire language by observing
and imitating adults.
When the infant is born the only vocalizations are cries. Variations of cries will increase during
the first 6 to 8 weeks of life. Next basic vowels and consonants are developed, then phonemes
sounds such as b, p, t, d, o follow. As teeth break thru the gums, the child develops more tongue
and throat control, increasing more sounds. Syllables emerge at the 6th month. By the 9th month
infants imitate simple words of adults.
12 months Understands some words
24 months Vocabulary of 50+ words, uses two word phrases
30 months New words added daily
36 months 1000 word vocabulary
By the third year, children better understand wide variety of words and inflections or word
endings.
By this time the child has learned to adapt and adjust to different social settings, in the family
and outside the family.
By the 6th month the infant develops bonds of specific attachment.

Life Span Development, Jeffrey S. Turner, Donald B. Helms, W. B. Saunders Company,

Philadelphia/ London/ Toronto, 1979
Grow Your Mind, Newsweek January 19&17, 2011

Jeffrey S. Turner, PhD Yale Univercity. Professor of Philosophy with Buckwel University.
Turner and Helms jointly wrote numerous books on Lifespan Development.

31
THE CHILD’S CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD

Based on extensive research conducted with children in Switzerland, France and Spain.

Notion of Thought
1st Stage (to age 7) thought is with the mouth and with ears; the mouth is the seat of
mental activity.
2 Stage (7-10) thinking is in the head, the “little mouth” inside the head.
nd

3rd Stage (age 11) thinking is disassociated from mouth and ears.

Origin of Names
1st Stage (5,6) name is part of thing/object; the thing knows its name.
2nd Stage (7,8) name was invented by the maker, a man; it is dissociated form the thing.
3rd Stage (9,10) made up by men, not particularly identified with creation, it is handed
down from father to son, it is just a sign.

Dreams
The first dream is real to the child, subsequently he learns from his parents and social
environment that it is not real.
1st Stage (5,6) dreams come from the outside and take place within the room, he dreams
with his eyes. When the dream is highly emotional, it means he did something
wrong, and he will be punished. The person in the dream caused the dream, or
maybe God, the devil, or gypsies. The memory of the dream is confused with
ordinary memory.
nd
2 Stage (7,8) dream is in his head, in thought, in voice; in front of him, he dreams
with his eyes; the person in the dream participates with him, the dream
arises inside but, is beside him in the room.
3rd Stage (10,11) dream is internal; confusion between dream and things dreaded; not a
material image, simply a thought.

Realism and the Idea of Participation

The infant can not distinguish his thoughts from that of others, his self from the external world.
When he cries his parents respond, they even foresee his desires. There is complete continuity
between the infant and parents.
To a child, thought is inseparable from object; names are part of the thing named, dreams are
external. Then the child becomes confused between the self and things, the internal and the
external, the psychical and the physical. The self and the external world is not clearly separate.
The whole world is a society of beings, obedient to moral and social laws. The sun and moon the
most obvious, are all for his purpose and benefit.
He endows inanimate things with life and consciousness. He also believes he can communicate
and participate with things; he can make the sun move. He also believes one thing can influence
another thing. Also reality can be controlled by thought.
He respects his parents, and believes the world is governed by moral rather than by physical
laws. He believes that man can control the sun, moon, stars...His parents can stop the storm.
With brain development and social influence, especially from mother, he slowly differentiates
self from things, and from his surroundings.

32
Language always lags in its aptitude for expression; he takes all metaphors literally “the wind
blows” as if a persons blows with their mouth. Thought creates language, and then language
seeks to imprison thought.

Consciousness is attributed to things

1st Stage (4,5) If a stone moves it can feel it. The sun has vision, it knows how many
people are watching it. A boat feels its passengers. Wood feels it is
burning. The wind feels obstacles. The wall feels it when it is broken
down, or when a stone is broken.
The sun and moon follow me.
nd
2 Stage (6-9) Only things that can move are conscious: sun, moon, stars, clouds, rivers,
wind, carts, fire…
 The sun and moon do not follow me, only the rays.
rd
3 Stage (8-12) Only things that move on their own accord are conscious: wind, sun,
moon, streams.
th
4 Stage (11,12) Only animals are conscious. The child becomes systematically reflective
and discards all animism of things.

Concept of Self
1st Stage. Self and things are completely confused; the desire exerts magical activity over
reality.
2nd Stage. Self is differentiated from things; still feels partially participating with things;
believes capable of acting on things from distance (words, images, gestures…);
psychical and physical ideas are not yet dissociated.
rd
3 Stage. Self is far distinguished from things; thoughts are situated in the head; gestures
are no longer effective; magic is no more; animism may remain ( the sun is
alive, concerned with our doings and desires our well-being); more like one
person to another.

Artificialism (human creation), Animism (living and active)

1st Stage. Sun and moon are made by someone, made by man, maybe from a flame with a
match or rockets. Like a baby made by parents, they grow into heavenly bodies;
his parents are omniscient and almighty. Humans control creation. The universe
is a society of living beings that live according to a well ordered code of rules.
All things are to some degree alive and conscious. Man made the planets; upon
receiving religious instructions, and also finding that their parents are not
omniscient and almighty, children transfer this believe to God, a “Gentleman”
living in heaven, closer to the stars and planets.
nd
2 Stage (8,9) Half natural, half artificial; sun and moon come from clouds, that come
from roofs of houses, produced from smoke in the houses.
rd
3 Stage (9-11) Not from human activity. Maybe the moon is cut into pieces by the wind
and then is re-united or just obstructed by clouds. The moon, wind, sky,
clouds… move by an internal force with a common end, they act by intelligent
collaboration. Planets no longer follow us or have concern for us, but maybe
they are conscious of their movement.

33
Meteorology and the origin of Water
The Sky
1st Stage. The sky is situated near the high roofs or mountains, like a ceiling or solid arch,
made by man (later by God); made of stone, earth, glass, air, clouds…
2nd Stage. Made indirectly by human activity; the sky comes from the clouds, that come
from smoke, coming from houses and ships.
3rd Stage. No more solid arch, the sky is made up of air and clouds, of natural origin.

Night
1st Stage. The night is there to sleep, no thought of who or how made.
2nd Stage. Is a black cloud or black air, it fills the whole atmosphere, moves by human
power, by God.
3rd Stage. The black cloud blocks out the day, like a shadow.
4th Stage. The sun disappears (the day is caused by the sun).

Clouds
1st Stage (5,6) Solid, made of stone or earth…made by men, by God, are alive and
conscious, they obey man, clouds make night so we can go to sleep.
nd
2 Stage (6-9) Come from the smoke of houses; no houses - no clouds.
3rd Stage (9,10) Natural, condensed air, moisture, steam, heat; inspired by school: sun
makes the water evaporate.

Rain
1st Stage (5-7) Clouds are made of stone or smoke; confusion: are the clouds a sign of
rain or the cause of rain; rain comes from the sky itself, water is made by
man with taps and pipes, God in sky sends water down from his tap.
nd
2 Stage (7-10) Clouds move where rain is needed. From school they learn water comes
from evaporation from the sea; they explain that smoke from houses go
and fetch water from the sea.
3 Stage. Rain comes from “melting” clouds; clouds are “wetness” or “perspiration”, the
rd

sun perspires.

Wood and Plants

1st Stage (6,7) Made from broken pieces of furniture or come from trees, trees made by
man. Put sticks in the ground or sow seeds, made by man.
nd
2 Stage (8,9) Wood comes from trees, from seeds or roots from trees themselves; men
must harvest them and sow them, or else they will not grow.
3rd Stage Correct explanation

The child’s conception of the world

Every object, including our bodies, is “made for” a purpose. Natural objects such as the sun,
lake, mountains are made for warmth, boating, climbing; they were made “for man”, and they
are closely related to him. The child’s life is intimately regulated by his parents ”for him”, and
“made by” his father and mother. These are basically feelings of mental predilections, rather than
explicit and systematized. Every thing in nature is charged with purpose, not by chance or
mechanical necessity. There is an internal and volitional drive to accomplish a goal. The clouds

34
and streams “know” they are moving and “feel” what they are doing. All things succeed as part
of the social organization of the work, they function with the aid of commands and commanders;
and man is the chief over all things. This belief is strongly held until the child’s mind is faced by
a problem; really the confusion between physical and moral law. The sun follows us “to warm
us”, that is the purpose of the sun. Even six to eight year olds say that the fork is there for eating
and mother is there to take care of them; and this covers everything in nature. The night is for
sleeping. The moon is for giving us light. The clouds are for making rain and for God to live in,
and rain is for watering flowers. Between the age of three and seven, children are so sure “why”
everything is that way; for the assigned purpose of serving man, and men order all this and the
things obey. Man is the reason for everything.
At the earliest stage the child believes that just as babies are born and grow, so it is with all
things; stones, mountains, lakes, clouds, moon, sun; and all is made by man. The baby existed
before he was born; he was wished and arranged by his parents. The parents are the cause for all
creation. Children often report the dead become little and are then born again as babies. The
children hear fables by their parents that angels, storks…sent the babies; or maybe babies were
manufactured. Mothers eat special food and then babies are born. But how does the mother put
the head, the legs, and arms together they ask?
Even three to seven year olds ask how the stars, clouds, wind, mountains, rives, ocean, earth, the
universe, even how God started. Babies are artificially made and living, all things are similar.
Society and living beings are controlled and directed by men. Self and the external world are
closely related.
1st Period. The heavenly bodies follow us voluntarily, to give us light and warmth. We
make them move, similar to the child’s relationship with his parents. He feels
free, aware of self, he knows he is dependent of his parents; they are the cause
of all he possesses. He feels part of them.
2nd Period. The awareness of things focus changes from diffused to more sharply defined.
Men now make the sun from stone or a match. Things are manufactured and
living at the same time. Just like babies made by hand.
3rd Stage (7-10) Children begin to understand and explain machines and human
techniques, such as bicycles and motors. Machines are now the new wonder.
They renounce belief in human omnipotence. They know reality and its laws,
the laws of nature. Man makes lakes and watercourses, but water falls from the
clouds according to natural processes. Moral laws are replaced by physical
determinism. Imparted movement is now distinguished from inherent
movement; manufactured things from living bodies.
th
4 Stage (9,10) The sun is independent of human manufacture, but still made for us to
give us warmth and light…clouds to give us rain. All nature is imbued with
purpose. Nature is now the force of change. About 1/3 of children still endow
plants with consciousness. If they received religious instruction, the human
activity of Stages 1 and 2 are now transferred to God, but God seems more like
a fairy or Father Christmas. Still all nature centers on the child and has been
organized by his parents or by human beings in general.

The child’s curiosity is related to manual experiments. Manual work is essential to the child’s
mental development. By the age of eight, his work becomes orderly, movement is controlled by
thought which precedes action.
35
Gradually the child decreases his egocentricity and develops an objective standpoint. As he
becomes more socialized, the exclusive bond to his parents is loosened and his own point of
view or self becomes clearer.

The Child’s Conception of the World, Jean Piaget, Littlefield, Adams & Co., Totowa, New
Jersey, 1975

Jean Piaget, b. 1896 Neuchatel, Zwitzerland. d. 1980

1918 PhD in Natural Sciences from University of Neuchatel.
1918-19 post Doctoral training in psychology under Carl Jung at University of Zurich.
1919-21 post Doctoral training in abnormal psychology at Sorbonne in Paris.
He developed the Binet intellingence Test, with Alfred Binet in Paris. He also developed a
theory of cognitive process from childhood to adult before 1921. Then he returned to
 Geneva.
1923 he was married; three children followed, whom he studied carefully from infancy on.
1925-29 professor of psychology, sociology and the philosophy of science at the University
of Neuchatel. He also taught at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne in Paris.
1929-68 Director of International Bureau of Education.
His six-decade carreer in child development studies have been highly recognized in Europe
and America.

36
PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

The human personality develops both under the influence of biologic and cultural factors. The
cultural factors are described by Eric Berne in his experience as a Psychiatrist described in his
concepts of Transactional Analysis. He found that individuals express their personality in three
ego states (concepts originally presented by Sigmund Freud), colloquially called: Parent, Child
and Adult. These states begin to develop at infancy and early childhood, and are quite well
established by the age of 5 years.

The Parent
The huge collection of information, unquestioned or imposed from parents or parent substitutes.
Everything the child ever felt, observed or heard is recorded in his Parent. This information was
taken in and recorded without editing. His dependency, and his inability to construct with words
made it impossible for him to modify, correct or explain. If his parents were hostile and battling
each other, he just felt terror; observing the two persons on whom he depended on for survival,
destroying each other. He did not know his father came home drunk due to a business failure and
his mother was sick due to her new pregnancy.
In the Parent are recorded the admonitions and rules and laws that the child heard from his
parents and saw in their living. They range from earliest parental communications, interpreted
nonverbally thru tone of voice, facial expression, cuddling, or non-cuddling, to the more
elaborate verbal rules and regulations espoused by the parents as the little person becomes able
to understand words. In these are the thousands of “no’s” and “don’ts” plus the looks of pain and
horror on mother’s face.
Likewise are recorded the coos of pleasure of a happy mother and the looks of delight of a proud
father. Later come the more complicated pronouncements: never tell a lie; pay your bills; always
clean your plate; you can never trust a woman; never trust a policeman; do to others before they
do to you; never marry a…
It doesn’t matter whether these rules are good or bad in light of reasonable ethic, they are
recorded as “truth” from the source of all power and security, the giants that the small person
feels obliged to please and obey. They are permanent recordings; they cannot be erased, always
ready for replay. They are essential for survival and life in the family and community.
Confusion develops in the child’s mind when the parents say: “don’t lie”, but tell lies; when they
claim adherence to a religious ethic and then not abide by it. Or the mother may be “good” and
the father “bad”. These lead to weakening of the Parent in the child.
Much Parent data is of the “how-to” category: how to eat soup; how to fix a bicycle; how to chop
firewood; how to prepare fish…to help the little person to get along by himself.
There are thousands of these simple rules and lesson in every person’s brain. Many are fortified
with imperatives like “never” and “always”. These rules are the roots of compulsions, quirks and
eccentricities that appear in later behaviors. These may be helpful or burdensome, and may be
revised by the Adult later; this will be discussed subsequently.
The child may also learn from his parents’ acceptable expressions of emotions under certain
circumstances. For example if a child feels frustrated: in one family it is modeled to yell, another
family to cry, another family to sulk, another family to talk about it to reach an understanding
and a solution.
There are other sources of Parental data than the physical parents also, such as TV and video and
computers. These also teach concepts of life, maybe complementary or contrary to parental
influences.
37
The Child
While external Parent data is being collected, there is another recording going on simultaneously
internally, the emotional response and evaluation called the Child. The main emotional reactions
are: fear, sadness, anger, surprise, excitement, guilt, shame, disgust, interest, and happiness.
The small child is so helpless, yet numberless demands and expectations are placed on him. He
also has needs and urges: hunger, itches, cramps, bowel movements, to know, to explore, and to
express feelings; yet he can not speak and explain himself. This leads to negative feelings,
concluding early that he is “not OK”. This happens even when the parents are loving and well
meaning. The negative “not OK” feelings, of frustration, rejection or abandonment, will return
later in life whenever difficult demands and expectations are placed on him, maybe expressed
with anger and hate.
There is a bright side also:
The Adult
By the age of ten months the child can move about by himself and begins to inspect his
environment. He can walk when held with both hands and enjoys social activities such as playing
peek-a-boo. He becomes aware of his world and even makes choices and experiments with the
limited alternatives available to him.
The Adult, during the early years is fragile and tentative. It is easily overruled by the commands
of the Parent and the fear of the Child. With time the Adult in the child matures and strengthens,
new experiences accumulate and strengthen the mental state. It evaluates these with the
influences of the Parent (the values and standards programmed by his parents and authority
figures) and the Child (prelogical thinking and poorly differentiated and distorted perceptions).
The Adult becomes the arbiter between competing claims and influences and can make final
judgments and live with the consequences. The Adult can even revise the Parent and Child
information with up to date experiences in real life. The Adult also cultivates the function of
probability judgment.

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?, Eric Berne, M.D., Grove Press, Inc., New York

Eric Berne, b. 1910 Montreal, Canada; d. 1970 California.

His father was a physician and his mother was a writer.
PhD from Mc Gill University 1935 in medicine and surgery.
Residency in psychiastry at Yale University, with studies in psychoanalysis until 1938.
Served in the United Stated Army Medical Corps during World War II.
After the war, he resumed his studies under Eric Ericson at the San Francisco Psychanalytic
Institure.
1958 he published “Transactionsl Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group
Therapy”.
1964 he founded the Intenational Transactional Analysis Association.
He wrote numerous books, mostly related to Transactional Analysis.

38

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

Psychologists have intensely studied human ways of thinking for several decades and divided
them into two modes:
System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary
control.
System 2 allocated attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex
computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of
agency, choice, and concentration.

Examples of System 1
Detect that one object is more distant than another.
Orient to the source of a sudden sound.
Complete the phrase “bread and …”
Detect hostility in a voice.
Answer to 2+2=?
Read words on large billboards.
Drive a vehicle on an empty road.
Understand simple sentences.

Examples of System 2
Brace for the starter gun in a race.
Focus attention on the clowns in the circus.
Focus on the voice of a particular person in a crowded and noisy room.
Look for a woman with white hair.
Search memory to identify a surprising sound.
Maintain a faster walking speed than is natural for you.
Monitor the appropriateness of your behavior in a social situation.
Count the occurrences of the letter”a” in a page of text.
Tell someone your phone number.
Fill out a tax form.
Check the validity of a complex logical argument.

All are aware of the limited capacity of attention, driving on a crowded highway and talking on
the cell phone is dangerous.
Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and
System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is
engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2; impressions, intuitions,
intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs,
and most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.
You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine-- usually.
When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific
processing that may solve the problem of the moment. System 2 is mobilized when a question
arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer, as probably happened to you when you
encountered the multiplication problem 17x24. System 2 is also activated when an event is
detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains. System 2 also

39
continuously monitors your own behavior - the control that keeps you polite when you are angry,
and alert when you are driving at night. Most of what you (your System 2) think and do
originated in your System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difficult, and it normally
has the last word.
The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and
optimizes performance. The arrangement works well most of the time because System 1 is
generally very good at what is does: its models of familiar situations are accurate, its short-term
predictions are usually accurate as well, and its initial reactions to challenges are swift and
generally appropriate. System 1 has biases however, systematic errors that it is prone to make in
specified circumstances. It sometimes answers easier questions than the one it was asked, and it
has little understanding of logic and statistics. This limitation of System 1 cannot be turned off.
One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1, System 2 is in charge of
self-control. Biases cannot always be avoided, because System 2 may have no clue to the error.
Even when clues to likely errors are available, errors can be prevented only by the enhanced
monitoring and effortful activity of System 2. Continuous vigilance in not necessarily good, and
is certainly impractical. Our thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too
slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 making routine decisions. The best we
can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely, and try harder
to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.
A more descriptive term for System 1 is “automatic system” and for System 2 is “effortful
system”.
A busy System 2, where self-control and cognitive effort and/or intensive physical exercise are
engaged simultaneously is more stressful, and will allow System 1 more influence on behavior.
Indicators of stress are the lowering of the blood glucose level and impeded sound judgment.
One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions
“suggested” by System 1, allowing some to be expressed directly in behavior and suppressing or
modifying others. The extent of deliberate checking and searching varies among individuals.
People tend to accept superficially plausible answers, they are lazy thinkers.
Ideas are like nodes in a vast network, called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to
many others. There are different types of links: causes are linked to their effects (virus->cold);
things to their properties (lime ->green); things to the categories to which they belong (banana-
>fruit). An idea that has been activated activates many ideas, which in turn activate other ideas.
Only a few of the activated ideas will register in consciousness; most of the work of associative
thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves.
Reciprocal links are common in the associative network. For example, being amused tends to
make you smile, and smiling tends to make you feel amused. The common admonition to “act
calm and kind regardless of how you feel” will very likely lead you to actually feeling calm and
kind.
Whenever you are conscious, and perhaps even when you are not, multiple computations are
going on in your brain, which maintain and update current answers to some key questions: Is
anything new going on? Is there a threat? Are things going well? Should my attention be
redirected? Is more effort needed for this task? The assessments are carried out automatically by
System 1, and one of their functions is to determine whether extra effort is required from System
2. Your feelings will range between cognitive ease and cognitive strain. In a state of cognitive
ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your
intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar. You are also likely to be

40
relatively casual and superficial in your thinking. When you feel strained, you are more likely to
be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and
make fewer errors, but you also are less intuitive and less creative than usual. So man seems to
be first concerned with his survival and preservation.
Predictable illusions will occur if a judgment is based on an impression of cognitive ease or
strain. Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias
beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because
familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have
always known this. You do not have to repeat the entire statement of a fact or idea to make it
appear true. The familiarity of one phrase in the statement suffices to make the whole statement
feel familiar, and therefore true.
Anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help: maximize legibility, the first statement
is more likely to be believed, your message printed and on high-quality paper, use simple
language.
Much of our life is guided by the impressions of System 1. People can overcome some of the
superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so. On most
occasions, however, the lazy System 2 will adopt the suggestions of System 1 and march on.
The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which
represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of
circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity either at the
same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the
pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it
determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectation of the future.
We infer physical causality from repeated observations on correlations among events. From birth
we have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.
They are products of System 1. We are born prepared to make intentional attributions. People are
prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.
System 1 does not have the capability for this mode of reasoning; System 2 can learn to think
statistically, but few people receive the necessary training.
System 1 functions by jumping to conclusions efficiently if the conclusions are likely to be
correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and
effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and
there is no time to collect more information. These are circumstances in which intuitive errors
are probable, which may be prevented by a deliberate intervention of System 2.
Understanding a statement begins with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the
idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it. The
initial attempt to believe is an automatic operation of System 1, which involves the construction
of the best possible interpretation of the situation. Unbelieving and doubting are operations of
System 2, but System 2 is sometimes busy and often lazy, and then more likely to be influenced
by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials. The operations of associative memory
contribute to general confirmation bias where people seek data that are likely to be compatible
with the beliefs they currently hold.
The halo effect is the name for a common bias that shapes our view of people and situations. It is
one of the ways the representation of the world that System 1 generates is simpler and more
coherent than the real thing. For example if you meet a person for a brief time and find her to be
personable and easy to talk to, you are likely to associate to her such favorable qualities as
generosity.
41
We generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to hard questions is
not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it.
People let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Self–criticism is one of
the functions of System 2. In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist
for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions, an endorser rather than an enforcer;
arguments and conclusions tend to be consistent with existing beliefs
Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness
of truly random events.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 18 West 18th Street,
New York 10011, 2011
Daniel Kahneman, b. 1934, Tel Aviv, Israel.
1961 PhD University of California, Berkeley.
1961-66 Lecturer in psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also his research was
published in the journal Science.
1965-66 Visiting scientist at University of Michigan.
1966/1967 A fellow at the Center of Cognitive Studies in psychology at Harvard University.
His research focused on behavioral economics and hedonistic psychology.
1968/1969 Applied Psychology Research Unit in Cambridge.
2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
His extensive research has been widely published from 1966 onward.

42
EARLY PHILIPPINE HISTORY

ca. AD 1st – 14th Centuries

Most of the people lived in small villages (30 to 100 households), engaged in subsistence
agriculture, by slash and burn practices; also in hunting and fishing. They were usually members
of the same kinship groups. They did not use farm animals for cultivating the land. The land was
communally owned. Plots of land would be used by individuals, cleared, cultivated, planted and
then harvested for his use; but then the land would revert to the community again. Sedentary
farming was the exception.
In coastal areas, at the mouths of big rives and sheltered bays, large trade centers formed with
2,000 to 20,000 people. The people of the nearby communities traded with each other and also
with far distant, even foreign traders (Chinese, Arabs…). They also had craft specialists in such
areas as: pottery, iron smelting, boat building, jewelry and fabric weaving.
Every community, known as a Barangay, was independent from other communities, and headed
by a Datu. Contiguous communities, forming a trade center may have a Pangulo over individual
Datus.
The people of the community were divided into three broad classes: Datu and his family were the
nobility; freeholders; and “dependents” (sharecroppers, debt peons and war captives). The last
two levels were called slaves by Spanish observers. The slave status was inherited, but by way of
manumission (emancipation) and interclass marriage was seldom extended over more then two
generations.
There were certain privileges exclusive to the classes. Wealth and personal ability were of
highest significance. The most basic principals of community life were based on kinship and
family.
Marriages were generally monogamous although polygamy was practiced sometimes also.
Giving of dowry by the groom to the family of the bride was common.
The position of Datu was generally based by heredity, but could also be by way of courage, skill
in war, material wealth and marriage. Most important was personal charisma. The Datu ruled the
community, sometimes with a council of elders, who served as: legislator, judge, arbiter,
mediator, and leader in war. His residence served also as seat of governance. He ruled according
to the customs and traditions of the community. He had the authority to punish and compel for
the payment of offences. He was limited to the territory of the community. In return for his
services, the Datu received certain privileges such as: a share of their crops, help in preparation,
planting and harvesting of his fields; with hunting and fishing; religious festivals; and in defense
and raids with neighboring communities.
Inter-barangay warfare was common. Usually in the form of raids, due to family feuds, abuse of
friendship or retaliation to unprovoked attacks from other barangays.
The people were very religious; they worshipped a myriad of spirits who lived everywhere, from
the immediate community to the ends of the universe. The spirits had the power to heal as well
as to cause illness. One name of the supreme spirit was Bathala, he was remote and hard to
reach, but the subordinate spirits, the anitos, could be contacted by the people to appeal on their
behalf. Only special people, the babaylan, could intercede on behalf of the people, by way of
rituals and ceremonies. The occasions would be during special festivals. The anitos were also
represented by idols, in the homes, and in the fields.

Filippino Prehistory, F. Landa Jocano, Punlad Research House, Inc., Metro Manila, Philippines,
1998
43
F. Landa Jocano, b. 1930Cabatuan, Iloilo; d. 2013. Foremost Philippine cultural anthropologist.
1957 BA from Central Philippine University. 1962 Master in Anthropology from University
of Chicago, later PhD there also. With University of the Philippines Department of
Anthropology for 31 years; Department Chairman, Director of Philippine Studies program,
Head of Asian Center Museum Laboratory. Prolific wide-ranging writing of his studies in
ethnology, folklore, pre-colonial history and international relations.

THE BAGOBOS
The Bagobos were one of more than six tribes, plus Muslim communities, living in the Davao
area when the Spanish came in 1849, after they signed treaties with the Sultan of Magindanao.
The Bagobos live in an area S of Davao City, SE of Mt. Apo to the Gulf of Davao.
Some of their many unique believes and practices were:
Their creation account relates how the human race sprang from Tuglay and his wife Tuglibong
who lived on Mt. Apo. Many fruits grew on the mountains and the forests abounded with game.
Children were born and grew up. One day the parents told the oldest son and daughter to go far
away across the ocean, a good place was waiting for them there. They left and no one saw or
heard of them anymore. Their descendents, the white people, came back to Davao later. The
remaining children stayed with their parents and later died and went to the sky. More children
were born, and after many more conflicts, trials, tribulations, and miracles they formed two tribes
increasing to populations into the thousands. And as the peoples stayed true to their beliefs in the
spirits, they became stronger in number, richer in houses, lands, and slaves.
The dominating social class among the Bagobo were the Magani (the warriors) with the chief
Magani being the Datu. He and his family did not have special privileges. The Datu’s most
important functions were judge and arbiter, administering punishment including death, and
defending the territory of the community. A man’s ambition was to become a Magani, the
symbol of manhood. To become a member, a man had to kill at least two enemies in battle. The
sign of this accomplishment was his uniform of blood-red shirt, trousers and headgear. This
vestment was considered the property of the spirits.
The next important class was the Mabalian, usually joined by women past middle age. A person
was chosen by a spirit thru a dream or vision. Maybe the spirit would reveal to the person a new
cure for an ailment. Once she related this experience to a recognized Mabalian, the later would
take her as pupil and teach her such skills and responsibilities as: midwife (the primary office),
the use of medicines, the proper way to construct shrines and conduct ceremonies, the correct
prayers with which to address the spirits, and to weave the cloth and sew the special headgear
worn by the Magani. During some ceremonies, the Mabalian was believed to be possessed by a
spirit, so when she spoke she was not a mere mortal but as the spirit itself. She was also allowed
to wear the same red clothing as the Magani.
Public opinion was usually enough to prevent most crimes; fear of offending the spirits was
another deterrent; and the final step was the drastic punishment by the Datu. Most offenses were
punishable by fines, and if the offender could not pay, he would be placed into servitude until the
dept was considered repaid. If he refused to serve, a Magani would immediately kill him, as
ordered by the Datu. All unprovoked murders and incest were also punished by death.
Their highest god was the benign Tuguiama, the creator of all things. He was over the many
other benign and evil gods. These gods made the earth, the air, the mountains, and the water;
there was also a god of marriage.
44
One of the most important gods was Mandarangan who lived in the crater lake of Mt. Apo.
He was the chief of the war-gods and patron of all men who had taken at least one human life in
battle.
The Bagobos had many feasts every year, which also served religious purposes. The two greatest
feasts, lasting about four days, were before sowing of rice and the “feast of women”. The feasts
began with the sacrifice of a human victim (a war captive or slave) in the forest, and then
proceeded to festivities in the home of the Datu. This included singing, dancing and followed by
eating. On the 4th day another ceremony was held, that included the sacrifice of a human or
animal victim, and cutting down of the ceremonial bamboo while raising the war cry. These
ceremonies were held to honor the gods, to appease the demons, for victory over one’s enemies,
to cure or prevent diseases, and to assure prosperity to those who offered it.
The place of sacrifice was considered sacred and held during the bright fortnight of the moon,
with agongs sounding at regular intervals. The rite was officiated by the Datu. Only the Magani
could pray to Mandarangan, as he was very evil and dangerous to approach. The victim was tied
to a stake and killed with a lance thrust. Then the body was chopped up by all present (women
and children included, so they might grow up to be fearless), and bits of the body were taken
home. Part of the worship was the recitation by the warriors (Magani) of their acts of valor and
the number of enemies killed, with the expectation that the god would continue to imbue them
with courage, daring and success in battle.
The main commonality between the Bagobos and the colonial Spanish with their indio
supporters was trade. The later replaced the Muslims who traded with the Bagobos for their biao,
almacigo and beeswax.
The Spanish tried to outlaw the cult of Mandarangan by 1889. The first reduccion was
established among the Bagobos by Spanish missionaries in 1892. By 1895 the Bagobos living
near the sea slowly acquiesced to the new social order.
The Philippine Revolution of 1898 led to the Spanish government representatives departing from
the Davao District in January of 1899. There was some chaos and confusion until a provisional
government was formed in August 1899.
The Americans came to Davao in December 1899 from Zamboanga in search for beef. They also
received complaints of abuse against the self-appointed governor of the province of Surigao. The
islands of Mindanao and Sulu were placed under a military government until 1914. The
Americans reported that the people in the Davao area were calm and peaceful. During this time
the present municipality of Sta.Cruz was formed along the coast of the Davao Golf. Some of the
Bagobos remained there, many migrated upland toward Mt. Apo. With the booming demand for
abaca fiber, more virgin land was planted with this cash crop. This brought many more outsiders
into Bagobo territory leading to cultural changes: monetized economy, specialized labor,
institutionalized religion…The Datu and Magany system declined and human sacrifices stopped.
A new syncretized belief system was formed, the Langis, with thirteen churches established.
With increases in mixed marriages, polygyny also stopped; and the Filipino culture has been
slowly assimilated.

The Bagobos: Their Ethnohistory and Acculturation, Heidi K. Gloria, New Day Publishers,
Quezon City, 1987

Heidi K. Gloria, 1985 PhD Ethnohistory UP Diliman. Since 1985 Professor of History,
Ateneo de Davao University, also conducts research on history, anthropology and other
social sciences.
45
HISTORY OF THE ARABS

The Arabs (desert dwellers) descended from the tribe of Sem in the southern part of the Arabian
Peninsula. Due to population pressures they migrated around 3,500 BC along the west coast thru
Hejaz and Sinai into Egypt and mixed with the Hamites to form the Egyptians. They also
migrated along the East coast to the Tigris-Euphrates area and mixed with the Sumerians to form
the Babylonians. They adapted to local cultures and customs. Due to limited rainfall, and long
periods of drought, they continued to migrate out, mixing with various people such as in Syria
and Palestine. At 1,500BC to 1,200BC the nomadic Hebrews appeared in Palestine and
established the first monotheistic faith that later became the basis for Christianity and Islam.
Besides the Egyptians and Babylonians other empires came and left also, such as the:
Aramaeans, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Parthians, Medes, Persians, Greeks and the Romans. But no
one conquered the desert wastes of Arabia, the home of the Bedouins, where everything seemed
to remain the same. The last great migration of the Arabs was in the 7th century AD, to the vast
areas from Persia to Spain and Africa to Central Asia.
The Arabian Peninsula is very hot and dry in the summer. Only the coastal regions and oases can
be cultivated. Saudi Arabia is 72% desert and 27% grassland. Until a generation ago five-sixths
of the population of Hejaz (the birthplace of Islam) were nomadic Bedouins, who speak the
Arabic of the Koran. Since the discovery of oil in the 1930s and the founding of the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, life for the Bedouins has also changed. The Bedouins main foods were dates
mixed with flour or roasted corn together with the milk from camels and goats, only seldom
could they eat camel. The main domestic animals were the camel, donkey, goat, sheep, cat, and
watchdog. The camel was the most important animal of the Bedouin; his food, transportation and
wealth for trading. His constant companion, he drank its milk, clothed with its skin, its hair made
into his tents. Its dung was used for fuel, and its urine for hair tonic and medicine. His special
gift from Allah.
His dress: a long shirt with belt, a flowing upper garment, and his head covered with a shawl
held by a chord. Footwear was rare. His body was as lean as his environment. Tenacity and
endurance were his virtues. The Bedouins where always searching for grasslands for their
animals, and also looking to their settled neighbors to meet some of their needs, by way of
exchange and need be by force.
The foundation of Bedouin Society was the clan, an encampment of tents with related families;
and numbers of clans formed a tribe. Membership to a clan implied boundless and unconditional
loyalty to fellow clansmen, this regarded outside clans and tribes to be legitimate victims for
plunder and murder. They were always in a state of semi-starvation and readily got into a
fighting mood. A fight could begin with an insult or minor dispute over pasture-land or water,
and lead to tribal battles, poetically memorialized for generations. Strangers, even weaker clans
and tribes could join into a client relationship with strong tribes. Sedentary communities and
smaller tribes often paid protection tribute to stronger tribes. Every clan recognized a chief, the
sheikh. He was a senior man of proven wisdom, bravery and generosity. For matters of judicial
and military concerns he met with the tribal council that represented component families. His
tenure depended on the consensus of the community.
The tents with the humble household contents were individual property; water, pasturage and
cultivable land were common property of the tribes.
The Bedouin considerers himself superior and happier above all other men, in the purity of his
blood, his noble ancestry, his eloquence and poetry. Even the Bedouin woman enjoys more

46
freedom than her sedentary sister, she has the right to choose a husband and leave him if ill-
treated.
Raiding was one of the few outlets for his manly expressions. If there were no enemies to raid, a
neighbor or even a brother would do. It was like a sport, but blood was shed only under extreme
circumstances. Their culture was simple, no reading and writing. Their traditions, legends,
proverbs, and poems were not put into writings until more than 100 years after the rise of Islam.
The poet was the tribe’s oracle, guide, orator, historian and scientist. The Bedouin’s love for
poetry is one of its greatest cultural assets. Arabic is one of the most poetic languages in the
world; the rhythm and rhyme of the poetic recitations can excite the highest and most forceful
passions. So also the style of the Koran arouses the “miraculous character” of faith in the true
believer.
Hospitality is one of the supreme virtues of the Bedouin. To refuse help to a wanderer in such a
hostile environment would be an offence to God, the real protector.
The Bedouin’s religion was basically animistic. The Spirits of arable land were beneficent deity;
the Spirits of arid land maleficent, the beastly “Jinn” or demon to be feared. Natural objects such
as trees, wells, caves, stones were sacred objects, media by which a worshipper came into
contact with deity. Wells in the desert with cleaning and healing life giving water were also
objects of worship. Zamzam’s holiness supplied water to Hagar and Ishmael. The Bedouins were
conscious of the astral beliefs centered on the Moon, the power that gives light for grazing the
flocks, regulates life, and brings dew for pasture grass to grow. The Bedouins in Hejaz had
sanctuaries of the three daughters of Allah. Uzza (the mighty Venus) was the most venerated idol
of the Quraysh, where Muhammad as a young man offered her a sacrifice. The pagan Kaaba
(holy shrine) became sacred to Islam later also. Allah was the tribal deity of the Quraysh and the
principal of many deities in Mecca, it is an ancient name originating in South Arabia among the
Minaean and Sabaean and also Syria. The name of Muhammad’s father was Abdullah (the
slave/worshipper of Allah). Allah was recognized by the pre-Islamic Meccans as the creator and
supreme provider, the tribal deity of the Quraysh.
Mecca became a religious cultural and commercial center for the traders and the Bedouins. The
Bedouins slowly accepted and adopted some of the urban religious ideas and practices, such as
the sacrifices of camels and sheep at Mecca and at various stones. For Mecca a “holy truce” was
established for the 11st, 12th, 1st, and 4th months of each year. Mecca, located in a barren area,
means Sanctuary, it was a city of wealth, the midway station on the N-S caravan route. The three
most important cities in the Hejaz area were Tayif (the summer resort of the Meccan aristocracy,
close to the image of paradise), Mecca and Yathrib (later called Medina) 500km north of Mecca,
on the spice road, from Yemen to Syria. The Quraysh were the custodians of the Kaaba and
made it into a sanctuary and national shrine. Medina was built on an oasis, an agricultural center,
where two of the tribes were Jewish who originated from Yemen. During the 1st century after
Muhammad, Mecca continued to flourish with Christian and Jewish physicians, musicians and
merchants. Mecca also had a colony of Abyssinian Christians. The pagan tribes of Hejaz were
also influenced over the centuries by the Christianized Arabic tribes in the North (Ghassanid,
Lakhmid), together with the Persians, Aramaeans, and Helens. That is how Dawud(David),
Sulayman(Solomon) and Isa(Jesus) became common Arab names. The Arabs considered
Abraham the first Hanif (believer in one God). There were also numerous Hanifs before, and
after Muhammad.
South Arabians, of Yemen and neighboring coastal areas, are sedentary agriculturalists and speak
the ancient Semitic language related to Sabaean and Ethiopic. They were also merchants, who

47
produced spices, myrrh, incense in their fertile and rain-favored land; also they traded pearls
from the Persian Gulf, fabrics and swords from India, silk from China; and slaves, gold and ivory
from Ethiopia. They developed the caravan land route from Yemen thru Mecca and Petra,
branching to Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. By the 9th cent. BC they had already developed a
29 letter alphabet. Their inscriptions are on bronze and stone monuments, reporting their battles,
victories, laws and ordinances. The first two kingdoms of Sabaea and Minaea were first led by
priest-kings and later became secular. They followed various social organizations: old tribal
systems, cast stratification, feudal aristocracy, and monarchy. These people also migrated on
many occasions to East Africa, Syria, Iraq, and still remembered their origin. Their religion was
based on the planetary astral system, with the cult of the Moon-God prevailing, a masculine
Deity, who was precedent over his consort the Sun-God of the Babylonians and Phoenicians,
including their Son and other offsprings. They built ornate temples, and followed elaborate
rituals and sacrifices; they represent the higher stage of development of the sedentary societies.
They later adopted the Christianity of Monophysite type from Syria in the 1st cent. AD. Judaism
was also established in Yemen. The Byzantine emperor established a Christian embassy there in
356.
Conflicts developed between the Christian Yemenis and the Christian Abyssinians, leading the
later to dominate Yemen from 525 to 575. A great tragedy in Yemen was another bursting of the
great irrigation dam in approximately 550. This led to another tribal migration to the north:
including the Ghassan to Syria, the Lakham to Hiram and the Kindah to the center. Also a
conflict arose between the Christian Abyssinians and pagan Mecca. The Abyssinian military
with their elephants were on their way north to Mecca in 570/571, when they were stricken by
smallpox, leading them to return to Yemen immediately. In 575 the Zoroastrian Persians
defeated the Abyssinians and established their dominance in Yemen until 628 when the Yemenis
embraced Islam.
The North Arabian Nabataeans came from the nomadic tribes from today’s area of Jordan in the
6th cent. BC. Their strength came primarily from commerce. The trade cities of Petra, Damascus
and Palmyra were in their kingdom, along the caravan routes from South Arabia. They later
became part of the Roman Empire. They spoke Arabic, but used the Aramaic characters of their
northern neighbors. This script evolved into the North Arabic language and the Arabic of the
Koran. The alphabet of the script is based on the beginning alphabet developed in the Sinai
Peninsula around 1,850 BC. This alphabet also evolved into the Phoenician, which in turn
developed into the Greek alphabet and later into the European writing systems. The Palmyrene
religion was prominent with the Solar features, of the North Arabian “Bel” of Babylonian origin,
was head of the pantheon. In these sedentary agricultural societies the Sun was associated with
the life-giving rays that support the growth of vegetation. In 272 Aurelian the Roman Emperor
destroyed Palmyra for revolting against Roman authority. He removed the ornaments of the
glorious Temple of the Sun (Bel) and installed them in the new temple he built in Rome to the
Sun-God of the East.
The Ghassanids descended from South Arabia Yemen at the time of the failure of the Marib
dam. They were Christianized (Monophysite) and mixed with the Syrians, adopted the Aramaic
language of the Syrians but also kept their native Arabic language. By the end of the 5th century
they were part of the Byzantine Empire and kept the Bedouin hordes in check. In 613/614 the
Persians overcame the Ghassanids and in 636 they adopted Islam.
Another tribe from Yemen was Tanukh who were Christian of East Syria (Nestorian). A
subgroup of the Tanukh joined the Druze later.

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The kingdom of the Laqhmids reached the highest power and influence under Justinian I at
Constantinople. They built houses of basalt, palaces, aqueducts, theaters, churches and public
baths. They honored and supported poets, musicians from Mecca and Babylonia and they
celebrated wine.
The Semitic religions developed in the oases and centered on stones and springs, such as the
Black Stone and Zamzam in Islam, and Bethel in the Old Testament. There are many more close
relations between the Hebrews and Arabs. Moses married an Arabian woman, the daughter of a
Midianite priest, a worshipper of Jehovah, who was apparently a North Arabian Tribal deity. The
worship consisted of burnt offerings of animals of their herds. The Hebrews were nomads and
settled among the more civilized Canaanites. Arabs are noted over and over again in the Old
Testament. Job was a chief of the Bene Qedem tribe. The Shulammite beauty in the Song of
Solomon was Arabic. The Queen of Sheba, from South Arabia, traded with King Solomon.
Proverbs 30 and 31 are the sayings of Agur and King Lemuel; they were kings of Massa, Arab
tribes. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul notes that after his revelation he went to Arabia
and Damascus for three years.
Mohammed was born about 571AD, a member of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. The Quraysh tribe
was the guardian of the City since 440. His father Abdullah died before his birth. His mother
turned the child over to a Bedouin shepherd’s wife for care, a common practice. He spent the
first six years of his life in the desert. Shortly after his return to his mother, she also died and he
was subsequently under the care of his grandfather, and then his uncle Abu Talib, who was a
merchant and also the collector of the poor tax. When Mohammed was 12 years old the uncle
took him on one of his annual caravan trips to Syria. On the way they stopped at a Syrian
monastery where they met the monk Bahira.
Muhammad could not read and write but he was highly intelligent, inquisitive, and reflective;
and he hated idolatry and the vicious way of life in Mecca. He had the reputation as an honest
trader and worked for the rich widow Khadijah, also a trader. She asked him to marry her when
she was 40 years old and he was 25, she was his only wife as long as she lived. He often
secluded himself and engaged in meditation in a small cave on a hill outside of Mecca. After
some periods of doubts and yearning for truth, he heard a voice: “Recite in the name of thy Lord
who created…” at the end of Ramadan in 610.
Sometime later he had a second vision; he experienced great stress emotionally and rushed home
in alarm and asked his wife to put covers on him. He heard varied voices, sometimes like
“reverberant of bells”; later one voice, identified as that of Gabriel related the message: “God is
one. He is all-powerful. He is the creator of the universe. There is a judgment day. Paradise
awaits those who carry out God’s commands, and terrible punishment in hell for those who
disregard them.” Muhammad went forth as the messenger of Allah among his people to teach,
preach, and deliver the new message. They laughed him to scorn. He considered himself a
glorifier of his Lord, admonisher, messenger, prophet of Allah, like the prophets of the Old
Testament. Few people were converted, his wife Khadijah, his cousin Ali, and his relative Abu
Bakr (later father in law of Muhammad). Against him was Abu Sufyan (Commander Chief of the
Army) of the aristocratic and influential Umayyad branch of the Quraysh tribe. The Quraysh
defended their custodianship of the Kabah and the pantheon of multitudinous deities, and center
of the pan-Arabian pilgrimage. The new recruits were mostly from among slaves and lower
classes and suffered persecution. In 615 they decided to migrate to Abyssinia, 11 Meccan
families and 83 individuals, including Uthman Ibn Affan. They found asylum in the domain of
the Christian Negus, who refused to deliver them to their oppressors. Muhammad marveled at

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the Jews and Christians having “Scriptures” and decided his people would have one also.
In 619 his faithful Khadijah died, with only one child surviving, their daughter Fatimah, who
became the spouse of Ali. Subsequently Muhammad would marry 12 wives. In 620 Muhammad
attended the Ukaz fair (meeting place for poets and musicians) where he met some Yathribites,
who were interested in what he said. In 622 a deputation of men came from Yathrib inviting
Muhammad to come to make his home there, hoping he could help reconcile two hostile tribes.
They remembered teachings of the Jews about a coming Messiah, and it seemed to them that
Muhammad had similar ideas. First Muhammad sent 200 people secretly to Yathrib to avoid the
Quraysh vigilantes.
Muhammad arrived on September 2, 622, this was the Hijrah (flight), the beginning of the
Muslim era. This was the turning point of Muhammad, he became a temporal ruler. The name of
Yathrib was changed to Medina Nabi Allah (City of the Prophet of God). He made a treaty of
alliance with the Jews, the Arab tribes of Medina and the Muslims, not to molest each other and
to defend the city against any aggressor. He decreed bloodshed to be a crime against God and
declared himself to be final court of appeal for all disputes. He called his followers of Yathrib
Ansar (Supporters) and they built the first Mosque. It was simple, made of bare mud walls,
adjoined by his simple living quarters. The Ansar lived with great simplicity as a brotherhood.
They also accepted the refugees from Mecca (Emigrants), by taking them into their homes.
Muhammad ordered all true Muslims to fast during the month of Ramadan, to refrain from
gambling and drinking wine, to destroy graven images, and to pray 5 times a day (facing
Jerusalem like the Jews).
Tension between the various tribes continued, plus the adjustments with the new emigrants. To
the tribal chiefs Muhammad seemed like an interloper.
Subsequently Muhammad received two more revelations:
1. For the true Muslim the Qibla (direction of prayer) was changed from Jerusalem to Mecca.
2. To “fight in the cause of Allah against those who fight against Him”.
He now became the warrior priest to carry the fight to his enemies, destroy those who plot
against him.
He proclaimed to be the last Prophet, sent with a sword, to lead the faithful, to destroy all who
refuse obedience to the law of Islam. “The sword is the key to heaven and hell. All who draw it
in the cause of the faith will be rewarded with temporal advantages…if they fall in battle…they
will be transported to Paradise, to revel in eternal pleasure in the arms of black-eyed houris.” He
also proclaimed the doctrine of predestination; death comes as ordained by Allah whether in bed
or battle.
Now Muhammad was ready to fight the Quraysh. He and the Ansar attacked their caravans, in
624 one caravan of Abu Sufyan with 50,000 gold pieces was threatened; the alarm went out to
Mecca and 1,000 Quraysh came out to fight. Muhammad’s army of 300 met for battle at Badr
near Medina with the advantage of higher ground. Islam won the first and decisive victory. This
was interpreted as divine sanction of the new faith. Abu Sufyan was furious. In the following
year the Quraysh beat the Muslims under the leadership of Khalid Ibn Walid (brother of Abu
Sufyan) in the battle of Ohud. Many of the Medinaites now turned against Muhammad, and he
became more careful. Two years later in 627 Abu Sufyan marched on Medina with 10,000
confederate warriors (Meccans, and Bedouins with Abyssinian mercenaries) to finish the
Muslims off. Muhammad was prepared; he had a moat dug around the city at the advice of a
former Persian slave. This defense proved to be effective at a time of bitter cold, and the Quraysh
left the siege of Medina after a month. After the siege Muhammad campaigned against the Jews

50
for “siding with the confederates” and killed 600 men of the Qurayzah tribe, removed the rest
from their land and gave it to the Emigrants. Another Jewish tribe the Badir, he drove into exile
the year before. The Jewish Tribe the Khaybar who lived on an oasis surrendered to Muhammad
in 628, paying tribute. The Medina period was the time for Arabianization and nationalization,
when Muhammad broke with Judaism and Christianity. Friday was chosen instead the Sabbath.
Call from the minaret, instead of trumpets and gongs. Qiblah (direction of ritual prayer) was
changed from Jerusalem to Mecca. Pilgrimage to the Kabah was authorized, and kissing the
Black Stone (a pre-Islamic fetish) was sanctioned. In 628 Muhammad led a band of Believers to
Hudaybiyah (15 km N of Mecca) and declared the Meccans and Muslims to be treated equal,
which ended the war with the Quraysh. Khalid Ibn Walid and Amr Ibn As were received into the
fold, and subsequently became the mighty swords of militant Islam. In 630 the conquest of
Mecca was complete. Muhammad went into the Sanctuary, smashed 360 idols and declared:
“Truth has come, falsehood has vanished”.
In 630-31 Muhammad stationed a garrison on the frontier of Ghassanland and concluded treaties
of peace with the Christian tribal chief and the Jewish tribes. The Christian and Jews were
obliged to pay a tax for being under the protection of the Islamic community. This set the
precedent for later conquests.
That period is also called the “year of delegation”, for the many tribes offering allegiance to the
prince-prophet, from all over Arabia. In 631-32 Muhammad headed the first annual pilgrimage
to the new religious capitol, Mecca. Three months after his return to Medina, he died
unexpectedly on June 8, 632.
During the Medina period of the life of the Prophet belong the religious laws of fasting,
almsgiving and prayer; the social and political ordinances; marriage, divorce; treatment of slaves,
prisoners of war, and enemies. The religious community of Medina was the beginning of the
state of Islam. The new community of Emigrants and Supporters was the basis of the
congregation of Allah. It was the first attempt in the history of the Arabs for a social organization
based on religion rather than blood. Allah was the personification of the supreme state, and
Muhammad was his vice-regent and supreme ruler on earth. All members within this community
were now brethren, regardless of tribal affiliation and older loyalties. The new bond was based
on faith. The new community would have no priesthood, no hierarchy, and no central see. The
mosque was its public forum, the military drill ground, and the place of common worship. The
leader in prayer, the Imam, was also the chief of the army, to protect against the world. All
Arabians outside the pale were considered heathen, almost outlaws. No wine, no gambling and
singing was frowned upon. From Medina the Islamic theocracy spread all over Arabia, later to
West Asia and North Africa.
To the Muslim the Koran is the word of Allah, dictated thru Gabriel to Muhammad; every word,
every letter is inspired. The Meccan Surahs (chapters) about 90 in number belong to the period
of struggle are mostly short, incisive, fiery, impassioned, and prophetic. The Medina Surahs, the
remaining 24 are mostly long, verbose, and rich in legislative style; containing dogmas,
ceremonial regulations relating to public prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and Ramadan. Also laws
against wine, pork and gambling; fiscal and military ordinances, alms-giving, holy war; civil and
criminal laws regarding killing, retaliation, theft, usury, marriage and divorce, adultery,
inheritance and freeing of slaves. Almost all historical narratives of the Koran have biblical
parallels, particularly the Old Testament, except a few purely Arabian stories. Also parallels
between Matthew and the Meccan Surahs. Even parallels of sacred Persian books, in regards to
heaven and hell. The Koran is the most widely read book ever written, translated into some 40

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languages. Koran means recitation, lecture, and discourse and is meant for oral recitation. The
Koran was the earliest, and ever since remaining model and standard of Arabic prose. The
language is rhythmical and rhetorical, but not poetical.
The Koran lists 99 names and attributes of God, and the full Muslim rosary has 99 beads. It is the
religion of “submission “and “surrender” to the will of Allah, like Abraham who was ready to
sacrifice his son. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, his admonisher, the last in a long line of
prophets and therefore the greatest. The Koran is the work of Allah. Gabriel is the bearer of
revelation, who is also the spirit of holiness. The Koran teaches clearly a future life, a day of
judgment and resurrection of the body with physical pain and pleasure.
The religious duties of a Muslim center on the five pillars: 1st there is no god but Allah. 2nd
Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. This is repeated five times a day in the prescribed prayer
facing Mecca.
The Friday noon prayer is the only public prayer required of all male adults. This is part of the
weekly congressional assembly, similar to the Jewish synagogue worship and later developed by
the Christian Sunday service. The Muslim worship ritual is unsurpassed in dignity, simplicity
and orderliness, led by the Imam with precision and reverence; resulting in a feeling of unity and
power. The 3rd pillar is alms giving on money, property, harvest, and merchandise, about 2
1/2%. This is used to help the poor of the community, build mosques, and defray government
expenses. The South Arabian merchants paid their tithe to their god before they were allowed to
sell their spices, according to Pliny (23-79AD). The 4th pillar is the fast, from dawn to sunset,
during the month of Ramadan. The practice of fasting was already well established among the
Jews and the Christians. The 5th pillar is the Pilgrimage to Mecca. This includes the seven-fold
circumambulation of the Kaaba, the stone-throwing ceremony on the way to the valley of Mina,
and the sacrifice at Mina of a camel, a sheep, or other horned domestic animal. The Pilgrimage is
a major unifying influence in Islam of believers from all corners of the world. Pilgrimage to holy
places is an ancient Semitic practice, frequently reported in the Old Testament. In pre-Islamic
times the annual fairs of North Arabia were followed by a pilgrimage to the Kaaba also. Another
duty in Islam is Jihad (holy war), raised to the 6th pillar by at least one Muslim sect, the
Kharijites. This has contributed to the great expansion of Islam as a world power. It has been the
duty of the Caliphs to continue the expansion of the territory of Islam. Another important belief
is the divine decree of good and evil, something is either Halal (permitted) or Haram (forbidden).
Ethical conduct now replaced tribal fellowship, similar to the Old Testament.
Conquest, Expansion and Colonization (632-661)
When Muhammad was alive he performed all functions: prophet, lawgiver, religious leader,
chief judge, commander of the army, and civil head of state. After his death, who should be
Caliph, in all except spiritual function? According to Arab custom, the chief or sheik, was
elected by tribal seniority. The Emigrants wanted the Caliph to come from the tribe of the
Prophet. The Medina Supporters (Ansar) wanted the Caliph position, since they gave asylum to
the Prophet. They joined and formed the party of the Companions. The Legitimists wanted the
husband (Ali) of the Prophet’s daughter to be the Caliph. The Aristocracy of the Quraysh, the
Umayyads, who had traditionally the authority, power and wealth of Mecca wanted to continue
so as Caliph also. The 1st party triumphed with the aged and pious Abu Bakr(632-34), one of the
first believers, married to Muhammad’s youngest daughter Aishah, close companion and advisor
of Muhammad. He received the oath of allegiance from the assembled chiefs. Next came
Umar(634-44), one of chief advisors of Muhammad who also married his daughter, nominated
by Abu Bakr to succeed him as Caliph. Uthman(644-56), first convert of high social and

52
economic standing of the Umayyad clan, married one of Muhammad’s daughters, elected Caliph
by a council established by Umar. Ali (656-61), first convert at age ten, a cousin of Muhammad,
married Fatimah daughter of Muhammad, he was also one of the scribes of Muhammad. They
lived and governed from Medina, except Ali who chose Kufah in Iraq to be his capital.
Abu Bakr, the 1st Caliph, mostly focused his attention on the secession /apostasy wars. After the
death of the Prophet most of the tribes outside Hejaz broke away from the new state and
followed a number of local prophets. They were also jealous against the Hejaz capital. Abu Bakr
demanded unconditional surrender. Khalid Ibn Walid “the sword of Allah” was the enforcer of
that policy, and within six months he forced Central and East Arabia into submission with such
great bloodshed, that Abu Bakr reprimanded him. Other Muslim generals also campaigned to
bring the backsliders and others who were never in the fold of Islam into submission. The
developing Arab empire was based on a more aggressive religion than Judaism, Buddhism, and
Christianity. The expansion into Syria and Iraq followed. Also the state treasury was empty.
These northward conquests started as raids, and provided outlets for the warring spirit and
opportunity for booty. 80% of the movable booty, including slaves, went to the military, 20% of
the movable booty and the immovable booty went to the state. The movement acquired new
momentum as the warriors went from victory to victory, and became acquainted with the
comforts and luxuries of the civilized region and the Fertile Crescent. The Arab fighters had no
contempt for death. They applied military techniques in the open steppes in West Asia and North
Africa with the use of cavalry and camelry. The Arabs were able to defeat the well-trained and
well-equipped armies of the Byzantine and Persian empires, who were not so capable for warfare
in the desert.
The Persians and the Byzantine had been fighting with each other to a standstill. In 614 Persia
took control of Palestine from the Byzantines, in 628 Byzantium threw Persia out of Palestine
and Syria. This fighting disturbed the native people greatly, who were also taxed by these
colonial powers. Most of these people were of Arab tribal origin. They were also Christianized
according to different traditions, leading to schisms between the Monophysite in Syria and
Egypt, and Nestorians in Iraq and Persia vs. Orthodox Byzantines in Constantinople.
These Arabic people felt a close affinity to the Bedouin Arabs. General Khalid, with 25,000
warriors, was the supreme commander going into Syria. Damascus capitulated in September 635,
after a 6 months siege, and Jerusalem fell in 638, under General Amr. This brought world fame
to Islam. The terms of surrender of the Damascus and Jerusalem Jews and Christians was that
they were allowed their own forms of worship, on condition of payment of a head or poll tax.
The Persian capital Ctesiphon was taken in June 637. The conquest of Persia took about ten
years, more difficult since the people were Aryan not Semitic. The empire was crushed after
1,200 years of existence. No tolerance was extended to their Zoroastrian beliefs, mass conversion
followed. Arabic became the official language; 300 years later the Persian language was re-
established. Various protest movements also flourished there, the Qarmatian, the Shi’ite sect and
the Fatimid Dynasty.
The Egyptians, descendents of Hamites and Semites, were kin to the Arabs. Egypt always was on
the Arab mind, close to Hejaz, land of granary of Constantinople; the capital Alexandria was the
base for the Byzantine navy and the door to the rest of North Africa. General Amr planned the
campaign with 4,000 riders carefully. He was very familiar with the cities and roads, as he was
on many caravan trips to Egypt before the time of Islam. He went from Palestine on the
international highway of the ancient world, and arrived in January 640. He waited for 6,000 more
troops and besieged the city of Babylon until July, and routed the Byzantine army. He offered the

53
city the usual three choices: Islam, tribute or the sword. The Byzantine emperor denied
surrender. The city was overcome by April 641. 10,000 new recruits joined for the siege of
Alexandria, peace was negotiated in September 642, and the terms were: a fixed tribute and land
tax, and the Byzantine army were to evacuate Egypt. The Arabs now had 4,000 villas, 4,000
baths, 40,000 poll tax paying Jews and 400 places of entertainment for the royalty. The military
camp outside of Babylon became the new capital Fustat until 969, when the Fatimids built their
capitol Cairo. Amr also cleared the ancient Pharaonic canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea.
The new rulers adopted the old system of Byzantine administration.
The policy of exploiting the fertile valley of the Nile was maintained to the utmost. Campaigns
proceeded west and south, mainly for booty. The first Muslim fleet was established in
Alexandria and concurrently in Syria. With this fleet, the Arabs conquered Cyprus in 649. The
fall of Egypt left the Byzantine provinces bordering on the west defenseless. Amr pushed on
westward with his cavalry in 642-3 to Tripoli subduing the Berber tribes. The Berbers were
largely nomads like the Bedouins. Abdullah continued on to Carthage, extending the same
privileges to the pagan Berbers as the Scripturaries. To the south of Egypt the Arabs moved into
the Sudan, the people were similar to the Egyptians. Abdullah stopped the southward movement
in 652 with the Christian kingdom of Nubia as he entered into a treaty with them.
Umar, the 2nd Caliph, drew up the first Constitution for the new Empire. One of his policies was
to keep the faithful pure, and the infidels paying. He declared the Arabian Peninsula for Arabian
Muslims only. He ordered the expulsion of all Jews and Christians from the Peninsula; they
subsequently took refuge in Palestine, Syria and Iraq. Only Arabian Muslims served in the army
and were organized into a new martial aristocracy, over all other classes and communities. The
Arab conquerors were living only in military camps, they were forbidden to fraternize with the
natives. Arabian Muslims were not allowed to own land outside of the Arabian Peninsula. All
Muslims were exempt from paying taxes. Non-Muslims paid poll tax and land tax. The tax
revenue was used first for the administration and the army, then distributed on a sliding scale: to
the Prophet’s family, the original Emigrants from Mecca and the Ansar (Supporters) of Medina,
the tribes (even women and children) in proportion to military service and knowledge of the
Koran. The conquered people had no military duty. They could live and work as before,
according to their own laws, administered by their religious leaders. Severe punishment was
imposed to anyone who reviled the Koran or Muhammad, or injured or robbed a Muslim. It was
forbidden to marry a Muslim or seek to convert a Muslim. Non-Arabs who became Muslim were
still debarred from the army; they also had to pay the poll tax and occupied a subsidiary position
to the Moslem Arabians. The existing government administrations remained in place, whether
Roman, Greek or Persian. Non-Arabs and non-Muslims were protected from Arabian land
grabbers.
The army was organized similarly to that of the Byzantine and the Persian. Many of their
weapons came from neighboring countries. The Arabian warrior received higher pay then the
Byzantine and the Persians, plus a portion of the booty.
Umar called himself the “commander of the faithful”. He transformed the Islamic state from an
Arabic principality to a world power. He controlled general policy and laid down principles for
administering the conquered lands. The structure of the later Islamic empire, including legal
practices is largely due to him. He was a strong ruler, ascetic to the point of harshness, and
universally respected for his justice and authority. He appointed successful military commanders
as the new ruling elite, who were expected to follow the sunna (norms of Islam). In the early
stages the conquering generals were also to lead in prayer and serve as judges. Later Umar

54
established the institution of judgeships. He dispatched teachers all over Arabia to establish the
first schools in the mosques, teaching the Koran, reading, writing, grammar, poetry and simple
arithmetic. The army was stationed in garrison towns located initially in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt
under appointed commanders. Each military town had a mosque, for prayer and worship sessions
every day, for learning, reciting and memorizing the Koran. Friday was the day of worship that
included the sermon, gave opportunity to express loyalty to the ruler, and later also used for
declaring rebellion. A Persian slave assassinated him for personal reasons.
With the conquest of the Fertile Crescent, Persia and Egypt; the Arabs came into possession and
influence of some of the most advanced civilizations in terms of art, architecture, philosophy,
medicine, science, literature and government. The original Arabians had nothing to teach and
everything to learn.
They began to assimilate, adapt, and reproduce their intellectual and aesthetic heritage from the
great cities of Ctesiphon, Edessa, Nisibis, Damacus, Jerusalem and Alexandria. The purely
Arabian contribution were in linguistic and to a certain extend the religious field. Similar to the
victorious Romans who were enlightened by the subjugated Greeks. It was also the continuation
of the early Semitic civilizations of the Assyro-Babylonians, Phoenicians, Aramaeans and
Hebrews. This high mark under Umar came temporarily to a standstill under Ali. Starting with
nothing, the Moslem Arabian caliphate became the strongest power in the world.
Uthman, the 3rd Caliph, was a member of the Umayyad clan of the Quraysh tribe. He was a
wealthy merchant. He was a rather passive individual, rarely displaying energy and initiative. He
was elected as successor by the council appointed by Umar before his death. He followed the
general policies of Umar. He also appointed a committee in 651 that constructed the official
Koran, the original codex was kept in Medina and three copies were forwarded to the three
military camps in Damascus, Basrah and Kufah, all others were destroyed. He tried to create a
more cohesive centralized administration, to replace the loose tribal alliance that emerged under
Muhammad. He gave permission for the sons of Arabia to hold landed property in newly
conquered territories; with this the age-old process of gradual infiltration burst into the last great
Semitic migration. He established a system of landed fiefs and made appointments to provincial
governorships, often his relatives and clan members, rather than the army. The Umayyads
became more forceful, and he was not strong enough to impose his authority over the governors.
The conquests increased the size of the Islamic empire, at greater cost, but less booty came to the
state treasury. In 650 rebellions began in Egypt and Iraq. Rebels besieged his home in Medina
and killed him in 656.
Ali, the 4th Caliph, was married to Fatimah and they had two sons, Hasan and Husayn. These
were the only male descendents of Muhammad. Ali was one of Muhammad’s scribes with an
excellent knowledge of the Koran and Hadith (the sayings and deeds of Muhammad). Following
the murder of Uthman, the Muslims of Medina invited Ali to accept the caliphate. He hesitated
for a long time, before he finally agreed. His party (the legitimists) considered him the only
legitimate successor even from the time of the death of Muhammad. He established his new
capital in Kufah, Iraq. He had many difficulties due to the corrupt state of affairs that he
inherited. He based his rule on Islamic ideals of social justice and equality. This offended the
Quraysh aristocracy of Mecca, who consequently rebelled against him. Aishah, the beloved wife
of the Prophet hated him. Another rebellion was led by Muawiyah, the kinsman of Uthman, who
was governor of Syria. Damascus, Syria became the new power base, Medina was left behind.
The last rebels, the Khawarij (seceders), killed Ali with a poisoned sword on January 24, 661. He
was canonized a martyr by the Shi’ite partisans. This ended the orthodox, republican period
caliphate.
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Muawiyah was proclaimed caliph at Jerusalem in 660 and declared Damascus the capital of the
Moslem empire. Iraq declared Hasan, the eldest son of Ali and Fatimah, the legitimate successor
of Ali. He was more interested in his harem than the throne, and abdicated to Muawiyah and then
retired to Medina with a big subsidy and pension. His younger brother Husayn also retired to
Medina. After gaining supremacy over opponent parties Muawiyah conquered the Syrian
shipyard of the Byzantines and built the Muslim navy, manned by Greco-Syrians. He expanded
North Africa on the west, and Khurasan and Turkestan on the east. He established the state on
the Byzantine framework, and relied on Syrians, mostly Christian, and Syro-Arabs mainly
Yemenites, to the exclusion of immigrants from Hejaz. He organized the military into a more
disciplined army. His favorite wife was a Jacobite Christian. The Christian family that formerly
served as financial controller under the Byzantines, served in the second highest position of his
government, after the military. The caliph’s physician was likewise a Christian. He even rebuilt a
Christian church in Edessa that was demolished by an earthquake. He cultivated the virtue of
using force only to the degree necessary. He is considered the first malik(king) in Islam, the best
Arab king. The Taurus mountain range served as a fixed boundary to Asia Minor of the
Byzantines, it was non-Semitic and never became Arabic. Later the area became Islamic under
the Saljuq and then the Ottoman Turks.
In 679 Muawiyah nominated his son Yazid for his successor, and received delegations form
distant provinces to take the oath of allegiance to him. This became an established practice even
into the Abasid dynasty. When Muawiyah retired in 680, his son Yazid became caliph. The
Iraqis declared Husayn caliph. On his way to Kufah Husayn was surrounded by troops loyal to
Yazid. When he refused to surrender he was killed in Karbala, and he became another martyr of
the Shi’ite. This became also one of the factors to undermine the Umayyad dynasty. A third
claimant, Abdullah, was proclaimed caliph by Hejaz. Yazid dispatched a punitive expedition
immediately and was victorious on August 26, 683. The army then besieged Mecca, and
inadvertently burned down the Kaaba. In the mean time Yazid died, and the second civil war of
Islam came to a temporary halt. Disputes, quarrels, and fighting continued until 692 in Hejaz,
when the power of the Ansar (Supporters) was finally broken. Some joined the armies operating
in North Africa, and the mother “island” spent itself.
Next came Marwan (683-5), the founder of his branch of the Umayyad dynasty. He was
succeeded by his son Abd al-Malik (685-705), the “father of kings” with his four succeeding
sons (705-20) at Damascus who reached the median of power and glory from Spain to the Indus
and even to China. During this period the government administration became Arabicized, in
Damascus from Greek; and in Iraq from Pahlawi. Coinage was changed from Roman and Persian
to Arabic gold dinars and silver dirhams. A postal service of relays of horses for travelers and
dispatches was established, between Damascus and provincial capitals. Postmasters were also
charged with keeping the caliph up to date with developments in the respective territories. Tax
policies were changed, so that non-Arabs who became Muslim were exempt from paying the poll
tax, and even received a pension when they joined the military. This also led to widespread
conversions; particularly with the Persians and the Berbers. Much construction was also going
on: rebuilding the mosques of Mecca and Medina, construction of the Dome on the Rock in
Jerusalem, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, schools; institutions for lepers, lame and blind;
hospitals for the chronic diseased. Abd al-Malik had to face many enemies also. 120,000 were
killed in the pacification campaigns against the Alids and the Kharijites mostly in Iraq and Persia
by his dedicated Syrian troops. By 700 all of North Africa was subdued, both the Byzantines and
the Berbers. In 711 Tariq, the Berber, led the marauding expedition into Spain.

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By 732 the Arab-Berber army reached Paris, when they were stopped and turned back by Charles
Martel.
The political administration under the Umayyad and even the Abbasid corresponded closely to
that of the provinces of the Byzantine and Persian empires. Gradually some of the provinces
were grouped together, and made into five viceroyalties. The government functions were divided
into: political administration, tax collection and religious leadership. The viceroy could appoint
his subordinates, but had to give the names to the caliph. The viceroy had full charge of political
and military administration; often the revenue officer was directly under the caliph. State revenue
was still mostly from the tributes of subject people. In the provinces all expenses for local
administration, state annuities, soldiers’ pay and miscellaneous services came from local income,
the balance went to the caliphal treasury. The judiciary was for Moslems only; non-Moslems had
autonomy under their own religious heads. In the beginning the Prophet and early caliphs
administered justice personally, then the generals and then the prefects of the provinces. Later
the governors made appointments for purely judicial offices. The qualified had to be learned
scholars in the Koran and Moslem traditions. Muawiyah also created a bureau of registry, that
later developed under Abd al-Malik into the state archives in Damascus.
The Umayyad army was organized like the Byzantine, the outfit and armour was essentially the
same, including siege machines and heavy engines. The Navy was organized like the Byzantine
also.
The royal social life and entertainment became quite established. Muawiyah was particularly
fond of listening to historical narratives and anecdotes; preferably South Arabian. Yazid was the
first confirmed drunkard among the caliphs. Dancing, singing and music went with drinking.
Sometimes the entertainers were screened off from the audience and sometimes they joined
together. Esthetic qualities like poetry were also cultivated. Recreational entertainment such as
hunting, later polo, cock-fighting, even national horse races were also popular. Ladies of the
royal households enjoyed a relative high degree of freedom.
The Umayyads supplied an unexcelled water system to Damascus, which is still functioning to
this day. This included the irrigation of the rich oasis outside the city.
The population in the empire could be divided into four classes:
1st the ruling Moslems; the caliphal household and the aristocracy. At the time of al-Walid I
there were 45,000 recipients on state salaries.
2nd the Neo-Moslems, the clients who professed Islam; they resented being second-class
citizens, and often espoused such causes as Shi’ite in Iraq or Kharijite in Persia. Some became
very fanatical, persecuting non-Moslems. They were the first to devote themselves to learned
studies and the fine arts. Eminent to the Moslem Arabians, they began to contest the political
leadership. Thru intermarriage certain racial strains developed.
3rd the tolerated sects, the professors of revealed religions; Christians, Jews and Sabians.
Disarmed, compelled to pay tribute and under Moslem protection. This political innovation was
by Mohammad, due to his esteem of the Bible and the aristocratic connections with the Christian
tribes. Later this status was also extended to the Zoroastrians, the Harrans and the Berbers. Under
the Umayyads the Christians of Syria were well treated until Umar II. The fame of Umar II was
based on his piety, remission of taxes imposed on neophyte Moslems and the first caliph and
only Umayyad to impose humiliating restrictions on Christian subjects, and Jews also. These
restrictions were not long in force.
On the bottom were the slaves. This was an ancient Semitic institution preserved by Islam.
Moslems were forbidden to enslave Moslems, but not an alien slave who adopted Islam. Early

57
Islam recruited slaves from prisoners of war, including women and children, by purchase and by
raiding. They came from everywhere: Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and China. It was also big
business; it flooded the Moslem empire due to conquest: Nusayr brought 300,000 captives from
Africa and 30,000 virgins from Spain; Qutaybah brought 100,000 captives from Sogdiana. An
Umayyad prince had 1,000 slaves; even a private in the Syrian army had one to ten slaves.
Master and female slaves would live in concubinage without legal marriage. Children borne to
them belonged to the master, and would be free. The status of the concubine would be raised to
“mother of children”, she could not be sold by her master, and at his death she would be declared
free. Society would eventually become a melting pot. Liberation of slaves was considered a good
work in Islam, and promised a reward in the next world. The liberated slave would then become
a client of the master, and if the later died without heirs, the client would inherit the estate.
The cities of Mecca and Medina became rather quiet shortly after the death of the Prophet in 632.
Would be scholars soon arose to study the mementous of the sacred past and to collect legal and
ritual enactments. Under the Umayyads these two cities of Hejaz changed drastically. Medina,
the forsaken capital of Arabia, became a place of retirement for many who wanted to escape the
turmoil of political activity and enjoy the fortunes now available from the wars of conquest.
Following Hasan and Husayn, many newly rich came also. Palaces and villas were built,
swarming with servants and slaves to provide the occupants with every variety of luxury, even to
notorious excesses. What a contrast to the time of the humble and pious Caliph Umar. They
became centers of worldly pleasure with secular Arab music and song; playing chess,
backgammon and dice. Amorous poetry became popular, and also houses of ill repute.
The invaders had a much more primitive culture than the lands they conquered. In Syria, Egypt,
Iraq and Persia they became the students, and very acquisitive at that. The Umayyad period was
more of a time of incubation, to come into full bloom under the Abbasids in Baghdad later. As
the conquered people became Moslem and intermarried with the Arabs, the nationality receded.
All passed for Arab, since that became the language they used. The books of medical science,
philosophy and mathematics originally written in Greek, Aramaean, and Indo-Persian were
translated into Arabic. As the two sister cities of Hejaz, Mecca and Medina became under the
Umayyads the home of music and song, love and poetry; and the twin cities of Iraq, Basrah and
Kufah became centers of the most intense intellectual activity in the Moslem world. The two
capital cities were originally military camps built in 638, and Kufah was the former capital of
Caliph Ali. In these centers of commerce and immigration, on the borderland of Persia, the
scientific study of Arabic language and grammar began and the first systematic textbook was
published.
The study of the Koran gave rise to the study of the sciences in philology and lexiconography,
and the Moslem literary tradition of hadith (narrative) of the acts or sayings attributed to the
Prophet or one of his Companions. This provided the foundation for the Law of Islam. The
scholars of Basrah had greatest influence on the Sunnis and the Sufis, while the scholars of Kufa
tended to relate closer to the Shi’ites and the Alids. It was under the Abbasids that these twin
cities of Iraq achieved the highest intellectual development. At this time Arabic history writing
also began, it was also an outgrowth of the development of hadith. Mutazilah, the school of
rationalism, was also founded in Basrah. The doctrines of free will (Christian Greek influence)
vs. predestinarianism, by the Qadarites (for power), the earliest school of philosophy in Islam,
greatly influenced two Umayyad caliphs. The Kharijites formed the earliest religio-political sect.
They insisted on maintaining the primitive, democratic principles of Islam, and were willing to
kill whoever deviated from their ideals over a period of 300 years.

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The Shi’ah also took definite form in the Umayyad period. They differ from the Sunnites
(orthodox), in the belief that Ali and his sons are the true imams and the leaders to salvation.
Ismailites, Qarmatians, Druzes and Nusayres were all offshoots from the Shi’ite sect, with forms
of veiled protests against the victorious religion of the Arabians.
Public speaking also developed to the highest level during this period. The Friday noon sermons
were used for ethical orations, to inspire patriotic feelings and military enthusiasm, and also a
forum for propaganda. The greatest intellectual contributions under the Umayyads, was the
poetical composition. With the ascension of the worldly Umayyads, the old connection of wine,
song and poetry was re-established. And with the influence of Persian singers, the language of
intense passions cultivated a freshness of chivalry. Besides love poetry, political poetry evolved
to commemorate the greatness of the caliphs. Poetry performed the same function as the party
press of today.
The early Umayyad princes were schooled in the Syrian desert to learn the pure Arabic tongue
and to become well versed in poetry. The educated person was expected to read and write, to use
the bow and arrow and to swim. The ethical ideals of the educated were courage, endurance in
times of trouble; observe the rights and obligations of neighborliness, manliness, generosity and
hospitality, regard for women and the fulfillment of solemn promises. These were the virtues of
Bedouin life. After Abd-al-Malic (691-743), the tutor, usually a client or Christian became a
standing figure in court.
Scientific Arab medicine comes mostly from Greek and part from Persian. The earliest treaties of
medicine were translated from Syriac to Arabic. The first school of medicine used by the Arabs
was that in Alexandria. The first books of alchemy, medicine and astrology were from Greek and
Coptic books.
Indigenous Arabian architecture only existed in Yemen. Architecture in the North was borrowed
from Hellenized Egypt and Syria.
The simple and dignified mosque (Arabic: masjid, a place to prostate oneself) of Muhammad at
Medina became the prototype for the first 100 years of Islam. It was a courtyard open to the sky;
the walls were made of sun-baked clay. For protection from the sun a roof was later added, made
of palm fronds and mud, supported by palm trunks. The first mosque built in conquered land was
in Basra, Iraq, in the winter camp of the army. Where the Moslems established themselves in
existing towns, they would use existing structures, such as churches of the Christians or arched
halls of the Persians as places of worship.
These buildings also lead to certain innovations to the design and construction of the Muslim
place of worship, leading to one of the earliest and most sacred places, the Jerusalem Dome of
the Rock built in 691. With the passage of time Mosques would be enlarged, rebuilt and designed
to use local building materials and native artistic traditions. The congregational mosque was first
a building for devotion, and also served as assembly hall and as an educational and political
forum.
The palaces of the new royalty were based on the designs of the Byzantine and Persian patterns.
In pre-Islamic time the Arabians had various types of song: caravan, martial, religious and
amorous. The chanting of poetry is maintained in the cantillation of the Koran.
The tambourine, the flute and the reed pipe also go far back in Arab history. At about the time of
the Prophet foreign musical influences arrived, such as Greek singing girls from the Ghassanids
and the Persian lute. The poet-minstrel was also popular. Most of the pre-Islamic poets sang their
compositions to music. The Prophet was against poetry and music that expressed heathen beliefs.
As wealth came to Hejaz, under Caliph Uthman, the appreciation for voice and instruments

59
blossomed. Male professional singer appeared for the first time. Singers and musicians also came
to Mecca and Medina, from Syria, Persia, Africa and other places, dressed in finest attire. These
cities became the nursery of song and conservatorries of music. These developments were
eventually used by the Abbasid enemy faction as propaganda to undermine the Umayyads,
calling them as a house of “ungodly usurpers”. By the time of Yazid II (691-743), music and
poetry were more important than the Koran and state affairs; also the eunuch system and harem
institution became fully developed. Yazid III (744) was the first caliph in Islam borne of a slave
mother. His two successors were also sons of such free women. Wine, women and song were
beginning to sap the vitality of youthful Arab society. The ancient tribal consciousness became
more significant again, eventually grouped into the Northern (Qaysite) vs. the Southern
(Yemenite) parties, which lead to conflicts over and over again. There was no fixed tradition of
hereditary succession. The ruling father to his son, was contrary to the Arabian tribal principle of
qualified seniority. Of the 14 Umayyad caliphs only 4 had their sons as immediate successors.
The dissident Shi’ites never tired of opposing the “Umayyad usurpers”. The Sunnite pietists
charged the caliphs with worldliness and neglect of koranic and traditional law. The Abbasids
claimed to be more worthy for caliph as they were more closely related to the Prophet than the
Umayyads; they also took advantage of widespread discontents, and posed as defenders of the
true faith. They set up their headquarters of propaganda at a small village near the Dead Sea, an
apparent harmless location, but close to the caravan route and the junction of the pilgrim road.
Non-Arabian Moslems and Persian Moslems in particular felt treated like second-class citizens
in regards to social and economic opportunities. They also represented a higher and more ancient
culture, acknowledged even by the Arabs themselves. Also the Shi’ah doctrine spread into
Persia, reviving Iranianism. A coalition emerged under the leadership of the great-grandson of
al-Abbas, uncle of the Prophet. On June 9, 747 the long meditated explosion broke out in
Khurasan, the Far East province of Persia. This was led by abu-Muslim, a Persian freedman,
under the black banner, the standard of Muhammad, now also the Abbasid emblem. Caliph
Marwan II could not help the embattled Umayyad governor, as he had troubles between the
North Arabian and South Arabian factions again. On October 30, 749 the Abbasids installed abu-
al-Abbas as the new caliph (750-54). Town after town opened their gates to the Abbasid, only
Damascus did not. A siege was laid, and the city surrendered on April 26, 750. The Abbasids
now commenced with the most ruthless extermination of the Umayyad house. The only
Umayyad, who escaped to Spain, was the youthful Abd al-Rahman who established a new and
brilliant Umayyad dynasty there. The Abbasid government called itself the new era. The new
capital was in Kufah on the Persian border, Persians now occupied the chief posts of
government. The old Arabian Moslems and the new foreign converts now coalesced into an
international Iranian Islam. The first Abbasid caliph was known as the bloodshedder, as he
depended more on force to execute his policies. He founded a theocratic state, in contrast to the
secular state under the Umayyad. It was the longest Arab dynasty in Islam (750-1258). Actually
the Baghdad caliphate proved to be as worldly as the Damascus. The Umayyad Empire was
Arab, the Abbasid more international. The caliphate was no longer united; Spain and North
Africa, Oman, Sind and Khurasan did not fully acknowledge the new caliph, Egypt only
nominally. Syria was in constant turmoil because of the outrages perpetrated against its royal
house. The Abbasid Alid alliance was only held together by the common hatred toward a foe.
The next caliph abu-Jafar (754-75), brother of the former, who assumed the title al-Monsur
(victorious by God) proved to be one of the greatest, though unscrupulous, of the Abbasids. His

60
uncle Abdullah who challenged him to the caliphate, was killed by abu-Muslim, the governor of
Khurasan. On a visit to the caliphal court abu-Muslim was also killed. A new sect of Persian
extremists was also mercilessly put down in 758. The grandsons of Hasan (son of Ali and
Fatimah), disgruntled Shi’ahs, were also ruthlessly killed. The Alids continued to be disruptive,
claiming their imams’ wisdom to be closer to that of the Prophet. An insurrection of avengers for
abu-Muslim developed, they were also disposed of. Nevertheless the greater part of the Islamic
empire was again consolidated, with the exception of North Africa and Spain.
The Abbasids continued to strengthen their borders and even expanded into the territories of the
Byzantines, areas south of the Caspian Sea, and Kashmir.
In 762 al-Mansur started construction of Baghdad. The site was carefully chosen, for
transportation centrality and military security. It took 100,000 workers and artists four years to
build it. The ruins of the former Sasamid capital Ctesiphon nearby served as the main quarry for
building materials. In a few years the city developed into one of the greatest centers of commerce
and politics of the world, only rivaled by Constantinople. The government was organized like the
Persian. The caliphate became more of a replicate of Iranian despotism than Arabian sheikdom.
Persian titles, wines, wives, mistresses, songs, ideas and thoughts. It softened the rough edges of
primitive Arabian life and paved the way for a new era in cultivation of science and scholarly
pursuits. In only two fields did Arabian culture hold its own, Islam remained the state religion,
and Arabic was the official language and state register.
Under al-Mansur the vizierate, a Persian office, was established for the first time in the Islamic
government. Khalid ibn-Barmak was the first incumbent to that high office. His father was a
high priest in a Buddhist monastery in Persia. Al-Mansur died in 775. His policies continued to
be followed for many generations. His son al-Mahdi (775-85) succeeded him as caliph. Next
followed the brief reign of his brother al-Hadi (785-6). The Barmak descendants continued as
vizier to 803 with unrestricted power, living in grand palaces with fabulous fortunes. They also
acquired great fame for eloquence and literary ability. Caliph al-Rashid (786-809) became so
paranoid and jealous of the Barmaks that he confiscated all their properties and had them all
killed in 803. The Abbasid dynasty attained its most brilliant period of political and intellectual
life between the 3rd caliph al-Mahde (775) and the 9th caliph al-Wathiq (842), particularly under
the 5th caliph al-Rashid (789-809). After al-Wathiq the state went downward, and under the 37th
caliph al-Mustasim it came to an end when the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258.
Between 797 and 806 Charlemagne of the West and al-Rashid in the East exchanged embassies
and gifts. These were of course based on self-interests; they had common foes, the Byzantium
and the Umayyads of Spain. Warfare continued between the Arabs and the Byzantines, on and
off, but the Taurus Mountains continued as the basic boundary.
By the time of caliph al-Rashid, Baghdad grew into a world center of prodigious wealth and
international standing. The royal palace had annexes for harems and eunuchs. Before he died in
809 he designated his son al-Amin (his mother was Arab) to be his successor. After the death of
al-Rashid, the uncle al-Mahdi and brother al-Mamun (his mother was a Persian concubine)
challenged him, leading to a civil war until 813, resulting with a large part of Baghdad in ruins.
Al-Mamun survived and became the next caliph. Soon the city recovered to eminence as a
commercial and intellectual center. His successor attracted to the capitol poets, wits, musicians,
singers, dancers, trainers of fighting dogs and cocks. Along the wharves lay hundreds of ships;
commercial, military and for pleasure. Into the bazaars of the city came porcelain and silk from
China; honey, wax, furs and white slaves from Scandinavia and Russia; spices, minerals and
dyes from India and the Malay Archipelago; rubies, fabrics and slaves from Central Asia;

61
ivory, gold and black slaves from East Africa.
From the provinces of the empire, sent by caravan or sea rice, grain, linen from Egypt; glass,
metal ware and fruits from Syria; pearls and weapons from Arabia; silks, perfumes and
vegetables from Persia. Arab merchants also exported from Baghdad. The adventures of Sindbad
the sailor in “The Thousand and One Nights” are based on actual voyages of Muslim merchants.
Professional men; physicians, lawyers, teachers and writers were also recognized by the caliphs.
This period witnessed the most momentous intellectual awakening in the history of Islam and
one of the most significant in the whole history of thought and culture. The awakening was due
mostly from foreign influences, partly from Indo-Persian and Syrian, but mostly Hellenic. The
translation into Arabic was from Persian, Sanskrit, Syriac and Greek. The Arabian Moslems had
very little science and philosophy on their own, but they had a keen intellectual curiosity and a
voracious desire for learning. They became beneficiaries of older and more cultured people, who
they conquered or met. In Syria they adopted the existing Aramaic civilization that was already
influenced by the Greeks. In Iraq they adopted the culture influenced by the Persians. In eighty
years after the establishment of Baghdad most of the philosophical works of Aristotle, leading
Neo-Platonic commentators and most of the writings of Galen as well, and Persian and Indian
scientific works were available in Arabic. In a few decades Arab scholars assimilated works
developed over centuries. From India came wisdom literature, mathematics and astronomy. Our
Arabic numerals came originally from India. From Persia came artistic, literary and historical
contributions; fables and the game of chess. Many sources came to Persia from India at earlier
times. Many of these works in Arabic were subsequently translated into some 40 other
languages. It was from these influences that the ancient Arabic became more elaborate and
colorful. Caliph al-Mansur invited in 765 a renowned chief doctor from a Persian hospital to
Baghdad, who was a Nestorian Christian, and with his six descendent generations continued to
serve as court medical practitioners.
The Greek intellectual legacy was already well established in Syria and Egypt, and became the
most vital foreign influence in Arab life. In their cities and cloisters, scientific and philosophic
studies were already cultivated. Greek scripts came into Arab possessions by way of booty from
raids and from emissaries in Byzantine and Armenia. Arabs did not know Greek; they relied on
Jews and heathens, but mostly on Nestorian Christians; to translate first into Aramaic (Syriac)
and then into Arabic. The highest degree of Greek influence was reached under Caliph Al-
Mamun. His rationalistic tendencies and his support to the Mutazilite cause, which maintained
that religious texts should agree with judgments of reason, led him to the philosophical works of
the Greeks. In line with this policy al-Mamun established in 830 his famous “House of
Wisdom”, a combination library, academy and translation bureau.
The voyage of intellectual discovery was begun with Greek: medicine by Galen (200AD),
mathematics and allied sciences by Euclid (300BC) and Ptolemi (100AD), philosophy by Plato
and Aristotle (300BC). Al-Mamun paid one of his translators the weight of each book with the
same weight in gold. By the 10th century Arabic which was before only a language of poetry,
revelation and religion, metamorphosed into a sophisticated language for scientific thought and
philosophical ideas of the highest order, and also a language of diplomacy and polite intercourse,
from Central Asia thru North Africa and Spain.
The Abbasid State
The head of the state was the caliph. He could delegate the power to civil authority, a vizier;
judicial power, to a judge; military function, to a general. This was basically the model of the
former Persian government. As a reaction to the “ungodliness” of the later Umayyad, the

62
Abbasids claimed a religious dignity of an imamate. With the passage of time, their titles
increased in honorific distinctions to include: “Allah” in their names; “God’s caliph”; later on, to
the end of the Ottoman caliphate, “God’s shadow on earth”.
The ill-defined hereditary principle of succession started by the Umayyad continued to the
Abbasid period, with the same mixed results. The reigning caliph would designate his successor,
a favored son, or other relative whom he considered most competent, but later he could be
replaced by the military or popular revolt.
Personal staff of the caliph would include chamberlain, executioner (with torture chamber), and
astrologer.
Next in power to the caliph would be the vizier, and as the caliph indulged more in the harem,
the vizier became more powerful. The vizier was even in charge of the “bureau of confiscation”.
The bureau of taxes remained the most important part of government.
Zakah was imposed only on Muslims and distributed to Muslims poor, orphans, strangers,
volunteers for holy wars, and slave captives to be ransomed.
Other public income: tribute from foreign enemies, truce money, capitation tax (non-Moslems),
land tax, tithes on merchandise (non-Moslems); land tax was the main source of income
(unbelievers). This money was used to pay the troops, maintain mosques and roads and bridges,
and meet miscellaneous needs of the Moslem community. Records of state revenue show great
prosperity for the 1st 100 years, and then steady decline with time.
Other government offices: auditors of accounts; chancery office (all documents of the state);
inspector of grievances, a kind of court of appeals; police, market (weighs and measures) and
morals (gambling, wine, usury); postal service, correspondents of state and private, relay routes
thruout road networks of the empire by mules and horses in Persia and by camels in Syria and
Arabia, transport of troops and their baggage, public use was at a fee, also served as government
espionage on government officials (in Baghdad alone there were 1,700 aged women spies; both
sexes-disguised as traders, travelers and physicians); Judges, responsible for law enforcement
based on the Koran and Hadith. They were also guardians for orphans, lunatics, minors and pious
foundations. Non-Muslims were under their own ecclesiastic heads or magistrates.
Military organizations; no large standing army; the caliphal bodyguards (higher pay and better
equipped) were directly under the caliph; regular troops were mostly mercenaries and
adventurers under their own chiefs; general levies units were based on tribes or districts, under
regular pay by the state, their pay was higher than construction workers, cavalry was paid double
that of foot soldiers. The soldiers were well armed, had siege machines, catapults and battering
rams; field hospitals and ambulances. There were one division of North Arabs and one division
of South Arabs (Yemenite), and a new division of Turkic (from central Asia) slaves. With time
there was a rise of Persian arms rather than Arab, also the caliph relied on Turks for bodyguards.
The Turks became such a nuisance later in the capital of Baghdad, that the caliph transferred the
capital to Samara. By 862 the Turks began to influence the state. They killed caliph al-
Mutawakkil in 861, at the instigation of his son. The military power of the state continued to
weaken, so by 908 tax farming was initiated by the governors and military commanders to pay
the troops from local funds as the imperial treasury was depleted.
Under the Buwayhid dynasty, Persian with Shi’ite character (945-1055) the soldiers received
land grants instead of pay in cash.
Under the Saljuqs dynasty, Turkmen (1055-1152) the governors and generals received grants of
towns and districts that they ruled with absolute power, paying the Saljuq sultan a yearly tribute.

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In times of war, he could call on a fixed number of troops who were equipped and supported by
the troops. As the authority of the provincial governors increased in proportion to their ability,
the weakness of the caliph became more real. The local income from each province was applied
to meet provincial expenses; only surpluses of revenue were sent to the caliphal treasury.
Abbasid Society
Under the Abbasids the primitive Arabian tribal system broke down, due to foreign influences.
Only three caliphs were sons of free mothers. The foreign mothers were Berber, Persian, Greek,
Greco-Abyssinian, Slav, Turkish or Armenian slaves. Arab aristocracy was superseded by
various nationalities, first Persians, later Turks.
Early Abbasid women enjoyed the same measure of liberty as their Umayyad sisters. Strict
segregation and seclusion became the practice under the Buwayhids.
Baghdad had about 27,000 public baths, used for ceremonial ablutions, amusement and luxury
resorts, supplied with hot and cold water. Women were also allowed to use them on special
reserved days.
Popular indoor games were dice, chess and backgammon. Outdoor sports were polo, croquet,
fencing, archery, horse racing and hunting.
Almost all servants were slaves from non-Moslem peoples. Besides manual work and household
chores; they were entertainers, singers, dancers, poets, both young men and women, and eunuchs
for the harems.
The high level of civilization was related to international trade, as far away as India and China,
by sea and caravan routes (transported by relays). The Arabs also exchanged embassies with the
various neighboring countries. Home industries were rugs, tapestries, silk, cotton, woolen
fabrics, furniture, kitchen utensils, embroideries, robes, soap, lamps, tables, sofas, glass, and
glazed tile. Jeweler’s art was highly developed in pearls, sapphires, rubies and diamonds
displayed in gold and silver jewelry. Perfumes were also highly prized and widely available.
Writing paper came form China in 750, the first paper mill was built in Baghdad in 800, the
paper industry came to Spain and Italy in 1,150. Movable printing was invented in Europe in
1,450, leading to the spread of popular education.
Agriculture in the Tigres-Euphrates area improved after the establishment of Baghdad as the
capitol. Canals for transport and irrigation were re-opened, newly formed and extended.
Similarly improvements were also made in Egypt. Everything grew there; cereal crops, fruits
and vegetables. The orange tree spread from India and Malay west to Mesopotamia and to Spain.
Sugar cane spread west from Persia. Horticulture also developed for flowers for purposes of
preparing perfumes and essences, from roses, oranges, violets and many others.
The agricultural class, who made up the bulk of the population of the empire and its main source
of revenue, were the original inhabitants of the land, now reduced to the position of dhimmis
(people of the book). The Arabs considered agricultural work below their dignity. The dhimmis
originally Christians, Jews and Sabians, later also included Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Harran
Sabians and others. In country places and on their farms they continued with their old cultures
and languages, Aramaic and Syriac in Syria and Iraq, Iranian in Persia and Coptic in Egypt.
Many who became Muslim moved to the cities.
In cities Christians and Jews often held important financial, clerical and professional positions,
often leading to open jealousy among the Muslims.
Two caliphs, Umar II (717-720) of the Umayyad and Mutawakkil (847-861) of the Abbasid
dynasty, imposed severe restrictions and shameful abuses on Christians and Jews. Another grave

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offence imposed by Muslim jurists was that the testimony of a Christian or a Jew could not be
accepted against a Muslim.
Under most caliphs there was a large measure of toleration. The Christians under the caliphs had
enough vitality to send missionaries to China and India. The Jews fared better than the
Christians, probably because they were a smaller number. Both Christians and Jews established
cultural centers in Baghdad and other large cities. During the 1st century of Abbasid rule, Islam
came to be the predominant religion in the conquered areas. There were isolated instances of
forcible conversions. The process of conversion was usually more gradual and peaceful, but also
included conditions for self-interest such as: escape of payment of humiliating tribute, to secure
social prestige and political influence, and to enjoy a larger measure of freedom and security.
The last victory on behalf of Islam was the acceptance and use of the Arabic language over the
various national languages of the subjugated people. This was much slower, it went on to the
later part of the Abbasid dynasty. Only in Persia, the Iranian language remained. Arabic as the
language of learning became prominent before Arabic as the vernacular.
Scientific and Literary Progress
The period of translation (750-850) was followed by creative activity. The 1st hospital was built
in Baghdad ca.800, based on the Persian model; it also had a women’s ward. An alchemist wrote
several treatises on pharmacology then, and druggists were required to pass examinations in
Baghdad. Al-Razi (865-925) one of the most prolific Muslim physician’s writings were
translated into Latin in 1187; was recognized as one of the greatest clinicians in the Middle
Ages. He is best known for his treatise on measles and smallpox. Ibn-Sina (980-1037) was a
great physician and a renowned philosopher. Al-Husayn of Bukhara cured the local sultan ibn-
Mansur (976-997) and received the privilege of using the ruler’s library, leading to a career of
writing of over 200 titles dealing with philosophy, medicine, geometry, astronomy, theology,
philology and art. Some of these titles were translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (1114-
1187) that became a textbook of medical education in Europe to the later part of the 15th
century. Al-Kindi (801-873) a pure Arab from Baghdad endeavored to combine Plato and
Aristotle, and considered Neo-Pythagorean mathematics to be the basis of all science. He was a
philosopher, astrologer, alchemist, optician and music theorist; 361 books are ascribed to him.
The Latin translations by Gerard of Cremona influenced the works of Roger Bacon (1220-1242).
Al-Farabi (862-950) was born in Transoxiana, educated under a Christian physician in Baghdad,
flourished as a Sufi (mystic) at Aleppo and died in Damascus. He wrote several treatises on Plato
and Aristotle and related these to Sufism (aesthetic mysticism). His writings reveal a fair
physician, mathematician, occult scientist and excellent musician. He is considered the greatest
Arabic music theorist.
The 1st astronomical observatory of Baghdad was built ca. 830 by a converted Jew. This was
built on the basis of Indian works, Persian astronomical tables and the Greek Ptolemy (127-145)
astro-mathematical encyclopedia. Equipment related with this was the quadrant, astrolabe, dial
and globes. Many more observatories were built by Islamic caliphs and sultans, leading to
measuring the orbits of the moon, the obliquity of the elliptic orbits of various planets,
computing accurate latitudes and longitudes. The old Persian solar calendar was corrected by the
famous Persian poet and free-thinker, who was also a renown mathematician and astronomer
Umar al-Khayyam (1048-1131), resulting to be more accurate than the Gregorian calendar of
1582.
Astrology is closely related to astronomy. The most distinguished astrologer abu-Mashar (d. 886)
came from Khurasan and flourished in Baghdad. His works were translated into Latin by John of

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Seville and Adelard of Bath (ca. 1120). He believed that the stars influence our birth, events of
life and death. But he also explained the laws of the tides, related to the rising and setting of the
moon.
The Hindu numerical system was translated into Arabic under caliph al-Mansur (709-775). Al-
Khwarizmi (780-850) composed the oldest work on arithmetic and algebra, including
calculations of integration and equation, using the Hindu numerical system. This work was
translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona and became the principal mathematics textbook in
European universities until the 16th century; this in turn was responsible for getting the Arabic
numerals introduced into Europe.
Arabs also made great scientific contributions in chemistry. In the study of chemistry and other
physical sciences the Arabs introduced the objective experiment; beyond the Greek speculations.
They made careful observations and collected facts, but they were weak in presenting
hypotheses. The father of Arabic alchemy was Jabir ibn-Hayyan (721-815). Like his Egyptian
and Greek forerunners, believed that base metals like tin, lead, iron and copper could be changed
into gold and silver by the use of mysterious substances. He conducted many experiments, and
made important advances in the theory and practice of chemistry. Twenty-two surviving Arabic
works bear his name. They were translated into Latin. He modified the Aristotelian theory of the
constituents’ of metal, which survived with slight changes into the 18th century.
Medieval Islam succeeded for the first time in human history to harmonize and reconcile
monotheism, the contribution of the ancient Semitic world, with Greek philosophy; and so
leading Christian Europe toward the modern point of view.
In medicine, philosophy, mathematics, botany and other disciplines Islamic development came to
a standstill after the 11th century. Reverence for the past with its traditions, both religious and
scientific, seems to have brought the Arab intellect to an impasse.
The study of geography had religious significants, the mosques had to face Mecca. Also
astrology required the latitudes and longitudes of all places in the world. Muslim traders,
between the 7th and 9th centuries had already reached China in the east by land and sea. They
went along the African coast to the far South, and penetrated Russia in the North. Merchants in
851 gave descriptions in Arabic of the coastlands of India and China. Ptolemy’s Geography
(127-145) was translated into Arabic before 901, it located a list of places by latitude and
longitude. At the instigation of Caliph al-Mamun (786-833), al-Khwarzmi (780-850) and 69
other scholars drew up a map of the heavens and the earth. By 900, geographical treatises were
written on various regions of the empire for purposes of: postal service, intelligence service,
historical topography and economic details for taxation purposes. By 950 colored maps were
drawn up for each country, together with detailed texts for travelers. By 1250 a geographical
encyclopedia was completed with places alphabetically arranged, including history, ethnography,
and natural sciences. Works of the Arab geographers were not translated into Latin by the
Europeans.
Most of the earliest historical writings in Arabic are from the Abbasid period. They begin from
oral legends and anecdotes of pre-Islamic time and religious traditions from the time of the
Prophet, and the early wars and conquests of Islam. Ibn-Sad (d. 845 Baghdad), the secretary of
al-Waqidi (747-823), wrote the first biographies of the Prophet, the Companions and their
Successors to his time. Al-Baladhuri (d.c.892) integrated the many stories of the conquests of
various cities and lands into one comprehensive whole. One of the first formal historians was
ibn-Qutaybah (828 Kufah-889 Baghdad), he was of Iranian extraction. Al-Tabari (838-923) was

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born in Persia; his history is based on elaborate and accurate information and on his commentary
on the Koran. He completed the first work of universal history in Arabic. He arranged the events
in chronological order from the creation of the world to 915. He made use of all available literary
sources of his day in Arabic and Persian, also oral traditions collected in his travels and lectures
from learned men in Baghdad and other centers of intellectual learning. He traveled extensively
in Persia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt. During 40 years of research he was known to write 40 sheets
every day. Al-Masudi from Baghdad (d. 987 Fustat, Egypt) inaugurated the topical method of
writing history in Arabic. He belonged to the rationalistic school of the Mutazilites and traveled
to almost every country in Asia. He spent the last ten years of his life in Syria and Egypt
compiling his material into a thirty-volume work. He did extensive research on Muslim topics,
and also on Indo-Persian, Roman and Jewish history. Miskawayh (930-1030) compiled a
universal history reaching to 980, he was also a philosopher and a physician. These were the high
points in Arabic historical composition. The historical writings have not been widely translated
from Arabic to European languages until modern times.
Theology and Jurisprudence
The sciences of theology, tradition, jurisprudence, philology and linguists were concentrated on
by Moslem Arabs. The need to precisely understand and explain the Koran became the bases for
extensive theological and linguistic study. Early contact with Christians in Damascus led to the
Murjite (Arabic: Those who Postpone) and Qadarite schools of thought. Next to the holy Koran,
the sunnah (the deeds, utterances and silent approvals of the Prophet, also include many of his
Companions or their Successors). The two are not canonically equal, in the Hadith Muhammad
speaks, and in the Koran Allah speaks. First in theology and jurisprudence is the Koran, second
the Hadith. To the pious Moslem the science of Hadith soon became the supreme quest of the
would-be scholar, undertaken on long and extensive journeys thru the expanse of the caliphate.
In the first two and one half centuries after the Prophet, the number and complexity of the
sayings and doings increased exponentially. Whenever a topic arose of religious, political or
sociological nature, every party of a controversy would look for authority from the Prophet, and
a Hadith was usually found. Al-Awja confessed in Kufah in 772 to circulating 4,000 traditions of
his own invention. Standards of verification were subsequently established leading to
classifications as genuine, fair and weak. By the third Muslim century six collections of Hadith
became recognized as standard. The first and most authoritative is by the Persian al-Bukhari
(810-70) who investigated 600,000 traditions that he collected from 1,000 sheikhs over a period
of sixteen years; of these he selected 7,397 that he deemed completely reliable. Hadith also gives
a wide range of duties to the Muslim community, even such trivial directions on how to cut a
watermelon before eating and cleaning teeth with a toothpick. It also conveys wise sayings,
anecdotes, parables and miracles, all ascribed to Mohammed.
Jurisprudence was a new concept to the Arabs, also influenced by the Greco-Roman system. The
regulations of ritual and worship, civil and legal obligations and punishment are elaborated in the
Hadith (traditions concerning the Prophet’s life and utterances). Of the six thousand verses in the
Koran, only about two hundred are legislative; they were not sufficient to cover all cases in civil,
criminal, political and financial conditions encountered in Syria, Egypt and all other conquered
territories. Two new roots evolved to the Koran and the traditions: analogy and consensus of
opinion. Four orthodox (Sunnite) schools developed for juridico-theological studies. The leader
of the Iraq school was abu-Hanifah, the grandson of a Persian slave and a successful merchant of
Kufah and Baghdad (699-767). He became the first and most influential jurist in Islam and he
was also a theologian. There were always disagreements over doctrine; his focus was to arrive at

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a uniform code, to aim for a wider and also future perspective. It is also the most tolerant school
of Islam; it is officially recognized in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire as well as
India and Central Asia. The leader of the Medina school was Malik ibn Anas (ca. 715-95). This
rite prevails in Northern Africa except for Lower Egypt and eastern Arabia. It stressed local
Medinese community practices (sunnah), preferring traditional opinions and analogical reasoning
to a strict reliance on Hadith. Ash-Shafi’i (767-820), a member of the Quraysh family studied
under Malik in Medina but was most active in Baghdad and Cairo. The school claims to be the
golden mean between the liberal Iraq and the conservative Medina schools. The Shafi’i rite
dominates Lower Egypt, eastern Africa, Palestine, eastern and southern Arabia, the coastal
regions of India and the East Indies. Its adherents number about 105,000,000, compared to
180,000,000 Hanifites, 50,000,000 Malikites and 5,000,000 Hanabalites. Ahmad ibn Hanbal
(780-855) was a student of ash-Shafi’i and of an uncompromising nature. He was very much
opposed to the Mutazilites, a rationalist Islamic school, for that he was persecuted under Caliph
al-Mamun (786-833), but ibn Hanbal prevailed and when caliph al-Mutawakkil (822-861) came
to power, reverting to Islamic orthodoxy and prosecuting non-orthodox and non-Muslims, ibn
Hanbal’s persecution came to an end. He was greatly honored for his life of asceticism and self-
denial. Not many follow the Hanabalite rite except the Wahhabis. The principles of ash-Shafi’i
have remained somewhat flexible to change their institutions in a changing world; the necessity
to belong to the Quraysh was suspended in favor of the Ottoman caliphs. With the four rites the
Koran was canonized, the six canonical books of Hadith were approved; the miracles of the
Prophet were accepted. The right to further interpretation of the Koran and the sunnah, or the
forming of new opinions by applying analogies, came to an end to the Sunnites.
The Shi’ites recognize learned men who can interpret the meanings of the sublime and hidden
imam.
Ethics
The canon law (shariah) regulated the entire life of the Muslim, religious, political and social.
They govern relations in the family, society and with non-Muslims. This includes sanctions and
inhibitions from the sacred law. Behaviors are classified as: 1. absolute duty; 2. reward for
correct, punishment for omissions; 3. permissible, legally indifferent; 4. reprehensible-
disapproved, but not punished; 5. forbidden (haram). These ethical directives based on the Koran
and traditions are numerous. Other sources of lessons in good morals are in Arabic literature,
based mainly on Indo-Persian anecdotes, proverbs and wise sayings.
Aristotle and Plato also influenced Arabic moral philosophy. Evan special enthusiasm for Christ
and Socrates as examples of the moral man; though to the Sunnite Muhammad, and to the
Shi’ites Ali are the perfect men.
Literature and Poetry
Arab literature culminated in the fourth and fifth Muslim centuries. One characteristic of prose
writing at that time was to be more sensitive and ornate, due to Persian influence; in contrast to
the early days more tense, incisive and simple expressions. Intellectually it was a period of
decline.
Arab poetry goes back to the heroic age far before Islam, and has continued as a base thru the
Umayyad and Abbasid periods even to modern Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad still making
reference to life in the desert. New style of poetry was influenced by Persia, included love songs
and elegant diction; also court poets celebrating valor and battle.
Education
The child’s education began at home. As soon as he could speak, the father’s duty was to teach

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him “the word”. By six he was expected to know the ritual prayer. Then elementary education
started, adjacent or at the mosque. Start with reading the Koran as textbook and writing. Also
learning Arabic grammar and poems, arithmetic and Hadith of the Prophet. Girls were also
welcome to the religious lessons in the lower grades. Memory work was emphasized. Physical
punishment was standard in school. Elementary teachers had low status. Wealthy people hired
private tutors.
The first prominent center of higher learning in Islam was “The house of wisdom”, founded by
al-Mamun (830) in Baghdad. It was his translation bureau, academy, public library and
observatory (also served as school for astronomy). Hospitals built in those times also served as
centers for medical studies.
The first academy in Islam, with boarding facilities and later for higher institutions, were the
Nizamiyah madrasahs. The first one was founded in 1065-7 by Nizam al-Mulk (1018-1092), the
Persian vizier of the Saljuk Sultans Alp-Arslan (1030-1072) and Malikshah (1055-1092), non-
Arab sultans, including later Saladin (1137-1193), who exercised power over Islam, patronizing
the arts and higher education. They also established theological seminaries for the study of the
Shafi’i rite and the orthodox Ashari system, which used the Koran and old poetry for the studies
of humanities. These academies spread all over the empire; about thirty were established in
Baghdad alone and about twenty in Damascus. Details of these organizations were incorporated
into early European universities. Adult education was widely available in many mosques, called
circles, or assemblies; besides Koran reading they also included linguistic and poetical subjects.
Mosques also functioned as libraries. Besides religious topics they had collections of logic,
philosophy, astronomy and other sciences. In some libraries paper was provided to students free.
Some private libraries had paid staff employed. The libraries were also used as meeting places
for scientific discussions and debates. Bookshops as commercial and educational enterprises
began in the early Abbasid period. In 891 one hundred book-dealers were on one street, and
more close to mosques. Booksellers were often calligraphers, copyists and literati; they also used
the stores for literary discussions. Bibliophiles had manuscripts of parchments, Egyptian papyri,
Chinese paper and leather scrolls. Paper mills were established in Baghdad ca. 800 when
government offices started using paper. Paper was made from flax, linen, and hemp rags. By the
10th century paper replaced papyrus and parchment in the Moslem world.
The Umayyad Mosques in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem (685-691) are
some of the early Muslim architectural monuments, indicate Byzantine influence. The founder of
Baghdad built the Golden Gate and the Palace of Eternity. The Great Mosque of Samarra was
built by al-Mutasim (833-42) and al-Mutawakkil (847-61), reflects Asiatic-Persian Influence.
Islam forbids representation of living beings, but paintings of nature scenes, animal, and even
people were popular in palaces. They were influenced by Byzantine and Persian culture.
Decorative designs and colors were already established from antiquity in Persia and Egypt and
continued into the Islamic era. Carpets and decorated silk fabrics from Syria became very
popular in Europe from the times of the Crusades. Because of Islamic prejudices against human
forms, conventional flowers and then Arabic characters became popular decorative designs. In
Syria the methods of enameling and gilding glass was perfected. The art of calligraphy of the
Koran, especially favored by Islam was honored far above painting and architecture. The art of
book-decorating and illustrating reached the highest development under the late Abbasid, Seljuk
and Mamluk periods. This was greatly influenced by the Nestorian and Jacobite Christian
practices.

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Early Islam frowned upon music, but it continued into the Abbasid period; together with poets
and scholars. Male and female singers accompanied them, sometimes by the thousands during
musical festivals. Caliph al-Wathiq (842-7) even performed on the lute and composed a hundred
melodies.
Musical theory came mostly from the Greeks: Pythagoras, Aristotle and Euclid; it was even
classified as a branch of mathematics. Such instruments as the guitar and the organ came from
the Greeks also. Al-Kindi the philosopher was one of the main musical theory writers. The Arab
musical writers were translated into Latin and became textbooks in Western Europe. Music
became also an important part of the Sufi fraternities.
Muslim Sects
During the first part of the Abbasid dynasty (750-1000) Muslim civilization developed and
retained the main forms to the present in theology and laws, science and philosophy, literature
and humanities.
The Mutazilah began with the rigid doctrine that the Koran was the uncreated word of God, but
later developed a rationalist wing that accorded human reason above the Koran. In 833 caliph al-
Mamun declared the dogma of “the creation of the Koran”, opposed to the orthodox view;
resulting in a Muslim inquisition. This dogma was overturned two caliphs later. A previous
Muslim inquisition under the Umayyad caliph Hisham (724-43) resulted in the execution of al-
Jad who taught that the Koran was created and al-Dimashqi for maintaining the doctrine of free
will. Attempts to reconcile religious doctrine with Greek thought became the supreme
preoccupation of intellectual Muslims and later of medieval Christians. This consideration came
to an end in Sunnite orthodoxy, when the anthropomorphic expression in the Koran was
demanded, based on the teachings of al-Ashari (873-935) and al-Ghazzali (1058-1111); by 1078
the later turned to Sufism and became a dervish (from Persian, meaning: poor, needy, a
mendicant). His writings were translated into Latin by 1150, and influenced Jewish and Christian
scholasticism, including Thomas Aquinas and later Pascal, leading to the Reformation in Europe,
but Islam stayed rigid. Sufism is mysticism in Islam; it is not a set of doctrines but rather feelings
in the religious domain. Muslim mysticism is a reaction against formalism in Islam. It pursues a
personal, direct approach to and a more intense experience with God and religious truth. They
see in the Koran mystical aspects of divine presence that the Sufis consider themselves as the
true interpreters. It began as an ascetic life, contemplative, similar to that of Christian monks.
Sufism absorbed many elements of Christianity, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism and Buddhism; and
passed thru mystical, theophysical and pantheistic stages. They adopted wool (suf) as a dress and
also celibacy, similar to Christian monks. The Sufi fraternity, as developed in the 13th century
also had masters and novices like Christians, clergy and beginners. Their religious service has
elaborate rituals, like Christian litanies. Sufism was first organized by Ibrahim ibn-Adham of
Balk (ca. 777), who experienced a Buddha like conversion experience leading to quietist
asceticism in Syria. The Muslim mystics of the second Moslem century felt a purity of soul, so
they could know and love God and be united with Him here and now. The Egyptian dhu-al-Nun
(ca. 860) taught that true knowledge of God comes only through ecstasy. The Persian al-Bistami
introduced the doctrine of self-annihilation for which the Persian al-Halloy was cruelly executed
in 922 by the Abbasid inquisition. His tomb in west Baghdad is that of a saint. The first self-
perpetuating fraternal order, of the Qadirite, started in the 12th century in Baghdad. It is the most
tolerant and charitable, claiming followers throughout the Moslem world. The fraternity of the
Rifaite (al-Rifai of Baghdad ca. 1183) can perform strange feats like swallowing glowing
embers, live snakes and glass, or passing needles and knives through their bodies. The

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Mawlawite order from Iconium (today’s Turkey), are commonly known as the whirling
dervishes, give importance to music in their ceremonies. Various other independent fraternities
developed in various countries at different times, ranging in their Sufism from ascetic quietism to
pantheistic antinomianism. The founder of the order became often the center of a cult, considered
to have divine or quasi-divine powers. Members of Sufi orders live in special quarters that also
serve as social centers. The Sufis also diffused the rosary among the Muslims. It is of Hindu
origin, first used by Eastern Christians. During the Crusades the rosary was brought to the
Roman Catholic West. Some mystics claim that the rosary helps them reach a state of ecstasy.
Sufism founded and popularized the cult of sainthood. This influence came from Christianity.
This relates the mystic call to bridge men and God in Islamic theology, and is based on the
performance of miracles. Women qualify equally as men. One of the most honored saints is
Rabiah al-Adawiyah of Basra (ca. 717-801), who declared: ”I have not served God from fear of
God…or love of paradise…but only for the love of Him.”
The Shi’ah, the partisans of Ali helped the Abbasids decisively in overcoming the Umayyad
dynasty. Their persecution resumed in 850 under caliph al-Mutawakkil, and in response, they
continued to rebel against the Sunnite power. The Shi’ah claim that their rightful imam has
inherited from Prophet Muhammad the prerogative to interpret the law, and the imam is divinely
protected from error and sin. Their 12th imam, Muhammad “disappeared” in 878 in the cave of
the great mosque at Samarra; and he is “the hidden imam” who will return in the right time as the
Mahdi (divinely guided one) to restore true Islam, conquer the world, and usher in a millennium,
and then the end will come.
From the Shi’ahs came a number of other sects. One was the Ismalites, who recognize Ismael
(ca. 760), as the 7th imam, the last. The number was of sacred importance. They claim “inner,
esoteric” understanding of the Koran and trained secret missionaries with the goal of destroying
the caliphate and to put one of their leaders, Abdullah (ca. 874), on the throne. This led to the
rise of the Fatimid dynasty in Tunisia. One of Abdullah’s zealous pupils and proselyters was
Hamdan Qarmat, who formed the Qarmatian sect. They established a headquarters near Kufah,
and started indoctrinating poor peasants and artisans and organized them into guilds, stressing
tolerance and equality and a strong sense of community. They even encouraged the Negro slaves
(Zanj) near Basrah to revolt, this revolt led to widespread violence and destruction in the region
from 868 to 883. Another missionary of Qarmat, al-Janobi, founded an independent state in 899
on the western shore of the Persian Gulf. These also engaged in terrible raids in the neighboring
lands, even seizing Mecca in 930. Between the 10th and 12th centuries they engaged in great
bloodshed thruout Syria and Iraq. Even distant Khurasan and Yemen suffered disturbances. From
the Ismalite doctrine, Druzism and the Assasins were organized in Syria. The Assasins gained
possessions of a towering fortification (3,400 m above sea level) in the nearby Persian
mountains; led raids in various directions conquering other fortresses. They terrorized the
Moslem world with their poisonous daggers. Caliphs and Sultans could not stop them. The
Mongolian Hulagu conquered Baghdad in 1258. Baybars, the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and Syria
defeated the Mongols and the Assasins in 1272. The bulk of the Shi’ites, the Twelvers, consider
the Qarmations, Druzes, Assasins and similar Ismailite sects as extremists who compromise the
divinity of God and disregard the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood. All Shi’ites represent
about 14% of the number of Muslims; they are also hostile to Sufism.
The Caliphate Falls Apart
Spain. The Umayyad Abd-al-Rahman established a new brilliant dynasty in 756.
Morocco. The great-grandson of al-Hasan, Idris ibn-Abdullah, lost out in the Alid revolt in

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Medina, and escaped to Morocco in 785 and founded a kingdom that lasted until 974; the first
Shi’ite dynasty in history. The dynasty was overcome by caliph al-Hakam II (961-76) of
Cordova.
Tunisia. The former Latin-speaking, Christian–professing land, the home of St. Augustine; was
governed by Ibn-al-Aghlab (800-811) as an appointee of caliph al-Rachid in 800. He assumed
the title “amir” and he and his descendents ruled Tunisia independently until 909. They had a
well–equipped fleet and conducted piratical raids along the coasts of Italy, France, Corsica,
Sardinia and Sicily. The Fatimids of Egypt conquered them in 909.
Egypt, Syria. Ahmad ibn-Tulun was sent to Egypt in 868 as lieutenant to the governor. He
established independence from the caliph in Baghdad and then also took control of Syria in 877.
He had an army of 100,000, with a core of bodyguards of Turkish and Negro slaves (he was of
Turkish descent himself). This was the beginning of Turkish elements in the state authority. He
improved the irrigation system of Egypt to improve agricultural production, and also built a new
mosque and hospital. The palace of his son had the most luxurious facilities with widespread
gold ornaments. Shortly after the founder died, the state reverted back to the Abbasid rule in 905.
After a few years of Abbasid sway, another Turkish dynasty was founded by Muhammad ibn-
Tughj (935-45) and ruled Egypt as a quasi-independent state. He also added Syria-Palestine to
his state; also Mecca and Medina with Hejaz were linked to Egypt for several centuries. His two
sons were not competent rulers, but the Abyssinian eunuch abu-al-Mink Kafur was very able. In
969 the Shi’ite Hamdanids of north Syria took control of Egypt. They were great patrons of
learning, included the famous philosopher–musician al-Farabi, and the eloquent court preacher
ibn-Nubatah. In 973 the Fatimids took control of Egypt.
In the east, the domain of the caliph was also shrinking, mostly to Turks and Persians. Caliph al-
Mamun gave the governorship of all lands east of Baghdad to his general Tahir ibn-al-Husayn in
820, his descendants stayed in power until 872, then the Saffarid dynasty of Persia took control
until 908, then the Samanids of Transoxiana conquered the Saffarids. Their capital Bukhara and
the leading city Samarqand rivaled Baghdad as centers of learning and the arts; including Arabic
and Persian scholarship. From this period onward Persian literature blossomed again. It was one
of the most enlightened Iranian dynasties; they also had the usual problems of a turbulent
military aristocracy, precarious dynastic successions, plus the Turkish nomads to the north.
Within the state, the Turkish slaves also became more powerful. One of the former Turkish
bodyguards established the Ghazanwid dynasty (962-1186), ruling over the independent state of
Afghanistan and Punjab, and then expanded the territory even into parts of India and Persia.
They also decorated their capital with magnificent buildings, and founded and endowed a large
academy, including poets and men of learning. The Turks were rising over the Persians. By 1186
the provinces of the Ghaznawid dynasty became independent.
The power of the Abbasids was shrinking, moving to the Shi’ite Persian Buwayhids and the
Sunnite Turkish Saljuqs. Only the capital Baghdad remained; but with limited authority, between
the unruly imperial guard and a revolt of Negro slaves. So disruptive were the Turkish
bodyguards of caliph al-Mutasim (833-42), that he moved the government 100km up the Tigris
to Samarra, were it served as capital from 836 to 892; where the caliphs lived more like a
prisoners than a rulers. The murder of caliph al-Mutawakkil by his bodyguards in December 861,
at the instigation of his son, was the first of a series of events to shake the Abbasid dynasty;
leading to two centuries of confusion and the disintegration of the caliphate; where the troops,
mostly Turks, made and unmade caliphs. Also during this period the rebellion of the Zanj slaves
of the salt marshes erupted, when in September 869 an Alid, Ali ibn-Muhammad, claimed a

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vision to deliver the oppressed. War raged form 870 to 883 with half a million people perishing.
It was during this war when Egypt, under ibn-Tulun, broke away from the caliphate. Baghdad
was restored as capital under caliph al-Mutadid (892-902), with the military still tending to
manipulate the caliphate. Under caliph al-Muqtadir’s reign (908-32), thirteen viziers rose and
fell, with some put to death. During this period there arose also three caliphs concurrently,
including a Fatimid in North Africa and an Umayyad in Spain. Al-Mustakfi (944-6) was “the last
of the real caliphs” when Ahmad ibn-Buwayd, a Shi’ite Persian conquered Baghdad, and the
Turkish guard fled, establishing a dynasty (945-1055); he used the titles: amir, malik and sultan.
In January 946 the caliph was blinded and deposed. Al-Muti (946-74) was chosen as the new
caliph, and others were made and unmade at the will of the Buwayds. The capital became Shiraz
in Fars, Baghdad was no longer supreme; now Shiraz, Ghaznah, Cairo and Cordova became
cities of international pre-eminence. The zenith of Buwayhid power came under Adud-al–
Dawlah (949-83), the greatest and most illustrious ruler of the time. He united several petty
kingdoms of Persia and Iraq, the state was more like an empire, and he called himself King of
Kings. He also beautified Baghdad, repaired canals, built mosques, hospitals and public
buildings. He built the famous hospital in Baghdad 978-9, staffed by 24 physicians that also
served as medical faculty. In the cultivation the arts of peace, he collaborated with the Christian
vizier Nasr ibn-Harun, who also repaired churches and monasteries. Literary and scientific
patronage continued by his son Sharaf-al-Dawlah (983-89), who also built a famous observatory.
A subsequent vizier Sabur ibn-Ardahir, a Persian, built in 993 at Baghdad an academy with a
library of 10,000 books. Family succession quarrels increased, resentment by Sunnite Baghdad
continued and Shi’ite-Sunnite confusion prevailed. The caliph was but a shadow of the former
power with his empire quite dismembered, one petty dynasty competing against another. Islam
seemed to be crushed.
In the meantime, Saljuq, the head of the Turkoman clan Ghuzz was coming from the Kirghis
steppes of Turkestan. These nomads settled in the region of Bukhara, where they fervently
embraced Sunnite Islam. The clan slowly took control of the Samanids, Kurasan and Marw from
the Ghaznawids, and other areas until the grandson Tughril Beg arrived on December 18, 1055
as head of the wild Turkoman tribes at Baghdad. The Turkish general and military governor of
Baghdad left, and caliph al-Qaim (1031-1075) received the Saljugs as deliverers. By 1060
Buwayhid power was crushed. Tughril’s official title was al-Sultan (he with authority) and was
hailed as the King of the East and the West. His reign was from 1037-63, his nephew and
successor Alp Arlan (hero-lion) 1063-72, the latter’s son Malikshaw 1072-92; this was the most
brilliant period of Saljuq ascendancy over the Muslim East. Fresh Turkish tribesmen swelled
their armies and conquered in all directions until again Western Asia was united into one
Moslem kingdom. A new race of Central Asia struggled for Islam world supremacy. In 1065 Alp
Arlan conquered Christian Armenia, then a Byzantine province. War broke out with Byzantine;
when Alp Arlan won a battle and took Emperor Romanus Diogenes prisoner. Then these
nomadic tribes began to settle in the plateau regions of Asia Minor. The cousin of Alp was put in
charge of the new territory, where he established in 1077 the sultanate of the Rum (Romans)
Saljuqs. After 1084 Iconium, the richest and most beautiful City in Asia Minor became the
Saljuq capital. They even recovered Mecca and Medina from Fatimid power. In 1091, during
Malikshah’s reign, the Saljuq seat of government moved to Baghdad, the capital of the caliphs.
The caliph became more than ever a puppet of the sultan, but a puppet dressed in regalia and
sitting on a throne. The height of Saljuq power was under Malikshah. He built roads and
mosques, dug canals and repaired walls; caravans could travel safely from Transoxiana to Syria.

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He even built sanitary treatment facilities for the city of Baghdad. The guiding hand of the
government administration for both Alp Arslan and Malikshah was the illustrious Persian vizier
Nizam-al-Mulk, a highly cultured and learned man. The aged Nizam was one of the earliest
prominent victims of an Isma’ili assassin in 1092. With his death the time of glory under the
three Saljuq sultans ended. After the death of Malikshah civil war broke out among his sons, plus
other disturbances, the tribal-nomadic heritage came to the forefront, leading to the establishment
of semi-independent states, then independents of most parts of the kingdom. Only Persia
remained in the center of the Great Saljuqs until 1157. One of the family subdivisions was
Persian Iraq (1117-94). The Saljuqs of al-Rum in Iconium were superseded after 1300 by the
Ottoman Turks, also of the Ghuzz tribe, like the Saljuqs. When the Crusaders came into Syria-
Palestine, neither Saljuqs or Abbasids showed an interest. After the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, a
Muslim delegation asked for help: none came. In 1108 help was asked of Tripoli, still no help. In
1160, finally Nur-al-Din and Salah-al-Din rose up successfully against the Crusaders and also
put an end to the schismatic Fatimids of Egypt; and installed the Sunnite tradition and the
recognition of the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir over Egypt and Syria. In 1220 Genghis Khan came
from Mongolia and moved westerly into Russia and central Europe; when Genghis died, the
Mongols retreated. In 1253 Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis, left Mongolia and moved west
again. He crossed the Oxus in 1256 and destroyed the Ismaili Assassin fortress at Alamut; in
1258 he besieged Baghdad, and when they refused to submit to his terms he killed caliph al-
Mustasim, the last caliph, and destroyed most of the city. Mosul, Kufah and Basra surrendered
and were spared. By 1260 Hulago was ready to take Damascus, when his brother the Great Khan
died in Persia, so he returned to Persia personally. The army remained behind in Syria, and was
destroyed the same year by Baybars, the general of the Egyptian Mamluk Qutuz. The whole of
Syria was re-occupied by the Mamluks and stopped further Mongol westerly advances. Hulago
founded the Mongol kingdom of Persia, and assumed the title of Il-Khan (lord of the tribe); with
his descendents in power until 1304, toward the end they became devout Moslems.
Arabs in Spain and Sicily
Musa ibn-Nusayr, the governor of North Africa under the Umayyad, sent the Berber Tariq ibn-
Ziyad with 12,000 men, mostly Berbers, to Spain, who had dynastic troubles among the Visigoth
rulers. Tariq met the army of King Roderick and routed the latter’s army with the help of the
king’s political enemies. After this decisive victory, in July 711, the Moslems marched on with
practically no resistance, only towns dominated by Visigothic knights put up a fight. Toledo and
Elvira were easily captured even Cordova, with treachery. Jealous with the great success of
Tariq, Musa came with 10,000 troops, all Arabians and Syrian Arabs, in June 712; and the
Moslem conquests continued northward. In the fall of 713 caliph al-Walid sent message to Musa
to report to Damascus; the caliph was offended that Musa went to Spain independently, without
his authorization. He slowly made his way to Syria, accompanied by his officers, 400 Visigothic
princes wearing crowns and girdled with gold belts, followed by an endless retinue of slaves and
prisoners of war, loaded with enormous treasure of booty. News of the impressive procession
traveled much quicker to Damascus. When Musa arrived in Tiberias, orders were waiting for him
from Sulayman, brother and heir of the sick caliph al-Walid, to delay his arrival to the capital
until his accession to the throne. Musa ignored the order and went on to Damascus and was
evidently received with favor by al-Walid; subsequently caliph Sulayman disciplined Musa with
the loss of his property and all authority. Spain (Arabic: al-Andalus) was now a province of the
caliphate and within seven years the conquest was complete. Some of the factors for the triumph
were: the rulers, the Visigoths (West Goths) came to Spain in the 5th century as Teutonic

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Barbarians, who had to displace their predecessors, the Suevi and Vandals, also invading
Germanic hordes; they followed the Arian form of Christianity whereas the native Spanish-
Roman population followed Catholicism. Finally in 587 the Visigoth rulers accepted
Catholicism. The Visigoths ruled as absolute, often despotic, monarchs. Large parts of the native
population were serfs and slaves. The rulers also persecuted the Jews. There was also dissention
among the royalty and nobility who had mostly become territorial lords. The Muslims crossed
the Pyrenees mountains in 717-8 but returned shortly; in 732 they went north again, almost to
Paris, but were soundly defeated. The Moslems also were not united, the same old divisions, the
North Arabians maintained the Sunni orthodoxy, the Yemanites were inculcated with Shi’ite
ideas and more sympathetic to the Abbasid dynasty, the Berbers who flooded the peninsula from
Africa were inclined toward the Kharijite doctrine and against the Umayyads and the Alids. The
Berbers also complained that they did the brunt of the fighting, yet were allotted the arid central
plateau, in contrast to the Arabs who were more in the fertile coastal areas. This contributed to
the raging revolt in Africa from 734-42, threatening the Arab minority; this led to caliph Hisham
sending in 741 75,000 Syrians to quell the African revolt. About one third of the Syrians came to
the peninsula as colonists. There was so much confusion and anarchy that between 732 and 755
twenty-three governors succeeded one another.
In 750 the Abbasids came into power and massacred the house of Umayyad, only very few
escaped. The most successful was Abd-ar-Rahman, who secretly traveled for five years until he
reached Spain, where he was welcomed in city after city, as the people hated the titular governor
Yusuf. Ar-Rahman organized an army and in 756 faced Yusuf in battle, where the latter lost. By
757, with his 40,000 mercenary Berbers, Abd-ar-Rahman established peace and order and
declared independence from the Abbasid caliphate. He was also a great builder; he built
aqueducts to bring water to the capital city Cordova, multi-arched bridges and rebuilt the great
Mosque of Cordova, it has survived to this day as transformed to a Christian cathedral in 1236.
His villa outside Cordova was planted with exotic plants and fruits, such as peaches and
pomegranates and palm trees imported from Syria. Ar-Rahman initiated the intellectual
movement of making Islamic Spain from the 9th to the 11th century one of the two greatest
cultural centers of the world. The zenith of Umayyad power was reached during the time of the
8th emir, Abd-ar-Rahman III (912-61), and began waning after the talented Hajib (chief
minister) al-Mansur (1002); when Islamic Spain broke up into petty kingdoms and principalities.
With the fall of Granada in 1492, the last of the Muslim rule ended in the peninsula.
From the beginning jealousies arose between the Arab Moslems and the newly converted
Spanish Moslems. Subsequent to the Moslem conquest the subject people were treated like those
of other conquered territories. Poll tax was levied on Christians and Jews. Land tax of 20% on
the yields stayed the same for the unconverted and the converted. Landed properties of lords and
churches were confiscated and given to the conquerors as individuals. Serfs were left on the land
as cultivators who turned 80% of their produce to their Moslem lords. State lands were also
distributed as fiefs to Syrians and Arabs imported to quell revolts. Christian communities were
left undisturbed to follow their laws and traditions, as long as it did not involve Moslems or
offenses against the religion of Islam. Christians flocked to Islam; in the cities this new class of
“adopted, affiliated” formed, and with the passage of time they became the most discontented.
Many of them where “secret Christians”; and all knew the clear law of apostasy from Islam,
certain death. Moslem Arabs treated them as inferiors; by the end of the 1st century after the
conquest they were the majority in many cities, and were also the 1st to take up arms against the
Islamic state.

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Civil Disturbances
Great riots broke out in one of the suburbs of Cordova in 805 when religious Neo-Moslems
attacked emir al-Hakam (796-822) and his foreign bodyguards with stones, because they
considered the emir impious. Subsequently 72 mob leaders were apprehended and crucified. In
814 a Berber religious leader led a mob that shut up al-Hakam in his palace. The cavalry of the
emir retaliated ruthlessly; 300 leaders of the mob were nailed to crosses, the suburb was
destroyed, and the whole population was driven out of Spain. The “royal city” of Toledo was
also restless under the Moslem yoke, with the renegades and Christians in a chronic state of
revolt. In 807, the governor of Toledo Amrus ibn-Yusuf, a Spanish Moslem, invited hundreds of
notable Toledoans to a banquet with al-Hakam. As they entered the courtyard of the new castle
they were all executed, resulting in a tranquil city for several years. Under emir Muhammad I
(852-86), was also a time of severe repression in Cordova, 422 Christians were killed in
voluntary martyrdom for reviling Mohammed and cursing Islam. Visigothic Arian Christian
teachings were close to Moslem doctrine. Many Christians were so impressed by Arab
civilization, that they adopted Arabic ways of living; they were recognized as a distinct social
class named Mozarabs. The Bible was even translated into Arabic for them. There was also
much disturbance and violence among competing ascenders to the throne. In different regions of
Spain, local champions arose of Arab, Berber, or Visigothic ancestry who established autonomy
from the Cordova government. By 912 the vast Moslem state had shrunk to Cordova and the
immediate surroundings; when the young emir Abd ar-Rahman III was only 23 years old. He
proved to be an effective leader, reconquering the lost provinces by 932. External enemies were
still in place, the Moslem Fatimids in the south and the Christian king of Leon to the north. By
this time Cordova was one of the three most glamorous cities of the world, with Baghdad and
Constantinople. The city had over a half million inhabitants, seven hundred mosques, and three
hundred public baths. Abd ar-Rahman’s palatial mansion al-Zahra, was named after his favorite
concubine. He surrounded himself with 3,750 foreign bodyguards, and a standing army of
100,000 men. With these he kept treason and brigandage in check, but reduced the influence of
the old Arab aristocracy. Commerce and agriculture flourished, and income multiplied. During
his reign and that of his son al-Hakam II (961-76), and then the dictatorship of al-Hajib al-
Mansur (977-1002) the pinnacle of Moslem Spain political influence in European and African
affairs was achieved. Cordova, the Umayyad capital, was the most cultured city of Europe. With
113,000 homes, seventy libraries, numerous bookshops, mosques and palaces, and miles of
paved streets that were illuminated by public lights.
The caliphal office was hereditary, though often army officers and nobles elected whom they
favored. There was often a hajib (chamberlain), and then below him the viziers, next the
secretaries; who all formed the diwan (administration). There were six provinces under Cordova,
each ruled by civil or military governors. The caliph was also the highest law giver and court of
appeals, who delegated legal authority to various judges for such areas as: criminality and
complaints on public officials, market weights and measures, gambling, sex immorality and
public dress. Usual sentences were fines, scourging, imprisonment, mutilation and; in case of
blasphemy, heresy and apostasy, death.
Most of the government income came from import and export taxation. Under the caliphate,
Spain was one of the wealthiest and most densely populated states in Europe. The capital had
some 13,000 weavers, plus a flourishing leather industry. Wool and silk were woven in many of
its cities. The Arabs learned the cultivation of sericulture from the Chinese. From Spain came
also glassware, brass works, and pottery. Gold, silver, iron, and other metals were also mined
and processed.
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The Spanish Arabs introduced agricultural practices from Western Asia. They dug canals;
introduced rice, sugar cane, cotton, apricots, peaches and many other plants. They also cultivated
beautiful gardens with their palaces. They developed trade for industrial and agricultural
products. Seville, one of the greatest river ports, exported cotton, olives and oil; and imported
cloth and slaves from Egypt, Europe and Asia. Exports of Malaga and Jaen were spices, figs,
marble and sugar; sent to markets as far as India and Central Asia. Much trade was also
conducted with Damascus, Baghdad and Mecca. From their extensive maritime leadership, many
words come from the Arabs: admiral, arsenal, average, cable, and tariff. The government
maintained a regular postal service. Arab money was the established currency even in the
Christian kingdoms of the north for the following 400 years.
The highest glory of Arab cultural contribution was in education. Al-Hakam was a scholar and
patronized learning. He founded 27 free schools in the capital. The university of Cordova was
established in the principal mosque of the city and was pre-eminent among education institutions
of the world. It preceded al-Azhar of Cairo and Nizmiyah of Baghdad, and attracted Christian
and Moslem students, not only from Spain but also from parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. He
piped water to the university and decorated it with mosaics created by Byzantine artists. A
library was established with 400,000 books and nearly everyone was able to read in the capital.
The next renowned head of state was Mohammed ibn-abi-Amir, of Yemenite ancestry. He
started as a humble professional letter writer, and under patronage of the queen, rose from office
to office, disposing the vizier, and then became the royal chamberlain (hajib) and dictator in 978.
He replaced the Slavonic bodyguards with loyal Moroccan mercenaries. To ingratiate himself to
the ulema, he burned all books of the library on philosophy and books blacklisted by the ulema.
In 981 he assumed the title of al-Hajib al-Mansur (victorious thru the aid of Allah). He also
reformed the army, leading them to be triumphant in North–west Africa against the Fatimids, and
the Christian kings in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula, dying in the field against Castile
in 1002. Forty years after his death Andalus was torn apart by Berbers, Arabs, Slavs, Spaniards;
and by the praetorian guards, like in ancient Rome and then decadent Baghdad. The Umayyad
caliphate was formally abolished in 1027.
By 1050 over 20 short-lived states arose in as many towns and provinces under chiefs or kings.
Cordova was a sort of republic that was taken over by the ruling Berber family (Zirid) of Seville
in 1068, and then overcome by the Moroccan Murabits in 1090. Malaga ruled by the Hammudd
dynasty was overpowered by the Murabits in 1057. Toledo was ruled by an ancient Berber
family (1032-85), was taken by King Alfonso VI in 1085. Saragossa was ruled by the banu-Hud
family until 1039, occupied by the Murabits in 1110 and conquered by Alfonso I (King of
Aragon) in 1118. Al-Mutadid was king of Cordova from 1068-91; he was also a poet, patron of
letters and enjoyed a harem of almost 800 inhabitants. He paid tribute to the King of Galicia. The
Christian monarchs of the north had internal troubles also. The kingdoms of Leon and Castile
united, later Galicia and Navarre joined with them also; and they became more aggressive in
their raids to the south, as far as Cadiz. For protection, al-Mutamid invited Yusuf ibn-Tashufin,
the powerful leader (1061-1106) of the Murabits (Almoravids).
The Murabits were originally a military brotherhood established by a pious Moslem (ca.1050) in
a fortified monastery in southern Senegal; with early recruits from among the Sahara desert
nomads. They followed the “correct” Islam, the Sharia according to the Maliki school. Starting
with 1,000 warrior “monks”, they forced one tribe after another to accept Islam. In a few years
they were masters of North-west Africa and finally Spain. They recognized the Abbasid caliph in
Baghdad as the supreme authority. This was the first time Berbers had a leading role on the

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world’s stage. Ibn-Tashufin founded the city of Marrakech, Morocco in 1062. This city became
his and his successors’ capital, with Seville (not Cordova) as the subsidiary capital in Spain for
more than 50 years. He came to Spain in 1086 with 20,000 men and defeated a Castilian army
under Alphonso VI, and sent 40,000 heads back to Africa as trophies, then returned to Africa
himself as a celebrity. He came back to Spain with his Saharan hosts a couple years later, now as
a conqueror to rescue Spanish Islam; 1090 Granada, 1091 Seville, by 1106 he controlled
virtually all of the Muslim State; except Toledo and Saragossa. He sent al-Mutamid to Morocco
in chains and destitution. The outbursts of religious fervor of the Murabits led to suffering for
many Christians, Jews and liberal Moslems. The Mozarabs, part of the Spanish population that
assimilated the Arab language and dress but retained their Christian faith were also placed under
restrictions and their churches destroyed. Under the devout Ali (1106-43), the son and successor
of Ibn-Tashufin, the works of al-Ghazzali were burned in Spain and al-Maghrib. In 1147 the
Murabits fell victim to their more vigorous kinsmen the Muwahhids (Almohads) “those who
attest the unity of God.” The Almohads were founded on the religious teachings of Ibn Tumart
(1080-1130), who proclaimed himself as a mahdi (promised messiah), based on the strict
interpretations of the Quran and hadith of the Asharite school. As spiritual and military leader he
began war against the Murabits in the Atlas Mountains in 1125. His trusted lieutenant Abd al-
Mumin took control after Ibn Tumart’s death in 1130, and continued to conquer Marrakech in
1147, expanded eastwards to the frontier of Egypt and took over Muslim Spain (1148-72). Abd
al-Mumin died in 1163 and the capitol was transferred to Seville in 1170. The Almohads were
defeated in 1212 by the Spanish Christians. The Malikite school of law was still well established;
and Sufism became widespread, with Sufi holy men venerated in towns and the countryside. By
1250 Almohad rule fragmented along tribal Berber lines into three states in the Maghrib. In
1269 the Berber tribe banu-Marin captured Marrakech. This Marinids tribe also had control over
Islamic Spain until 1344 when they suffered a serious military defeat by the Christian kingdom
Castile, who continued to set one Muslim chieftain against one another with only Granada
remaining. Between 1331 and 1357 the Marinids even fought with other tribes in Maghrib.
Yusuf ibn-Nasr (1232-73), a descendent of a Madinan tribe established a state around Granada in
alliance with Christians. He became Muhammad I, the founder of the Nasrid dynasty. He acted
as the champion of Islam; he and his successors also paid homage and tribute to the Castilian
crown. One half million people lived in the city. From the remains of an earlier Umayyad castle
he built the world–renowned Alhambra; this was further enlarged and embellished by three of his
successors. The Nasrids’ patronage of art and learning attracted many scholars, especially from
North Africa. They also encouraged commerce; especially the silk trade with Italy, leading
Granada to become the wealthiest city in Spain. The Nasrids also gave asylum to Moslems
fleeing from Christian attacks and to the heirs of Cordova a home of art and science.
Islam did not conquer all of the Iberian Peninsula form the beginning in 718; the mountains in
the North, the land Austuria, stayed free, and became the launching region for reclamation. It
became a serious threat at the fall of the Umayyad caliphate (1027). Toledo fell in 1085, Cordova
in 1236, Seville in 1248 and the fall accelerated with the union of Castile and Leon in 1230. By
the 13th century many Moslems became subject to Christians either by conquest or treaty, but
they preserved their laws and religion; they were called Mudejars. With the passage of time
many adopted the Romance language and became more or less assimilated to the Christians. The
marriage in 1469 of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile looked like the doom to Moslem
power in Spain. The Nasrid sultans were not able to cope with this increasing danger, they had
their own dynastic troubles. 21 sultans reigned from 1232-1492, some of them two or three

78
times. The final ruin was hastened when the 19th sultan Ali abu-al-Hasan (1462-82-85) refused to
pay the customary tribute and also attacked Castilian territory; and then his wife also instigated a
rebellion by his son Muhammad abu-Abdullah, taking control temporarily (Mohammad XI) of
Granada who was later captured by Ferdinand and Isabella; abu-al-Hasan took control again, and
abdicated to his able brother (Mohammad XII) in 1485. In the meantime the Castilian army was
advancing town by town; in 1487 they captured Malaga. Mohammad XII appealed to the
Moslem rulers of Africa for help, none came; they were preoccupied fighting among themselves.
In 1491 the army of Ferdinand pressed a siege around Granada; in the winter extreme cold, snow
and food scarcity; the garrison agreed to surrender under the following terms: the sultan, his
officers and people take an oath of obedience to the Castilian sovereigns, the Moslems would be
left secure in person under their laws and free to exercise their religion. They had two months to
comply; no sign of relief from the Turks or Africa. The Castilians entered on January 2, 1492.
The sultan and his queen departed with their colorful retinue.
The Catholic Majesties of Ferdinand and Isabella did not abide by the surrender agreement.
Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros, the queen’s confessor, inaugurated a forced conversion campaign
in 1499, including the burning of Arabic books and manuscripts. In 1501 the Muslims of
Granada were required to convert or leave, they revolted against this, and the revolt was put
down. In 1526 this was imposed on the Moslems of Aragon also; by 1609, over all of Spain.
Later the same policy was imposed on Jews also.
Intellectual Contributions
From ca. 850 to 1300 the Arab-speaking peoples brought ancient science and philosophy to the
world, contributing to the renaissance of Western Europe; with this Arabic Spain participated
also. Even Hebrew grammar, based on Arabic grammar, was formulated in Moslem Spain. Many
Arabic literary works (fables, tales, apologues), often of Indo–Persian origin, were translated into
Spanish, French and Latin. Even Cervantes’(1547-1616) “Don Quixote” had strong Arabic
influence. Arabic naturally lends itself to poetic beauty and many of the Umayyad and
subsequent sovereigns had laureates attached to their court. Music and song established their
alliance with poetry. Some varieties of folk-songs were invented in Spain and spread to North
Africa and the East; some were even written in Persian, Turkish, Coptic and Ethiopic. Even
Christian hymns and Christmas carols developed into popular Castilian verse.
The troubadour poetry of love and fantastic imagery came from Moslem Spain to France.
Primary education was based on reading from the Koran, Arabian grammar and poetry. A high
percentage of Spanish Moslems could read and write. Women also had opportunities for reading
and writing.
Higher education was based on koranic exegesis and theology philosophy, Arabic grammar,
poetry and lexicography, history and geography. Cordova, Seville, Malaga and Granada had
universities with departments of astronomy, mathematics and medicine, in addition to theology
and law. The university of Granada was founded by the 7th Nasrid, Yssuf abu-al-Hajjaj (1333-
54), the curriculum comprised theology, jurisprudence, medicine, chemistry, philosophy and
astronomy. The university also held public meetings and commemorations for reciting poems
and delivering orations by faculty. Castilian and other foreign students were also enrolled.
Libraries flourished with the universities; the Cordova library was started by Muhammad I (852-
86). Private collections were also held, including by women.
Writing paper was first manufactured in Andalusia ca.1150; from there, the manufacture spread
to France and Italy ca.1268.
There were many Andalusian historians and biographers; including members of Arab and Berber

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tribes of the Maghrib. The greatest Arab historian was Ibn Khaldun (1332 Tunis-1406), who
developed one of the earliest non religious philosophies of history, formulating the laws of
national progress, he is considered the founder of the science of sociology. The most brilliant
geographical author and cartographer of the medieval time was al-Idrisi (1180 Morocco-1165),
writing in the form of an itinerary, a common practice in the Middle Ages. He flourished in
Cordova also as a poet and philologist. Another great traveler’s narratives were by ibn-Jubayr
(1145 Valencia-1217), who took journeys from Granada to Mecca, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Sicily.
The Moroccan Arab ibn-Battutah (1304 Tangier-1377), made four pilgrimages to Mecca and
went on to Constantinople, Bengal, Ceylon, China, and the interior of Africa. The Arab
geographical studies kept the ancient doctrine (from India) of the sphericity of the earth alive;
was published in Latin in 1410 and later also influenced Columbus.
Astronomical studies were intensely cultivated from ca. 950, especially in Cordova, where
people believed the stars had definite influence on the events of their daily lives; so the interest
in astrology contributed to the study of astronomy. The planetary tables of mathematician and
astronomist al-Khwarizmi (780 Baghdad-850) were corrected by Spanish Moslems and
translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (1114 Lombardy-1187), even Copernicus made
reference to these works. During this period large numbers of Aristotle’s works on astronomy,
physics, meteorology and geography were also translated from Arabic into Latin. Many terms in
the European languages came from the Arabic at that time, such as: algebra, azimuth, nadir,
zenith, algorism, sine (trigonometry), and zero (from India). The Arabic numeral that we use
today came in 1202 by way of North Africa to Italy.
In the 12th century the Cordova physician al-Ghafiqi collected plants in Spain and Africa and
named each in Arabic, Latin and Berber. Abu-Zakariya of Seville published an agricultural book
that included 585 plants and over fifty fruit trees; and related them to grafting, properties of soil,
use of manure, discussed diseased of trees and vines, and means of treatment. When the “black
death” struck Europe in 1347-1351, the Moslem physicians of Granada had already published a
treatise on contagion.
The court physician of al-Hakam II, al-Zahrawi (936 Cordoba-1031), wrote a treatise on surgery
that was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona; this was published widely in Europe and
served as a manual of surgery for centuries. Ibn-Zuhr (1091 Seville-1162), Court physician of
Abd-al-Mumin wrote six medical works, which included such topics as therapeutics and diets.
In the first centuries of Islam in Spain, knowledge flowed from the East to Andalusia, in the 12th
century the current overflowed into Europe. Particularly from Toledo after it was conquered in
1085 by King Alfonso VI; as a center of Islamic learning it became the main channel of
transmittal and translation of Arabic knowledge. A regular school of translation was established,
where translators from various parts of Europe flourished from 1135-1284. Some of the most
renowned translators were: Michael Scott, Robert of Chester, Adelard of Bath, Gerard of
Cremona, Abraham ben-Ezra of Toledo, and John of Seville. By 1300 the translated works made
their way to the North: France, Germany, and England; to permeate all of Western Europe.
Transmission of Greek philosophy with the Arab’s contribution of harmonizing Aristotle and
Plato with the Koran; led to the European development of scientific and philosophic thought with
theology. Ben-Gabirol, a Jew, (1022 Malaga-1058) was the first of the great teachers of Neo-
Platonism in the West. His work was translated into Latin in 1150 and inspired the Franciscan
school. Ibn-Bajjah (1095 Zaragoza -1138), philosopher, scientist, physician, musician and
commentator on Aristotle flourished in Granada and Saragossa. In one of his philosophical
treatise he writes that the object of philosophy is to perfect the human spirit thru union with the

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divine. Moslem biographers considered him an atheist. The last of the great Moslem
philosophers, especially in regard to his influence over the West, was the Spanish Arab
astronomer, physician and Aristotelian commentator, ibn-Rushd (1126 Cordova-1198). He
contributed an encyclopedic work in medicine (he reported that no one is taken twice with
smallpox; he also described the function of the retina very accurately). He also served as chief
judge of Cordova. In the Jewish and Christian worlds, he is best known as a commentator of
Aristotle and was a dominant influence from the 12th to 16th centuries, in spite of the orthodox
reactions first by the Moslems of Spain, then the Talmudists and last the Christian religious. The
most famous of the Jewish physicians and philosophers was ibn-Maymun (1135 Cordova-1204).
He moved to Cairo in 1165, because of Muwahhid persecution, where he became court physician
of Salah-al-Din and his son al-Malik al-Aziz.
Ibn-Maymun distinguished himself as astronomer, theologian, and physician and above all as
philosopher. He tried to reconcile faith with reason, explaining prophetic visions as psychical
experiences; this led to angry reactions by the conservative theologians. His works were
generally written in Arabic, later translated into Hebrew and then Latin. His works had far
reaching influence over Jews and Christians: the Dominicans, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scatus,
Spinoza and Kant.
The greatest mystic of the age was ibn-Arabi (1165 Murcia-1240), of Islamic Sufism. He
flourished mainly in Seville until 1202, when he went on a pilgrimage to the East where he
remained in Damascus until his death. He wrote many books in esoteric allegory form; his
followers called him the grand master. Ibn-Arbi taught that the true mystic would find God by
the inner light, in all religions. His teachings also influenced the development of the Persian and
Turkish Sufi circles; and in Augustinian scholastics such as Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon.
Art and Architecture
The artworks developed in other Moslem lands were also adapted in Spain. The metal-works in
cutlery, sword blades and astrolabes from Toledo and Seville were famous. The astrolabe was an
astronomical instrument of Greek invention, perfected by the Moslems and introduced into
Europe in the 10th century. Its importance was for determining the hour of prayer and the
geographic position of Mecca; it was also an important nautical instrument for nautical
observations for mariners, and used as an instrument for astrological purposes.
Valencia became a center of colored glazing of earthenware. Imitation of this art was later
developed in Holland and Italy in the 15th century.
The Arabic–speaking peoples were leading makers of fine textiles and silks in the medieval
world. Cordova was a center of the weaving industry and Almeria was reported to have had
4,800 looms. The Oriental silk textiles with their rich coloring, floral and geometric designs were
very popular for church vestments, and aristocratic and royal robes. Later factories were set up in
France and Italy also doing similar work.
One of the earliest and grandest monuments of religious art was the Mosque of Cordova; built in
786 on the site of a Christian church that was originally a Roman temple. Enlargements
continued to by made until 1000; today it is the cathedral of the Virgin of the Assumption. The
culminating expression of architectural beauty was the Nasrid palace Alhambra of Granada; built
between 1248 and 1359, with columns imported from Rome, Constantinople and Carthage.
The founder of Spanish musical art was Ziryab, who came in 822 from the Mawsili School of
music in Baghdad to Cordova. With his great musical talents and magnetic personality and the
patronage of Abd-al-Rahman II, he opened conservatories of Andalusian music in Cordova,
Seville, Toledo, Valencia and Granada. Seville became a center of music and even a

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manufacturer of musical instruments, and also exported them. The Christian population accepted
the lyrical models of the Moslems thruout the peninsula. Moslem musicians flourished at the
courts of the kings of Castile and Aragon. This popular music spread to southwest Europe and
after the 13th century, thru Arabic to Persia and Byzantine. Many instruments introduced into
Europe are of Spanish Moslem origin, such as: the lute and the rebec (the pre-cursor of the
violin), the old trumpet, the tambourine, the guitar and the timbal. Alphonso X, king of Castile
and Leon (1252-82) was a great collector of poetry and music; his code of law also shows
Islamic influences.
Sicily
The first Arab contact with Sicily was in 652, the year the Arabs destroyed the Byzantine navy in
Alexandria. That was the first of many plundering raids. The conquest of the island by Moslems
began in 827 and was complete by 902. After that they continued the raiding, even Rome and
Venice; Pope John VIII (872-82) even paid tribute for two years. In 869 they conquered Malta
also. In 909 Sicily became an independent emir dynasty; that was overcome in 917 by the
Fatimid caliphate. Their navy continued to conduct raids as far as Genoa. Friction developed
again between the Spanish and African elements and South Arabians (Yemenites) and North
Arabians. Consequently the Yemenite Kalbi founded another independent state in 948, reaching
its height in 998. The Kalbite emirs’ capital in Palermo included enlightened courts, and 300
mosques in the city. The downfall came due to civil wars and Byzantine interferences, and the
arrival of the Normans under count Roger I in 1060. By 1091 the Normans conquered all of
Sicily and Malta. Under the Normans an interesting Christian-Islamic culture blossomed, on the
base of a prior legacy of Greece and Rome. Roger I was an uncultured Christian, who patronized
Arab learning and surrounded himself with Eastern philosophers, astrologers and physicians; and
allowed non-Christians full liberty to follow their rites. He maintained the former administration
and kept high Moslem officials. His court in Palermo seemed more Oriental than Occidental.
Trade remained in the hands of Moslem merchants and the cultivation of the land continued to
prosper under Arab example, which introduced sugar cane, date palms, cotton, olives, oranges,
mulberries and other plants and fruits. The Normans introduced sericulture after 1147. King
Roger II (1095-1154) issued coins with Arabic numerals and Arabic inscriptions in 1138, and he
also dressed like a Moslem. His fleet was a leading maritime power in the Mediterranean,
commanded by emirs. The Hispano-Arab al-Idris (1100-1166) became the most distinguished
geographer and cartographer on the Middle Ages while in the court of Roger II; his treatise sums
up the main features of Ptolemy (127-145) and al-Masudi (d. 957), and based on original reports
submitted by observers sent to various lands to secure data. He also constructed for his Norman
patron a celestial sphere and a disk shaped map of the world, both made of silver. The grandson
of Roger II, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1215-50) ruled both over Sicily and Germany, and
held the title of emperor of the Holy Roman Empire after 1220. Frederick also was semi-
Oriental; in his court flourished philosophers from Syria and Baghdad. He also maintained
political and commercial relations with the world of Islam, especially the Ayyubid sultan of
Egypt. Between 1220 and 1236, Michael Scott represented in Sicily and Italy the learnings of
Moslem Spain. This spirit of investigation, experimentation and research in the court of
Frederick marks the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. His greatest contribution was the
founding of the University of Naples in 1224, the first in Europe to be established by a definite
charter; where he also deposited a large collection of Arabic manuscripts. He had the works of
Aristotle and ibn-Rushd translated into Latin, which were used in the curriculum of the
Universities of Naples, Paris and Bologna. One of the students in the University of Naples was

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Thomas Aquinas (1224-74). Sicily had people who spoke Greek and Arabic widely; and a body
of scholars who spoke Latin. All three languages were current in the Palermo royal charter.
Many documents were not only translated from Arabic to Latin, but also directly from Greek to
Latin. The Norman kings were rulers over Sicily and Southern Italy, and this served as another
bridge for Arab learning to go into the direction north of the Alps. Also artwork and architecture
spread northward for hundreds of years.
 The Shiite Caliphate
The Fatimid caliphate, the only major Shiite one in Islam, was established in Tunisia in 909,
deliberately challenging the religious leadership on the Abbasids of Baghdad. The founder was
Said ibn-Husayn, he was related to one of the founders of the Ismailites, the Persian Abdullah
ibn-Maymun. The spectacular growth of the Fatimids was directly related to the propaganda
campaigns that led to the downfall of the Umayyad caliphate. Another contributor to the success
of the Fatimid caliphate was al-Husayn al-Shii, a native of Sana in Yemen, who proclaimed
himself the precursor of the Mahdi (messianic deliverer), leading to sedition of Berbers against
the Aghlabid rulers in North Africa. Al-Shii helped Said overcome the Aghlabid dynasty and
became the ruler. Said assumed the title of Iman Ubaydullah Al-Mahdi (909-34) and proved to
be a very capable ruler. After two years in power he killed al-Shii and then extended his rule
from Morocco to Egypt. In 914 he seized Alexandria and devastated the Delta; and then founded
his new capital in Tunisia. He inherited a fleet from the Aghlabids, and with it he and his
descendents raided the Mediterranean Islands of Malta, Sardinia, Corsica and other islands, plus
the coasts of Spain, France and Italy; carrying off slaves and other booties; but no permanent
conquests. In 969 the Fatimids overthrew the Ikhshidid rulers of Egypt and established a new
city there, the present Cairo where they built the great mosque al-Azhar; that soon became an
academy under abu-Mansur Nizar al-Aziz (975-96). The height of Fatimid power was reached
during the peaceful reign of Caliph al-Aziz, the 5th member of the dynasty; ruling over North
Africa, Yemen, Mecca and Syria. The Egyptian caliphate was more formidable than that of
Baghdad. Al-Aziz lived in luxury; build new mosques, palaces, bridges and canals; and extended
toleration to Christians as never before. After he died, his descendents began importing Turkish
and Negro mercenary troops, like the Abbasids did before them. Quarrels and conflicts arose
among the troops, and also with the Berber bodyguards; leading later to the collapse of the
kingdom. Abu-Ali Mansur al-Hakim (996-1021) came to the throne at the age of 11. His
behavior was cruel and deranged. He killed several of his viziers and demolished a number of
Christian churches, including that of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009, and imposed highly shameful
and abusive regulations upon Christians and Jews. He was the third caliph in Islam, after al-
Mutawakkil and Umar II to persecute non-Moslems. The Fatimid regime was favorable to
dhimmies (the protected, tribute payers). Al-Hakim finally declared himself the incarnation of
Deity; and was so accepted by the newly organized sect, the Druzes. In 1021 he was killed in a
suspected conspiracy of his sister. His descendents continued to rule, but in a diminishing
domain. The Turkoman Saljuq overshadowed Western Asia; the African provinces stopped
paying tribute, to become independent or to revert to the old alliance with the Abbasids, and the
Normans subdued Sicily. Only Egypt remained; and here continuing conflict erupted between
Turkish, Berber and Sudanese battalions, plus seven years of famine, exhausted the country.
Court intrigues, feuds and jealousies continued also. Then the Crusaders came and conquered
Jerusalem, even threatened Cairo. Salah-al-Din came, dethroned the Fatimid caliphate in 1171
and later defeated the Crusaders.

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Life in Fatimid Egypt
Islam lived thru various cultural influences in Egypt. The Arabs arrived in 642. The Arabo-
Persian era: Tulunid Dynasty 868-905; Ikhshidid Dynasty 935-69. Persian era, Fatimid 969-
1171. Perso-Turkish era: Ayyubid Dynasty 1171-1250; Mamluk Generals 1250-1517; Ottomans
1517-1798. The backbone of populace was the Arabicized Copts, always Sunnite at core. The
Fatimids were a unique, completely sovereign power on a religious basis. The caliph was more
like a Persian king, even up to the end. A report in 1049 noted: the caliphal palace housed 30,000
persons, 12,000 of them servants and 1,000 guards. The caliph owned 20,000 houses, mostly
brick, rising five to six stories, with equal number of shops. The main streets were roofed and
lighted by lamps. Old Fustat had seven great mosques and Cairo had eight.
The government was organized according to the old Persian model: three ranks of military;
several classes of viziers, army/war office, high chamberlains, judges, state treasurer, inspector
of markets, plus civil service with various clerks and secretaries.
The Fatimids were patrons of scientific and literary progress: in medicine and historical writing.
Al-Aziz was himself a poet and lover of learning and also supported studies of law; his royal
library contained 200,000 books. Al-Hakim established in 1005 the hall of learning, for teaching
the extreme Shiite doctrine. This was part of his royal palace and was also used for copying
manuscripts, and contained a library and meeting rooms. He also built an astrological
observatory with an astrolabe supported by two towers. He sponsored Ibn-al-Hayham (L.
Alhazen, 965-1039) who wrote over one hundred works on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy,
medicine and optical theory.
Art and architecture were also important to the Fatimids. The oldest surviving structure is the
Azhar Mosque, built in 972. The practice of tomb-mosques began in 1085. A new design with
stone pillars, also with bold Kufic inscriptions, began in 1169. In the Museum of Cairo are
panels of carved wood, showing birds, animals and monsters, going back to Sasanids tradition.
Cast bronze of animal and mirrors. Textile with designs of animals and heraldic poses. Ceramic
art of the Fatimid period follow Iranian patterns, also including Chinese glazed earthenware. The
earliest Islamic bookbindings, starting in the 8th century were similar to earlier Coptic bindings.
The Crusades
At the close of the 11th century motley hordes of Christendom came into Syria to wrest it from
Moslem hands. Syria was split into various factions: local Arab chieftains, in the north the Saljuq
Turks, in the south the schismatic Fatimits of Egypt. There were also different languages and non
orthodox Muslims: the Druzes, the Nusayriyahs and the Assassins. Among the Christians, the
Maronites still spoke Syriac. The Saljuqs of Syria were not united with their sultanate in
Baghdad (established in 1055). The Byzantines were on and off, capturing and losing, towns
along the north coast. The Saljuqs, as Sunnite Moslems, considered it their duty to destroy the
Egyptian heresy. The Crusades was also a reaction of Christian Europe against Moslem Asia,
which was on the offensive since 632, not only in Syria and Asia Minor, but Spain and Sicily
also. The destruction in 1009 by al-Hakim of the church of the Holy Sepulcher, the object of
pilgrimage of thousands of Europeans, was widely known. The immediate cause for the Crusade
were the repeated appeals of emperor Alexius Comnenus to Pope Urban II; as the Seljuqs were
closing in on the Byzantine territories and even threatening Constantinople. This would also
unite the Greek Church and Rome to overcome the schism that divided them between 1009 and
1054. On November 26, 1095 Pope Urban delivered his fiery challenge at Clermont, S-W France
to “wrest the Holy Sepulcher from the wicket race”.

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By spring 1097, 150,000 men, mostly Franks, Normans and partly rabble, collected at
Constantinople. The reason for joining varied: acquiring principalities; merchants from Pisa,
Venice and Genoa for commerce; adventurers, criminals, unemployed masses from France,
Lorraine, Italy and Sicily, and some devout. The Crusades went on in waves, roughly divided
1097-1144, 1147-9 and 1200-91. Until July 1097 the Crusaders fought their way thru Asia Minor
against the Saljuq al-Rum. Some proceeded east into Christian Armenia and founded the first
Latin State. The main body reached Antioch in Syria, and after a long siege, October 1097 to
June 1098 the city fell, and became another principality. Most continued on south into Lebanon,
destroying towns that opposed them. In June 1099, 40,000 Crusaders (20,000 effective troops)
faced Jerusalem. After a one-month siege they stormed the city and indiscriminately killed all
ages, both sexes. This became the third Latin state. Many Crusaders and pilgrims now returned
home, they finished defending the Holy Sepulcher.
The other towns along the seashore were captured, and the Italians set up trading posts along the
Mediterranean Sea. The Antioch and Tripoli area became the fourth Latin state. Damascus was
never conquered. Times were more often peaceful than fighting, and friendly relation were
established. The Europeans changed their clothing to more comfortable native attire and acquired
new tastes in food, especially the use of sugar and spices. They preferred Oriental houses, as they
were more spacious, even had running water. They also intermarried.
The first counter–Crusader was Zangi (1084-1146), governor of Aleppo under the Saljuq sultan.
He overcame a Latin city and towns along the trade route to Baghdad. The Crusaders reacted
with a new siege against Damascus, which was unsuccessful. The son of Zangi, Nur-al-Din
continued the pressure on the Franks to push them out of Syria, he also annexed Egypt in 1169-
71; part of this military campaign was Salah-al Din ibn-Ayyub (Saladin, 1138-1193), born in
Takrit of Kurdish parents. Saladin had two strong ambitions, to re-establish Sunnite Islam in
Egypt and to expel the Crusaders. In 1169 he became vizier over Egypt, and in 1171 he led
prayer on Friday in the name of the Abbasid caliph al-Mustadi (Sunni) instead of the Fatamid
caliph, with very little disturbances. Next he concentrated on the Crusaders, but first he had to
deal with his Moslem enemies and the Assassins in the north Syrian mountains. By 1187 Saladin
started to attack and defeat the Franks. Jerusalem was put under siege from August 1189 to July
1191, when the Franks surrendered. No inhabitants were subsequently killed, but had to pay
ransoms to leave. In November 1192 a peace was concluded between the Franks and Saladin; the
coast would be under the control of the Latins and the interior under the Moslems. In February
1193 Saladin took ill and died in Damascus; his tomb is close to the Umayyad Mosque there.
Saladin was more than a warrior and champion of Sunnite Islam; he patronized scholars,
encouraged theological studies, built dykes, dug canals and founded schools and mosques.
Among his surviving architectural monuments is the Citadel of Cairo built ca.1183. His sultanate
spread from the Tigris to the Nile and was divided among his various heirs, not one inherited his
genius. The younger brother of Saladin, al-Adil (died 1218), became ruler over Egypt and most
of Syria and also maintained good relations with the Crusaders. The descendants of Saladin had
dynastic disputes; allowing the Crusaders to take control again of Bairut, Tiberias and Jerusalem
in 1229, even encroaching into Egyptian territory. The Crusaders had internal quarrels also: the
Genoese vs. Venetians, the Templars vs. Hospitallers; sometimes Moslems helped one side
against another. The son of al-Adil, al-Kamil (1180-1238), ruler of Egypt, Palestine and Syria,
forced the Crusaders out of Egypt and entered into a treaty with Frederick II (King of Sicily
1197-1250 and King of Jerusalem 1229-43), allowing Frederick II to hold Jerusalem. A
successor to al-Kamil invited Turks, associated with Chingiz Khan, in 1244 to restore Jerusalem

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to Islam. By 1250 the dynasty of Saladin was exhausted, and the Mamluks (slave soldiers) of
Egypt took control. Aybak was the first Mamluk sultan, was killed in 1257, in a fit of anger by
his wife. One of the most renown was the fourth Mamluk sultan, the Turkish born Baybar I
(1223-77). In the meantime Hulagu (1217-65), the grandson of Chingiz Khan, was sweeping
west from Persia, destroying the Assassins’ fortress in 1256, then sized and sacked Baghdad in
1258, and killed the last Abbasid caliph, al-Mustasim. On his way into Syria and Palestine, the
Mamluk army under Baybar I defeated Hulagu. Next Baybar I concentrated on the Crusaders; he
went down the coast step by step; the city of Antioch surrendered in May 1268, 16,000 were
slaughtered, and 100,000 were taken into captivity and sold into slavery; by 1291, all Crusaders
were gone.
Outcome of Crusade Time
The destruction and suffering wrought by the Crusaders, the Mongols and the Mamluks,
particularly in northern Syria and along the coasts of Syria and Palestine, has generated and
contributed ill will between Moslems and Christians to this day. Yet the Nuids and Ayyubids
made contributions in Damascus that are still noticeable today, in architectural and educational
activities. The second hospital in Damascus even included a school of medicine. The madrasahs
(academies), collegiate mosques, from the Nizamija devoted Shafii rite, not only in Damascus
but also in Aleppo, Hims, Hamah and Balabakk. One of the main objectives of Saladin was to
combat Shiite heresy and pro-Fatimid tendencies with education. That is how Damascus became
a city of schools; he also built madrasas in Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria. In 1184 Ibn Jubayr
counted twenty-two madrasas, two free hospitals and numerous dervish “monasteries”; Saladin
also introduced these “monasteries“ into Egypt. The Ayyubid school of Syrian architecture was
continued by the Mamluks in Egypt, they display the characteristics of strength and solidity. The
Citadel of Cairo, with fortifications like Norman castles, also served as residence of Saladin;
where he surrounded himself with viziers who were renowned scholars and physicians.
By the Crusader epoch, Islamic culture was already on sharp decline in the East; in philosophy,
medicine, music and other disciplines, all great lights had already vanished. In science and
mathematics, the Franks had very little to teach also. Frederick II visited Egypt and Syria and
wanted to reconcile Islam and Christianity, he also patronized several translators from Arabic, in
Antioch and Tarsus. The Crusaders brought back with them to Europe the innovations of
hospitals and public baths. The legends of the Holy Grail and the stories of Arabian Nights
originate from the Orient also. In the military arts the Crusaders learned the use of the crossbow,
wearing heavy mail (padded with cotton) by knight and horse, adapted the lute and kettledrum
into the military band, training of carrier-pigeons to convey military information, the knightly
sport of tournament, improved siege tactics, and the applications of combustibles and explosives.
In the realm of agriculture, industry and commerce the Crusaders brought much to Europe. New
plants and crops: sesame, millet, rice, lemons, melons and apricots. The Franks also acquired
new tastes in the Orient: perfumes, spices, sweetmeats, incense and fragrant gums of Arabia; also
alum, aloes and new drugs. Most important was sugar (an Arabic word); with this came soft
drinks, with perfumed fragrances, and varieties of candies. Also improved windmills and
waterwheels; home furnishings such as rugs, carpets and tapestries; clothing of velvet, silk and
satin; and toiletries such as powders and glass mirrors coated with metallic film. The rosary was
originally an Arabic reliquary. With fine clothing and metallic wares: lacquers and dyestuffs
such as indigo, and new colors like lilac, carmine and crimson. Stained glass windows became
popular in churches.
The demand in Europe for Oriental agricultural products, industrial goods, pilgrim and

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Crusader travels, stimulated maritime and international trade, not known since Roman times.
Marseille rivaled the Italian city republics as a shipping center, and an increasing share of
wealth; faster circulation of money and use of credit notes. Bank branches from Pisa and Genoa
opened in the Levant; also consular offices for commercial purposes opened up, including later
in Egypt.
The Mamluks
The Mamluks were a dynasty of slaves, of varied races and nationalities, forming a military
oligarchy in an alien land. These slave sultans cleared the Syrian–Egypt region of the remnant of
the Crusaders. They stopped the advances of the Mongol hordes of Hulagu and Timur, sparing
Egypt of the devastation that befell Syria and Iraq, and preserved Islamic civilization. From 1250
to 1517 the Mamluks dominated this turbulent area of the world, keeping themselves racially
distinct. They were cruel, yet they also promoted art and architecture. The power of the Mamluk
national power started with the widow of Ayyubid al-Salih (d.1249); Shajar-al-Durr was
originally a Turkish or Armenian slave, a member of the harem of caliph al-Mustasim. For forty
days she was the ruler of Egypt, just like Cleopatra (193-176 BC). The amirs (commanders) of
the Mamluks elected Izz-al-Din Aybak to sultan and he married Shajar. She killed him when he
planned to marry another woman; a slave woman of Aybak, his first wife, in turn killed her. The
Mamluks formed two dynasties, the Bahri (1250-1390) and the Burji (1382-1517). The Bahris
were mostly Turks and Mongols purchased for bodyguards by Ayyubid al-Salik, very similar to
what the caliphs of Baghdad did, with the same results. The Burjis were mostly Circassian slaves
founded by Qalawun (1270-90); twenty-four Bahri sultans followed by twenty-three Burjis. The
average rein for a sultan was less than six years; generally there was not hereditary succession,
but election by the amirs. The most eminent Mamluk sultan was Baybars (1222-77) a former
Turkish slave, who defeated the Tartar army of Hulagu, and subsequently killed the Mamluk
sultan Qutuz in 1260. Baybars ruled as sultan over Egypt and Syria from 1260 to 1277, he also
crushed the power of the Assassins in northern Syria. He was more than a military leader: he
rebuilt the navy, dug canals, established a swift postal service from Cairo to Damascus by relays
of horses, perfected the pigeon post, fostered public works, and beautified mosques. Of his
architectural monuments, the great mosque (1269) and the school bearing his name survived.
The Zahiriyah library in Damascus is under the dome of his burial. His religious orthodoxy and
zeal, with the holy war he conducted for Islam is considered even higher than Saladin. During his
reign Baybars entered into many alliances with both Mongols and Europeans: the chief khan of
the Golden Horde, the Byzantines of Constantinople, the kings of Sicily, Aragon and Seville.
After Baybars the outstanding Mamluk was sultan Qalawun (1279-90), he also was a Turkoman
slave. He secured the throne by disposing of Baybars’ seven-year-old son. Qalawun was the only
Mamluk whose descendents succeeded him to the fourth generation. The Mongol Il-Khans of
Persia (Hulagu’s son and successor), together with help of Armenians, Greeks and Georgians,
attacked Syria in 1280, but Qalawun defeated them decisively at Hims. The sultan strengthened
the existing amicable relations with the Golden Horde, the Byzantine emperor, the republic of
Genoa and the kings of France, Castile and Sicily. Little Armenia was ravaged for the help they
gave to the Mongols. Toward the end of his reign Qalawun issued orders excluding Christians
from all government offices. He won distinctions in other fields also: he renovated on a grand
scale the citadels of Aleppo, Balabakk and Damascus; he built a hospital in Cairo, connected
with a school-mosque and mausoleum (completed in 1284). The hospital had special wards for
various diseases (fevers, ophthalmia, and dysentery), laboratories, baths, kitchens, and an
equipped lecture room. Qalwun’s son and successor Khalil (1290-93) conquered Akka and the

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remaining areas still under the Franks, he was murdered by his emirs. His younger brother and
successor al-Nasir (ruled 1293-4, 1298-1308, 1309-40) destroyed in 1302 the Templars, who
occupied a small island north of the Syrian coast. The seventh Il-Khan Ghazan Mahmud had just
adopted Islam as the Mongols’ state religion when they invaded north Syria and occupied
Damascus. After four years the Egyptians pushed the Mongols out again, never to return. Next
al-Nasir persecuted the Druzes of Lebanon, the Alids in Kisrawa and the Maronites of northern
Lebanon for cooperating with the Mongols. In 1302 he devastated the land of the Armenians
again, and re-imposed restrictions on Christians and Jews like Umar II and al-Mutawakkil. He
led a very extravagant lifestyle, but also constructed outstanding public works: a canal
connecting Alexandria with the Nile, an aqueduct in 1311 from the river to the Citadel of Cairo,
about thirty mosques, a number of dervish “monasteries”, public drinking fountains, baths and
schools. His own mosque in the citadel and school (1304) exemplify the finest Moslem
architecture. He also cultivated minor arts such as brass and bronze works, enameled glass lamps
and illuminated Korans. The heavy expenditures led to exorbitant taxes and contributed to the
downfall of the dynasty. He made tax and trade reforms, but these were only palliative. After
him erupted civil wars, famine and the plague; the same “black death” which devastated Europe
in 1348-9, lingerd in Egypt for seven years, resulting in the death of 900,000 in the capital alone.
The twelve descendents of al-Nasir who followed him in rapid succession (1340-82) were
figureheads only; their emirs ruled, deposing or killing the sultans as they saw fit. The Circassian
Barquq became the first sultan of the Burjis dynasty in 1382.
Intellectual and Artistic Activity
By the beginning of the 13th century the whole Arab world lost its intellectual hegemony it
maintained since the 8th century. In science there were two branches where Arabs maintained
their leadership: astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, particularly ophthalmology. The first
discipline came mostly from the Arab-writing Persian scholars centered with the Il-Khanid
observatory and library of Maraghah headed by illustrious al-Tusi (1201-74). The elaborate
hospital built by Qalawun shows the Egyptian interest in medicine. Its dean ibn-al-Nafis (d.1288)
described the pulmonary circulation of the blood clearly and correctly. Under al-Nasir important
treatises on veterinary medicine were written. Jewish physicians in the tradition of ibn-Maymun
(1135-1204) dominated Egyptian medicine since Ayyubid days. A Judeo-Egyptian pharmacist
composed in Cairo ca.1260 an Arabic treatise on pharmacy. This period was also fertile in
gynecological/erotic works now designated “sex books”. Arabic literature, in all ages, primary a
male literature, abounds in anecdotes, jokes and remarks we would call obscene today. A special
interest in spiritual cures was also evident in that period, what we might call psychotherapy.
Ophthalmology was an early discipline developed by the Arabs and was practiced on a more
scientific basis in Syria and Egypt during the 12th and 13th century, in 1256 cataract removals
were common. Ibn-abi Usabiah, a physician of Damascus and Cairo wrote an elaborate
collection of 400 biographies of Arab and Greek medical men, this was also a great source of
Arab science in general.
Shams-al-Din (d.1282) Alepo and Damascus wrote 865 biographies of the most distinguished
Moslems in history, the first dictionary of national biography in Arabic. Ibn-Khaldun (1332-
1406) was the greatest Arab historian. Al-Suyuti (1445-1505) wrote a linguistic encyclopedia
with 560 works extant.
The reformer theologian ibn-Taymiyah (1263-1328) flourished in Damascus, a follower of ibn-
Hanbal, whose puritan principals were later adopted by the Wahhabis of Najd.
Stories of romance and adventures have their beginning in the Mamluk period and still entertain

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audiences in the cafes of the Moslem Orient. Shadow–play and puppet plays flourished under
Baybars; tales with comic effect came from the Far East of India or Persia. These may have
influenced such western actors as Charlie Chaplin.
Great architecture flourished during the Mamluk period as never before in Arab lands.
Monumental mosques, schools and mausoleums built with fine artistic expressions, which have
survived to this day. Delicate articles of art are also expressed in luxurious life style, such as:
cups, bowls, incense burners, ear-rings, necklaces, bracelets and amulets similar to those still
used in modern Egypt. Mamluk banquets were followed by entertainment featuring dancers,
jugglers and shadow plays. With the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt almost all Mamluk
industrial arts began to decay, except glazed tile and brass-work.
The End of Mamluk Rule
The Bahris Mamluks were Turkish, the Burji were all Circassian, except for two Greeks. The
Burjis were totally against hereditary succession, the sultan basically continued as a member of
the military oligarchy. The new regime continued the intrigue, assassination and rapine of its
predecessor, the lowest level of culture in the history of Syria and Egypt. The sultan with the
whole oligarchy was corrupt; various factions evolved, at enmity with one another. They
monopolized the trade of sugar and spices and debased silver money, at the expense of the
public. Periodic plagues, locusts and droughts reduced the population of Syria and Egypt by two
thirds. In 1498 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama found his way around the Cape of Good
Hope, leading the spice trade and other tropical products, from India and Arabia, to be divested
from Syria and Egypt.
The only contributions by the Burji Mamluks were a number of impressive Mosques with
Mausoleums, some also included schools and one even a fountain.
Foreign relations were no better than the domestic conditions. The Mongolians under Timur, the
successor to Hulagu, were threatening from the North, and instigating with the Syrian governors
against the Mamluks. The only victory the Burjis had was their conquest of Cypress in 1424-26;
home of the remnant of the Crusaders, whose corsairs repeatedly ravaged Syrian ports.
Timur Lang was born in 1336 in Transoxiana. As head of his Tartar hordes he initiated in 1380 a
series of campaigns conquering Afghanistan, Persia, Farsi and Kurdistan. He captured Baghdad
in 1393 and overran Mesopotamia the following year. In 1398 he ravaged northern India and
massacred 80,000 inhabitants of Delhi. In 1400 Timor swept over northern Syria, giving Aleppo
over to plunder for three days and then piled up the heads of 20,000 Moslems. He was a nominal
Moslem with Shiite tendencies. He destroyed Hamah, Hims and Balabakk also, and then routed
the Egyptian army under Sultan Faraj and captured Damascus in 1401. He carried away from the
city scholars, skilled laborers and artisans to his capital Samarqand. Then he rushed back to
Baghdad to avenge the death of his officers, dotting the city with 120 towers built of the heads of
the dead. During the next two years he invaded Asia Minor and crushed the Ottoman army at
Ankara in 1402. He died during a campaign against China in 1404, this was a relief for the
Egyptian Mamluks.
The founders of the Ottomans (from Arabic Osman), the leaders of the Turkish warriors for the
faith of Islam entered Anatolia with a mass of Turkmen nomads, fleeing from the Mongols of
Genghis Khan; they beat a Byzantine army in 1071 and occupied the eastern and central
Anatolia. They continued to fight against the Byzantines; and also had to fight the Mongols who
invaded Anatolia following the establishment of the Il-Khanid dynasty by Hulagu, a grandson of
Genghis Khan over Iran in 1256. The Mongols defeated the Seljuq army in 1293. The Il-Khanid
princes ruled as a regional dynasty until 1353; some embraced Sunnite Islam, others Shiite Islam,

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leading to great social unrest. The Ottoman sultan Osman I (1258-1324) emerged as the bey
(prince) over Byzantine Bithynia in northwestern Anatolia. By 1300 the Ottoman state was more
like a frontier emirate. Hemmed in by the more powerful Turkmen principality on the east, the
successors of Osman I concentrated and conquered Byzantine territories to the west reaching the
Bosporus. The successful Ottomans now attracted masses of nomads and urban unemployed
roaming the Middle East searching for livelihood and religious desire to expand the territory of
Islam. The Ottomans continued their push west against the weakening Byzantine Empire and as
they gained wealth and power, they expanded and assimilated Anatolian Turkish principalities to
the east. By 1326 the Ottomans developed the administrative, economic and military power to
create a real state and army; and began using Christian mercenary troops, thus lessening the
dependence on nomads; with a capital in Brusa. Starting in 1354 they crossed the Dardanelle and
expanded into Europe with permanent conquest. The Ottomans incorporated the Europeans
vassals into their empire by retaining local native rulers, who in turn accepted their suzerainty,
paid tribute, and provided contingents for the Ottoman army when needed. By 1366 the
Ottomans had a stable state, recognized as a kingdom with Adrianople as capital. By 1397 the
Ottomans defeated the last of the Turkmen states in eastern Anatolia. This however attracted the
attention of Timur who built a powerful Tartar empire to the East. He attacked the Ottomans and
overwhelmed their army near Ankara in 1402, and then continued to further conquest in the Far
East. The Ottomans took all of Anatolia under control again and also continued with their
European holdings in tact. By this time they established the Janissary Corps, the elite slave
soldiers. They were Christian boys 12 to 20 years old forcibly taken from their homes in the
Balkan provinces by Turkish officials, to be trained for military and other government service.
They were selected on the basis of superior physical and mental qualities and indoctrinated into
Turkish speaking Muslims. Based on their performance they could advance to highest level of
authority in the empire. About 3,000 were recruited a year. Until the end of the 16th century they
were required to be celibate. In June 1826 they were all killed under Sultan Mahmud II for
failure to adapt to army reforms.
Later on, the archenemy of the Turks was the Persian Shah Ismail (1502-24), the founder of the
Safawid dynasty (1502-1736), the most glorious of the native dynasties of Moslem Persia; the
family members were ardent Shiites. In 1514 the Turks beat the Persians in battle and the
following year the Turks also overcame the Mamluk army in Syria. The Turks used modern arms
such as artillery, muskets and long-range weapons. Under Muhammad II the Conqueror (1451-
81) they conquered Constantinople in 1453, and a new era of the empire was inaugurated. The
Turks swept south into Egypt and in 1517 defeated the Mamluk army near Cairo, plundered the
city and slaughtered all the Mamluks they could find. Now Mecca and Medina became part of
the Ottoman Empire also; and the following Friday the Egyptian preachers invoked Allah’s
blessings on the victorious Selim I (rule 1512-20). To maintain his power he killed all of his
brothers, seven of their sons and five of his own sons. After touring Egypt, Salim I returned to
the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. The son and successor of Salim I was Suleyman I the
Magnificent (rule 1522-66). The sultan-caliph of Constantinople became the most powerful
potentate of Islam; heir to the caliphs of Baghdad and the emperors of Byzantium.
Arab Lands as Turkish Provinces
In 1518 Ottoman corsairs (pirates) of Greek birth, Khayr-al-Din Barbarossa (d.1546) and his
brother Aruij (d.1518), invaded Algeria to ward off Spanish encroachments and bestowed it upon
the Sublime Porte. In exchange the Sublime Porte (Ottoman government) bestowed upon Khayr-
al-Din the title of beylerbey (lord of lords), who inaugurated there a military aristocracy with a

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corps of Janissaries (slave soldiers) as its backbone. He also organized a well-equipped fleet (he
became admiral) with seasoned crews, recruited mostly from renegade Christians, Italian and
Greek, for the Sultan’s service, ready to expand the Ottoman Empire.
In 1534 Khayr-al-Din occupied Tunis, when they had a native succession conflict, becoming a
Turkish province forty years later. The Turks occupied Aden in 1547 and Masqat in 1551. The
Turks captured Tripoli in 1551, and conquered Yemen in 1568.
Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers became seats of provincial government of the Turks, they were
actually semi-independent; paying annual tributes to the Porte, and sometimes revolted against
the Sultan’s representative. As the Ottoman fleet deteriorated, these North Africans became
known as the Barbary Pirates for the next 300 years, they were also joined by exiles from
Moslem Spain; targeting primarily the Christian states Spain, France and Italy; Holland,
Denmark, Sweden and the US, who often just paid tribute.
The zenith of the Ottoman Empire was reached during Suleyman I (1520-66); when they ruled
from Hungary to Baghdad, from the Crimea to the first cataract of the Nile. It was the greatest
Moslem state in modern times, and one of the most enduring of all times; 36 sultans, all direct
male descendents of Uthman from 1300 to 1922.
Suleyman I was also known as the lawgiver, his Ottoman law stood in effect until the reform in
the 19th century. He also built and beautified in his capitol and other cities: mosques, schools,
hospitals, palaces, mausoleums, bridges, aqueducts, caravanserais and public baths; 235 of which
were built by his chief architect Sinan (1489-1588), the son of Greek Christian parents who was
drafted in his youth into the Janissaries corps. Turkish culture is a striking blend of diverse
influences: from the Persians came artistic and political ideas like exaltation of the monarch;
from their Central Asian nomadism came their predisposition for war and conquest and
hospitable assimilation; from the Byzantines, by way of the Saljuqs of Rum, military and
government institutions; from the Arabs the Turks acquired their sciences, their religion, with its
socio-economic principles and sacred laws, and an alphabetic system of writing until 1928.
While still in Central Asia they had little written literature, they used the Syriac script from the
Christian Syrians. With the adoption of Islam and the Arabic characters, thousands of religious,
scientific, legal and literary terms were borrowed from Arabic and Persian. The Ottomans made
original contributions of importance in statesmanship, architecture and poetry. The empire of the
Ottomans, like the Romans and the Abbasids before it, was basically military and dynastic in
character and organization. The focus of the state was to promote the sultan-caliph, not the
welfare of its subjects. The subjects were a conglomeration of nationalities: Arabs, Syrians,
Iraqis, Egyptians, Berbers, Kurds, Armenians, Slavs, Greeks, Albanians..; of diverse languages,
creeds and cultures, held together by military force. The Turks remained a dominant minority
group in the vast empire. They married non-Moslem women and admitted into full citizenship
any subject who accepted Islam, adopted the Turkish language and joined their court. The levies
of boys, the Janissaries slave soldiers, from non-Moslem communities were pressed into military
and civil service. Some of the highest talent of the conquered people were brought to the capital
to be Islaminized, Turkicized and promoted to advance the imperial state; Circassians, Greeks,
Albanians, Slavs, Italians, even Armenians and rose to the highest positions, even grand vizier.
The millet system allowed each non-Muslim religious community autonomy, under their own
laws, headed by a religious leader who was responsible to the central government for fulfilling
such duties as paying taxes and maintaining internal security. When the consciousness of
nationalism developed, the centralized supreme authority weakened. Shortly after the death of
Suleyman I the empire started to weaken and fall apart. The failure of the second attempt on

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Vienna in 1683 was the fracture point. Military expansion stopped, the role of the military
diminished. The Europeans awoke: Greece, Austria and Russia, but they were competing with
one another.
The Arab lands of North Africa were lost first; Algeria was taken over by the French in 1830,
after much fighting between the French and the Algerians they became independent in 1962.
France occupied Tunisia in 1881; by 1955 they had internal autonomy and full independence in
1956. Tripolitana was the last of the Barbary States to be lost to the Turks in 1912 as a result of
the Turko-Italian war; in 1934 the Italians took over Cyrenaica also, and joined the two areas to
form Libya. The French, British and native forces expelled the Italians during World War II and
Libya became an independent kingdom in 1951.
Egypt
Sultan Salim I (rule 1512-20) appointed the traitorous Khair Bey as pasha (provincial governor)
over Egypt with an army of 5,000 Janissaries slave soldiers. He was the Turkish governor of
Aleppo who betrayed his former Mamluk master. In Egypt the Mamluk government remained in
place; the land was divided into twelve districts, each under the authority of a Mamluk bey
(prince), who surrounded himself with slave warriors to uphold his authority. They collected
taxes and levied troops of slaves from the Caucasus as usual, but now acknowledged Ottoman
suzerainty by their annual tribute. The turnover rate of pashas was so high, maybe by two years,
that they lost control over local affairs; resulting in a number of mutinies in the 17th century.
Conflicts arose between the Ottoman pashas and the Mamluk beys. Under the dual control,
corruption and bribery increased, pushing the natives lower into misery and poverty. On top of
that, famine and pestilence prevailed, the pestilence in 1619 killed a third of a million people,
and another one in 1643 left 213 villages desolate. The population dropped one-third from the
time of the Romans.
In 1769 the Mamluk Ali Bey (1728-75) expelled the Ottoman pasha and declared himself
independent of the Sublime Porte, who was busy in a war with Russia. Then he proceeded to
conquer Arabia and Syria for himself. His lieutenant and son-in-law, abu-al-Dhahab, entered
Mecca victoriously in July 1770. In 1771 abu-al-Dhahab marched with 30,000 men into Syria
ready to capture Damascus, then negotiated secretly with the Porte and turned his troops against
Egypt. In the course of fighting Ali Bey was wounded, and subsequently died in 1773. The Porte
now appointed abu-al-Dhahab to pasha, who was a slave of Ali Bey before. The leading
Mamluks continued their fighting for top government positions, when a new invader in
Alexandria surprised them in July 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte. His primary objective was to
undermine the British Empire’s developing power in the East. Fighting broke out between the
British and the French in the east Mediterranean and Egypt; first the British defeated the French
navy on August 1, 1798, and then the joint forces of the British and the Turks defeated the
French near Alexandria on March 21, 1801. The French forces subsequently left Egypt, and the
Near East came to the attention of the European intrigue and diplomacy. The Turkish army that
helped drive out Napoleon was headed by a young officer born in Macedonia, Mohammad Ali
(1769-1849). The Porte made him pasha over Egypt in 1805, and he made himself the new
master of the valley of the Nile, in nominal subordination to the Porte. He founded the last
dynasty that ruled Egypt until 1952. He was truly the father of modern Egypt; there was no equal
to him in initiative, energy and vision among any of his contemporary Moslems. He stood
supreme in peace and war. He confiscated all land holdings; he was the monopolist in chief; over
land, manufacturing and construction. He built canals; promoted scientific agriculture, in 1821-2
he introduced the cultivation of cotton from India and Sudan. He was illiterate, yet patronized

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learning, started a ministry of education, founded the first school of engineering in his realm in
1816 and the first school of medicine. The professors and physicians came mostly from France.
He invited missions of military and education to train his people, and sent his people to study in
Europe; to Italy, France, England and Austria at state expense. A French colonel, Seve converted
to Islam, reorganized and modernized the Egyptian army. Another French naval engineer built
up the Egyptian navy. A reception was held in the Cairo Citadel in 1811, among the honored
guests were Mamluks, who were consequently slaughtered near the reception site, and then
hunted down thruout the land; solving the Mamluk problem of almost 600 years. The first
military venture was against Wahhabi Arabia in 1811, which lasted until 1818. The second series
of military campaigns by the Egyptians was into eastern Sudan in 1820. Their third military
venture was in support of the Porte against the Greeks in their struggle for independence. When
the Turko-Egyptian fleet attacked the Greeks, the Europeans responded with a combined Anglo-
French-Russian fleet and destroyed the Turko-Egyptian fleet at Navarino on October 20, 1827.
This led to the establishment of the independent Kingdom of Greece in 1832. The last military
enterprise of Muhammad Ali was the conquest of Syria in 1831; after ten years there, the
European powers put pressure on him to clear his military out of Syria, they wanted to keep the
Ottoman empire intact, for their own interest. He died in 1849 and subsequently many of his
reforms were abandoned.
Syria
Salim I conquered Syria in 1516, changing little in administration and population. He made Jan-
Birdi al-Ghazali viceroy over Syria; the later was governor of Damascus under the Mamluks, and
then betrayed his Mamluk master. When Salim I died in 1520, al-Ghazali proclaimed himself an
independent sovereign. Suleyman I responded quickly, his Janissaries destroyed a large part of
Damascus. Turkish pashas followed in rapid succession, 133 between 1517-1697. These officials
more or less bought their position, with the intention to recover their investment and to glorify
themselves. The subjects were treated as herds, to be shepherded, fleeced and milked. This led to
the steady decline of the Syrian economy; the discovery in 1498 of the sea route around the Cape
of Good Hope from Europe to India, bypassing the Arab and Syrian middlemen, had further
negative impact on the Syrian economy. The Mediterranean also lost significance until Ismail,
the successor of Muhammad Ali, opened the Suez Canal in 1869. Bold reforms: for
guaranteeing the lives, property and honor for all the subjects before the law, under various
Ottoman sultans from 1789 to the Young Turks in 1908, were not followed with practical results.
The various religious groups, classified as millets, were self-contained nationalities; even
Europeans living in the land were treated as millets, subject to the laws of their religious heads,
and other privileges part of capitulation. Capitulation rights (to be governed by individual foreign
laws in Ottoman territory) were first granted to the Venetians in 1521, the French in 1535 and the
English in 1580. The European trade centers started out in Aleppo for procuring Eastern luxuries
and products that the West became acquainted during in the Crusading period; Aleppo was the
terminus of the trade route leading to Iraq, Persia and to India. With the European businessmen
came their missionaries, teachers, travelers and explorers; even the founding of Uniat churches,
using Syriac or Greek rituals.
Lebanon
When the Turks and the Mamluks fought over mastery of Syria, the Lebanese mountain tribes
stayed on the sidelines. When Salim I emerged as the victor, the Lebanese leaders humbled
themselves before him; he recognized their emirs and sheikhs, allowing them the same
autonomous privileges enjoyed under the preceding regime, imposed a relatively light tribute on

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them, and did not require their military service to the sultan. Fakhar-al-Din II (1572-1635), the
most energetic Lebanese feudal lord, cherished a three-fold ambition: crating a greater Lebanon,
severing all relations between Lebanon and the Porte and setting the land on the road of progress.
He increased the territory to the north and the south peacefully. He was with the Druze religion
and a supporter of the Christian Maronites. He was uncertain of Ottoman support and allied
Lebanon with Tuscany in 1608; this aroused suspicion with the Porte who subsequently exiled
him. After five years in Florence (1613-18) he returned home, more determined than ever to
enlarge and modernize Lebanon. In 1624 the Porte recognized him as the lord of “Arabistan”, an
area from Aleppo to the frontiers of Egypt. He imported from Italy architects, engineers and
agricultural experts and encouraged improved methods of farming. One of his projects was the
draining of the swampy area in the north. He also welcomed Christian missionaries, mainly
French Catholic, who established centers in Beirut, Sidon, Tripoli, Aleppo, Damascus and many
villages. He professed Islam before Ottoman authorities, Druzism before his people, and showed
interest in Christianity. In his emirate Druzes and Christians lived in harmony. His sympathy
with Christianity came to the Porte’s attention, who then sent his army from Damascus against
Fakhar; he offered some resistance to the army, was captured and taken to Damascus in chains,
where he and his sons were executed in 1635. Lebanon was fractured after his death. The
independent greater Lebanon that Fakhar labored for, was again attempted by another emir,
Bashir al-Shihabi II (1767-1850, he ruled 1788-1840); this was finally realized in 1943.
As the Ottoman empire declined speedily in the 18th century more and more local chieftains
established independence; in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon such as: Hamah, Damascus, Sidon,
Acca and Tripoli. They remained loyal to the Porte despite of maltreatment by the Turkish
government. Sometimes families ruled, sometimes individuals; they shifted associations;
sometimes disputes arose between them, sometimes with the Porte. Discontent also arose in the
feudal aristocracies, which the Turks stimulated (divide and rule), leading to the massacre in
1860 of 11,000 Christians, mostly Maronite and the burning of 150 of their villages. This
massacre invited a European intervention, leading to an occupation by French troops. In 1861 the
Organic Regulation gave autonomy to Mt. Lebanon, the axial mountain region, under a Christian
governor appointed by the Ottoman sultan. The land had no Turkish garrison, paid no tribute to
Constantinople and its citizens did not serve in the military. The governor founded a college for
boys in 1862, as a Druze institution. Mt. Lebanon prospered beyond any other province on the
Ottoman Empire. Western teacher, preachers, physicians and merchants were drawn to the land.
In 1866 the Americans established the Syrian Protestant College (later named the American
University of Beirut) and in 1881 the Jesuits started the Universite Saint-Joseph. The autonomy
continued until World War I when the Ottoman government took strict control. At the end of the
War, Mt. Lebanon was occupied by the Allied forces and placed under French military
administration. In 1920 Beirut, other coastal towns and districts were added to the autonomous
territory as defined in 1861, to form the subsequent Republic of Lebanon. The constitution on
1926 provided for the president of the republic to be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunnite
Muslim and the speaker of the chamber a Shi’ite Muslim. Much confusion and controversies
developed around World War II. In 1946 Lebanon became wholly independent and became a
member of the United Nation and the Arab League.
Iraq
The Ottomans came to the valley of the Euphrates in 1534, with similar development as the
valley of the Nile. Turkish pashas, local lords and Mamluks competed for dominance, while the
common people suffered from corruption, insecurity and injustice. The authority of the

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provincial governors weakened by the end of the 16th century. The country was then divided into
three regions: Baghdad, Basra and Mosul; and faded into obscurity. The country was further
divided due to the Shi’ite majority, with their holiest shrines in Karbala and Najaf. They looked
down on the Sunnite caliphs and Ottoman sultans, while considering the Persians as friends and
allies. Turkey and Persia had hostile dispositions toward one another. Persia occupied Baghdad
for a period after 1508, and again after 1623. This warfare degraded the economy further. The
English East India Company entered the Persian Gulf in the early 17th century and then
dominated maritime trade there. Other perennial disturbances: Bedouin raids; divisions between
towns and tribes. The Mamluk government was more of an autonomous vassalage then a
viceroyalty under the Ottomans. The last Mamluk Dawud (d. 1830) was more progressive by
building schools in Baghdad. After the Crimean War (1853-6) Constantinople established
stronger authority over Iraq. The War started out with a conflict between Russia and Ottoman
Turkey, with Britain, France, and Austria later supporting Turkey. After 1826 (the demise of the
Janissary corps), the Ottoman army reforms were also extended to Iraq. Military schools were set
up in Baghdad; some of the graduates were admitted to the military academy in Istanbul, who
also became leading figures in the post World War I state of Iraq. The government and foreign
missionary organizations opened primary and secondary schools. The graduates entered the
provincial bureaucracy, leading to the expansion and modernization of government services. The
first steamships went in operation on the Tigris and Euphrates in 1835, leading to regular service
between Basra and Baghdad. In 1860’s telegraph lines linked Baghdad and Istanbul; roads were
improved and new ones built. Midhat Pasha (1822-83), a liberal and progressive statesman, was
appointed governor over Iraq from 1869-72, resulting in many positive changes. He checked
lawlessness, settled the Bedouin nomads as peasants, improved irrigation and introduced a
system of land registration. He also wrote the first constitution of Iraq, which was later abolished
under Ahd-al-Hamid in 1877. Oil was first discovered by 1927 near Kirkuk by the Turkish
Petroleum Company. Britain occupied Iraq after World War I, and after much protest and
negotiation with the nationalist, Iraq became independent in 1932.
Arabia
The Arabian Peninsula is distinct from the North Africa and the Egyptian-Fertile Crescent areas.
It is the cradle of Islam wiath the image of sacredness to believers thruout the world. Together
with geographic isolation, it reflects very medieval characteristics, isolated and insulated against
modern ideas and influences.
The Yemenis follow the teachings of the 12th century iman Zaydi, an offshoot of the Shi’ah, but
are also close to the Sunnite tradition. They established a native imamate and expelled the
Turkish governor in 1633. From 1871 to 1911 they came under the authority of the Turks again,
who finally departed during the last year of World War I. After the War, the northern area of
Yemen became independent.
The English East India Company entered the Persian Gulf in the early 17th century and
dominated the maritime trade there, over the Dutch and the Portuguese. Subsequently to that,
Britain entered into protected relations with the various sultanates and sheikdoms of Aden,
Oman, Muskat, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. By 1967 they became independent.
Modern history of Arabia begins with the puritan revival in Najd by Abd-al-Wahhab (1703-92)
when he determined to restore Islam to its primitive strictness according to the teachings of ibn-
Taymiyah (1263-1328). He joined with his son in law ibn-Sa’ud (d.1765) to aggressively
conquer Central and Easter Arabia, sacked Karbala in 1801, captured Mecca in 1803 and Medina
in 1804, and then continued on to Syria, Palmyra and Uman. This greatly alarmed the

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porte Salim III, who asked Muhammad Ali of Egypt to stop the Wahhabis; he attacked them and
destroyed their capital in 1818, but their teachings remained, and even spread over a wider area.
The Sa’uds ruled much of Arabia from 1780-1880. They were driven out of their capital in
Riyadh in 1881 by their rivals the Rashids and became poor exiles in Kuwait. In 1901 Abd-al-
Aziz ibn-Sa’ud (1880-1953) left Kuwait with 40 camel men and secretly came to Riyadh, killed
governor Rashid and reconquered half of central Arabia. He decided to revive the support of the
Wahhabis with their religious fanaticism and organized the tribesmen into a military
brotherhood. By 1922 they conquered the remaining Rashidi territory and in 1924 they
conquered Hejaz with Mecca. In 1929 he crushed the fanatical tribesmen disobeying him. By
1932 ibn-Sa’ud concentrated on unifying and governing as King of Saudi Arabia. In 1933 he
signed an agreement with an American oil company. Oil was struck in 1938, but work was
suspended during World War II. Oil sales started in 1950 and by 1953 more money was coming
in than the King knew what to do with, and the old life of Arabia vanished.
No valuable intellectual work was generated in the Arab states under Ottoman rule. Even before
the arrival of the Turks, the Islamic creative spark faded. By the early 13th century the scholastic
theology was fixed, uncritical reverence was in place, and militated against scholarly
investigation and productivity. The Arab intellect did not begin to loosen until the early 19th
century, under Western impact.
The writers of the period were by and large commentators, compilers and abridgers. Some
literary works were produced in Egypt. Abd-al-Wahhab al-Sharani (d. 1565) was a mystic,
writing only of Sufism plus some koranic and linguistic sciences. He conversed with angels and
prophets, this led to his persecution by conservative theologians. The noted lexicographer, al-
Sayyid Murtado al-Zabidi, was born in 1732 in north–west India, he wrote a massive
commentary on al-Ghazzali (1058-1111, a Sufi). He died of the plague in 1791. Another
important Egyptian chronicler was Abd-al-Tahman ibn-Hasan al-Jabarty (d. 1822) whose
ancestors came to Cairo from Jabart in Abyssinia. He also held the chair of astronomy in al-
Azhar. He was murdered by Muhammad Ali, who felt the historian was critical of him.
In Lebanon were three renowned chroniclers, all Maronites. Istifan al-Duwayhi (d. 1742)
educated in the seminary established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1584 in Rome, he also served in
his church in the highest office, the patriarchate. Al-Amir Haydar (d. 1835), part of the
aristocratic Shihab family, that provided Lebanon with many of its feudal governors. The most
distinguished scholar was Yusuf Siman al-Simani (1687-1768) who also studied in the seminary
in Rome and brought to the Vatican Library a large collection of Oriental manuscripts, now
considered one of the riches in the world, in Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Ethiopic
and Armenian with a major source of information of the churches in the East.
In Syria two authors wrote prolifically: Muhammad al-Muhibbi (d. 1699) born in Damascus and
educated in Istanbul. He was also an assistant judge in Mecca. His principal work was the
collection of 1290 biographies of individuals who died between 1591 and 1688. Abd-al-Ghani
al-Nabulusi (d. 1731) whose family came from Palestine, he was a Sufi and a traveler. His many
works were mostly about mysticism and holy shrines and legends about them.
Impact of the West
Napoleon’s descent on Egypt in 1798 impacted in many ways. He brought to Cairo an Arabic
printing press that he had confiscated from the Vatican. He used it to publish a propaganda sheet
in Arabic, and also established a library. This kindled an intellectual spark, which so impressed
Muhammad Ali (1769 Macedonia-1849 Alexandria) leading him to invite French and other
European officers to train his army. He also sent student missions for training to Europe. The

96
Ottoman Turks had already been doing that. Muhammad Ali also founded schools in Egypt for
military science, medicine, pharmacy, engineering and agriculture. His grandson Abbas (1848-
54) and his successor Said (1854-63) were opposed to Western ways and dismissed all foreign
advisors and abolished all foreign schools, as well as other institutions of European character.
Ismail Pasha (1863-79) established the first school for girls in Egypt. He also founded the
national library and the Royal Geographical Society. During his reign an American college was
founded at Asyut in 1865 that is still in operation.
Syria and Lebanon
The decade of Egyptian occupation of Syria (1831-40) under Ibrahim Pasha (1789 Macedonia-
1848 Cairo) a son of Muhammad Ali, was epoch making in the cultural history of the land. He
undermined the powers of the local lords, enforced regular taxation and instituted laws in 1839
of equal rights to all religious denominations. This new liberal policy attracted Europeans as
never before. The Jesuits returned and Protestant missionaries from Britain and America came.
Arabic printing presses were placed into service. The American School for Girls in Beirut started
in 1830. A school for boys was founded by the Lazarist mission in Damascus in 1775, and is still
in existence. The Syrian Protestant College, now called American University of Beirut, was
founded in 1866. The Jesuits founded the Univesite Saint-Joseph in Beirut in 1881.
The first Arabic newspaper was published in Egypt in 1828 and in Syria in 1858. Native schools,
magazines and literary societies, following Western patterns, were started in Egypt at the time of
Muhammad Ali. Butrus al-Bustani (1819-83) headed a native school in Beirut and also started a
political, scientific and literary paper. In 1876 he published an Arabic encyclopedia, of which he
completed the first six volumes. His writings stirred Arab national consciousness and also helped
Lebanon achieve the highest rate of literacy among Arab states.
Iraq started developing commercially with the British move into the Persian Gulf. England and
France became rivals in the Egyptian and Syrian affairs; even Russia got involved, leading to the
Crimean War of 1854-6. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made these lands strategically
more important for world trade. France built and financed the Canal and Britain bought out
Ismail Pasha’s interest in the Canal in 1875. Ismail continued to have financial problems, leading
Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1908) to replace him with his son Tawfiq in 1879. In 1881 the army
officers under Ahmad Arabi (1839-1911) staged a revolt against Tawfiq Pasha and the dominant
Turkish and Circassion officers, they were also against the Europeans in Egypt. Arabi became a
national hero with his slogan “Egypt for Egyptians”, this led to riots in Alexandria. The British
responded by bombarding Alexandria and occupying Egypt; Arabi was captured and exiled until
1901. A great reformer also came forward, Mohammed Abdud (1849-1905), who identified
himself with Arabi, he had studied and taught at al-Azhar. He was sensitive to the paradox in the
Arab people: with the influence of the West and the emphasis of nationalism and political
democracy with independence from foreign rule; and the traditions of Islamic concept of
religious universality. In his writings and speeches he prescribed intellectual and political
revivification of religion together with political unification; maintaining there was no conflict
between Islam and science. Egypt continued to be under nominal Turkish suzerainty until World
War I, when Britain declared a protectorate over Egypt. In 1922 the protectorate was terminated
and Egypt was declared independent. British troops remained in Egypt until 1936, when they
withdrew to the Canal Zone. In 1952 King Faruq of Egypt was overthrown by the military,
leading to the establishment of a republic; headed by Colonel Jamael Abdel Nasser, who took a
bold stand against Israel, Britain and France, raising him to a Pan–Arab hero.

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History of the Arabs, Philip K.Hitti, Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, 1970

Philip K. Hitti, b. 1886 Syria, d. 1978 Princeton.

1908 graduated from the American University of Beirut where he also taught after
graduating.
 1915 graduated from Columbia University with PhD and taught Semitic languages.
After World War I he returned to the American University of Beirut until 1926.
1926 was offered chair at Princeton University that he held until he retired in 1954;
he was Professor of Semitic Literature and Chairman of the Department of Oriental
Languages. After that, he held a position at Harvard University.
He wrote numerous historical books between 1924 and 1973.

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TESTAMENT AS HISTORY

Abraham, the Bible tells us came from Ur of Chaldea, meaning from Mesopotamia; the region
between the Tigris and the Euphrates; it ran from the foothills of eastern Turkey and north Iraq to
the Persian Gulf. The system of writing called cuneiform was invented about 3300 BC in
southern Mesopotamia, it consists of pictographic impressions made with edge-shaped sticks in
soft clay tablets, which were consequently dried in the sun or baked in an oven. The earliest
writing consisted of lists of commodities and over time evolved to record accounts, receipts,
contracts and civil laws. They also reported science and literature; a scale of time in years and
minutes, numbering systems in units of 60, 360 degrees in a circle and 12 division of the zodiac.
The Mesopotamian gods also traveled with these tablets; their names and their stories, rites and
rituals permeated the East. The Bible tells us that Abraham traveled from Ur to Haran
(crossroads) 800 km to the southeast down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to the ancient
Mesopotamian heartland, the Land of Sumer, where coneiform writing came from. The most
powerful city states (also listed in Genesis) were Babylon, Uruk and Akkad in the Land of
Sumer. These southern cities traded north to Haran, south to the islands in the Persian Gulf and
on to the roads that ran to India and China. The riverside cities had vast wharves, police and
customs authorities, fortified hostels for merchant caravans; with military patrols guarding the
rivers and trade routes. They traded such goods as grains, minerals, oils, cloths, fine foods and
wine. North of Haran over the mountains were the city states of Anatolia, and from there
continued the routes going on to Europe. Southwest of Haran were the trading cities of Syria and
Canaan and leading on to Egypt. Mesopotamian and Greek myths and Bible stories also passed
back and forth down the ancient trading routes; the same routes that Abraham and his herds
travel in the Book of Genesis: Ur, Haran, Canaan and into Egypt. It was the great arc of trade,
the huge highway, the only practical route for both merchants and nomads like Abraham, whose
donkeys and sheep could not cross the central desserts of Syria and Arabia. Camel caravans
which can travel for long distances without water were not used until a few centuries before
Christ. The term Chaldea also was introduced in this later period of ancient history. These later
references must have been added to older stories in the Book of Genesis. Hundreds of thousands
of contemporary documents, cuneiform texts dug up by archeologists from ruins of the ancient
cities contain references such as Benjaminites (“sons of the right hand” and “of the south”) and
Habiru (“peasant” or “gipsy”). The names Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Israel are common names
in ancient texts used thruout the ancient world. The Habiru were considered a perennial menace
that roamed the trade routes from Sumer to Egypt. The relationship between city dwellers and
nomads were based on respect and friendship. The nomads exchanged their produce; skins,
cheese and meat for products of the city craftsmen. Cuneiform texts have been found in store
rooms near city gates describing negotiations and covenants such as plots of land, or words
spoken by heads of families on the deathbed, and selling of birthrights. Some of the oldest law
codes come from Sumer. King Hamurabi of Babylon is shown on his famous law stela of the 18th
century BC, receiving his laws from his god at the top of a ziggurat, a man-made temple-
mountain of the Mesopotamian plains. The ancient trade routes are at least 10,000 years old and
many of the names and customs described in the Book of Genesis and in the ancient cuneiform
text survive in the East until today.
In the 1930s the archeologist Leonard Woolley excavated the Mesopotamian mound “Tell el
Mukkayer” where he discovered tombs with nearly 2000 burials of princes and princesses with
their musicians, servants and concubines, and with treasures, all squashed flat under the weight

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of earth; who died from poison some 5000 years before. Only gold and stone remained intact;
bone, wood, leather and silver were in deep decay. He continued excavating under the
“Deathpit”, amid the strata of more ancient cities, he found a great black band of river silt; the
debris of a vast destroying flood. This was of course due to floods from the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers overflowing their banks. Silt stratas at many different elevations indicating floods at
differing dates have become common archaeological finds in Mesopotamia since Woolley’s day.
Such all-enveloping deluges never occurred in Abraham’s other countries, not in the hills of
Canaan nor the quiet valley of Egypt, where the annual inundations were the means for
livelihood. People turned these events of random catastrophes into stories of dialogue between
gods and people (between Jehovah and Noah). Stories about floods and heroes who had built
boats or great fortresses to protect animals, or an arc towed thru the waves by a gigantic fish. The
oldest known version of the story of a flood was found in the 1600s BC cuneiform tablet in the
south Mesopotamian city of Nippur. Also an episode of the long poem of “The Epic of
Gilgamesh”, a thousand years before that time makes reference to a flood. Fragments of the Epic
were found in the city states of Syria and Turkey, the archives of Egypt palaces and later in the
city fortress of Megiddo in Canaan. There were ten generations between Genesis’ Adam and
Noah, so there were ten generation of kings who ruled before the ancient Mesopotamian flood,
and ten generations of Patriarchs between Noah and Abraham. At the end of Noah’s story there
is a compact between him and Jehovah that guarantees man’s continued existence upon the earth.
The nature of a contract states that man also has rights alongside the infinite power of God.
Before the story of Noah, we find the Genesis 6:1-4 that the sons of God married the daughters
of men. In the Mesopotamian flood story it is the god Enlil who, like Jehovah, angrily brings
down the deluge intending to destroy all life on earth, but is calmed by a speech of the goddess
Ishtar. Then the Mesopotamian gods gather around the sacrifice that their Mesopotamian Noah
has made for them, upon reaching dry land. Then the goddess Ishtar makes a contract with
humankind pledging to save it from Enlil’s wrath for evermore. She dedicates a marvelous
necklace that the god of the Sky has made for her in memory of the deep-drowned world.
Ancient stories often have higher significance than documented historical accounts, the ancestral
purity and supreme significance, of the ancestral hero or single family chosen by god. For
ancient Israel it is Abraham and his descendants. Abraham married Sarah his half-sister, the
“mother of nations”, this is contrary to the Laws of Jehovah, but important to keep ancestral
purity. In the Greek ancestral story the marriage of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta was barren,
so Abraham’s Sarah was “stopped up” until she was ninety. Twice Abraham tried to give Sarah
in concubinage to foreign kings, but in the interest of ancestral purity, Jehovah does not let this
happen. Similar incest continued with the following generation of Isaac and Rebecca.
Just as in the first three days of Genesis’ Creator Jehovah makes the elements of the world, so in
the “Enuma Elish”(ancient Mesopotamian epic), the first three generations of gods are the gods
of water, silt and sky, the elements of the Mesopotamian world. In the forth, fifth and sixth days
of Genesis’ Creation, God makes the animate world, so in the “Enuma Elish”, the fourth, fifth,
and sixth generations of gods are the gods of moving things. Jehovah makes the sun, moon and
stars of the forth day; so the male deity of the fourth generation of “Enuma Elish”, is Anu, the
god of heaven .Just as Jehovah rests after the six days and then makes man, so the god Marduk
too of the sixth generation of “Enuma Elish”, creates man so the Mesopotamian gods might rest.
It is the same Mesopotamian landscapes that these gods make, the same story that they act out.
For the Jehovah of the hardy tribes of hilly Israel orders a Mesopotamian creation, a distant
memory of that wide, well-watered plain.

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Like Adam’s world outside of Eden, Mesopotamia gave its people a hard uncertain life. Eden
was typical of thousands of walled gardens that sheltered vegetable yards and orchards from
sweeping rains, violent storms and driven sand from the deserts in the west to smother the
ancient fields, but also raided and sacked periodically by nomads sweeping from the surrounding
mountains. This violent and continual tragedy is movingly reflected in the cuneiform literature of
the ancient cities, in tragic stories that alone survived their empires and their mud cities now
dissolved away. It is strange to watch as Genesis’ scribes re-cast the violent saga of “Enuma
Elish”, to hold the solitary majesty of Jehovah, this ancient poem that the priests of the ancient
cities chanted from the doorway of their temples each New Year’s Day. They began: before the
heavens were named there were only the gods Tiamat and Apsu, the deities of the sweet rivers
and salt seas. And mixing the waters with Mammu, the god of form, made the gods of the silt
banks, Lahmu and Lahamu. In their turn they generated the gods of the horizons, Kinshar and
Anshar, and they engendered the god of heaven, Anu, whose son was Ea, the god of the earth. Ea
is the firth generation; his son Marduk will make man and Mesopotamia itself. Just as in the
story of Abraham and Sarah, the story of “Enuma Elish” struggles with the contradictions of
ancestral purity and unlawful incest. It begins with Apsu, the great patriarch resolving to kill all
his descendants for making too much noise. But Ea, his great-grandson kills him first, stirring
Tiamat, the wife of Apsu to fury. Leading a host of demons, she and her new husband declare
war upon the rest of the family. The family is paralyzed with fear. Then Marduk, the youngest of
all, offers to be their champion, if they accept him as their king; this they gladly do. Marduk goes
off to war, routs the demon army; catching Tiamat in a net, and drives a tempest into her open
mouth. Then Marduk mashes Tiamat’s skull, splits her carcass in half to make heaven and earth
and from the arch of her legs, a vault to support the sky. He buries Tiamat’s head under a
mountain, piercing her eyes so that the Tigris and Euphrates can flow from them. Marduk has
made Mesopotamia his royal estate. Then he created man, to put him to work to finish a ziggurat
which the gods were laboring to build for King Marduk, the tower of Babel at Babylon. This
unholy mayhem seems like it could not underpin the magisterial Creation of the Jehovah in the
Book of Genesis. Yet is does. Genesis separates the intense dramas of “Enuma Elish” into two
halves. In the first, the abstract creation of Jehovah is presented alone; all the forces that drive
“Enuma Elish”, jealousy, rage, the underlying conflicts of incest and purity are absent. In
Genesis they will appear in the stories of the first generations of man. Adam is first made,
innocent and unknowing, a blank slate. Then the serpent faces Eve with two choices; sin and
wisdom or the lack of them. After the liberative bite of the apple, Jehovah expels his first people,
now properly human, from their timeless Eden into the harsh Mesopotamian plain. Unlike
Abraham, Adam and Eve are not nomads, but farmers. The subsequent founding of the race
(Gen. 4:1) is part of the consequences of their fall, the knowledge of the Tree of Good and Evil.
So the conundrum of incest of the first family is then resolved by the necessity of procreation.
Eve’s two children are the founders of pastoral and urban societies; Abel, the herdsman and
hunter, lives in the West; Cane, the farmer, to the East of Eden. Cain’s offering is rejected by
Jehovah; he murders his blameless brother and builds the first city. Jehovah does not punish him,
but marks him so all will see that he is divinely protected. The grand story is conducted inside
the Mesopotamian order of the universe on the Mesopotamian plain. The tensions and pressures
of that ancient fraternal family of gods, bound and repelled inside relationships of love and
hatred, gives us the world of the Bible of a dynamic system of relationships. This process is
based on the sages of Mesopotamia and structures of the most ancient story were turned to the
purposes of Israel and their singular and solitary God. About 450 BC, the Greek historian

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Herodotus visited the ancient city of Babylon in Mesopotamia where he saw the Tower of Babel
“the Gate of God”. The great brick ziggurat was still in use, served by a large priesthood as it had
for thousands of years. On the top was a small shrine of blue-glazed brick and inside a couch and
golden table, where Marduk spent every New Year’s night in the company of selected
Babylonian maidens. The mystic union of earth and heaven was the spiritual center of
Mesopotamia’s most important festival. The priests of Babylon were constantly going up and
down the ziggurat’s central staircase ministering to the topmost shrine that stood at heaven’s
gate. Abraham’s grandson Jacob’s had a biblical vision of a stairway, to “the gate of heaven with
angels going up and down it” (Genesis 28:12). A famous Egyptian text describes a young prince
(later to be Pharaoh Tuthmosis IV, 1400-1390 BC) lay sleeping in the shadow of the Sphinx
when the Egyptian god revealed to him: “I am your father who will give you my kingdom”, he
then poured out his offering of oil onto an altar under pictures of the Sphinx showing the
Egyptian gates of heaven. Jacob also believed he had slept at Heaven’s gate, called the Syrian
sanctuary Beth-el (“the House of God”), then sets up a stone, and poures oil upon it. Abraham’s
family received their education in the great cities of Mesopotamia, but it was Egypt that gave
Jehovah its earthly expression.
Ancient Egypt had a deep awareness of an underlying unity of holiness within the universe,
different from the ferociously divided gods of Mesopotamia. The practice of ancient Egyptian
religion was for attaining and maintaining cosmic harmony here on earth, not a way to reach
heaven. Cosmic harmony, the fruitful balance of man and the gods was achieved by correct
public life and careful ritual observances. Blindness might be due to blasphemy; an impious or
incompetent pharaoh could provoke a drought or famine. Ancient Egypt was the land of grains
and gold where the nomads came at times of famine. The main highway was the “Way of Horus”
going thru Canaan and Syria. Closer to Egypt as the road passed thru the desert of northern Sinai
fortresses were controlling the road and ancient wells. Every summer for millennia, the nomadic
Bedouins would come to the marshy Nile Delta to graze their animals. They also came to trade
their products of the desert in the richest kingdom on earth. To the Egyptians they were
uncultured Asiatic barbarians. Many foreigners came down the “Way of Horus” to live and work
in Egypt, and could be completely acculturated and become part of Egypt. So the stories of the
slave Joseph and the foreign foundling Moses being accepted and promoted to highest
government positions is very likely. In the eastern Delta the city of Tell el Dab was uncovered
only a century ago, an ancient settlement of many foreigners; with stone temples including of the
Canaanite and noble palaces. The residents had rich trading contacts with Syria, Crete and
Mycenae. Using this city as a base the northern Hyksos conquered northern Egypt around 1640
BC, and one hundred years later they were expelled by the southern Egyptians.
Wisdom and foresight are the two most frequent attributes claimed by Egyptian bureaucrats in
their tomb-chapel biographies. They used dreams, magic and practical knowledge of their
country to look into the future and plan for national prosperity. Ancient Egyptians believed that
during a dream the spirit left the body and returned to the unformed darkness at the edge of
creation, to the place where all time and all people could meet and would reveal unknown truths
about the future. They had dream books to explain that “fat cows” meant good harvests and “lean
cows” meant bad ones. Egyptian prisons were for holding people while they were being
investigated, not for punishment. So the imprisoned baker’s dream of birds pecking at a loaf, the
spoiling of his livelihood, was interpreted by Joseph as his doom. Joseph also used a silver goblet
for divinations. There are many biblical Egyptian stories that place them into a genuine Egyptian
environment, just like the Genesis’ Mesopotamian stories. The Book of Proverbs and some

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Psalms show direct connection with ancient Egyptian texts. The famous poem the “Hymn of
Aten” attributed to Pharaoh Akhenaten about 1345 BC, shows clear parallels to Psalm 104.
The biblical story of Joseph and Patiphar’s wife appeared in Egyptian literature about 1200 BC,
as the “Tale of Two Brothers”. When the Old Testament borrows stories from ancient pagan
literature, they serve above all else to develop the slow-developing relationship of Israel and
Jehovah in the unfolding revelation of a god. The stories of the Book of Genesis relate the first
episodes of this lengthy saga. Joseph’s story is part of the interaction between Jehovah and the
Patriarchs, family stories of the later history from ancient history. With Jehovah’s help Joseph
goes into Egypt, brings the family to Egypt suffering imprisonment and enslavement leading
later to the Land of Milk and Honey. The Exodus “Going Out” is the vindication of Israel, the
proof of its closeness to Jehovah, the all-powerful god. In the long sojourn in the land of Egypt
where the solemn worship of the ancient gods gave them awareness of a calm and universal
holiness and their response to solemn and unending pieties. In the Book of Exodus, Moses is
chosen to lead his people out of Egypt on the very edge of nationhood. The family saga grows
into a national history. At the same time it also tells the story of the development of a new
religion, the religion of Jehovah. The story of Moses is in the Mesopotamian tradition, where
King Sargon as a baby in 2000 BC drifts in a basket caulked with pitch, a common commodity in
Mesopotamia but a rare import in ancient Egypt. Moses’ prophesies of plagues are natural
environmental disasters caused by the inundation of the Nile River. The flow with blood was the
syrupy-thick Ethiopian silt from the melting snow of the African highlands at the Nile’s source,
accompanied by red micro-organisms destroying the river’s normal ecology. Ancient records
also tell us that such flooding also broke dikes; destroying towns, temples and corn stores that
held next years seed corn. Later when the flood water lay stagnant all over Egypt, flies and
pestilences from mass drowning would lead to another unbearable suffering. Other abnormal
seasons would bring freak storms, or dust storms with locusts; frogs, even fish, whisked up into
the air and dropped dead on the earth. In the 18th century BC such a disaster, continuing over
several years, brought down the government of a pharaoh, he was obviously not fit to rule. There
are no records outside of the Bible that note Moses, an enslaved Israel, nor an emigration of
more than 600,000 people. Nothing in Egypt, nor the Sinai where the tiniest traces of ancient
Bedouin encampments and the spars 5000-year-old-villages of mine workers preserved in the
desert, ever found evidence of a large body of ancient people ever living in the wilderness. Nor is
there any evidence of a spring that could support such a multitude for even one week. The
legendary struggle between Pharaoh and Moses is contained thruout the Old Testament in the
fights between Jehovah and the celebrated monsters as Leviathan, Rehab and Behemoth that re-
appear in the Bible’s last Book. These are mentioned in various places: Job 26:12, Psalm 89:10,
and Psalm 87:4. Rehab, the Mesopotamian goddess of chaos and salt water, was another name of
Tiamat, the mother-goddess that Marduk slaughtered in the “Enuma Elish”. The ancient stories
came full circle, the Bible story of Creation and then the creation of a nation, ancient Israel.
Marduk has become Moses the divider of the waters. Moses met Jehovah in the Burning Bush
and followed Him for forty years from Egypt to the Promised Land. The Israelites made a
carrying chair, the Ark, for Jehovah; like the chairs that carried Egyptian gods and pharaohs.
Sometimes Jehovah was ruthless and erratic as a Mesopotamian god, angrily killing those who
did not obey his law. On calmer occasions the Jehovah of the Book of Exodus displays the
awesome power held inside the sacred pomp of Egypt. Jehovah insists in the unity of all holiness
inside him alone. A vision in the Old Testament slowly reveals an enlarging and majestic God.
Another powerful theme of Exodus is the liberation from slavery and Jehovah’s revenge upon
the slave masters.
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This completely departs from the reality of the world. Slavery on such a scale and type did not
exist in ancient Egypt, nor anywhere in that ancient world, where mankind was set inside a holy
order in which everyone from pharaoh to bonded peasant was at the disposal of the gods and the
state. In that world the modern conception of slavery and freedom, even of ownership and
buying and selling, have little meaning. The city of Tel el Dab was different; the Egyptians
regarded it as a foreign place.
Ten thousand years ago, farmers living by the spring of Jericho, built a stone tower. According to
the Bible, this was the first place to fall as Israel entered the Promised Land. The remains of the
city are still at the edge of an oasis. Archeologists have excavated the tower area to the bedrock.
In a grave Egyptian jewelry was found bearing the name of a pharaoh who ruled at about 1350
BC. The City walls were built in enlarging concentric circles, showing evidence of Early Bronze
Age, Middle Bronze Age with evidence of sieges, earthquake, invasions and destruction and
finally desertion during the last Bronze Age. Jericho reflects the destruction of Bronze Age
Canaan, long before Iron Age Palestine, the first “Israelite” period.
More ancient history is preserved in Egypt than anywhere else in the world. At the time of the
Kings of Israel the sacred capital of Egypt was the city of Thebes. Pharaoh Mernepta built a
temple there in the 13th century BC and recorded there his campaign into Canaan and the
conquest of the towns of Askelon, Gezer and Yano’am and the nomadic tribe of Israel. That is
the oldest known reference of the Israelites while they were still roaming in Canaan (1207 BC).
Hundred upon hundred of “tells” (small elevated sites) in Syria and Israel, situated by perennial
springs for crops and ancient city wells, with residences and warehouses of princes who ruled the
area. This uneven landscape from sea to desert, from Egypt to Anatolia, part of bad lands, part
green plains, and hard to survive mountains of Canaan was also traversed by the ancient highway
with vital links to the Egyptian empire. With cities rich enough to plunder for treasures and
harvests like Megiddo, Hazor, Gezer and Beth Shan; where archaeologists found black bands of
ash in the cities’ strata that tell of the numerous sackings. The most famous Canaanite town was
Megiddo; also known as Armageddon where at the end of the world, the final battle between the
Lord and the kings of the earth will be fought (Revelation 16:16). The ancient temples there from
5000 years ago were reviled by the Bible’s prophets. Yet their design was close to the
Tabernacles and Temples of Jehovah: courts with water basins and altars for incense and animal
sacrifices.
The rich coastal city of Ugarit (230 km north of Damascus) traded thruout the Fertile Crescent
and across the Mediterranean. It was destroyed by the northerners who swept thru northern
Canaan in about 1200BC. Ugarit’s temples show the same ritual arrangements of the Biblical
Temple of Solomon and the same construction methods. Ugarit had a huge bureaucracy working
from a lavish scriptorium, where clay was prepared and tablets made; hundreds of texts have
survived. The community was multilingual, educated by its trading. They used a twenty six letter
cuneiform alphabet. This was the direct forerunner of our modern Western alphabet and the
biblical Hebrew. Some of the Old Testament’s oldest passages, its liturgy and Psalms are rooted
in Canaanite literature. Ugarit’s texts are much older than Israel. The scribes of Ugarit knew of
the city Jerusalem and its nearby holy Mount Zion (“the seat of a god” in Ugaritic Canaanite).
Jerusalem, Absalom and Salomon hold in them the name of “Solom” the name of the Canaanite
god of the evening star. Sacred Ugarit texts have been helpful in deciphering some biblical
passages, scrambled thru millennia of copying, such as David’s lament for his friend Absalom (2
Samuel 1:21), and the famous words of the exile in Psalm 137. Notations of the Bible’s Psalms
hint at the strong musical traditions in Canaanite rituals. At sites like Meggido and Ugarit,

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figures of musicians, harpists, drummers, and lute players were common finds in the temples.
Many of other literary Old Testament manners are found in Ugaritic literature. Both Ugarit’s
great God Baal and Jehovah “mount to the clouds” in their chariots, both “utter voice” in thunder
and storm, and both stand “at the head of the assembly of gods”. It was not the biblical Israelites
that destroyed Canaan’s prosperity but the ferocious northerners moving down from the Asian
plains. They passed thru Canaan, skirting the coast in ships, marching across the plains,
destroying city after city; until they reached the gates of Egypt. The Egyptians fought with the
northern invaders in 1176 BC, some twenty years after the destruction of Ugarit. Scenes of those
wars decorate the walls of the Theban mortuary temple of the warrior pharaoh Ramses III. They
show the northern invaders, a great mass of people welded into a single terrifying migration;
soldiers, women and children traveling in ox-carts. Men of a dozen tribes, all warriors in
distinguished headdresses and ornaments, with their fearsome weapons: huge straight swords for
thrusting and chopping, and great rounded shields. Ramses III trapped their ships in the marshes
of the Delta at the very edge of Egypt. The Egyptian archers caused carnage, and huge numbers
of northerners were slain and captured. Both Homer and the Old Testament, in their elliptical
way, tell of the disorders of those days. The last letter written in the city of Ugarit describes
seven black boats coming close down the coast, boats that had already attacked and burned
several smaller towns along the way. In the 13th century the entire way of living collapsed. Only
in Egypt and southern Mesopotamia did the old cultures survive. This is the age of the biblical
Exodus, a savage age, an age of endings and beginnings. After their defeat at the hand of Egypt,
many of the sea-going tribes settled around the Mediterranean, perhaps the ancestors of Achaean
Greeks, the Sardinians, the Cypriots, the Sicilians and maybe the Etruscans. They built
successful cities on the ashes of Canaanite towns, and were also absorbed into the growing orbit
of the Philistines; who settled closer to the Egyptian border, and served the pharaohs as
mercenaries as their forefathers had done. According to archeologists this new international
culture of the coast and its plain was barely literate, but with a distinctive painted pottery quite
alien to that of the old Canaanite cities. They did not extend to the mountain area above the
coast, there the Bible tells us in the east were the Israelites. The Books of Judges and Samuel tell
us, there the Israelites fought not only with each other but also with their neighbors in the hills
around them; the Edomites, the Moabites, the Ammonites, and the Syrians. The Bible describes
the twelve tribes of Israel growing up in semi-isolation, with distinct customs, gathering together
only to wage war against common enemies. Life was hard; sheep farming and small holdings,
with wine and olive crops on poor limestone hillsides and wheat grown on tiny terraces and
valley floors. Not desirable for plain dwellers, such as the Philistines.
The Bible has many stories of battles and famous heroes. David’s fight with Goliath is set
between the Philistine plain and the Israeli uplands. David an Israelite shepherd boy fights with a
simple sling, with stones picked up from a brook in a valley; against Goliath, the Philistine
champion, with armor and weaponry of a professional soldier, like the northern invaders.
Samson who fights the Philistines is like the archaic Greek Hercules. Both brave strong men are
destroyed by women, even the numbers are the same: slaying thirty men at the wedding feast,
setting 300 foxes into the Philistines’ fields and require 3000 Judeans to take him captive. How
should poor Israelite farmers relate to wealthy and cosmopolitan neighbors like the Philistines?
From Samson’s downfall they learn the results of violating Jehovah’s Law. The Book of Ruth
tells clearly how the children of mixed marriages can be accepted as legitimate. The stories teach
over and over on what is “natural” or “unnatural”, sacred or defiled, right or wrong. The foreign
seductresses include Delilah, Jezebel and the Queen of Sheba; who introduced foreign cults into

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holy Israel leading to inevitable damnation. The wars that the Israelites fought brought them to
nationhood, the biblical battle between Sisera and Barak and Deborah in the Vale of Jezreel
(Judges 5:2-13) is considered among the most ancient passages. They show the emerging
federation of the single-minded biblical mountain folk of the Twelve Tribes nurturing their
perception of God and government under Jehovah’s Law. The Bible tells us that Israel came
down from the mountains into the rich plains, to capture the old cities and was then influenced to
choose kings and courts, that the Bible’s prophets so despised. On Mount Gilboa to the east,
biblical King Saul and his sons were killed, and then exposed, in the manner of a Canaanite
harvest ritual; on the walls of the huge old city of Beth Shan.
The Book of Joshua tells us the next city to be destroyed after Jericho was Ai (24 km away).
Archeological excavations indicate that this huge city was deserted for more than a thousand
years before the beginning of the Iron Age (the time of the appearance of the biblical Israelites in
Canaan). Here are Bronze Age city walls, built at a time when these states were rich, literate and
successful. Here is a fine temple with a wide hall, and outside the standard courtyard that Israel
would later adopt. Here after a one thousand-year gap in habitation are scanty ruins of a
settlement of the early Iron Age, built in and over the ancient city. The settlement at Ai is but one
of hundreds, if not thousands, of similar settlements sprinkled thruout the hills of eastern
Palestine. Archaeology indicates that these settlers moved into the hills to escape the troubled
world below. This scanty hilltop culture, the style of pottery and houses all material of their lives
are continuations to Canaan, on a smaller scale of the life of Bronze Age cities. These
settlements were the refuges from the breakdown of Bronze Age Canaan; many of the people
escaped from these cities, escaping from the path of the migration of the northern tribes, and later
from the states these invaders established in Canaan after their defeat at the borders of Egypt.
Here in the mountains they could live safely, even if only by constant labor. Flight to the empty
hills as a solution to the crisis at the end of the Bronze Age was adopted by many different
people, running right along the edges of the Canaanite plains; and into regions outside these
areas of the biblical settlement of the tribes of Israel; probably thousands of more settlements
stretching from south-eastern Turkey, thru Syria, Israel and Jordan down to the border of Saudi
Arabia. No archeological difference was found between the early Israelite lands and those
outside the area.
Where then were Israel and its god born? The Bible tells us it was the rapacious warrior
neighbors that welded the Israelite farmers into warrior coalitions. Archeology indicates the
hill-culture slowly moving down into the plains and valleys, to cities like Megiddo and
Jerusalem. This agrees with the Bible’s stories of tribes joining together in covenant under a
common god to establish eventually the Kingdom of Israel and its capitol city of the covenant,
the holy city of Jerusalem. Time and time again the Bible tells us that Jehovah was a god of this
coalition, the cement that held the Israelite tribes together, first to hold off invading neighbors
and later to establish cities and kings. Many of Jehovah’s biblical laws show a practical basis for
such success; covenants, treaties of peace and coalition, and a joint identity based on the worship
of a single, unifying god. They distrusted the past, the old city states and their cults that
obviously ruined and failed. Kings were not necessary to these poor farmers; they were
remembered as taxing overlords. They only needed prophets to guide the holy vision of the
confederation. The later history of Israel, in the Books of Kings and Chronicles give account of
disaster, the slipping away from the ideal, a retreat from ritual purity and from Jehovah. The
biblical covenants impose a binding faith; Jehovah is a jealous god: no mixed marriages, no
melding of inheritance, not treaties with godless foreigners, no worship of foreign gods. Judges

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and prophets oversaw the rules of the faith. And this faith filled all areas of life in the ancient
world. If this was not strictly adhered to, consequences would follow: infertility, sickness, and
defeat in battle… Jehovah alone, the god of the covenant, gave the covenanted hill tribes victory:
divided they fell, it was a practical faith. Adherence to the rules of Jehovah’s biblical covenant
promised security, peace, riches and a perfect world: these were also the earthly rewards of the
coalition.
Today the ancient covenants and rules are carefully listed in the Old Testament have been
organized and edited again and again by generations of scholars and theologians. Many stories
far older than the history of ancient Israel have been shaped to fit the truths of those small hilltop
communities. It was there where the need to form coalitions arose and in the ancient manner, a
god of covenant, the embodiment of unity, was identified.
The coalition of the tribes of Israel came down to the plains to fight the Philistines and the
Canaanites. On such slopes Saul and his sons were slain, but David and his men came down, and
with Jehovah’s help, conquered the city of Jerusalem.
Archeologists have found one of the first Israelite temples, built at the time of King Solomon in
the tenth century BC, in the hilltop Israelite fortress of Arad. This is located at the southern edge
of ancient Israel, facing the Negev desert. Texts written in archaic Hebrew were found there,
written by professional scribes, dealing mostly with military matters, one mentioning a “House
of the Lord”. The fortress had about ten housing units inside the stout walls. Israelite Arad was
destroyed several times, but the location was so important that it was maintained in continues use
to the times of the early Arab invasion 1500 years later. A cistern underlies the temple courtyard;
doubtless the ritual basin there was once filled from it. The altar of sacrifice stands in the
courtyard built of 5x5x3 cubits unhewn stone as required by Law (Exodus 20:25). The temple
also fits into Canaanite traditions. The first Israelite temple of Arad was built along with its stone
fort, in the 10th century BC, in the biblical age of King Solomon, when he built the great temple
at Jerusalem. Only later on was temple worship of Jehovah limited to Jerusalem.
David took Jerusalem from the Jebusites. Jerusalem also had underground cisterns and tunnels
under the entire length of its rocky spur, diverting the flow of a natural spring to supply fresh
water at a time of siege. Some tunnels were probably in place before David’s arrival, and later
enlarged by King Hezekiah at the time of an Assyrian advance upon Jerusalem in 701 BC.
King David’s rule was seen as a golden age, when the covenant was strong, when the mountain
farmers were not yet city scribes, soldiers or courtiers, when royal sins did not affect the destiny
of Israel. Biblical nationhood was born of covenant, not kingship. Israel’s perfection died at
Jerusalem. The rule by a King is antipathetic, yet the people feel a need for them. The Bible says
the covenant broke down and the penalty was the splitting of the kingdom into two parts, Israel
and Judah, north and south; and the people stumble ever deeper into darkness and eventually into
exile.
Pharaoh Sheshonk took the Egyptian army abroad and won great victories over 130 cities. This
was celebrated by reliefs and inscriptions in the temple of his father at Karnak in 924 BC. That
would be at the time of Jeroboam, one of Solomon’s embattled successors. Once more the cities
listed included Megiddo, Gaza, Beth Shan and Arad and its satellite forts. Today archeologists
still find the dark wide bands of the ashes of Sheshonk’s sackings in their excavations. The
pharaoh extracted such enormous tribute from Jerusalem that the Book of Kings calls it looting.
Jerusalem must have bought Sheshonk off, since the city is not mention in Sheshonk’s great roll
call of victories taken by force. Israel always appears like this in the records of other nations; a
collection of cities struggling to survive on the crossroads of an increasingly embattled ancient

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East that is finally defeated and loses everything. It is a sorry story that the Old Testament makes
the most of, using the slow deaths of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as the instruments of
divine retribution – the fate of hapless kings who had not kept Jehovah’s Law. The kings of
Samaria, the capital of then northern kingdom look especially bad in the Books of Kings and
Chronicles to demonstrate divine retribution. King Ahab of Israel and his wife Jezebel are
denounced, yet he and the kings of Damascus joined together and were victorious in battle
against the Assyrian army in 853 BC at the Battle of Qarqar, according to Assyrian records.
Inscriptions of neighboring kingdoms, like Damascus and Moab indicate they also worshipped a
god named Jehovah along with other gods, who may also have been a god of covenant and
nationhood. In the 8th century BC the Assyrian armies were on the march. Their home base was
north Iraq; they conquered and extended to Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia; displacing
peoples, tribes and families; marching them east to settle them again in the ruined cities of earlier
Assyrian conquests. In 722 BC Sargon II of Assyria entered Samaria, killed the king and the
nobles, and transported the remaining cities far away to the east, and settled Samaria with Arabs.
This was the end of the ten tribes of Israel. The Assyrians’ love of good order and hard battle
could not be matched for centuries; their kingdom was subsidized by booty of conquest and
brutal taxes collected over long years. They were universally feared and hated. The Assyrian
records attribute their victories to their gods. The Book of Kings describes the catastrophe at
Samaria in the ninth year of Hoshea, the result of the children of Israel “sinning against the Lord
their God…therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight” (2
Kings 17). Only Judah and its little ally Benjamin remained in the southern Kingdom of Judah
with its capital in Jerusalem, they had long been subject to Assyrian control according to
contemporary records. Eighty years after Samaria fell, and Assyria was pre-occupied with revolts
close to home; the Bible tells us that Josiah, King of Judah, tried to break out of the oppressive
orbit. The Books of Kings and Chronicles tell us that Josiah did “that which was right in the sight
of the Lord, and walked in all the ways of David” (2 Kings 22:2). They also tell of his
restorations in the Jerusalem temple, implying the misfortune of the Kingdom was due to the
forgetfulness of Jehovah and his laws. During the temple restoration they also found ancient holy
books; the first biblical reference to the ”Books of Moses”. One wonders how could Jehovah’s
High Priests ever lose these essential guidebooks, or have forgotten the words of their covenant
with Jehovah.
The Assyrian power declined during the sixth century BC. Egyptian pharaohs sensed the rise of
yet more threatening empires further east, and sent armies to help the Assyrian forces. The Old
Testament tells us that Josiah tried to block the Egyptian army at Megiddo. In 2 Chronicles 35:21
the Pharaoh shouts to Josiah: “I have no quarrel with you today… God has purposed to speed me
on my way and God is on my side; do not stand in his way or he will destroy you.” Josiah died in
the pursuing fighting with the Egyptians.
Some communities of Judah who refused to continue to pay heavy tribute to the Assyrians were
severely punished by them and then transported east. Soon thereafter the Babylonian armies
defeated Assyria, and Nebuchadnezzar and his armies conquered Judah in 586 BC, plundering
and later destroying the temple of Jerusalem. The Babylonians were even more cruel than the
Assyrians, they blinded Judah’s last king Zedekiah, killed his sons; and the remainder of the
court, priests, scribes and noblemen were led off into exile.
The Greek historian Herodotus visited Babylon around 460BC and reported his impressions: the
most magnificent city in the world, 24km x 24km exact square, the exterior walls 22m wide x
91 m high, the city was surrounded by a broad and deep moat full of water. On the edges on top

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of the walls were buildings, with a clear roadway in the middle to allow a four horse chariot to
turn. The city was divided into two portions by the Euphrates River; most houses were three or
four stories high, with streets all running in straight lines. The hundred entrance gates to the city
were made of bronze. At that time many Israelites were still living there in exile. Babylon was
the home of venerated ancient gods, temples of gold, thousands of years old; Israel’s prophets
would later call the city Babylon the Great Whore. The exiled Judeans entered this seductive city
where Jehovah’s laws were unknown and each day of their exile they were forced to compromise
with a pagan world. Many defeated kings with their courtiers, their gods and their attendant
priests, city craftsmen and scribes were brought there. They were provided with the necessities of
life and even promoted in the Babylonian court. The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were
swallowed up over some two centuries; including Solomon’s temple, even the ancient Hebrew
language was replaced by Aramaic, the language of the dispossessed. Israel came to an ending.
Whatever literature they possessed – scrolls of law, books of history, memories of temple rituals,
folk stories, psalms and poems; what Jehovah promised Israel in the covenant, both rewards and
punishment, could be seen clearly in exile to be true, just as the prophets told. They lived side by
side with other captive peoples. Under these pressures their culture was attacked, but also there
were fresh insights gained from cross-cultural concepts, a new way of seeing time and history,
new ways of understanding and approaching god. The Lost Kingdom took on the dimension of a
dream, a simplicity, an age of purity, new visions of a perfect world, an Eden regained by
following the laws that Israel flouted. This would be loaded into the ancient texts by editors
filling them with fresh insights and emotions. Psalm 137 summarizes these sentiments. The next
catastrophe was the complete destruction of the Jerusalem following the Roman wars of AD 70-
135. Both these events threatened the annihilation of Israel. Thru all of this, the sacred writings
became the heart of the national identity, the ancient written law its shield; a means of Israel’s
survival. These disasters forced the Hebrew Bible into existence, which also became the
Christian Old Testament.
The ancient gods with their cults and rituals were connected to the character of the cities, land
and civilizations; further described in ritual and sacred stories where they were first worshipped,
a faith that was part of harvests and weather, that gave them victory and prosperity; now required
in exile, a careful justification, a subtle theology. The local myths and gods expanded to embrace
new landscapes to fit more general truths into a universal account of creation and something like
a science. Local creation stories are elevated into a universal account of creation. The followers
of these uprooted gods came to believe that they alone hold the secrets of the universe and hence,
of salvation.
The literature of the first exile – vivid, biting, sometimes introspective, and sometimes angry –
held a powerful truth for the generations of the second exile. It became the word of God, set
down in the sacred books. With the ancient words refined, corrected and amplified over
generations became the center of a new nation. After 539 BC, when Babylon fell to Cyrus the
Great, Judah became a Persian province. The astute Cyrus knew that his rapid victory over the
old Empire was helped by the intolerance of the Babylonian kings toward their captive peoples.
He decided on a wiser system of government, not to alienate the conquered. He returned the
Babylonian exiles, gods, kings and courtiers back to their own lands. After more then fifty years
of exile, the Judeans were encouraged to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild their Judea. Cyrus
gave orders to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem and also handed back all surviving Temple
furnishings that the Babylonians had removed and stored from the destruction of the first
Temple. Zerubbabel, grandson of Judah’s last king, Jehoiachin, led the exiles home and began

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the restoration of the Temple. Eighty years later he was followed to Jerusalem by Ezra the
Scribe, who re-established the ancient law in the Holy City. Then Nehemiah, a Jewish official of
the Persian Court, rebuilt the city walls. The Bible tells us that he was King Cyrus’ cupbearer, a
court chamberlain and hence probably a eunuch. The Persians also had a set of religious books
which held the substance of their faith, the “Zend Avesta”. Perhaps the urge to restore the sacred
books of Israel was felt during the close contact with the Persian court. The years of Babylonian
exile had brought the Jews (the word born in exile) into renewed contact with the ancient East’s
oldest myths, such as creation and the flood. The story of Adam and Eve seems to be set in the
Persian period also. The “Spirit of God”, that moves on the face of the waters in the opening of
Genesis, is a common Persian expression. Some of the optimistic Persian notions of an afterlife
seem to have entered into later Books of the Prophets of the Bible; even the story of King Saul’s
meeting with the dead Prophet Samuel, ”called up” by the Witch of Endor (I Samuel 28:7-21) is
a shadow survivor of the Persian period. The Book of Isaiah, certainly compiled after the
Babylonian exile, presents a full-blown theory of death and resurrection, a forerunner of a major
theme of the New Testament. Another major theme of both Judaism and Christianity began to
appear in the Bible, the idea of the Messiah “the Anointed One”. Cyrus the Great is the first
biblical person to be given this title. Later, biblical scribes redefined the term to mean a son of
the House of David, a defender of the Children of Israel, to establish a new kingdom with its
capital in Jerusalem. The mysterious faith of ancient Persia runs thru the Old Testament,
continues into the New Testament, and leaves a trace even in the words of Jesus.
The Temple that Zerubbabel and his successors built at Jerusalem has vanished. The ancient
Temple platform standing there now is like a wide altar on the summit of Mount Moriah. This is
typical Persian of the Cyrus the Great period, even as his palace built at Pasagadae in southern
Persia. Ezra 6:3-4 records the edict of King Cyrus for the construction of the Temple of God in
Jerusalem. Beyond this there is little evidence of Persian domination at Jerusalem between 539
and 331 BC.
Unlike the older surrounding cultures, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Canaan, ancient Israel left no
monumental inscriptions of national history. The Books of Chronicles and Kings make mention
of a “book of law” (2 Kings 22:8 and 2 Chronicles 34:14); they also mention the Annals of the
Kings of Judah and Israel, the Book of Assher, and the Acts of Solomon, they have disappeared.
The Pentateuch, first five Books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) of the
Bible tells us were written by Moses himself. There must also have been a vast mass of material,
some very old, some written in exile: ancient oral traditions, poetry, prophesies and stories,
genealogies and myths. In this period, Israel’s most ancient literature was not only put in order
and edited but was also updated, even rewritten, to conform to contemporary preoccupations.
Occasionally archaic passages of poignancy and power stand out, such as the Song of Deborah in
the Book of Judges (5:2-31), and the strange tale of the giants and the daughters of men in
Genesis (6:4). Gathered up and pressed into the Bible, such fragments preserve an extraordinary
mixture of custom and belief.
At the time of the return from Babylon, many of the Old Testament books had not yet begun.
The brand new Bible Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are confirmed broadly by Persian Imperial
Archives. The great cruelties of the age were rejected in visions of a Second Coming leading to a
new Heaven and new Earth. This vision was now celebrated in the Book of Psalms, a wonderful
collection of hymns, ancient and modern, designed for use in the new Temple built by
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Nehemiah 7:73 to 8:12 tells us that Ezra the Scribe gathered all the people of the city at the
Water Gate of Jerusalem; both the returned exiles and the “people of the land” (the indigenous
inhabitants). There Ezra read the ”Book of the Law of Moses” to the assembly. Apart from the
earlier obscure reference to Josiah’s “book of Law”, this is the first clear mention of the Law.
The passage portrays the beginning of a national preoccupation with precise ritual observances-
the “joyous observance” of the Law, a resurgent national faith that would be held with passion
unto death. This story of Ezra’s public recitation of the law can be seen as the beginning of
Judaism. But what exactly was this Book of the Law of Moses which Ezra read, and where did it
come from? The Book of Deuteronomy contains several references to a Temple at Jerusalem that
can only be the one re-built by Zerubbabel. The literary style of Deuteronomy shows clearly that
it was part of a three-volume work, including the Books of Joshua and Kings. The author-editors
of this self-contained work within the Bible are known as “the Deutoronomist”. Similarly the
author-editors who compiled the first four books of the Pentateuch, equally unified in their style
by showing very different preoccupations from the Deuteronomist, are called “the Priestly
Writer”. The Deuteronomist relied on much older works for his compilation, and put together a
clear message for the people of his own age in the Persian Period. His three-part history shows
the divine retribution detailed in his Book of Kings, followed the breaking of the Law set out in
the first of his books, the Book of Deuteronomy.
Biblical Ezra the Scribe reads the Law to the people of Jerusalem because he believes that only
its observance will bring prosperity and that the weakest link in the chain of the national
covenant with Jehovah will bring disaster to the new-born nation. Not all Jews shared Ezra’s
opinion; neither did all Jews of Babylon return to Jerusalem. Many stayed in Babylonia, others
moved within the Persian Empire or other eastern lands. In the fifth century BC, when Ezra and
Nehemiah were at Jerusalem, a settled community of Jews at Aswan in Egypt served as part of
the Persian garrison (found in documents last century). This border town built beside the cataract
over which the Nile flowed northward into Egypt, under Persian domination. To the south lived
the nomadic tribes of Nubia. The priests of the Temple of Khnom had lived there also for
thousands of years, measuring the water flow for agricultural planning in Egypt. Unlike the
exiles at Jerusalem, the Jews of Aswan mixed freely with their neighbors, and happily married
outside their faith. They kept their Jewish names and recognized David’s City as the spiritual
center of their faith. They asked permission of the High Priest in Jerusalem to rebuild their local
temple of Jehovah at Aswan which had been burned down in a riot when the priests of Khnom
discovered the Jews sacrificing a ram, which was Khnom’s sacred animal. The destroyed temple
was built of stone, with bronze doors and fittings of gold and silver. The Aswan Jews stopped
sacrificing animals upon its temple altar, a compromise with local sensibilities as well as with
Jerusalem. Biblical histories of Israel relate there were several temples of Jehovah outside
Jerusalem in more ancient times. Just as both archaeology and the Old Testament testify there
were many pagan shrines in Israel and even in Jerusalem. Two hundred years after the request
from Aswan, a son of a Jerusalem High Priest opened another temple of Jehovah in Egypt; so
one sees several strands of Judaism. One orthodox, believing that Jehovah’s temple was the
Jerusalem Temple. That marriage to non-Jews was forbidden, with strict letters of the Law
requirements to observe, the Judaism of Ezra; while another kind of Judaism was in the more
usual manner of the ancient world. In Aswan the Egyptians served their god Khnom, just like
they did in Memphis and Thebes. The Aswan Jehovah and the Aswan Khnom were earth-bound
and similarly divisible. Jerusalem’s Jehovah was a universal god surrounded by a mass of laws
and theology, which required detailed specialized knowledge to understand and obey; a

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hierarchy of priests and teachers who taught that they alone could interpret holy Law, to insure
harmony of the community and the salvation of the people. This then is the birthplace of modern
Western religion. Even in the city of Ezra and Nehemiah this attitude was far from universal.
These differing perceptions of god and his demands of man are shown in many Books of the
Bible. For example, the Book of Jonah has been suggested to be a satire on the religious
obnoxious of some of the returning exiles. The prose indicates Aramaic origin, the language of
the Persian Empire, suggesting it was written in the Persian period. Other divisions inside
Judaism were the Jewish exiles released from Babylon, sent off to govern the new Persian
province. They returned to the impoverished provincial city with Persian subsidies and a new
sense of national purpose; determined to live by the ancient Law whose breach had caused their
exile and destruction of the ancient kingdom. They found themselves at odds with the indigenous
inhabitants of the city. The Book of Ezra tells how the pious scribe separated many of the poor
people from their “strange” (foreign) wives: on that sad day “all the people sat in the street of the
house of God, trembling because of this matter, and for the great rain” (Ezra 10:9). These people
had also been excluded from the rebuilding of the Temple. They subsequently built their own
temple close to the Israelite citadel of Samaria. As “Samaritans”, they followed a schismatic faith
that recognized only the books of the Pentateuch as the authoritative Bible.
At about the same time that Jehovah was lighting “the light of understanding” in the mind of
Ezra, the Greek historian Herodotus was in Tyre, a port north of Jerusalem, to visit the Temple of
Hercules and “to get the best information about the origins of this god”. Herodotus (c.490-
425BC) spent much of his life traveling thru the ancient world, collecting legends and histories,
and putting them together in long narratives, now called the world’s first history books. Our
knowledge of the ancient world still comes from the writings of such men. The ancient myths of
Egypt, the sagas of Osiris, Isis and the other gods, were written by literary Greeks who gathered
age-old fragments of rituals and beliefs and cast them into long adventure stories. This Greek
sense of historical narrative was also practiced by the writers of the Old Testament. Both Greek
and Jewish writers saw history and their religions not as the rest of the ancient world has usually
seen them – the endless cycles of planting and harvesting according to cosmic harmony, and the
victories granted by the gods to good men – but as a succession of single, unrepeated events.
History now became a record of unique events moving in a continuum, related by cause and
effect. Only the peasants still labored in rhythm with the gods and nature. Kings and their courts,
educated men, could now move in their own time. So during the Persian Period, the biblical
editors shifted the stories of the Patriarchs out of the ancient cyclical time of myth and saga into
the vigorous linear time based on happenings in men’s own lives. Israel’s past was transformed
from theology to history. This new vision also affected daily life: now men felt they could
control their own future. Unlike the Jews, the Greeks did not believe that control of the future
depended on careful observances of rituals and laws. They saw man’s destiny depending on
political, financial and military choices as much as fate. The future would be shaped by the arts
of war and trade.
The champion of the new ideology was the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great. Before he
died in Babylon of a fever at the age of 33, he and his armies conquered Egypt and the Persian
Empire (including Judea), and across Afghanistan to the Indus Valley. They plundered the
ancient world and founded new cities. After his sudden death in 323BC his generals broke up the
huge empire and formed new kingdoms which they ruled from these new cities; Ptolemy over
Egypt and Selucius over Syria. For some 800 years these kingdoms lasted with varying success.
In the eastern landscape, Judea occupied a small impoverished area with harsh climate and poor

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land; with increasingly foreign armies marching back and forth along the age-old routes. In the
following three centuries more than 200 campaigns were fought across Judea, chiefly Egyptian
and Syrian armies. In the midst of this turmoil, the people of Judea were also pressed by the new
Greek way of life, but the Jews held on to their ancient Law. Alexander’s cities such as
Alexandria in Egypt and Ephesus in today’s Turkey developed to an international way of life;
with Chinese silks, gilded statues, and great semi-circular theaters on the hillsides, papyrus,
parchment, incense and jewelry. Overwhelming wealth displayed in warehouses, palaces and
public buildings, including libraries and academies for learning. Ephesus even had a wide road
paved with marble and illuminated at night. The ancient cities of the east - Babylon, Jerusalem
even Aswan all had temples at their centers with lavish statue-houses of the gods, served by a
traditional, hierarchical priesthood. The new cities of Alexander’s empire were built around large
market squares and other public buildings. Man now moved into the center of the cities. To the
Jews and other peoples of an older tradition these cities had elevated man at the expense of God,
and that was blasphemy. Constant wars and impoverishment of their land after Alexander’s death
led large numbers of Judeans to move to the new cities of the East. They wanted to join the new
prosperous culture of Alexander’s eastern legacy. Commerce and diplomacy were carried out in
the Greek language. The choice was to become a Hellene or a barbarian. Dynasties of kings from
Libya to Afghanistan, black, brown, blonde monarchs, all affected Greek manners, built marble
markets and theaters and had Greek inscriptions on walls and columns. They allowed local
manners to be absorbed into the new style.
In Ephesus, the famous city-goddess Diana was changed form an Anatolian mummy to a plump
matronly virgin in the best Greek manner. In Alexandria composite gods were invented, fusing
venerable Egyptian deities with lively Greek gods, and everyone was pleased. The tolerant yet
pushy Hellenism confrontation with Jehovah’s intransigent Law was postponed by centuries.
Large and prosperous Jewish communities participated in this new city life. Jews filled every
role from merchant prince to craftsman, from soldier and courtier to slave. The technical wonder
of the world was the huge lighthouse of Alexandria with its oil fired light beam drawing ships of
all nations to the city. Its marbled halls and columned market places had slaves, gold and silver,
silks, statues and civic houses, fast horses, whores and exotic foods. All Hellenistic kings took
pride in their learning and libraries, staffed with scribes and librarians; handling hundreds and
thousands of scrolls. The rulers of the Hellenistic cities saw public benefaction, libraries, baths,
fountains and marble streets as working for the common good.
The Jews used the city vernacular called “Koine”, the common Greek that developed from the
classical tongue. The Hebrew sacred books that were translated before into the Aramaic of the
Persian Empire were now translated into Greek “Koine”. The Books of the Pentateuch were first
translated in Alexandria around 250BC, and the rest soon followed. These translations were the
professional work of scribes well used to making transcriptions from one language to another.
Not all Jews approved of these translations. Many felt that the work held them and their faith up
to ridicule. In light of new civic virtues, the Patriarchs appeared as cheats, liars, and barbarians;
people did not understand the ritual purity of the Israelites. During this time the “Septuagint”-the
“Book of the Seventy-two” was the only Old Testament available, this also served Christianity
and the New Testament until the forth century AD. The act of translation affected the flavor and
direction of the ancient texts; literary Greek was different from Hebrew and Aramaic, as it was
the product of public orator and philosophic discourse. There were also points of similarity;
mystic visions of the prophets’ language were familiar to Hellenistic religious sects. The cults
grew up along the Jewish communities of the marble cities; in two centuries after Christ they

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became especially receptive to preaching Christian missionaries.
Another product of the meeting of Judaism and Hellenism was the Synagogue (assembly in
Greek). They were common in the Hellenistic cities, Alexandria had more than 300 of them.
They were shaped like classical council chambers, where community elders met and alms were
distributed to the poor. Here circumcisions and weddings were enacted with appropriate rituals;
where Sabbath prayers were recited and the Books of the Law kept in a secure central place, and
then were paraded and read in the public assembly. The Pentateuch was read and discussed in
public over a three year cycle, and teachers called rabbis led the Hellenistic congregations. The
synagogue became the center of Hellenistic Jewish communities. Jewish travelers, like Paul,
gravitated naturally to the assembly place where the sacred books and the traditions of the faith
were stored and celebrated.
Here in their faith Jews stood apart from the life of the marble cities. Hellenistic society, like
most of the ancient world, was tolerant in religion, happy to accommodate all gods. Jews could
never compromise, Jehovah was a jealous god and the Jews were his chosen people. They had
certain affinities with the Greeks, both people indulged in abstract thought and considered that
supreme. The Jews were seen as philosophers, barbarian philosophers, and worthy of respect.
They were also different; they would not work on their Sabbath days, or treat humans as gods –
not even Alexander or the Roman emperors who later ruled the Hellenistic world.
A central element of city life that Jews could never properly join were the ‘gymnasia’, huge
houses dedicated to the cult of the body, just as the libraries and teachers trained and tuned the
mind, the gymnasium and its professional athletes trained the urban body; it was a major element
of Hellenistic life. The Macedonian ‘gymnasium’ was the training ground of young Alexander
and his future generals, in learning the skills of war and government leadership. But in the fat
cities of Hellenism the ‘gymnasia’ became like luxurious city clubs. There all free men exercised
together in the nude, then bathed in the large marble public baths. To get on in Hellenistic
society membership and use of the gymnasium was essential. Slowly and inadvertently,
Hellenism and its prizes were attacking the most basic Jewish values. Within a century of
Alexander’s death great numbers of Jews had gone to new cities and out of the traditional ways
of the sacred Law. They became Hellenistic Jews, working as hard as their pagan neighbors for
the prizes offered by the glittering cities. Tremendous tension developed inside Judaism, between
the old uncompromising faith and the brave new world. After centuries of fretful accommodation
and self-doubt, there developed a violent and devastating reaction. It was in this last period that
Jesus lived out his life, and in this period also the Old Testament that we have today was born.
By the third century BC Hellenism stood like a demon at the gates of Jerusalem. The city had
been re-built now around Jehovah’s Temple. Jerusalem had fallen to the armies of Alexander in
332 BC, a year before he brought the Persian Empire to its end. By the second century BC the
high Priest of the Temple, the virtual ruler of Israel since the return from exile, curtailed the
evening ritual at the Temple, to allow the priests to watch the athletic events at dusk in the city
‘gymnasium’. Jerusalem was under the rule of Syrian kings, a dynasty founded by one of
Alexander’s generals, who sold the position of High Priest to the highest bidders. The history of
this period is clearly laid out in the two Books of the Maccabees in the biblical Apocrypha,
written in clear Greek. It describes the plundering of Zerubbabel’s Temple and its treasure, of
plots and wars, and terrible suffering under the Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanes in 168 BC. His
generals burned the sacred scrolls, banned circumcision and the celebration of the Sabbath; he
also set up a pagan altar and established ritual prostitution inside the Temple. The indignation of
the common people was immediate and ferocious; when Juda ben Mattathias killed a Syrian

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army officer when he was making an offering to the Syrian King upon a pagan altar; war broke
out and continued for several generations and costing the lives of Mattathias’ five sons. The
Syrians were driven out, followed by a century of pride and power by the priestly warriors – the
Maccabees – who established their own dynasty of priest-kings who ruled Judea from Jerusalem
with the restored ancient Law.
The new power of Rome appeared and a new ruthless order was established in 63 BC. The
Romans built a huge new port and theater in Caesarea on the coast of Palestine. It also became
the capital city of Herod (73 BC-4 BC), King of the Jews, who received the royal title from
Rome. He was allowed to fight his way for more power over the Maccabees family of Judea and
then expanding to Samaria, Galilee and most of Syria. King Herod skillfully first backed Mark
Anthony (81 BC-30BC) and then sided with Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), the future emperor; who
rewarded him with new cities and provinces to rule. Herod supplied soldiers to the Roman
armies and cash to a succession of Roman emperors. He also built a great white temple,
dedicated to Caesar and Rome at the center of Caesarea. Herod was a Jew; unlike most of his
subjects, he was convinced that prosperity was to be found by adopting the manners of
Hellenism and the cause of Rome. In his palace at Caesarea he was a splendid Hellenistic king;
at holy Jerusalem he was a pious Jew, god-fearing and mindful of Jehovah’s Laws. In 15 BC,
Herod made a proclamation for replacing the old Temple of Zerubbabel, as it was 30m short
according to the Holy Law. This proclamation frightened the priesthood of Jerusalem. With tact
and energy and outpouring of money, Herod appeased the fears of the priests. The sanctuary was
built exactly according to the Laws of Moses; and all around with a succession of wide
courtyards, vast vaults and arches, decorated with grand Corinthian columns so beloved by
Rome and Eastern Hellenism. He completed this enormous project within ten years. The Temple
was a triumphant meeting of two cultures, also epitomized the tightrope that Herod walked
during his long life. The building was happily accepted by the people of Judea.
The everyday language of the people of Roman Judea was Aramaic (in local dialects). The
sacred texts were translated into Aramaic by specially trained rabbis. Abroad in the Jewish
communities in the cities of the Roman Empire the Greek text of the Septuagint was popular
alongside Latin versions. Despite all these translations, Hebrew remained the essential language
of the faith. Scholars of the faith used only the Hebrew texts. Spurred on by the new Roman
masters, Hellenism relentlessly infiltrated every aspect of life in Judea. In the New Testament’s
Gospels Jesus is shown constantly arguing about the interpretation of Holy Law in Hellenistic
society. The Jerusalem rabies founded schools of scholarship that dealt with these same
problems. To many people, the Hellenized priests of the temple now appeared remote and
corrupt, leading Greek lives with Greek names; holy men denounced them as idle and wicket.
Terrific tensions were slowly building up inside Judea, commentaries of ancient texts warned of
battles between the faithful and heathen. Some texts tell of a Messiah who will free God’s
chosen people, others prophesy the last trumpet that will announce the end of the world. Most
eastern nations cheerfully accepted the Roman emperors and gods. The Jews would not. A large
part of Herod’s success had depended on his subtle accommodations inside Judea with the few
outward marks of power on which the Romans insisted, a balancing act of greatest delicacy.
Upon Herod’s death, members of his family murdered and plotted one against another to death or
exile; resulting in Roman governors to be appointed to rule the land. Judea became a third-rate
province governed by unexceptional imperial bureaucrats with little sympathy or understanding
of the people. As long as Rome’s own self interests were safe, people could get on with their
lives as they pleased. By Herod’s day a split had developed between religious conservatives and

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Hellenized city dwellers, many of whom became rich in the Hellenized world. One popular
northern preacher, John the Baptist, was beheaded for denouncing the unlawful marriage of the
local Hellenized prince of Galilee; the words of Jesus of Nazareth seemed to hold similar
nationalistic aspirations for purity and piety. To many Judeans, both the Romans and the Jewish
nobility were godless sinners, keeping the people of Israel from ritual purity and unity with their
Lord Jehovah. The Romans were engaged in wars to the east of Judea, and the eastern provinces
were taxed hard to pay for armies. The fighting also stopped the trade that was the life-blood of
Hellenism. In Judea the Hellenized merchants and priests lost sympathy with Rome. Economics
joined religions sentiment, and to no one’s surprise but the Romans, rebellion broke out when the
priests in the Temple stopped making daily offerings on the emperor’s behalf to Jehovah in 66
AD.
Judaea and Galilee were lightly garrisoned, that gave the Jewish leaders time to prepare for the
Roman onslaught. The defense of Galilee was entrusted to Flavious Josephus (AD 37-100), a
nobleman of Jerusalem; first studied with some Sadducees (half-Hellenized priestly nobility that
controlled the Temple and its vast revenues), then studied with the Pharisees (teachers and rabbis
dedicated to the elucidation of the law, who increasingly demanded that Jews live a life of strict
observance). By the time he was thirty he had visited Rome to plead a cause for some friends in
prison. Some years later he wrote the long and detailed history of the rebellion and wars.
The Roman Army came down from Syria into Galilee, some of the northern cities were heavily
fortified and offered brave and bloody resistance. But the Romans could not be stopped;
Josephus was injured in Galilee, captured and brought before the victorious general Vespasian
(AD 7-79), he so charmed the Romans that they took him along with the campaign to Judea and
on to Jerusalem. They surrounded Jerusalem and found it heavily defended by several factions,
including Josephus’ refugees from Galilee. The rivalry between the different factions was so
fierce, that the Romans simply encamped, and waited for populist rule, street battles and
starvation to damage the besieged city. Then the Romans built siege towers against the walls and
sacked and burned down the city in 70 AD. After the fall of the city Josephus walked in the
streets of the ruined city, and was able to obtain the release from slavery a hundred or so people
he knew. He also asked to be allowed to take the “Holy Books”; with them many of the
surviving scholars, like Josephus, set about building the literary memorials of their ancient
culture.
Before the rebellion Josephus also visited a monkish sect called the Essenes who lived in male
communities strictly bounded by the Law. Their piety and austerity attracted the attention of
many writers, such as Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79), a Roman historian. The Essenes were often
put forward as precursors of Christianity. Perhaps John the Baptist or even Jesus himself had
studied with these mysterious people. The enthusiasm for the Essenes lit up with the treasure-
troves of ancient text known as the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940’s and 1950’s. These texts had
definitely been made before the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The scrolls were found
mostly by Bedouin shepherds and sold piecemeal, to Israeli and Jordanian archaeologists. Much
of the materials were in thousands of fragments, only four scrolls were virtually complete. They
contained biblical texts; also governing rules of a Jewish sect, including descriptions of
ceremonies of initiation and ordination. The word Essene did not appear in any of them. Close to
the scroll caves were found ancient remains of Khirbat Qumran, where one room was identified
as the scriptorium where scrolls had been written and stored. No religious object was found there
to prove to have a specific religious use. It was a Judean fortress built between the ninth and
seventh century BC and refortified in the last century BC, and finally sacked during the 66-70

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AD Jewish rebellion by the Roman legions. It seems the caves near Qumran served as
storerooms for the fortress.
The scrolls have been an important link in the history of the Bible. Before their discovery, texts
of such antiquity were few and far between, existing only in isolated fragments. The oldest of
surviving Hebrew texts were copies of the “correct and clear manuscripts prepared by the master
Aaron ben Moses ben Asher” in Tiberias, by Lake Galilee in AD 1008. Of the 80 texts presently
identified from among the material in the caves, 175 are copies of Bible books. And 70 of these
are of the Pentateuch. There are 48 scrolls of the prophets, majority being of the Book of Isaiah,
and 57 copies of the Books of Psalms and the historical writings. The oldest of all texts found
was one of four copies of the Book of Samuel dated to the third century BC. Some texts appear
to be revisions of the Samaritan Pentateuch, others very similar to the later Massoretic text (of
ben Asher of Tiberias). There never was a single original Holy Writing.
The ancient Essenes were probably a large international organization. Well enough known that
Pliny heard of them, and Josphus describes them as people of “the third way” after the
Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Essene headquarters were certainly in Jerusalem.
The Dead Sea Scrolls also included an unusual engraved copper scroll that listed large caches of
treasures. All other scrolls are written with ink upon parchment, leather or papyrus. It was the
only purely secular document found in the caves and was made in the period when the Scrolls
were hidden, as it was written in first-century colloquial Hebrew in the manner of ancient book-
keepers, from the time also of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. It even lists eight locations
of scrolls, the earthly and spiritual treasures of Jerusalem. The Scrolls are of an extraordinary
diversity, three contradictory rule books were found together and several different versions of
sacred texts appeared in the same place. These were all part of a large mass taken to the desert
caves for storage. These documents were used by rabbis and scholars for their education, who
later shaped the Hebrew Bible, Christianity’s Old Testament.
Local people had hidden their precious possessions in the preserving desert for thousands of
years before the time of the Romans, from the Stone Age 7000-8000 BC forward.
The Dead Sea Scrolls also contained extraordinary Jewish literature of the Hellenistic age;
esoteric records, ruminations, rage and meditations on the gross impieties of the age that pressed
so hard on Judaism. Some texts speak of the misfortune of a Teacher of Righteousness, others of
a Wicked Priest, other of “Seekers-after-Smooth-Things”. One of these texts, known as the War
Scroll, tells of the battle to take place at the end of time. It describes precisely the ritual order,
according to ancient Law, by which the Sons of Light will triumph over the Sons of Darkness. It
lists the specifications of field latrines, the baggage porters, and the ritual order of advance that
will secure the final victory. Such dreams sustained the Jewish fighters when Roman legions
advanced, such as the famous fortress of Massada, who held out for three years after the fall of
Jerusalem. In the palace storerooms of the fortress and under the floors of a little synagogue,
fourteen scrolls were found of both biblical and apocryphal texts, including a Book of Psalms, a
variant type known previously from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The pre-occupation with the future is
present in many texts of the Scrolls’ non-biblical and in the sacred texts; examined closely for
prophesies and intimations of apocalyptic battles, giving a feeling of destiny to the story of
Israel. People saw the Exile and the Return as an end and new beginning, as the Prophets had
promised. And now another catastrophe, another ending, was at hand. As the Romans destroyed
Jerusalem and the Temple fell for a second time, it must have felt like that the second apocalypse
was imminent.

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Making the Book

During the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 when Jewish factions were fighting among themselves,
Rabbi Johannon ben Zakkain had a coffin made for him, and in it he was carried to the Roman
army beyond the walls. The rabbi then begged General Titus for permission to establish an
academy away from the condemned city; and this was granted. Westward to the coast, in the
town Jamnia, close to Jaffa, they opened the academy called Beth Hamidrash. When Rabbi
Johannon was informed of the destruction of the Temple, and the burnt Holy of Holies, he and
his pupils cried; for the loss of Jehovah’s own house; the center of the world and only place on
earth where Jews could atone for sin. As he watched Jerusalem burn, Rabbi Johannon foresaw
the vacuum opening in the lives of the survivors; in the large Jewish communities outside of
Judea, in Egypt, Babylonia and thruout Roman Europe without leadership. At Jamina, Rabbi
Johannon, a Pharisee, gathered distinguished scholars around him and the academy was quickly
recognized as the educated voice of Judaism. He was succeeded by Rabbi Gamaliel, a
descendent of an august line of Sadducees who controlled the Jewish council and high court in
the days of Herald’s Temple. Remnants of the old Jewish hierarchy came together and formed a
new religious government under the direction of a nasi (prince). For the next fifty years, the
survivors among the Jewish scholars came to Jamnia and fixed for all time the canon of the
Hebrew Bible. There were many bitter arguments and debates that accompanied this new
administration where Gamaliel fought hard for power of the nasi. Outside of the circles of
scholarly politics he was much admired. The rabbis and scholars wanted to reform Judaism and
to help the people survive the loss of the Holy City. Gamaliel, for example fixed many rules that
govern Judaism to this day, such as the ritual of Passover Eve, and the obligation to pray three
times a day. At the same time, under the direction of the academy, new translations of the Sacred
Writings into Greek and Aramaic were prepared. Many of Gamaliel’s pronouncements are still
debated among the orthodox. He was friendly with many gentiles, but he also made the first
Jewish ordinances against the rising faith of Christianity. One of the most extraordinary rabbis of
the academy was Akiva, he was twenty years old when Jerusalem was destroyed. He came from
his own academy nearby with a large group of students. He was a fire and brimstone nationalist,
who saved the Song of Songs for the Bible, but forbade singing in beer halls. The Books of
Maccabees, of Tobit and Eccleciasticus were excluded, and only after much argument were the
books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes admitted. The Book of Ester, the only biblical book
purportedly written by a woman, was halved. Eighteen psalms, the “Psalm of Solomon”, were
detached. The problem was that certain passages of the texts did not support the law. The opulent
poetry of the Song of Songs caused much debate; Rabbi Akiva was not merely defending the
human emotion of love and lust, but the symbolic image of Israel as the bride of God, a common
theme of Jewish mysticism. Rabbi Akiba is also credited with bringing order to the great mass of
traditional teachings upon the Law and the Sacred Books. Commentaries were prepared to link
scripture stories to recent historical events. The Hebrew Bible became endowed with a new
sanctity as the texts were minutely checked for deviations in matters of the Law, yet internal
inconsistencies were carefully preserved. The holy text, the Hebrew Bible, was fixed forever; no
more writings recording the relationship of Jehovah and his chosen people. In his old age rabbi
Akiva, about AD 130, saw the last phase of his holy history rising around him, and he traveled
thru the Jewish communities of the Eastern Empire preaching an imminent apocalypse and the
establishment of the direct rule of Jehovah on earth. He named and anointed a resistance leader,
Ben Kosebah a son of the house of David, as the Messiah to free the Jews. The revolt, as
happened sixty years earlier, had an initial success. Once again the Roman legions were

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marshaled in force and war ravaged Judea. Rabbi Akiva was arrested and executed. In AD 135
all Jews were banished form their Holy City. A new city called Aelia Captolina was raised on the
ruins and new temples housed the gods of Rome; Judea was by then virtually depopulated.
Scribes and Printers
Thousands of fragments of paper that were gathered from a Cairo synagogue are virtually the
only remains of the Hebrew Bible for the centuries after Rabbi Akiva. Mixed with these
fragments are also pages of the ninth and tenth centuries, indicating trade in Jewish texts that
extended thru the Mediterranean reaching Jewish communities as far away as Babylon and
Yemen. The scraps of sacred texts show considerable change from the days of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. In general the differences were very minor. There was a problem in reading and
understanding ancient writings. Traditionally words were written without gaps between them and
most vowels were omitted. This system worked well as long as reader and writer shared the same
pronunciation of Hebrew and a single tradition of interpretation. But over the centuries, as Jews
spread all over the ancient world, they evolved into communities of changing languages and
accents, affected by contact with other people. By the eights century ways were found of
overcoming this. The ben Asher family of rabbis of Tiberias in Galilee devised a written method
of recording precisely the traditional vocalization of the Hebrew language and the separation of
words, sentences and paragraphs of every column of the Hebrew Bible. Stringent laws also
specified every step in the production of the sacred texts: the ink, the parchment, spacing of
lines, words and letters.
Movable type was invented in Europe in the 1440s. The first Hebrew book appeared in 1477, and
in 1488 the most beautiful of all printed Hebrew Bibles was made in Italy by a family of German
Jews. In 1495 the same press produced a Hebrew Bible small enough to be carried in a bag or
pocket. It was this convenient Bible that Martin Luther used to translate the Old Testament into
German. This version was revised by the venerable scholar Jacob ben Khayim and printed by
Daniel Bomberg in 1524 in Venice, Italy; it became the standard Hebrew Bible. Soon Christian
scholars printed Hebrew versions of the Bible alongside Greek and Latin versions.
Jesus and The New Testament
The Bible was made in the wake of two invasions of the Holy Land. The first from the east in the
sixth century BC, resulted in the capture, exile and then the liberation of Judah, and the priests of
Jehovah – prompting the Jewish scribes to re-make the ancient records of the nations faith into
the book that became the basis of the Old Testament. The second invasion, from the west in the
fourth century BC, brought Hellenism. This alternately tempted and repelled the Jews, leading to
conflicts and deadly wars with the Romans. This tragedy led the rabbis to fix for all time the
Hebrews Bible. The cultural and political insecurities of that time of the foreign order in Judea
and Galilee prompted the rise of Christianity and the writing of its sacred books, the New
Testament. The first Christian converts outside Palestine were citizens of the eastern Roman
Empire in the societies of the Hellenistic cities. The Apostles took their message and faith direct
to the great cities of the Empire – Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria, Corinth and Rome. The New
Testament, during the second century after Christ, was aimed at the people of this world.
Christianity’s initial success was based on its patent remedies for Hellenism’s discontents. The
marble cities also had vulnerabilities; behind their confident facades and private fortunes was a
darker side visible in their statutes of their gods. A famous statue of Hellenistic taste was the
marble statue Marsyas, hanging waiting for Apollo, god of light, to flay him alive. This was for
losing a mythical musical competition to Apollo. A major theme of Hellenistic sculpture: giants,
gods and mortals participate in terrible, mindless competition and combat. There is no hope in

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these earth bound battles, only the acute awareness of solitary vulnerability. It was a separation
from the gods which rarely occurred in more ancient societies. He is the forerunner of all the
images of crucifixion, the fate of martyrs. Marsyas hangs between myth and reality, Jesus hangs
on his cross in modern time. The son of God, his earthly body is tuned to the savage moment.
Anew, impersonal cruelty hunting daily life was the slave industry. The gold and silver mines
worked by slaves sustained the ancient city states such as Athens, financed the expansion of
Alexander’s military campaigns and also sustained the Roman world. Rome controlled its slaves
by such sever punishment as crucifixion.
The Gospels show Jesus of Nazareth dealing with a range of problems the Old Testament
Patriarchs never knew, such as morality in the money-based economy, including allegiance in
new cities, civic duties, taxes and tax evasion; of the relationship of the new world to the old
gods.
As the New Testament was being written, the Roman world was a lively world, with gods and
spirits all around, relatively prosperous and well regulated. The words of Jesus and the sermons
of the Apostles provided a new vision of spirituality from the East; the West would give it a firm
shape and organization. The vast Roman Empire was better organized and more powerful than
any of its predecessors. Greek and Latin were international languages and literacy was high. The
international trade of the empire carried Christianity and its books, along with several other
faiths, to its furthest outposts. The Jesus in the Gospels was not born in urban internationalism,
but largely inside the conservative society of Judaism; he acts like a Pharisee from Galilee.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus gained popularity as a miracle worker and healer of the sick. In
those days these powers would have been regarded of a holy man, skilled in religion and
religious law. “Rabbi”, says Nicodemus to Jesus, “we know thou art a teacher come from God:
for no one can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him” (John 3:2). This also
contributed to Jesus’ prosecution and death. As a healer and preacher in Jerusalem he visited the
sanctuaries of the sick, like in most of the Hellenistic cities, they were usually situated close to
water. At Corinth in Greece similar cures were described in the Temple of Aesclepius, the god of
medicine. In Jerusalem there was also an Aesclepium, a sanctuary for the sick; it was so famous
that it pictured some of Jerusalem’s coins. The Gospel of John (5:4) says that healing only
happened after “an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water”. A
Christian father of the fourth century describes the pool with “a great many sick people lay
there”. Archaeologists found in the 1960s fragments of classical relief near the pool, of
Aesclepius’ frequent companion writhing around the staff of Coduceus, the emblem of doctors to
this day.
The Four Gospels were written at a time when the church was rapidly expanding and the acts and
sayings of Jesus became fixed into regular forms. These were compilations of the living oral
traditions inside the early church. Was Jesus the real founder of this church, or only its
inspiration? The Gospels seem to show that he intended its foundation – but they also show Jesus
as a typical Jewish prophet of his day. There still remain the wide variations of Jesus’ identity,
his aims and his ambitions. Is Jesus simply a holy teacher with no great plan for the world or a
church? Is he consciously engaged in acting out thruout his life the prophesies that cement the
four Gospels securely to the Old Testament, and so promising mankind a very specific destiny?
Are all such interpretations gleaned from the words of Jesus, or merely from the expectations
that he aroused among the Gospel writers and their followers? The first Christian writings that
have survived were the letters written some twenty years after Jesus’ death by the Apostle Paul,
and they show that already at that time the church on earth was well-established and beginning to

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grow into a highly complex organization with rules and rituals more intricate and elaborate than
anything Jesus teaches in the Gospels. Yet we have very little information about these vital
decades after Jesus’ death. Luke’s Book of Acts that describe this period in some detail was
estimated to have been written some thirty years later, at the time of the Gospels themselves.
Apostle Paul (c.AD10 Tarsus - c.67 Rome)
Tarsus was on the main trade route going East and West. Like many Jews, Paul was a Roman
citizen. He grew up with a good command of idiomatic Greek, and the experience of a
cosmopolitan city. Tarsus was also home of famous Stoic philosophers. He had a strict Jewish
upbringing and trained as rabbi in Jerusalem under Gamaliel I. He probably never met, and was
not aware of Jesus at that time. His Jewish name was Saul and he supported himself as
tentmaker; probably learned from his father. He later regarded the Christian movement as a
threat to Pharisaic Judaism. The Christians proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah and heavenly Lord,
and also claimed that the temple and its sacrifices were superseded by the sacrificial death of
Jesus and that the Law could be disregarded. Serious persecution resulted against the Hellenist
(Greek speaking Jews) Christians in Jerusalem. Saul participated in the stoning to death of
Stephen. Consequently Hellenist converts fled from Jerusalem to foreign cities, while the
original Aramaic-speaking Jews in Jerusalem kept a low profile to avoid provocations.
While Saul was on his way to apprehend scattered converts in Damascus he had a life changing
revelation of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:11-12). Such close familiarity with divinity was not
uncommon in the Hellenistic cities. This conversion was a few years after the death of Jesus.
Paul’s own account is much in keeping with the Old Testament calling of a prophet. Like many
Jews of his time, he believed that God’s final Day of Judgment was at hand, to free the world
from sin and establish lasting peace and righteousness. This conversion changed Paul from bitter
enemy to lifelong dedication to the Christian cause. His faith in Christ became the foundation of
Paul’s preaching. He saw his vocation to be a missionary to people of every nation to prepare
them for God’s coming.
Paul’s biblical letters are the oldest surviving Christian texts, written probably before AD 60.
Paul’s writings to the Corinthians, and his speech at Athens have parallels to Stoic elements. By
the third and fourth centuries the Stoic influence is clearly seen in the writings of the church
Fathers.
After his conversion he spent a period of solitude in Arabia. Then he set up residence in
Damascus for three years and the first base for his mission work. This came to an abrupt end
when he had problems with the governor there, and escaped from the city; and went on to
Jerusalem where he met with Peter and the Apostles, and James the Lord’s brother. This
established Paul as a recognized Apostle alongside the founders of the church at Jerusalem. He
did not visit Jerusalem again for fourteen years. Two weeks later he returned to his native city of
Tarsus and then moved to Antioch, the capital of Syria, to assist Barnabas in his successful
mission there. The converts included a large number of Gentiles (non-Jews). A serious crisis
erupted there (lasting several years), in which Paul emerged as the champion on behalf of the
Gentiles, ensured that Christianity became not just a Jewish sect but a universal religion. Paul as
a Christian rejected the need for the observance of the Law, but he never rejected the social
attitudes of contemporary Judaism, which then the Christian church inherited: rejection of pagan
rituals and libertine behavior (of the Hellenistic world), food and its preparation, proper behavior
of men and women (such as styling hair and clothing, etc). Paul was in a hurry to complete his
mission because he believed that the end of the world was near.

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On his first Missionary Journey he visited cities in Asia Minor and Cyprus, and then he returned
to Antioch. Peter visited Antioch; he agreed with Paul that Gentile Christians did not require
circumcision and to observe the Jewish Laws.
On the second Missionary Journey Paul revisited the churches in Asia Minor; and then went on
to the churches in Corinth (the major center of Greece) and Thessalonica, he also visited Athens
(there was no church there), and then returned to Antioch. He set up a base in Ephesus for three
years and consolidated and strengthened the established churches in Greece and Asia Minor. He
also took up a collection for the poor church of Jerusalem, to symbolize unity between Jewish
and Gentile churches.
On Paul’s third Missionary Journey he visited Jerusalem, together with delegates from Gentile
churches. He was there arrested and held in prison for two years, but was treated well there as a
Roman citizen. Just before his trial, he appealed to Caesar. On his way to Rome he was
shipwrecked for three months in Malta, and arrived in Rome in the spring of AD 60. He was
under house arrest for two years awaiting trial, while there he had freedom to have visitors and
wrote many letters there. He was probably executed in Rome later in the reign of Emperor Nero.
A few years later the Roman legions devastated Judea and destroyed Jerusalem.
The Gospels
Paul‘s writings continued to be widely distributed after his death. Between Paul’s letters and the
writings of the Gospels, a time of about half a century; there was a whole world of difference,
Jerusalem was gone, a tangible earthly cataclysm had occurred. There is not even a hint of Paul’s
letters in the Gospels. His main theme is Jesus’ message of God’s love for the world, and also
Christ’s assertion that the ending of the world is imminent. In comparison, the Gospels often
seem uncertain of their central message; and Jesus’ purpose on earth is elusive. Jesus in the
Gospels is set in a rambling series of incidents and sermons engaged in mysterious progress
around an unstated drama that finally ensures his capture and death. How did Jesus see the
political or social consequences of his teachings? Elusive indeed, to the relationship between
church and state in Christendom, even into modern times.
Jesus’ mission on earth begins, so the Gospels all agree, with the baptism in the Jordan by John
the Baptist. It is the story of a young Galilean countryman who came to see the famous preacher.
Jesus will be using agricultural metaphors of his childhood; to whom the “lilies of the field” are
the most beautiful. He seldom refers to cities and their ways. The greater parts of his teaching
were conducted in three small towns of the Galilean landscape.
With the Gospels, like many studies of ancient history, we are not left with firm facts, but with a
scale of probabilities ranging from very high to very low. The Gospel writers seem to be
uncertain of Jesus’ identity. Even Jesus seems to have doubts because he asks a disciple “who do
men say that I am?” (Mark 8:27). The account of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist contains the
political seed of his ending on the cross. Like John the Baptist, Jesus promised redemption from
earthly sin, not by the orthodox Jewish method of making offerings at the Jerusalem Temple but
by the simple gesture of personal repentance from earthly sin, not by the orthodox Jewish
method of making offerings at the Jerusalem Temple, but by the simple gesture of genuine
personal repentance. Not by an expensive journey to Jerusalem and offerings at the Temple, but
in John the Baptist’s case, by immersion, by baptism in the free-flowing water of the River
Jordan, and in Jesus’ case by an internal act of will and faith. When the Romans destroyed the
Temple forty years after Jesus’ time they destroyed the political and spiritual heart of Judaism.
Most ancient kings raised revenues thru taxation which was often called an offering to the state

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gods. In Jerusalem also the elaborate system of Temple offerings was central to the fiscal power
of the state. By proposing the redemption of sin outside the Temple and its system of offerings,
both Jesus and John not only denied the spiritual efficacy of the priests, but also hit at the source
of their wealth. John the Baptist and Jesus were both executed; they both struck at the heart of
the state.
The Gospels describe the baptism of Jesus as a personal visionary experience, Matthew tells us
“and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove” (Matthew 3:16). His vision is a common
Jewish form as is “a voice from heaven”. From that moment, Jesus, like John the Baptist
preached the possibility of personal redemption outside the structures of organized Judaism. John
preached with the rough fervor of a desert hermit, Jesus with calmness and a love of life. Both
Jesus and John viewed their mission as preparing people for the establishment of the Kingdom of
God on earth – Paul’s end time. And all of them believed, the New Testament says, that this end
was very near. In Jesus’ time there was much talk of a Messiah who would liberate the Jews by
force. The Romans executed several of these would be Messiahs, as well as Jesus of Nazareth.
This label of Messiah automatically challenged both Roman and Jewish authority, he would arise
and, with the help of God, expel the godless as often expressed in Hebrew Scripture; and this
would become a reality at the end-time, the final war against the “Sons of Darkness”- the
Romans. In the Gospels Jesus declines all claims to earthly power, he also foresaw the ending of
the Temple, and wept openly for the Holy City. There were underground movements like the
Zealots, who may have seen Jesus as a military Messiah; Caiphas and the other priests of the
Temple wanted him out of their way. Some of Jesus’ preaching attacked the Temple’s money
changers resulting even in a bazaar brawl. Pontus Pilate would have seen Jesus as another focus
of civil disturbance and in an empire ruled by divine emperors, Jesus’ claim to be Son of God
would have been sufficient cause to have him condemned to death. These are the factors leading
to the trial of Jesus before Pontus Pilate.
A generation later Jerusalem was destroyed and decades after that, the Gospel writers wrote with
benefit of hindsight which saw Jesus’ trial as the prelude to his resurrection. They wrote about
their Lord, Jesus Christ, addressing a gentile church. They were eager to excuse the Roman
authorities for Jesus’ death, as the inheritors of that government were now prospects for
conversion. So Pontus Pilate, who was known as a ruthless and insensitive administrator, is
portrait in the Gospels as a bemused bureaucrat – the “Jews”, the population of the city are seen
as a single vociferous crowd of Jerusalem. The order of the Jewish council, described in the
Gospels, describes the council after Jerusalem’s fall, known from Jewish records, not of the time
of Jesus.
Today, accumulated ages of opinion stand between us and the Gospel writers’ accounts of the
trial. Each of the churches too, has created their own version of Jesus; often he is not seen as a
man, but as a being whose life was a series of moral parables and holy lessons. The man in the
Gospels who barely defends himself against his accusers and prompts from Pontius Pilate the
question “what is truth?” stands somewhere between all these hopes and dreams and
apprehensions.
The four Gospels share three hundred and sixty events that can be grouped into two headings:
Jesus’ teachings and incidents from his life. The different Gospels often show variations in the
order of the same stories. There is no way of knowing how much times passes between the
narrative of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, “Palm Sunday”, and the arrest and crucifixion. There is
no development of his thoughts; his words are described as a largely unrelated succession of
teachings – stories that grew up around the person of Jesus.

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Many of the Gospel stories are designed to show how Jesus’ life fulfilled the Messianic
predictions of Hebrew Prophets. The use of ancient archetypes to explain contemporary events
was common in ancient Israel. Just as the Patriarch Jacob had wrestled with an angel, had been
wounded, then changed his name and founded a nation, so also Soul had a vision on the road to
Damascus, changed his name to Paul and preached a new faith. These were familiar ways in
biblical Palestine, and the Gospel writers who took many of their stories about Jesus’ life and
related them to ancient prophesies and so fortified their belief that Jesus had been the Messiah to
fulfill ancient predictions. To do otherwise would have been historically incorrect and
sacrilegious. Jesus must be born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem with a star in the night sky
over his stable because the Prophets told how the Messiah will be born. Similarly, Luke’s
account of the circumstances of Jesus’ birth was at the time of Emperor Augustus decree for
registration throughout the Roman world (Luke 2:1) is inaccurate historical fiction, introduced to
enable the Messiah to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the Prophet’s words. Matthew’s lengthy
genealogy includes some fantastic ancestors; Tamar, for example, whose children were born of
incest, Bathsheba whose offspring was born of adultery: illustrating Jesus’ illegitimacy and
provide extraordinary and miraculous antecedents to him, doesn’t contribute to understanding of
Jesus.
Many details in the Gospels, both historical and topographical, are circumstantially correct.
Sometimes the story seems odd, like the case when Jesus asserts that he was only sent to the
“lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24), and then describes some gentile neighbors
as “dogs”, an insult in the East still considered highly offensive. Jesus way to the cross and the
crucifixion at Calvary (place of the Scull) related a reality of immediate truth. The act of Jesus’
crucifixion was extremely degrading death in the Roman Empire, worse than decapitation,
burning or exposure to wild beasts. It was rarely used on anyone but the poor and enslaved and
only for such crimes as spying, desertion, rebellion and forgery. Traditionally it was the fate of
all slaves who injured and/or betrayed their masters. It was not until the third century that Jesus’
cross of execution became a common symbol of the Christian faith.
Gospel Beginnings from Archaeology
The oldest examples of the Gospels yet discovered came from the ancient sand-bound towns at
the edge of the Sahara desert in Egypt – from the Hellenistic cities in the large oasis Fayuum and
ancient monasteries at the desert’s edge along the river Nile. In the 1880s and 1890s
archaeologists traversed the Nile Delta making rough excavations and crude plans of the ancient
cities, which largely disappeared thousands of years ago. They found Greek and Roman
antiquities and fragments of every conceivable kind of text; from ancient bureaucratic writings,
master pieces of Greek and Roman playwrights and philosophers, written on papyrus; rather than
long scrolls favored by both Jewish and classical scribes. And also parts of the Gospel of John,
dated at AD 130, by the style of its handwriting part of a small booklet bound with strings. It
confirms the accuracy of later versions of modern Bibles. Dozen or so slightly later Gospels also
came from Egypt; from a single ancient library, perhaps a Christian meeting-home or early
church. These Hellenistic desert cities had been established in Egypt as commercial enterprises
part of huge irrigation and farming schemes that thrived for centuries on the Egyptian oases until
the fields salted up and became useless. From state officials to workmen and slaves, the people
of these cities were bound together in a close bureaucratic organization that carefully extracted
the maximum it could from the land and the peasants. They formed a Hellenistic microcosm, a
mixture of Egyptian, Greek and Jewish cultures set side by side, sometimes with an Egyptian-
Style temple at the center that housed hybrid Greek gods; inherently also a sandy Greek “agora”

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and modern bathhouses for aspiring Hellenes. Hellenistic Egyptians lived in these brand-new
cities, and they wrote and read the oldest Gospels that we have today. These Egyptian Gospel
texts were written by clerks and businessmen, who usually wrote only of their work and family
affairs; who now copied out these Christian texts in their spare time for their personal use, not for
ritual, but for reading. They were written in the convenient notebooks, the “codices” usually used
by merchants. Paul also used notebooks (2 Timothy 4:13). They did not limit their activity to the
Four Gospels; other ancient and fragmentary documents record unknown “Sayings of Jesus”,
proved to be “The Gospel of Thomas”.
Antioch was one of the largest cities in the world at the time of Jesus. It was also close to
Jerusalem. Today the ancient city and its port have long been silted up by the river and buried by
ten meters of mud. Great Antioch was one of sixteen similar cities built by the Syrian dynasty
founded by one of Alexander’s general. After Olympia in Greece, Antioch had the most famous
Games in the world, and legendary chariot races. Antioch had a three kilometer long main street,
the first to be paved with marble, donated by the admiring King Herod of Judea. The main street
was lined by great markets, backed by merchant houses and city temples. Titus came here after
the destruction of Judea and the burning of Jerusalem, and erected an altar inscribed “from the
spoils of Judea”. Jews had lived in Antioch since its beginning and prospered with the city.
Rabbis from Jerusalem visited the city regularly to collect tithes and to attend the court of the
Roman governors of Syria. These close connections with Jerusalem made it inevitable that
Antioch would be among the first cities to receive the Christian missionaries when they started to
move thru the Roman East after the death of Jesus. The Book of Acts tells us that Paul, Peter
and many others of the early preachers went to Antioch. Antioch was the first city to reach out to
the gentile, imperial world and on to the big cities of the Roman Empire. We learn this only from
the Book of Acts and later church traditions. The Four Gospels were written several generations
after Christ. The earliest church engaged in word-of-mouth preaching rather than composition of
written texts. They also reflect the needs of the audience for whom they were written, and the
witnesses of Christianity around the Mediterranean in the first and second centuries.
John’s Gospel developed in Antioch and the Gospels of Mark and Luke are directly linked to the
city by early church historians. Luke was the secretary of Paul and he also wrote the Book of
Acts, which is a direct continuation of his gospel. Just as Hellenism itself was international, so
was Christianity. The Four Gospels are not the writings of four men, but are the product of
different traditions and different churches, that had accumulated many of the same stories of
Jesus and his life. Careful analyses in the nineteenth century conclude that Mark’s Gospel was
the basis for both Matthew and Luke, and Mark may even have known Jesus. John’s Gospel is
indeed different; with more abstract expressions and intellectual beauty of ancient Middle
Eastern theologies, they seem to inhabit the same world as Paul’s Epistles, and both are
addressed to an educated, middle-class Hellenistic audience. It is still confusing as to who “John”
was; the Gospel, the Letters and the Book of Revelation - are so different in style that it was most
probably not written by the same person.
Rome was the center of the Empire; of politics, business and unlimited opportunities. As the
people of the Empire and the surrounding countries came to Rome also, they brought their
cultures with them; and slowly eroded the public structures of Roman society, of the high sense
of honor that fueled the system and built an empire. The cult of Mithras from distant Persia was
taken up with great enthusiasm by the Roman legions. Eastern religions, Christianity among
them, were attracting support at all levels of society. Ancient foreign faiths quickly became
urban hybrid sects. Often influenced by Hellenized versions of local religions, sects created their

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own rites and lurid, savage and frequently orgiastic rituals thru which it was claimed, one could
gain self-awareness and ultimate truth. In the Roman basilica of Porta Maggiore, the stuccoed
vaults and arches indicate a place of worship, showing elegant poses with gestures on walls and
ceiling, with outstretched hands as an attitude of prayer. Many of the strange sects held Persian,
even Indian, conceptions of the world: universes of two oppositions, dualism of goodness and
sin, of light and darkness, of god and the devil, opposing forces in creative tension. The powers
of darkness controlled man’s world, light and intellect were the opponents. They saw the
organized Christian church to be made by the devil to prevent true faith. Some underground sects
aimed for perfection, aided by eating magical food. Paul in his Epistles clearly defined the
differences between sacred and profane love - to many Hellenistic Christians these differences
were not clear.
There were also pious and learned men with different views of Jesus and of God. They preached
as confidently as did Paul, who also had never seen Jesus, and felt sure of their understanding of
the true religion; even to the extend of disagreeing with some of Jesus’ disciples. They wrote the
oldest known Christian texts of the New Testament, some were writing mystical narratives,
poems, stories, and abstract speculations; they saw their faith in terms of the culture they came
from. By the second century there were more than a dozen gospels circulating, along with a
whole library of other texts. These included letters of Jesus to foreign kings, letters of Paul to
Aristotle, histories of disciples and many other characters in Jesus’ life and times. These were all
outlawed by the later church, but many survived in Christianity to become secret sources of
mystic Christian knowledge. Their influence on Christian art, literature, and symbolism of
Christian ritual go back to these forgotten and once forbidden sects. Many of these writings were
made in eastern cities like Antioch, Ephesus and Alexandria, alongside their Christianity, they
also reflected local believes and ways of thinking. Since the beginning of civilization many
eastern religions had held gods who died and then were resurrected, gods like Jesus, were the
underlying powers that provided nature’s annual fertility. Christians born in such cultures easily
joined Jesus to gods like Osiris, god of the rising of rivers and the sprouting of seeds. In Egypt
the ancient “ankh” sign, a hieroglyphic sign for life, became Christ’s cross, the sign of lives
reborn. And like Christ, Persia’s Mithras had been born in a cave and from there he sent his light
to the world. Some saw in Christ’s promise of salvation and redemption an immediate release
from the sins of the world, and freedom that could be acted out in the age-old rites of orgiastic
rituals and bacchanalia. God’s universal forgiveness as preached by Jesus was the key to
“individual” salvation; so the Gnostics believed that the church itself was a device of the devil
made to keep man from God and from realizing his true nature. Many groups practiced secret
faiths; they called themselves “knowers” or Gnostics. They alone, they felt, held the keys of the
universe. They might have seen Jesus Christ as an enlightened teacher or maybe one of many a
wise man, a magi. Stories of his secret life were woven into Gospel narratives. Like Mithraism,
these sects operated across the social fabric on society, and penetrated different faiths as well. In
the first and second centuries they were a strong part of the identity of the Christian church.
At that time there was no orthodoxy yet, it was defined later in arguments against many of the
Gnostic sects. There was a multiplicity of churches, of teachings, of holy books; a world with no
clear Christian creed, no single body of accepted truth and no New Testament. The Book of Acts
record debates among the Apostles whether or not Jesus’ message should be preached to the
gentiles at all. Many of Paul’s letters deal with the new gentile churches should be obliged to
keep the Jewish Law as part of the Christian faith.
In the mid-second century a bishop’s son, a wealthy ship owner from Asia Minor named

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Marcion, made the oldest-known list of Christian books – a list of contents for a New Testament.
Marcion preached a Christianity that denied all Jewish connections with Jesus and with the Old
Testament. Jesus, Marcion believed, had not been born but had sprung, like Zeus, fully grown
from God. This Jesus was set down on earth to preach a ministry of redemption; he offered a
God who, unlike capricious and cruel Jehovah, was primarily a God of Love. Marcion thought
that all Jewish connections with God had been inspired by the devil and elaborated by sinful
men. Marcion’s non-Jewish Bible is rather short, some of Paul’s letters and just one Gospel,
basically Luke’s but carefully abbreviated to exclude all mention of the Jews. A little later, the
church adopted Marcion’s notion of defining orthodoxy by listing a sacred canon of texts – the
Christian Bible – and then attacking those who would disagree or alter it. A few years after
Marcion’s works, a Roman document written about AD 170, called the Muratorian Cannon;
written in rough Latin listed four Gospels including Luke and John and probably that of Mark,
also lists the majority of the New Testament texts. It rejects Marcion’s writings.
Irenaeus (c.AD 120 – c.200) of Lyon
In the mid-second century Christian missionaries from the churches of Asia Minor came to the
town of Lyon in Gaul (today France). Lyon was founded in AD 43 on orders by the Roman
Senate as a new city for retired legionaries. The splendid hillside city had theaters, public squares
and large courtyards, and a huge temple for the eastern goddess Cybele. Here also came the
followers of the Persian Mithras. The city also became the region’s capital. Lyon’s first Christian
Bishop, Pothinus, had come from Smyrna with Irenaeus, an assistant, and learned the barbaric
local language so they could preach the word of God to the Gauls.
By Pothinus’ day official Roman attitudes toward the Christian church had changed form general
disinterest to erratic persecution, and many Christians now faced such capricious torments with
passive courage. Their new faith and new–found community gave them strength that often
preferred death to apostasy. The exclusive Christian God could not recognize the Emperor’s
divinity; in the eyes of the imperial administration this was clearly a political confrontation.
Many provincial administrators also had difficulties with these Christian groups, who bound
themselves by oaths not to steal, not to commit adultery or lie, and then eat together. In the early
second century Pliny the Younger, governor in the Asia Minor province of Bithynia, wrote
directly to Emperor Trojan; reported women called “deaconesses with perverse and extravagant
superstitions”. Emperor Trojan interviewed Bishop Ignatius of Antioch who told this earthly
divinity that he was mistaken, Ignatius was then taken to Rome in chains and thrown to wild
beasts in a public stadium. Ignatius’ friend Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, too, was later martyred
and burned in the city’s amphitheater. Twenty years later, Pothinus was arrested with a group of
Christians and the old man was so badly beaten during an audience with the city governor that he
died a few days later in a prison cell. Many other Christians were publicly tortured to death in the
Lyon amphitheater, and were among the first martyrs of Western Europe. And the gnostic
Christians showed themselves just as steadfast as Pothinus’ congregation.
Irenaeus went to Rome appealing thru the office of the Roman church for the stop of the
persecution of the Lyon church. In Rome he also found all manner of different cells and sects, so
different from the traditional teachings of the Asia Minor church; and turned against them as
against enemies. Irenaeus attacked the gnostic sects in a lengthy series of writings, first
describing the principles and rituals of each heresy and then attacking them with “common-
sense” theology, insinuations and ridicule. And in the course of this vast polemic, almost
inadvertently, Irenaeus also laid out the orthodoxies of the Christian church, its faith, its
preaching and the books that it held as sacred authority. His popular work “Against the Heresies”

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have been found thruout the Eastern world. He gave a pedigree of authenticity to his beliefs and
to the scriptures, and also to the church itself, showing the origins and succession of the Bishops
of Rome and of other churches also. The New Testament he says, had long been authenticated by
the use of them by the church fathers gone before; like Ignatius and Polycarp and the earliest
generation, “those who had seen the Lord”. Irenaeus’ book became the yardstick of major
heresies and then their refutation, and the starting-point of later inquisitions; and in an inverted
way, became a definition of the orthodox faith.
Irenaeus’ writings also moved the church and its holy texts into a new era: Paul’s end-time was
indefinitely postponed; and his vision of the “future” of the church. He saw that gnosticism was a
holy anarchy, a closed sectarian faith built for a few initiates, not for the mass of the Empire’s
people. He saw “his” church as the true church, a universal church and inevitably the faith of the
Empire itself. That is the reason he laid out the precise descent of the Roman Bishops, he knew
where the seat of real power lay; in Rome the capital city of the Empire, and one God was the
single supreme universal power. The order of heaven was to be mirrored by the earthly order.
Emperor Octavian Augustus (63BC-AD14).
His parents came from prosperous families, he was born near Rome. Julius Cesar was his great
uncle, who also adopted him and then launched him in public life at an early age. Octavian was
18 years old when Julius Caesar was murdered. Caesar identified him as his chief personal heir.
He slowly and carefully integrated himself with the city populace, the Senate and Caesar’s
troops; he faced innumerable political, economic and military challenges, and won. He was the
greatest Roman emperor who established a constitutional government, he and his family were
worshipped for the priceless gift of peace while he was the supreme ruler, when he died the
Senate pronounced him divine.
Emperor Diocletian (AD245-316)
He was born of very poor parents in Dalmatia. He lived most of his life in military camps. He
was one of the army chiefs who joined emperor Carinus against the Persians. When the emperor
was killed, Diocletian was acclaimed emperor by his soldiers, in 285. He established an efficient
government under his military dictatorship; he recognized that the empire was too big to be ruled
by one man so he divided it into two halves, east and west, to be ruled by two rulers called
“Augustii”; each one also had a deputy Caesar who would be the successor for the senior partner;
governed by officials called “vicarii”. He declared himself divine while he was still alive.
On May 1, 305 Diocletian and his fellow “Augustii” resigned and retired to their individual
palaces; and the two Caesars became the next Emperors. Fighting broke out soon between
the successors. Diocletian’s palace was built in his home town Split in Dalmatia (now in Croatia)
between 295-305.
On his palace grounds Diocletian had also built a great mausoleum and a Temple dedicated to
Jupiter- the father of gods. Syrian architects placed Roman arches high on Corinthian
columns, forming triumphant arches, later repeated in thousands of Christian churches.
Diocletian and his party conducted sacrifices in the Temple and in his mausoleum, where he was
worshipped as Jupiter. There Diocletian would sit on the imperial throne, with orb and scepter,
clothed in silks, pearls and golden fabrics, with a halo of lighted torches about his head,
perfumed with precious incense and attended by priests dressed in rich robes of late Roman
courtiers. Shouts of praise and hymns issued by the assembly, incense, the most ancient of
medium to join heaven and earth, men and gods together, joined around the throne. Such rituals
would be displayed in Christian churches in years later. The ancient Middle Eastern religions,
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populations into a single coherent mass, were obvious models. The city gods of Rome had not
been large enough to encompass the huge Empire. There was also a tendency to monotheism;
Diocletian’s edicts refer to “God” as a single deity.
Diocletian did not tolerate any foreign religions such as Mithraism and Christianity, he was the
last and most violent persecutor of Christians.
Rising from the battles of the “Augustii” and the “Caesarii” after Diocletian, the new emperor
Constantine (280-337) came to power. His father was an army officer, who became a Caesar of
the Western Empire in 293. Constantine grew up in the Diocletian court. Constantine joined his
father in a campaign in Britain in 305. When his father died, the troops of the northern legions
proclaimed Constantine an “Augustus” in 306 at the age of twenty-one. A few years later he
entered Rome in triumph after defeating and killing another emperor outside the city. Before that
battle Constantine told his army he had a dream in which he was promised victory if they fought
on that day under the sign of the cross and so ordered his troops to paint Christian monograms on
their shields. But the coins struck in celebration of this great victory were dedicated to legion’s
perennial favorite, the sun god Sol Invictus. After the victory the two emperors, Constantine in
the west and Licinius in the east, met in council in Milan, and agreed, among other things, to stop
persecuting Christians, which had all but ceased by that time anyway. Constantine had already
been involved in the politics of the church for some time, hearing disputes and receiving church
petitions. Twelve years after the Milan conference Constantine defeated and killed Licinius for
Christian persecution in the East. Then in 325 he convened the first general council of the
Christian church at Nicaea in Western Asia Minor. Constantine was unpopular in Rome. His
huge new Empire was extremely stressed, divided by different faiths and political allegiances.
Even the Christians were divided on matters of doctrine. Churches of North Africa split from
Rome, the Eastern church split north from south. The church comprised only about ten percent of
the population- that the Emperor now convened almost as a parliament for his new Empire.
Constantine would use the Christian bishops to broadcast his new rule and order, both temporal
and spiritual, thruout the Empire. The Council of Nicaea was a council of church leaders brought
from the four corners of the ancient world, from Spain to Persia, from North Africa to northern
France, from Egypt, Syria, Armenia and Palestine. Constantine established and controlled this
gathering, the first ecumenical conference carefully creating the first image of Christianity. And
here the enthroned Empero1zr and his bishops appeard as the prototype of Western government,
the dual order of temporal and spiritual power first received sanction. At the center of this new
Christian empire stood the holy Books of the Bible.
The Council of Constantine was related to a smaller council called by eastern bishops to settle a
question of heresy. In the letter of invitation to his imperial convocation Constantine says: ”It
was formerly agreed that the Synod of Bishops should meet at Ancyra of Galatia, but, it has
seemed to us on many accounts, that it would be as well for a Synod to assemble at Nicaea, a city
of Bithynia, both because the Bishops from Italy and the rest of the countries of Europe are
coming, and because of the excellent temperature of the air, and in order that I may be present as
a spectator and participator in those things that will be done…” There was no mention of the
intended excommunications for the purpose of the Ancyra conference. His desire was for unity,
not further confrontation. The bishops were summoned not by contentious churchmen but by the
Emperor himself; they would travel under HIS order to HIS conference to be held at HIS chosen
location, and Nicaea was just twenty miles from the palace of the executed Licinius in whose
apartment Constantine was living. So the Emperor filled the church council meeting with his
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The chief results of the Council proceedings were a creed of faith called the Nicene Creed and a
list of twenty statements that lay down the rules of behavior for the clergy. The main ones were:
“excessive” interests, the normal rate in the Roman Empire was twelve percent, presumably over
that; rules of order for standing and sitting during church services; re-admittance into the Church
individuals who had broken from the faith during the persecution: excluding clergy who
emasculated themselves; the right of clergy to marry.
As for the Creed, it represents a compromise, guided by Constantine himself, intended to
reconcile two factions that were threatening to divide the Eastern church. What Constantine
sought in all this was a pre-eminent position for his imperial self. Constantine wanted HIS
Imperium to resemble the order of heaven; with the role of the emperor echoing the role of God
in heaven. Christ’s birthday was fixed on December 25, took over the feast day of an earlier
favored deity of Constantine, Sol Invictus. In all this the church and its officers became a vital
part of the earthly hierarchy, the organization thru which the people reach God. And at the top of
the worldly pyramid of power stood Constantine, the holy emperor, whose earthly order reflected
that of Heaven itself. In later letters and decrees, Constantine continually reminded his subjects
that these sacred definitions were drawn up by “three hundred bishops remarkable for their
shrewdness”. In return for imperial acceptance of the bishops and their faith, the Council
validated the emperor’s earthly rule, the sanctity of which Constantine, raised at Diocletian’s
court, had not doubted. In his desire for church unity, Constantine went out of his way to
assimilate the heretics. The more vocal heretics were exiled only after personal interviews and a
barrage of letters.
As several predecessors had done, Constantine decided to build a new capital to take the place of
Rome, his Christian city. Located in the ancient Greek city Byzantium; on the strait of Bosporus
that separates Asia and Europe. The eastern most tip of Europe facing toward Asia, and set
between the two rivers that formed the Empire’s most vital borders; the Danube to the north and
the Euphrates to the east. The new capital’s foundation ceremonies were conducted on May 11,
330. Constantine’s elaborate ceremonies included both traditional pagan rites and Christian
rituals, with prayers, sacrifices and burials of rich ancient images from Zeus and the burning city
of Troy; also fragments of Jesus’ cross from Golgotha. A blackened column is still standing that
once supported a colossal statue of Apollo. The center of Constantinople was the racing stadium
Hippodrome, and Constantinople became the center of the Eastern Roman Empire - the
Byzantine world. Constantine decorated his city with antiques from all over the Empire: bronze
horses of Lysippus already some six hundred years old; still standing a huge bronze column of
three twisted snakes, an offering made to Apollo in Delphi in 479 BC, in thanksgiving for a
Greek victory; a great granite shaft still standing already two thousand years old when
Constantine removed it from Egyptian Thebes. On the base are scenes of the Emperor Theodoris
and his court having a day at the races half a century after Constantine’s death. The humans
shown in the later scenes are no longer classical human figures of individual dignity, but blocks
of figures pressed into thin envelopes of space. The Emperor is the largest figure, with the
flanking courtiers reduced in size according to political importance. This reflected the harder life
of the empires of Diocletian and Constantine with the great expansion of slavery and poverty.
These emperors and their court seem far from Western Christendom. Constantine came with a
way to connect the God of Haven with the Empire on Earth, he constructed imperial churches:
across the seven hills of Constantinople, thru the ancient city of Rome and thruout the empire.
His most remarkable feat, he built the elaborate architectural ceremonial in the eastern province
of Palestine, the land of Jesus Christ. Constantine the great collector of antiquities and relics,

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made this land itself into a relic, a literary landscape, a Holy Land.
In Constantine’s day, Jerusalem was a typical small Hellenistic town, little changed since the
days when Emperor Hadrian had established the Roman city Aelia Capitolina in the ruins of the
Israelite capital two centuries before. One day each year a delegation of Jews was allowed to
anoint the venerable rock that marked the site of the Temple, and mourn it loss. Over the place
where Christians believed the tomb of Jesus had once stood, was a large temple dedicated by
Emperor Hadrian to Jupiter and Aphrodite. After the Council of Nicaea, Constantine asked
Marcarius, the Bishop of Jerusalem, to make arrangements for the construction of the finest
basilica, including a gilded roof. And Jupiter’s temple “the gloomy shrine of idols dedicated to
the impure demon Aphrodite” was taken down to its lowest foundation. At that time
Constantine’s aged mother, the Empress Helena, came to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, like ever-
increasing numbers of Christians from all over the Empire. Aided by the equally aged Bishop
Marcarius, using prayers, dreams and diligent questioning, Helena discovered the True Cross of
Jesus, with Pilate’s wooden label still beside it with two nails. These relics stand as testaments to
the direct link between heaven and earth, the tangible symbols of the grace of God on earth. The
role that Constantine saw as emperor was the link between the two worlds, human and heavenly.
This role would be inherited, along with the holy relics, by all the kings of Christendom. During
her pilgrimage Empress Helena dedicated two other churches in Palestine, one on the Mount of
Olives at the site of Christ’s Ascension into heaven, and one where he was born at Bethlehem.
These three locations memorialized some of the most fundamental passages of the Nicene Creed.
The Imperial Bible
Constantine died in 337, in the 32nd year of his reign, 20 years after the Counil of Nicaea, and 13
years after the dedication of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. From his letters and edicts his
self image is that of an Old Testament monarch and prophet; and a New Testament apostle; a
chosen vessel, a tool of God. And naturally, Constantine saw all his opponents as evil, anti-
Christian, enemies. He planned his own tomb, one of thirteen monuments, one for each Apostle
with Constantine as the thirteenth apostle, lying at the center of the cross that formed the
Church’s ground plan.
Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea compiled extensive early church records into the Ten Books of his
“Storia Ecclesiastica” (312-324), and also served as Constantine’s biographist. He provided the
first complete surviving list of the Christian Bible, including the “New and Old” Testaments of
Irenaeus (120-200). He also discussed other texts which he called “doubtful ones”, these were
finally excluded from the sacred canon in the half century after his death. Eusebius also records
how he was commanded by Constantine to manufacture fifty bibles for the churches of
Constantinople. Constantine specified that these bibles be prepared on vellum (animal skins,
from 500 animals), easy to read, conveniently portable, by professional scribes with exact
understanding of the craft, to be prepared as quickly as possible, and to commandeer two public
carriages for their transport. The famous and most beautiful “Codex Sinaiticus” is likely to be
one of these surviving bibles. Eusebius was the holder of the famous library of the Bishopric of
Caesarea that had been the center of Bible studies for over a century. Origen, the great
theologian, had settled there after fleeing from a jealous Bishop of Alexandria in 231. Origen
compiled different versions of the Old Testament, his huge book was known as the “Hexapala”,
six different versions of the Old Testament written out side by side. The first columns held the
Hebrew text, and were followed by five Greek versions. Four made anciently by Hellenized Jews
and the final version by Origen himself that he carefully compiled, based on all of the other
versions. He died an old man in 254 after torture, during persecutions in Caesarea. His student

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Pamphilius died a similar death in Caesarea sixty years later. Eusebius was imprisoned as a
young man with Pamphilius and even changed his name to “Eusebius (son) of Pamphilius”.
Emperor Julian (331 Constantinoples-363 Mesopotamia), Emperor 361-363, was a nephew of
Constantine; he was also a noted scholar and military leader. With continuing succession
conflicts his father and elder brother were killed, Julian was proclaimed emperor by his troops.
In his youth he was educated in Italy and Greece; and after his studies in Ephesus and later in
Athens, he had a deep love for Hellenic culture; usual in his contemporary educated society. He
proclaimed to rule as philosopher, on the model of Marcus Aurelius (121-180). In 361 Julian
proclaimed freedom of worship for all religions. Differences soon arose between Christianity and
paganism; he favored the later and instituted animal sacrifices and sun worshipping. He died in
an unsuccessful battle with the Persians, serving as emperor only twenty months. The real threat
to the Empire were the Asian tribesmen on the move to the west, when they dislodged the Gothic
tribes of eastern Europe; the Goths were reluctantly accommodated in the eastern part of the
Empire. One million of whom had settled in Dacia (modern Romania) with consent of the
emperor at Constantinople. Twenty years later these Goths were coming south into Greece
destroying Athens, and later moved on to Italy. These barbarians who would destroy the Western
Empire were of the faith which Julian despised, they were Christians. The Gothic tribesmen
marched with Bibles at their head, and when they came to Rome and dealt with the senators, who
were mostly pagans. Later the tribal armies ejected the priests from Hippo, the city of St.
Augustine in North Africa, because they considered them to be heretics. But the Christian
Empire had condemned the beliefs of the Goths since the Council of Nicaea; everyone knew that
it was the tribesmen who were heretical.
The Goths became Christians when they settled in Dacia, thru the efforts of their Bishop Ulphilas
(c. 300) who received his education at the court of a bishop in Constantinople; a schismatic
bishop who would pass on his heresies to the barbarian tribes. He followed the teachings of
Arius (c. 250-336) who was an ascetical and moral leader of the Christian community in
Alexandria; who described the descending power of God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son of God
and then God the Holy Spirit; the Orthodox Catholicism position was that the god head
comprised “coequal and coeternal” members. Ulphilas translated the Bible that the tribesmen
carried into Greece and Italy. Later the Vandals carried the Bible with them as they roamed, and
visited destruction and fire in France and Spain, and destroyed imperial North Africa. Ulphilas
devised a new script for this non-literal people, and invented words to hold the Bible ideas. He
rendered it from the original Greek. Rare fragment of the fifth-century text known as “Codex
Gissensis”, a bilingual Latin-Gothic Bible have been found in Egypt, and others in Italy and
Germany. His translation is word for word accurate and reverent. The theological wrangling
concerned the nature of the Holy Trinity and weather the Father was greater than the Son.
Orthodoxy was as much related to the exercise of power on earth as it was with the court of
heaven.
Jerome (c.347-c.420) and the Roman Bible
When the gothic tribes struck into Greece, the province was under dispute between the Western
Emperor at Rome and the Eastern Emperor at Constantinople. The real power rested with the
Eastern Emperors. Slowly an individual Western church – a Latin church was developing; set
firmly in the ancient tradition of patrician bureaucracy, and was exercising a magisterial control
over their congregations, and even Eastern churches began looking westward for guidance in
ecclesiastical disputes. Rome was still far from the center of faith. The Bishop of Rome did not
attend the Council of Nicaea; Rome was no longer the center of the Western Empire, the

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government was moved north to face the barbarian threats directly. The literary heart of the faith
for the Christian Bible was written in Greek, and the majority of church writings also. Yet Latin
was the age-old traditional language of the Western empire and the language of its church also.
In this kind of a milieu Jerome was born in Dalmatia (now part of Slovenia), and died in
Bethlehem. He came from a well to do Christian family where his education started; and at age
12 he continued his education in Rome, becoming a serious scholar, enamored by Latin
literature, and also frequented the catacombs (subterranean cemeteries). Near the end of his
education in Rome he was baptized c. 369. The next twenty years he traveled and lived in
impermanent residences; at Trevis (now Tier in Germany) he was profoundly attracted to
monasticism. In 373 Jerome went on a trip East, reaching Antioch in 374 and stayed as a guest of
a priest Evagrius in Antioch. In mid-Lent 375 during a near-fatal illness he had a celebrated
dream (where he was accused of being a Ciceronian –rather than a Christian) so he made a vow
never again to read or possess pagan literature. In the same year Jerome began a search for inner
peace as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis. He spoke only Latin, here he was confronted with
Syriac and Greek. His response to temptation was incessant prayer and fasting. He learned
Hebrew from a Jewish convert, studied Greek, and had manuscripts copied for his library and his
friends, and carried a brisk correspondence. A crisis arrived in Chalcis involving ecclesiastical
and theological controversies, centering on episcopal succession, Trinitarian and christological
disputes. Jerome subsequently quit the desert and returned to Antioch. His host Evagrius won
Jerome over to the party of Bishop Paulinus (who was opposed by Basil, bishop of Caesarea);
since Jerome was now known as a significant scholar and monastic figure, Paulinus ordained
him. Jerome attended exegetical lectures of Apollinaris of Laodicea and visited the Nazarenes
(Jewish Christians) of Beroea to examine their copy of a Hebrew gospel. He met with Didymus
the Blind the celebrated biblical scholar of Alexandria. He also came to know many theologians
of Iconium at the Council of Constantinople in 381. He continued his pursuit of scriptural studies
until 382. Jerome translated 14 of Origen’s sermons on Old Testament books into Latin, and the
church historian Eusebius’ “Chronicon”.
The most decisive influence on Jerome’s later life was his return to Rome (382-385) as secretary
to Pope Damascus. There he pursued his scholarly work on the Bible and propagated the ascetic
life. When Pope Damascus was elected, a rival contested the papal throne and fierce battles took
place in the city’s streets. Barred from entering the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiori, Damascus’
supporters climbed onto the church roof, removed the heavy roof tiles and dropped them down
onto the rival congregation below. More than a hundred people died and the pretender fled.
Damascus commissioned Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin. He revised the Old Latin
versions of the Gospels on the basis of the best Greek at his command. Damascus did much to
reconcile the pagan noble families of Rome to Christianity. Jerome also held classes for a
monastery minded circle of noble Roman widows and virgins (including Paula and her
daughters). He taught them the Hebrew text of the Psalms, orally and in letters, he answered their
biblical problems and he wrote a defense of the perpetual virginity of Mary, Jesus’ mother (383),
and attacked views of the equality of virginity and marriage. His preaching in support of the
monastic life and his relationship with the ascetic community, his castigation of Roman clergy,
lax monks, and hypocritical virgins, and his correction of the gospel text raised such a storm of
criticism and slander, that after Damascus’ death in December 384 he left in August 385
“Babylon” (Rome) with bitter indignation and went on his way to the Holy Land never to return
again. Paula and her company of virgins also joined him on a pilgrimage thru Palestine and
monasteries in Egypt. In summer of 386 he settled in Bethlehem, and by 389 the saintly Paula

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and her daughter Eustochium joined him there also; they helped him build a monastery for men,
and a convent for women (under her supervision), and a hostel for pilgrims. There he lived
except for brief journeys until he died in 420. His first task was to finish the New Testament
translation from Greek, and then started the translation of the Old Testament from Greek and
checked it against the original Hebrew, then continued on directly from Hebrew; Paula also
helped him with biblical translations for which she learned Hebrew, she also helped with the
copious correspondence with people in North Africa, Gaul, Rome and Asia Minor. As Jerome
finished each Bible book, manuscripts were copied and sent around the Western Empire; he also
received lively criticism of his scholarship. He tried to answer with gentle reasoning and biblical
commentaries, and if that failed to impress his critics, he resorted with biting invectives. With the
translations he also wrote commentaries on points of scripture, including personal experiences of
his life. As Jerome and Augustine (354-430) did in their youth, the pagan Romans thought the
prose of the Christian Bible was barbaric, and were scornful of the strange, rough, Eastern
versions. Jerome’s Vulgate provided a text appropriate for sophisticated and intelligent Roman
taste, and lent weight to the primacy that the Roman church claimed for a struggling and
embattled church, it was a treasure beyond price.
In 410, six years after Jerome’s last translation of the Old Testament, Alaric’s Goths sacked
Rome; the city had withstood two sieges in the previous decade after they paid ransoms of 5,000
pounds of gold and 400 silk tunics, then the city was broke. Rome was still the center of the
world to Jerome, and to Augustine far away in North Africa and prompted Augustine to begin
his “The City of God”. In Bethlehem Jerome’s friend and helper, Paula died before him. Jerome
became blind and could work only by dictation; Eustochium helped him until she too died. And
all the while Jerome’s correspondents told him of the terrible progress of the barbarian tribes as
they moved thru Italy, Gaul and Spain and right across North Africa, and there in Bethlehem he
died, c.420. Jerome’s Latin Bible and Augustine’s flood of books became the Western church’s
bridge between the ancient classical world and the Christian faith of later ages.
Into the Dark
As the Western Empire died, empty cities with marble ruins in their centers remained. Slowly the
population formed separate and modest nations of small farms and savage armies. There was
little international trade and almost total illiteracy. Ironically as Christianity arrived in the west
the Empire started to dissolve. Even in Jerome’s day, Rome had long been abandoned by the
Western emperors, their courts moved first to Milan where Augustine (354-430) came from
North Africa to study and preach; and then to Ravenna, a marshy city in the delta of the river Po,
an unhealthy city to discourage all but the most organized invaders. The imperial palace now lies
under the modern city, unexcavated in the marshy soil. Many of the ancient buildings have
survived, including splendid court churches, some of the greatest treasures of Europe and the last
monuments of the Western Empire. They also show how Christianity and its book had already
transformed the hard art of pagan Rome. The famous Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (c.390-450)
was according to legend her burial place and that of the last Emperors of the West, her brother
and her son. Empress Galla was the daughter of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius I (347-395),
she had been brought up at Split in Diocletian’s huge palace, and was educated in the palace of
Constantinople. A beautiful young woman, who was carried off by Alaric (c.370-410) at the sack
of Rome in 410 and was married to one of Alaric’s sons at the Gothic capital at Narboune in
France. The young Queen then went to campaign in Spain with her husband, where he was
assassinated and she was led in chains by her husband’s killer. Ransomed by the Eastern
Emperors for 600,000 measures of wheat (the imprudent Goths were starving), lived again in

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Constantinople, having been exiled from Ravenna by her brother. Then she married again and
raised a Greek family, before invading Ravenna at the head of an Eastern army, virtually to rule
the West as Empress and regent for a quarter of a century up to her death in 450. The Huns
invaded Gaul in 451 and northern Italy in 452.
The dome of the Mausoleum of Galla Placida is completely different from Diocletian’s great
cold tomb at Split. The Ravenna dome is filled with heaven’s stars; a mosaic Christ sits in an
imperial arch a fresh-faced young Christ, a shepherd with blonde hair and a Greek nose. The
other mosaic is of a dead church deacon, St Lawrence, a martyr at Rome in the persecution, who
gave the treasures of the church to some of the poorest people of Rome. And higher up of the
dome by the side of St Lawrence is a scene of a bookcase holding four leather–bound books,
each one of them a Gospel. The symbols of the Four Evangelists hold up the central dome, the
very vault of heaven.
There is also another imperial dome, the tomb of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (454-526 Ravenna);
built seventy years after Galla Placidia’s mausoleum. It is an ominous tough little stone octagon,
part nomad, within the low dome, reminiscent of the yurts that his Gothic ancestors lived in. It
has small windows shaped like eastern crosses; on the underside of the dome is a huge four-
square cross, like the jeweled and golden cross that Constantine had placed on the Rock of
Calvary.
Odoacer (433-493 Ravenna) the German warrior entered with the Sciri into Italy in 470 and
joined the Roman army. He helped in the overthrow of the last Western Emperor Julius Nepos in
475. He was proclaimed king by his troops in 476, and was also supported by the Senate of
Rome.
Theodoric the Ostrogoth was appointed king of Italy by the Eastern Emperor Zeno in 488, who
ordered him to overthrow Odoacer. Theodoric invaded Italy in 489 and captured the whole
peninsula except Ravenna in 490, forcing Odoacer to take refuge in Ravenna. After a three year
siege the city surrendered, Theodoric then massacred Odoacer and his followers. The Goths were
settled in northern and central Italy. Theodoric put aside the skins or furs that Germanic rulers
usually wore, and dressed in the purple of emperors. Theodoric maintained peace in Italy, and
was never guilty of religious persecution. He brought some of Rome’s finest scholars and
diplomats to his court; a barbarian, who the scholars felt, might be made into a Roman emperor.
The prodigious scholar Boethius (c.470-524) came with several other senators to try to civilize
the northern tribesmen who now ruled Italy. Boethius advised the Gothic court about lutes and
water clocks and framing proper Christian laws for the Ostrogothic kingdom. Theodoric
published his “Edict”, a collection of 154 rules and regulations to be applied to the Goths and the
Romans; they were restatements in simple language of Roman laws, so the Goths were also
subject to Roman law. In his writings Boethius comments on Aristotle’s optimistic assertion that
knowledge invariably increases: but in his time the problem was on how to preserve knowledge.
At the end of Theodoric‘s long reign, he became ever more suspicious and frightened by such
cultivated Romans, and had Boethius imprisoned and then murdered in 524. In jail under
sentence of death, Boethius wrote “The Consolation of Philosophy”, perhaps the finest of all
such prison books, in which he meditates on fame, fate and destiny. Though a Christian who
wrote commentaries on religious themes; Boethius the old aristocrat focused in his last days on
Classical education. His “The Consolation of Philosophy” became one of the most influential
books of the Christian Middle Ages, affecting Dante, Petrarch; and in England King Alfred,
Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I all translated it. After Theodoric’s death in 526 the Western
Empire descended into greater poverty, local wars and illiteracy. In 540 the armies of the Eastern

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Emperor entered Ravenna after a long and bloody campaign up thru Italy. The Gothic Empire
was finished and Cassiodorus (490-585), the chief minister, left the north for his home town in
the south of Calabria where he founded a religious community, an academy of learning where
monks studied, copied and translated classical texts, both pagan and Christian. In this beautiful
retreat called “Vivarium” (L, park, preserve), all the letters and decrees which he and his fellow
senators had composed for the Gothic kings with such clarity and humanity were collected and
edited; later to become the models for chancelleries of medieval Europe. The most important
undertaking was the collection and revision of the Latin Bible, the book that would eventually
supply re-born Europe with its model of earth and heaven, government, dignity and morality. All
texts were individually hand-written, it was extremely easy for the copyists working in the
scriptoria to misread or misquote as they wrote. Thru generations of such errors, mistakes, even
of spelling or of punctuation, could slowly deform the words of the text. Scribes copying the
Jewish Bible were obligated under Holy Law to use only the finest materials for their work and
perfect exemplars from which to make their copy. No such regulation had been pressed on the
Christian churches, and by Cassiodorus’ day there were endless variations and versions of Latin
Bible texts in circulation, including several different versions of Jerome’s great Vulgate, the
Bible texts were not yet in a single set of covers. One of the tasks of Cassiodorus and his monks
was the purification of the Latin Bible and to produce a fine, clear text in a single book. All
spellings were regulated and the Bible’s Latin grammar too, even Jerome’s inconsistencies. The
monks consulted the Greek original and the works of early Christian writers. The Bible was then
divided into chapters, each with a new title, and each of the chapters was divided into verses with
every phrase and sentence broken down further by special spacings and punctuations. Following
a system that Jerome had sometimes used, the result was the standard Jerome Vulgate. It became
the one-volume European Latin Bible known as the “Codex Grandior”. By this time most of
Europe retreated into farming and fighting, with learning and books found only in isolated
monasteries, often at the edge of the old Empire. One of the oldest surviving one-volume Latin
Bibles the “Codex Amiatinus” was made about 700 at the monastery of Jarrow in
Northcumberland (northern England) by monks in Bede’s (c.672-735) scriptorium, this was
probably copied from a “Codex Grandior” from Cassiodorus’ Vivarium. The Jarrow monastery
was founded around 665 by a Northumbrian nobleman Abbot Benedict Biscop trained by the
monastic order of St Benedict (c.480-c.547) in the south of France, who made frequent trips to
Rome. A text of some two thousand pages contains original illustrations from Cassiodorus’
Bible; with illustrations of the Four Evangelists and the Old Testament Ezra in his library, shown
with northern scenery. This required several thousand hours of work, the labor of seven scribes,
and consumed the skins of some five hundred animals. There was also an older monastery some
eighty km up the coast of Jarrow on the island of Lindisfarne, from an older Irish tradition of
monasticism, from the times of Roman missionaries, when SE England was part of the Roman
Empire. The monks there also made copies from the Vulgate of Cassiodorus for their Gospels,
decorated with gold, silver and precious stones, styled with Anglo-Saxon traditions, and even
older Central Asian influence.
Constantinople: The Devine Wisdom
The West was quietly sinking into its dark age, the Eastern Empire continued brightly on its way.
In Constantinople classical texts both pagan and Christian were widely read. The abstractions of
the Greek theologians were debated by a fiery and literate population, as interested in theology as
chariot races in the hippodrome. Constantine’s successors greatly enlarged the city, surrounded
by huge new walls and Roman fortresses to keep the enemies of the Empire at bay for a thousand

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years, and to fight their perennial enemies – the Persians, the Bulgars, the Russians, the Goths,
the Arabs and the Crusaders from the West. Constantine’s classical Christian city played out this
millennium of Christian history surrounded by a large protecting empire, sometimes by the
enemy at the gate. God himself delivered up the final crowning glory for classical literature, the
New Testament in Greek, the city’s own tongue. Constantine’s scholars studied and copied all
the ancient texts and even decorated them with classical illuminations. In this city, the classical
past was part of the present, no destruction, no breakdown of the ancient wall. Constantinople’s
second name was Byzantium, the Greek name of the small town that Constantine made into
Constantinople. Splendid oratory, the Roman games, the practice of fine art and the subtle court
diplomacy continued on. In the sixth century a series of Bible books were prepared in
Constantinople. Their pages, stained with the imperial purple, held a carefully corrected version
of the original Greek texts; these texts are still used in the Eastern Church to this day. Their rare
pages are also the oldest-known decorated Bible texts. Their pictures not only illustrate the
Bible’s stories but also offer interpretations of awkward points; such as the use of biblical images
to explain political dogma and imperial authority. Traces of its classical heritage are also visible,
such as St. Mark shown in one of fifteen illustrations in the “Codex Rossano”, having a woman
beside him directing the movement of his pen. She is the poet’s muse of ancient classical
tradition, named Sophia or Wisdom. The drawings reflect more simplicity, the beginnings in the
development of Byzantine form and architecture. These Biblical illustrations also influenced the
Christian arts of fresco painters and mosaic artists. By Justinian’s (483 Taresium, Serbia – 565
Constantinople) time the Christian monks and nuns had a profound effect even on architecture.
Ancient Greek temples displayed appearances of prosperity and power, different from the
development of the architecture of Eastern churches. The emphasis shifted to the power and
majesty of the interior of the church, with its theater of imperial rituals that became the center of
the Eastern church’s public life. Justinian even replaced an earlier church built on Constantine’s
acropolis with the vast church dedicated to the Divine Wisdom, “Hagia Sophia”, the lady that
guides the Apostle’s hand in the Codex, and the ancient muse that eastern Christianity
transformed into the personification of the inspiration of Christ. Now as God ruled in Heaven, so
by the grace of God did Justinian rule on earth. In the West, the Dark Ages left Rome without an
emperor and with bishops with a power they never attained in the Eastern Church which stayed
close to its emperor.
In the Image of the Bible: The Emperor of Byzantium
In the 530s one of Justinian’s armies was slowly fighting its way up the Italian peninsula. The
Byzantines fought a long and bloody campaign; at Ravenna, Cassiodorus retired from the court
and founded his monastery in Vivarium. While the Gothic lords left the city to the invaders. The
Greeks finally conquered all of Italy, and Justinian himself arrived at Ravenna in 540 to dedicate
a new court church at the palace there; the church of San Vitale. It remains today the best place
in the world to experience the reality of Byzantium. It contains all in mosaic; with an abundance
of Bible scenes, together with the emperor and his court in all their finery. At Ravenna Justinian
wanted his presence to be firmly stamped upon his newly conquered province. The mosaic
portraits are powerful and immediate; among the greatest of all work is this most intractable of
mediums. Justinian leads the imperial entry into the church. To the left of him stand a bishop and
two priests, behind him his administration; the holy trinity that ran the Empire. Opposite to this is
a panel filled with women decked in jewels and silks with the lovely, lively Theodora,
Justinian’s empress. These two panels show the presumptuousness and superb peculiarity of the
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upon the walls of San Vitale they are the theaters for the rituals of the faith when gods and men
might meet; they declare the role of the Eastern emperor on earth. Of all Byzantine church rites,
the Mass was the most powerful, the most central, showing Justinian and Theodora and their
couriers walking to the celebration, carrying the equipment used in the Eastern church ritual; and
then proceeding and carrying that most “holy and memorable mystery of the Host” in the
Eucharist. In Justinian’s time the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist led to the
justification for the divine right of emperors to rule on earth. In all this, the church of San Vitale
at Ravenna would make a deep impact on the West, its rulers, their churches and their art.
Charlemagne and Alcuin
Christianity took deep roots in Gaul in the fourth century; Martin of Tours (316-397) introduced
monasticism and established an Episcopal hierarchy in the Roman provinces. The Germanic
tribes of the Franks, Burgundy and Visigoths crossed the Rhine into Gaul c. 400.
The founding ancestor of Charlemagne (742-814 Aachen, now in Germany) was the Frankish
king Childeric (d. 480) in the area of Tournai (now in Belgium), he was a barbarian ally of the
Romans. His son Clovis (466-511) succeeded him as king in 481 and expanded his influence and
included the Roman province of Belgica in 486, this included the territories of the Alemani and
Visigoths in the area of northeast France. He became the most powerful Western ally of the
Byzantine emperor. He married a Catholic Burgundian princess; under him the “Law of the
Salian Francs” was written, a code combining customary law, Roman written law, Christian
ideals and royal edicts. Clovis believed his military victory in 496 was due to the help of the
Christian god. With the support of the Bishop of Reims, a leader of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy,
Clovis converted with 3,000 of his army. The support of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the
Roman Christian population followed, this assured the triumph of Roman Christianity over
paganism and Arianism. He also dealt politically and diplomatically with the catholic bishops of
Gaul. Clovis established Paris as his new capitol c. 507.
Competition and fighting continued between the numerous descendents and other barbarians, but
the Frankish kingdom continued to expand, together with close cooperation with churchmen.
Another important descendent was Charles Martel (the hammer, 688-741) young and determined
who faced rebellions in the Frankish kingdom. To consolidate his military gains, he supported St.
Boniface (675 England-754 Frisia, now Netherlands) and other missionaries in their efforts to
convert the German tribes on the eastern frontier to Christianity. Charles reconstituted the realm
that was at the point of breaking up. The Muslims arrived in Spain from Africa in 711 and soon
raided Frankish territories repeatedly and came as far as the city of Pointers (near Paris), Charles
stopped the Muslim advances into Gaul in 739. He died in 741 and his son Pippin III proclaimed
himself king in 751. His sons were Charles (later known as Charlemagne) and Carloman. Pope
Stephen II came to the Frankish kingdom in 753 asking for help against the Lombards who were
attacking Rome. The Pope anointed Pippin III and his two sons as kings. Pippin III and young
Charles joined in many military campaigns, which expanded the kingdom to the Pyrenees.
They had high regard for the church and the king’s duty to spread the Christian faith, while
asserting royal suzerainty over the church. They considered themselves accountable to God and
for the Christians entrusted to them. Pippin III died in 768 and Carloman died in 771, Charles
then became the sole ruler. He went to help the Pope, defeated the Lombards and made himself
king over them in 774 and enlarged the land area of the Pope. He also subdued the pagan Saxons
772-777, and by 788 all the Germanic tribes were united in one political unit. The huge kingdom
comprised of Germany, France, the better part of Italy, central Europe, the Low Countries and
northern Spain. In 799 Pope Leo III had personal problems in Rome, leading him to escape to

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Charlemagne’s court for safety. When Charlemagne returned the Pope safely to Rome in 800, the
Romans proclaimed the king as emperor, and during the Christmas mass held in St. Peter the
Pope also crowned him Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
In 801 as the Emperor Charlemagne returned to Germany he passed thru the old imperial city of
Ravenna and took from its ruins quantities of fine marbles to decorate his court. His northern
court was threadbare, his huge empire ignorant and illiterate. Inside San Vitale, Justinian’s
building and mosaics had spoken to Charlemagne as one emperor to another, and he took the old
imperial imagery for himself. When he returned to Aachen he determined to make his court the
intellectual, political and administrative center of his Empire. He summoned prominent scholars
from all parts of the empire and even abroad, among these the most important were Einhard
(c.770-840, Franconia, Germany) and Alcuin (c.732 York, England-814 Tours, France). Later he
had his architect measure up the church of San Vitale and reproduced the architecture at his
palace at Aachen. Alcuin spent the first fifty years of his life in Yorkshire, first as pupil, then as
headmaster of the cathedral school of York, the most renowned school of its day. He met
Charlemagne in 781 in Italy and accepted his invitation to Aachen; he introduced the methods of
English learning into Frankish schools, systematized the curriculum, raised the standards of
scholarship and encouraged the study of liberal arts for better understanding of spiritual doctrine.
In 796 he left the court and became abbot of the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours (4th cent.), where
he encouraged his monks on the beautiful Carolingian minuscule script, the ancestor of modern
Roman typeface. Charlemagne founded many monasteries in which, for the first time in
centuries learning and literacy were cherished; he founded many scriptoria too, where the word
of God was carefully copied out and decorated. In these monasteries Latin, the language of the
law as well as of God, was taught to the children of his illiterate nobles. Maybe the greatest
contribution of Charlemagne was his long rule (771-814) which gave a rare stability in a raw and
brutal age, a time for his government, his laws and administration to make a mark. At the heart
of this revival stood the Bible, the seat of wisdom and the work of God. It was the Bible itself,
the kernel of the faith, the center to understanding of all things in this world that spearheaded
Charlemagne’s drive for literacy. There were many different Latin Bible texts in the Empire -
French, Spanish and Gothic versions, some with spurious and garbled passages with many
changes and additions. A new standardized edition of the Latin Bible – Cassiodorus’ version of
Jerome’s Vulgate - was central to Charlemagne’s ambition to revive piety and learning in his
Empire. This task was given over to Alcuin to supervise, using the very sparse resources of
learned men and scribes who lived in Charlemagne’s domain. Alcuin stayed in Aachen some ten
years attending to the revision of the Bible, and writing new prologues for all the books. He
oversaw the court scriptorium and also the school where the nobles’ children were educated. The
new Bible now called Alcuin’s Vulgate, was a cleaned and re-purified copy of Jerome’s Vulgate.
In the north of Europe, the Irish monks had maintained a live tradition of scholarship. French and
English monks studied in their remote monasteries; even Greek was taught there. They went on
pilgrimages to the Holy Land, even traveled to Egypt, and surveyed the pyramids. These Irish
scholars went thru Charlemagne’s Empire preaching the love of God and spreading their
precious wisdom, and were also taken to Charlemagne’s court. One of the Emperor’s most
magnificent foundations was the Monastery of St. Gall (720), in Switzerland, which even today
contains Irish manuscripts by some of these traveling scholars. The monastery was named after
an earlier Irish missionary who lived there one hundred years before the foundation. It was a
farm with a central church, the monastery, a hostel and kitchen for guests, schools and a doctor
clinic, an infirmary and a cemetery together with a scriptorium and library.

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Some of the finest bibles ever made were produced in Charlemagne’s scriptoria under Alcuin’s
direction; in beautiful script with fine illuminations and covers of precious metals, gems and
ivories; like decorations covered in churches’ most revered reliquaries. This raised the status of
books and learning among a largely illiterate and indifferent aristocracy. Not only was the Bible
copied in the monasteries of Tours and Fulda, Reims and Etternach, Orleans, Corbie and St. Gall,
but also all the surviving texts of classical literature. Some eighty-five percent of the oldest
copies of classical literature are those made by Carolingian scribes, all written out in the
characteristic firm round hand in tall-black ink on creamy vellum.
Alcuin had a deep love of antiquity and a determination to preserve it. His letters to abbots and
kings often talk, among his sermons of the Christian life, of making presents of writing materials,
pigments and inks, and encouraging the monks at their work. When in June 793 Lindisfarne was
sacked and burned by raiding Vikings, he wrote long letters to the Northumbrian king and to
Bishop Higbold and his congregation on the island; and exhorted them with all love and respect,
and promised to encourage his Emperor Charlemagne to help restore their loss. The sacking was
but one of many and made life along the northern coastlines uncertain for hundreds of years and
brought the precarious age to Irish monasticism to an end.
After ten years work at Aachen court, Alcuin retired to the monastery of St Martin at Tours.
There he oversaw the work of another scriptorium, while remaining in correspondence with the
Emperor. Alcuin died in 804, ten years before Charlemagne. His Empire became placid and
slowly building in prosperity. In the court-chapel at Aachen that Charlemagne had copied from
Ravenna, he set up a marble throne in the gallery on the first floor, where he could sit and
observe the service, conducted with Roman and Byzantine rituals and ceremonies. This was now
the seat of Western Christendom; and Europe was girded about with a true faith based on a true
Bible.
In the Image of the Bible: the Kingdoms of the West
Charlemagne’s faith was held inside the fortress of a chapel at Aachen; in the Gothic cathedrals
that followed, Carolingian solidity was replaced by a tent of stone: light, tense and filled with
aspirations; their buttresses flying up to support high thin walls, the inside promises a miracle.
With passion the people built the cathedrals of airy stonework. The buildings’ dizzy ambitions
show them to be the product of a new society; of skills and virtuosity with the precocious power
of the newly rich.
To a large extend, the church itself had changed old Europe. The monasteries nursed and
nurtured Charlemagne’s poor Empire. Under the monks’ directions new lands were opened up,
forests cleared and drainage channels cut. New harnesses greatly increased the efficiency of
draught animals; water mills, the major source of mechanical power, grew in number and
effectiveness; sheep-breeding strengthened and enlarged the different breeds – this meant that by
the end of the first millennium, Bible parchments were greatly increased in size. In
Charlemagne’s day, Europe’s population stood at less than thirty million. Four hundred years
later, in the age of the great Cathedrals, it almost trebled. In the same period, some three
thousand European cities were founded and the old ones greatly increased in size and prosperity.
Twelfth-century Paris held nearly a quarter million people. A new ‘bourgeoisie’ came into being,
and eagerly assisting in their progress, the Church encouraged their industries and the formation
of their trade-guilds under saintly patrons. New commercial fairs held on Holy Days sent
merchants traveling thru Europe once again, buying and selling their goods.
Some of the bishops also opened schools which became the universities of Europe, and these
were usually built beside their churches and cathedrals. Twelfth-century Chartres was a famous

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center of learning, its cathedral school staffed by scholars who had studied with Arabs and Jews
in Spain and Africa and who could read Greek. For the first time since Charlemagne’s day
classical literature was read in the West again, and also the mathematical propositions of Euclid
were again studied. The movement of the stars were observed and recorded. And by the
thirteenth century the climate of Europe was also slowly warming up.
Buildings like Chartres cathedral were seen as the celebration of this brave new world, and
stimulated the growing intellect of Europe. So the architecture of these cathedrals not only shows
the aspirations of the architects, but the whole world of this new culture. In this world the single
central factor, its common truth, was the Bible: Charlemagne’s Bible, Alcuin’s Vulgate, with his
prologues still standing at the head of every book. The Bible was the rulebook, the text which
justified and explained the world. Today, science has a shorter list of absolutes; the speed of
light, the interior vibrations of certain crystals and a few more. The Gothic world had every
statement and every word of the Bible. This gave literate people, especially the teachers and
students at new schools like that at Chartres, two main problems: firstly, how to interpret holy
words – thruout the Middle Ages and beyond people were both burned and sanctified for their
variation of opinion – and secondly, how could the brilliantly intelligent writings of the pagan
classical world, that were coming into the light once more be integrated with the Bible. How
could Plato’s assertions about the physical world be subsumed into the biblical account of
Creation in the Book of Genesis? Nobody denied that he lived in the world that the God of the
Bible had made; but now people were expecting more detailed explanations of the world than
that which the Bible gave them. ‘You poor fools,’ protested a scholar when told that such
understanding did not really matter because God could do anything. ‘God can make a cow out of
a tree, but has he ever done so? Therefore show some ‘reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold
that it ‘is’ so?’ For people like that, it was the pagan classical writers who promised detailed
answers.
By the thirteenth century, building upon a century of scholarship and disputation, Thomas
Aquinas (1224 Sicily-1274 Papal States) produced the ‘Summa Theologica’ that has remained a
basis of Roman Catholic theology until this day. His thoughts were shaped by the writings of
Aristotle with Christian writings and then welded into a single system of thought. But the
greatest expression of his time, that moved whole nations, was still the great cathedral, where
God and reason were held in balance high among the spires and buttresses. It was the God-given
learning of previous ages which had produced the wealth and knowledge that now allowed these
huge building enterprises. ‘We are dwarfs mounted upon the shoulders of giants, so that we can
perceive much more than they, not because our vision is clearer, or because we are taller, but
because we are liftet higher thanks to their gigantic height,’ affirmed Bernard of Chartres, who
taught classical philosophy at that city during the first years of the twelfth century. Around the
Chartres cathedral doorways the giants of the past are all lined up: St Jerome with his Bible
writing commentaries upon the sacred writings, aided by a dove of divine wisdom that sits upon
his shoulder. On the façade there is a calendar of the farming year, and the Zodiac from ancient
Babylon, the sun and moon, and figures of Virtue and Philosophy, the latter dressed just as
Boethius had described her. And alongside them all stand the people of the Bible, the prophets
and saints – the forerunners thru whom God sanctioned the order in this brave new world.
Numbers were also important in the theology and architecture of the Gothic world, and they
found their proof in the Bible’s word. Classical authors identified the number seven as the
harmonious number of the universe: there were seven planets, seven zodiacal signs, and seven
notes in a harmonic scale and so on. So Christians detected seven virtues and seven sins inside

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man, and seven ages for his life as well. And the Book of Genesis gives Jehovah’s sanction to
this mystic numeration; the world was made in seven days, and in the cathedral seven services
each day praised his name. It was on these sacred numbers, geometric harmonies, that the great
Gothic churches were all built. A triangle with sides that are proportionally three, four and five
makes a right-angle triangle: with compasses and string and just such simple systems you make a
geometry as subtle as a great cathedral, just as God had measured out creation with his
compasses. These extraordinary buildings were a celebration of the new society, built according
to the sacred rules of God’s universe, as they were discerned in the Bible. Gothic architects also
saw this same abstract order all around them in the natural world. Beautiful faces were perceived
as conforming to the same divine geometry; artists drew their figures over geometric grids of
lines. In their natural elegance, plants and animals, too, seem to conform to these sacred
harmonies. Everything in the world was seen to have its roots, its significance in the Bible’s
order, and the world was seen to be beautiful – for the first time in many centuries. The world
was a bright and open place, full of passion, love and profit. Peter Abelard, the greatest
theologian of the twelfth century, was castrated by an irate guardian after the seduction of one of
his pupils. Some twenty year later, in 1139, the Lateran Council decreed that no churchman was
free to marry. And at that time the cult of the Holy Family was fast growing into another sacred
Trinity. Mary the Virgin mother was now celebrated in poems, in works more usually reserved
for objects of more earthly passions. There was also a growing expression of human warmth
celebrated by a great host of people beginning by Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) to Francois
Villon (1431 Paris-1463).
Thousands of people came from the country around Chartres to build the cathedral, nobles and
peasants alike fitting the halters of the draught oxen to their own shoulders and dragging the
masons’ wagons that carried the building stones from the barges on the river up the hill to the
cathedral. These strange devotions were accompanied by an intense silence, broken only by and
occasional pious exclamation as the penitents moved under their loads.
The architects and artists, the glassblowers, the glaziers and painters, the sculptors and the
stonemasons made in the medieval cathedrals – dazzling visions of another world and a fertile
mystery. Like the sculptures around the cathedral doors, the stained-glass windows, those vast
carpets of glass – those western Mantras – hold the whole world of the Middle Ages in them:
Gothic people and the Bible’s characters all mixed together. Once the architect’s designs for the
building had been realized, the stained-glass craftsmen designed these panels in the church,
fitting their patron’s ideas into the general scheme. And these small scenes, these individual
masterpieces of storytelling place all the people of Christendom inside the new world order
created in the medieval schools. Alongside Moses, Jacob, David and other biblical figures,
medieval butchers slaughter oxen, bakers make their bread, water carriers sit in poses like
classical river gods in rhythm with the actions of the Bible heroes nearby. All the guilds of
medieval Europe, all the local nobles and notables and the kings of Christendom are celebrated
in the stained-glass windows, paid for by gifts of money. Most of these cathedrals were built by
subscription; clergy would solicit funds from all over Europe. Miracles often attended these
fund-raising efforts, sometimes the Virgin would appear to prospective donors. Kings gave
windows to the cathedrals; French monarchs donated pictures of their patron St Denis, while
Spanish kings preferred St James, a knight of their court who had fought the Moors. Laborers
donated windows with subjects such as Adam, the first man who had dug the earth. Almost
everybody in Gothic society found reflection in these great cathedrals, dignifying the society that
made it, in images from the most sacred book.

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As the traveling merchants rode toward these Gothic cities, as the peasants stopped at their work
in the fields and looked to their church, they all saw in its exciting silhouette the power of
Christendom and by implication the great book that held its order. On feast days the people of
these new Gothic towns gathered to walk thru their streets in long processions, passing thru the
open doorways of the cathedral, arriving together inside this model of the Church of God. Every
element in society from the court to the guild, from the merchants to the peasants, was there,
moving toward their church.
These passionate buildings of the new age represent one of those rare moments in human culture
of absolute sureness, the brief fresh time before passion becomes routine, it was an age when
God was felt to be close to earth, and the Bible held the visions of society. Also more heretics
and scholars were burned in the Middle Ages than were ever killed in Carolingian times. For at
this time the Inquisition came into its own, and torture, largely unused since Roman days, was
reintroduced.
Tuesday May 29, 1453
On the morning of May 29, 1453 the last emperor of Byzantium fell fighting the Turkish armies
that streamed into Constantinople. For centuries, Gothic West and Byzantine East had run side
by side; the West slowly transforming with riches, plagues and scholarship and evolving beyond
all imagination. The East slowly turning into a beauteous plundered museum filled with the
relics of classical and early Christian culture. From the eleventh century on waves of Western
armies – the Crusaders – had gone to fight in the lands around the eastern Mediterranean, in
Palestine and Syria, capturing Jerusalem from Arab armies and setting up a series of castled
kingdoms from the edge of Anatolia down to the Egyptian border. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade
plundered Constantinople and most of its holy relics, and treasures were taken away to decorate
the cathedrals of the West. Byzantium was never the same again. The old Empire was shattered;
the city itself sometimes appeared to be little more than a vassal of the Turkish sultans who
controlled the better part of Asia Minor.
The last emperors of Byzantium traveled frequently to the West, to Paris, Rome and London,
begging assistance against the Muslims. And several times the churches, East and West, met in
council and finally after a thousand years of schism joined together again at Florence in 1439.
But this last-hope of an alliance was rejected by the people of Constantinople, a city whose
soldiers were now afraid to mount cannons on the great old walls for fear they would be shaken
down with the vibration of the blasts. Now, too, poverty ate away inside the city. The last
Byzantine emperor was crowned in a court in southern Greece in 1449; in the deciding battles
most of his generals were Italians from Genoa.
The Turkish army stormed the land walls at their center, after pounding them for weeks with a
battery of European-designed cannons. Once inside the triumph was immediate; in a few hours
they streamed down the ancient street past Constantine’s statue, on to the hippodrome, by the
Church of Haghia Sophia. On the evening before, the Imperial Mass was conducted for the last
time. Four days later on the Friday morning, Sultan Mehmet’s muezzins cried the call to prayer
from the roof of Haghia Sophia. In his triumph, the Sultan saw that this building was made to
honor God and he let it stand intact and ordered looters to stop their destruction. He directed his
masons to obscure only the most obvious signs and symbols of Christianity, and the church of
the Divine Wisdom became the Mosque of the Divine Wisdom, and the supreme masterpiece of
Justinian’s Greek architects became the architectural model for succeeding centuries to the
Ottoman architect built mosques. The Turks took 60,000 people into captivity. At first Sultan
Mehmet was inclined to be lenient with the Byzantine nobles, but after a few months the old

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hippodrome was used as an execution ground where thousands were put to death. The classical
world came to an end and the West was embarrassed. All the city libraries were plundered. One
hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts disappeared. But some remained behind and many of
these were later collected by the Greek nobles who survived and indeed prospered under the
Ottomans; they sent the volumes off to the monastic libraries at Mount Athos in northern Greece.
The exodus of Byzantine scholars to the West began with the city’s poverty and had long
preceded the arrival of the Turks. By 1400 Greek monks from southern Italy were teaching
literary Florentines how to read their ancient language. Later, when the late Byzantine emperors
came to Europe seeking help, many scholars and priests in their entourages stayed behind. The
visit of John VIII to Florence in 1438 with Cardinal Bessarion is sometimes taken to be the
starting point of the Italian Renaissance.
In the same year that Constantinople fell, the German goldsmith, Johann Gutenberg was casting
cold letter type and printing the first book, the Latin Bible, Jerome’s Vulgate. These craftsmen in
their workshops at Mainz on the Rhine invented a machine that, in half a century, changed the
world. After Gutenberg, the Bible would be made in hundreds of editions, many of them
inexpensive and printed in a dozen different languages. This would subvert and change forever
the old religious order of the West. The Bible was still at the front of Christendom, once its guide
and mirror; now it would become a medium of political struggle and social change.
Paradise Lost
The Bible has lost the golden covers that it wore for a thousand years and changed into
paperback: the Bible has become a book.
A new vision began to grow inside Europe in the later Middle Ages. It started inadvertently by
the gentle Tuscan scholar, the poet Petrarch (1304-1374). He popularized the awareness and the
love of style, a fascination with form, with the abstract beauty of words and of nature. In many
ways, this was the birth of modern man. When he was sixteen, his father determined that his son
follow him into the law, and so sent him off to study law at the University of Bologna. There
Petrarch quickly developed a dislike for law, and instead collected classical texts. When his
father visited him, the father was so incensed that he built a bonfire to burn his son’s books, and
only desisted when the son burst into tears at the thought of ‘such sweetness and sonority of
word’ going up in smoke. This was the birth of a new attitude to words and writing. Young
Petrarch saw the style and form of things as their ‘essence’: ‘the style is the man,’ he writes,
‘something singular and of our own.’ This became a large part of the manner of the Renaissance,
where style and flair were everything: the arts a matter of aesthetic exploration. Thruout his life,
Petrarch spent much of his time searching for ancient texts, many of which were lying forgotten
in the libraries of ancient monasteries, he rediscovered the writings of the Roman Cicero, and at
the same time in Florence his friend Boccaccio (1313-1375), the celebrated author of the
‘Decameron’ was reading Homer in Greek. Petrarch’s poetry became so popular and renowned,
that the Senate of Rome crowned him with laurels as the Poet Laureate in 1349. In his finest
works Petrarch combined his knowledge of classical verse with his own love of nature and,
especially, his love for a married woman of Avignon, the papal court in France. In his verses he
calls her Laura, after the poet’s antique laurel; Petrarch was in love with fame and women. He
climbed mountains until exhaustion, and then reflected on his reading of the ancients such as St
Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ and felt detached from the ‘real world’. The Black Death came to
Europe in Petrarch’s lifetime, killing his beloved Laura and half his own family, and half the
population of France as well. It took Europe a century of recover. The shortage of available
labor caused wages to rise; trade and commerce expanded as never before and merchants became

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princes. The new wealth engendered a confidence not seen since Petrarch’s day. The new age
was a rebirth, a Renaissance, and Petrarch’s scholarship was seen as one of its cornerstones.
Petrarch’s admiration for the classical writers, and his warm awareness of their personalities, led
him to study the ancient texts with special care. He was after the truth of their life and times;
learned to distinguish different writers by their style; and searched for authenticity and accuracy
of any of the surviving texts. He and his followers spent great effort reconstructing the exact
words of ancient texts for many different versions. In such scholarly circles, medieval scholastics
like Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas were regarded with scorn as being hopelessly uncritical
of their sources and frequently inaccurate in their interpretation. Insisting of a more critical
scholarship, Petrarch fathered a new kind of learning.
Florence became a center of this new scholarship where it was fostered at the courts of the
Medici dukes. Here grew up a great love of classical literature and a noble democratic spirit, a
love of life and good manners. They searched for more ancient literature in old monasteries of
Europe, many founded in Charlemagne’s days. In many ways these fifteenth-century scholars
were romantics trying to rediscover ancient literary worlds, reviving visions of the ancient people
whose lively thoughts, writing and art so delighted them.
This work of literary resurrection greatly depended on a firm grasp of the Latin language. At
Rome, Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) the son of a lawyer employed at the papal court, a contentious
scholar and a secretary of the pope, devoted the best part of his life to a systematic understanding
of the ancient language; at the time when Latin was disappearing as a living popular tongue,
transforming into the Italian dialects that persisted until the nineteenth century. Just at the time
when the words of Jerome’s great Vulgate Bible were lost to the Roman population, Valla and a
few other scholars were turning Latin into a fixed, and therefore highly self-conscious literary
language. Valla developed a great sensitivity to antique Latin styles which led him to detect
many forgeries and incorrect attributions, such as the long-accepted correspondence between St
Paul and Seneca, and the celebrated document known as the ‘Donation of Constantine’. Valla
compared Jerome’s New Testament Vulgate text with a Greek original, and made long lists of
errors in translation in his ‘Adnotationes’ in 1448. He confined himself to observations upon
language and not upon theology or science, but some contemporaries accused him of heretical
ideas. Valla’s employer, the pope, regarded his scholarly judgment balanced, as usual courtly
discussions of scholars. Valla’s ideas had no effect upon the course of religion in his lifetime.
Sixty years later his ‘Adnotationes’ were published in central Europe and led to inspire a new
generation of scholars, intent on re-examination of the Bible in preparation for translation into
contemporary European languages and the Protestant Reformation.
In Valla’s day the most powerful and most public means of expression in Italy passed from the
scholars and writers to the fine artists. The written work of the Renaissance became
overshadowed by the bulk of beautiful paintings, sculptures and architecture; celebrating for
almost a century a brave new world with great skill and cleverness.
Michelangelo (1475-1564), was born into a family of many generations small-scale bankers in
Florence; his father was not so successful. Michelangelo was a Renaissance sculptor, painter,
architect and poet; he was the greatest living artist in his lifetime. He observed in the course of
his life that the shift from medieval manners to Renaissance high self-conciseness was leading to
the de-valuation, the de-sanctification of Christendom, and with it the divine order of society, of
kings, popes, and even of the Holy Bible itself.
This is personified by the many powerful and influential individuals of this period:
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)

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Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503)
Ceasare Borgia (1475-1507)
King Louis XII (1462-1515)
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Martin Luther (1483-1546)
As Michelangelo worked in Rome and Florence, a veritable revolution was in progress north of
the Alps. By the 1520s printing presses were pumping out hundreds of thousands of books and
pamphlets; the writings of the Renaissance scholars and editions of the new-found classical texts
were appearing in the universities and in the houses of an emerging middle class. There was an
unparalleled explosion of learning and information. At the same time, northern princes who had
always been reluctant to concede their authority to either the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor
had found a most eloquent voice in Martin Luther, a monk teaching at the University of
Wittenberg in Saxony. His father was a hardworking and successful copper miner, expecting
Luther to become a lawyer.
Gothic Saxon builders were working upon Wittenberg’s four-square town hall as Michelangelo’s
craftsmen were building his Renaissance architecture at Florence. The town hall stood for a new
wealth in the north, in the city’s guilds, in a new middle class. Like the south, northern Europe
had also recovered from the terrible plagues of the previous centuries and by the sixteenth
century, industry and trade made it richer than ever before. Duke Frederick the Wise, the ruler of
Saxony and a powerful and often dissenting voice in imperial council, had given Wittenberg a
fine new university with celebrated teachers, first-class printers, good artists and a string of
booksellers; and of course, the monk Luther.
Young Luther, a promising university student, became a monk as a result of a vow made in holy
terror when a lightning flash threw him, in an echo of St Paul, down to the ground. After
studying at Erfurt and entering the strict Augustinian Monastery there, Luther was sent in 1508
to the brand new University of Wittenberg, to lecture on the Ethics of Aristotle, a traditional
adjunct to theology in medieval education. He was thoroughly versed in the traditions theology,
but neither Aristotle nor Thomas Aquinas could supply him with the key to a balanced life. He
was haunted by the inevitability of sin and damnation, despite the Church’s teaching that
mankind could escape from hell-fire by repentance and penance. Luther turned to the Bible. As a
student, he had imbibed enough of the critical attitudes of Renaissance learning to question if the
Church’s traditional interpretation of the Holy Word was correct: whether, the Latin word that
signified grace had been correctly understood - the grace of God thru which mankind was
redeemed from hell; he concluded it had been incorrectly understood. As he read the first chapter
of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, he saw a different meaning; a grace by which God granted
everybody the possibility of salvation by allowing everyone the potential of belief. Soon Luther
found innumerable passages in the Bible and in the writings of the early Fathers to support his
reading – that man’s salvation was not granted by acts of penance and repentance, nor thru the
intersession of saints and martyrs or prayer of the church, but by belief, by faith alone. At this
Luther tells us, ‘I felt myself straightaway born afresh and to have entered thru the open gates
into paradise itself.’ The Gospels, the word of God, were the first and only authority. For true
salvation the Church must return to the Bible’s teachings and the writings of the early Fathers. In
the contemporary German climate of dissatisfaction with Rome and with the emperor there were
also practical political applications for Luther’s insight.
In Rome itself, at precisely the same time, the popes were rebuilding the ancient church of St
Peter’s – the same church which at a later date Michelangelo would transform with his huge

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columns and beautiful high dome. From the beginning the vast project was financed in the
traditional manner, by raising money thruout Christendom just as the medieval bishops had done
for their cathedrals. Now, however, the generosity of the faithful was further encouraged by the
sale of indulgences, an act of penitence by which money given to the church was rewarded with
a letter of pardon: which, coupled with genuine inward repentance, granted remission from the
temporal penalties of sin which traditionally ran from formal prayers to excommunication.
This system first found favor hundreds of years before Luther’s day, when indulgences were not
purchased but earned by those who had joined the crusading armies in the East. By Luther’s time
the system had degenerated to the point where, by a few coins to specialized indulgence sellers,
they would assure you that you had ransomed the souls of a dead relative from purgatory. To pay
for St Peter’s, the pope had granted the sale of all the indulgences in Saxony to the Archbishop
of Mainz, a man who had bought his office from the Church with a loan obtained from south
German money lenders. The deal was that half the money from the sale of indulgences would go
to Rome for the building of St Peter’s and half would go to the Archbishop’s bankers to pay for
his debt. Though Luther never knew of this shameful shareout; the preposterous claims of the
indulgence salesmen, who were taking considerable sums form the ordinary people of
Wittenberg, were quite enough to anger him. For Luther now had a new understanding of St
Paul’s scripture; he ‘knew’ that God’s grace was not to be bought with money, but was freely the
gift of faith. But Luther was still a medieval monk, and debated accordingly; he made a list of
ninety-one statements in the form of a thesis, and posted them in the usual way of
announcements at Wittenberg University on the wooden door of the castle church; on October
31, 1517, the eve of All Saints’ Day. He also sent copies of the theses to the archbishop of Mainz
and to his bishop. Soon the theses were published and circulated by Fredeick and several other
German princes, who for many years had been moving into a close federation and struggling for
greater freedom from both their temporal and spiritual overlords, the Holy Roman Emperor and
the pope. Luther’s denunciation of this most obvious corruption enjoyed a great celebrity. The
pope asked the vicar of the Augustinians to deal with the recalcitrant monk in the usual channels.
The Dominicans pressed for Luther’s impeachment for heresy. In October 1518 the pope sent
cardinal Cajetan (c.1468-1534), a renowned Thomist, to interview Luther and to warn him to
recant. Strong theological controversies followed at universities and Luther published a tract
asserting the equality of all men before God: ‘between laymen and priests, princes and bishops,
or as they call it, between spiritual and temporal person, the only real difference is one of office
and function and not of estate.’ Luther also wrote a pamphlet addressed ‘To the Christian
nobility of the German Nation’; in native German rather than in scholarly Latin, where he
appealed to the imperial princes and to the Emperor himself to establish a reformed church in
their kingdoms. They ruled, he argued, by the divine right of all legitimate monarchs and were
therefore obliged to establish a just church inside their kingdoms. Poor German peasants who
had not profited from the rising wealth inside the cities revolted and were backed by many
ministers of the new church. Luther at first sympathized with them; but as the revolt turned into
open war he issued a polemical pamphlet ‘Against the Robbing, Murdering hordes of Peasants’,
and appealed to the princes to annihilate them, a feat which they speedily accomplished. ‘I
always said.’ Luther wrote, ‘that if the peasants won, the devil would win.’ Luther stood for the
old sacred order in society.
In January 1521 the pope issued a bull formally excommunicating Luther.
In April 1521 he was summoned to appear before the imperial Diet meeting at Worms.
There were some threats to his safety, but he was determined to go. As he entered the city he was

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welcomed by a cavalcade of German knights like a triumphal procession.
During the trial before Emperor Charles V (1500 Ghent-1558 Spain; King of Spain 1516-56,
Holy Roman Emperor 1519-56) and the princes, Luther spelled out the basis of his attack upon
the Roman church: he would stand by his writings, ‘until I am convicted by the testimony of
Scripture or plain reason’. At the end of his speech the imperial Spanish guard shouted for him to
be burned, yet the German princes protected him. They gave him a castle-refuge where he
translated the Bible into German that developed as a literary language of a common German
identity. Every book was carefully reviewed by his friend and fellow scholar Philip Melanchthon
(1497-1560), whose disposition was more diplomatic, compared to Luther who was more
passionate and powerful.
At Christmas 1521 in the Gothic church of St Mary’s in the town square of Wittenberg the first
Protestant communion was celebrated with Luther, without the vestments of the cathedral mass,
without the prayer of consecration, without the ‘elevation’ of the Host and with the entire
congregation taking the bread and wine. Then Luther announced from the pulpit that he would
marry a nun from a local convent.
By this time the Reformation of the northern church was supported by an ever-increasing number
of princes, from Switzerland to the North Sea, in a direct and unambiguous challenge to the old
order of Christendom both temporal and spiritual. But so diverse in attitudes and opinions were
the reformers that their only common bond was their antagonism to the papacy, to its doctrine
and power. Yet the response to this was slow and diffused, both from the Roman popes and from
the Holy Roman emperors, Charlemagne’s successors and sovereigns of the shifting, ramshackle
collection of European states stretching form Spain to Poland. Luther was excommunicated and
driven beyond the influence of the church. The reaction of the Holy Roman Emperor was
similarly confused; the young Spaniard aroused little enthusiasm in the reforming German
princes. When in 1529 an imperial council called for a re-imposition of papal authority thruout
Christendom, they countered the edict by an indignant declaration, a ‘protestia’ – the word
‘protestant’ was born – and shortly afterwards the Emperor was forced to cede many of his
temporal rights to a powerful German Federation. From that year onwards, all imperial decrees
concerning Germany were written in German. Thru it all Luther was living under threat of being
burned as a heretic. At first, the princes protected him surreptitiously; then as their union grew
stronger, he was openly espoused. Luther’s great eloquence and personal fame spread thru
Germany, helping to weld the ambitious states together in a common bond.
At Wittenberg there was everything needed to propagate Luther’s new religion, and as more and
more pamphlets and books issued from Wittenberg’s presses, Luther persuaded a master printer,
Hans Lufft to come to the university and establish a printing shop. For half a century he
continued to print accurately and quickly made works that were published by three booksellers in
the city. Lufft produced simple spartan works, and also elegant Bibles, with columns of text and
superb woodcuts; cheap enough for the large and literate German middle class to buy in quantity.
While Luther made his Bible and the Wittenberg reformers set up their churches in calmness and
prosperity, the reformers of other lands and cities were harassed, hunted and burned. As the
potential of this movement dawned upon the Catholic kings and princes, they saw that printing
itself, the mass medium of Protestantism was the reformer’s most potent weapon. Along with the
reformers themselves printers were also executed. The crime was heresy, the punishment
automatic: burning for men, burial alive for women - and there were many women working in
the printing and book trade. By 1540 laws aimed at booksellers and printers were formed in
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thruout the sixteenth century, and most of these, printed in Protestant towns, strongly reflected
the teaching of the Protestant churches. In England, religious reformation was mixed, as it was in
Germany, with rising nationalism and also, during the reign of Henry VIII (1491-1547) with the
divorce of an ailing monarch seeking an heir to the throne.
William Tyndale (1490 England-1536 Brussels), a university scholar from Gloucestershire made
the first Protestant translation of the Bible into English. He believed only the Bible should
determine the practices and doctrines of the church and every believer should be able to read the
Bible in his own language. He translated the New Testament from the original Greek and had
18,000 copies printed in Germany in 1524, and then smuggled into England. He changed many
biblical words in translation: church became congregation, priests became elders, penance
became repentance, charity became love…King Henry VIII and his archbishops did not
appreciate Tyndale’s work, yet his translation became the model for all future English versions
for nearly 400 years. He continued translating the Old Testament; but before he finished the
translation he was imprisoned near Brussels for a year and then executed in 1536.
Desiderius Erasmus (1469 Rotterdam-1536 Basel) was a brilliant Humanist of the northern
Renaissance and close friend of English Humanists such as Thomas More (1477-1535, beheaded
by Henry VIII). Erasmus found a copy of Valla’s ’Adnotationes’ scholarly appraisal of Jerome’s
Vulgate Bible; the book inspired his life’s work of issuing accurate printed editions of ancient
Christian texts like the works of Irenaeus and Jerome. Erasmus moved to Basel to live in the
house of Europe’s finest printer, Johannes Froben. There Erasmus with his ‘Novum
Instrumentum’, had the first New Testament published in Greek, accompanied by a new Latin
translation. This remained for centuries a standard source book of New Testament translators:
Luther’s German New Testament, Tyndale’s English New Testament and contemporary Dutch,
French and Italian Reformers. Many of Erasmus’ own writings, books and essays on doctrine
and theology, were soon prohibited by the Roman Church, but like his friend More the mild-
mannered man never broke with Rome. The blunt passion of the Reformers offended him as
much as the corruption and superstition inside the Roman Church.
In September 1538 Henry VIII ordered that every church in his realm should have a Bible
translated into English. The frontispiece of the Great Bible pictured the king as the head of the
new English Church, including his chief cleric Archbishop Cranmer and his chief minister
Thomas Cromwell; both worked to set this Bible into the churches, and both later died at the
order of the Crown. At the bottom of the page the English populaces are shown crying ‘Vivat
Rex’ and ‘God sayve the Kynge!’ The Bible was largely Tyndale’s translation, edited by his
close friend John Rogers. Tyndale was disguised by presenting the work under a pseudonym,
Thomas Matthew. The Great Bible was also sold privately. Despite his seizure of church
property and renunciation of papal authority Henry VIII still saw himself a devout Catholic and
had little interest to reform either the doctrine or the worship in his English churches, as he
feared the continental Protestants. Henry’s Roman Catholic daughter Mary (1516-1568), ‘Bloody
Mary’, once she ascended the throne in 1553, sent Archbishop Cranmer and several hundred
other Reformers to the stake. During Mary’s reign, many leading scholars and divines like John
Foxe and John Knox went to Basel or Geneva that had Calvinist governments in the 1550s; there
a group of Englishmen produced a new English Bible, the so-called Geneva Bible. The French
Bible was also printed in Geneva. These Bibles were also based on a new Latin translation of the
New Testament, working directly from a Greek original.
Elizabeth I (1533-1603), Mary’s successor, granted a London printer the right to publish the
Geneva Bible in England, it remained popular long after the appearance of the King James’

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Bible, due perhaps to the small and convenient size of the English edition. Queen Elizabeth
herself always opposed the Puritans who embraced it at the time. The Geneva Bible was used in
English schools and households for centuries, but it was never appointed to be read in churches.
In Scotland, however, the strongly Calvinist sentiments of its annotations were immensely
popular.
The Roman Catholics had to flee for their lives in Queen Elisabeth’s reign, a fate compounded
by a papal decree that excommunicated the Protestant queen, England’s first, and ordered her
Catholic subjects to rise up against her government. Jesuit missionaries to England were hung as
traitors, for intending to destroy the majesty of government; and all these punishments were
found in Holy Scripture. The exiled Roman Catholics established a seminary at Douai in
Belgium and from there William, Cardinal Allen, ran a church in exile, supported the Spanish
Armada sent against Queen Elizabeth and sent priests into England to minister to Roman
Catholics. Allen’s ‘traitorous seminarie’ as it was called, produced an English Bible to counter
the Protestants who now had ‘every passage at their fingers ends’. This, the so-called Douai
Bible, was not based on Erasmus’ Greek text, or upon the numerous printed Hebrew Bibles, but
upon Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which had been confirmed by Papal Council as an authentic Bible
text, in the previous century. The contribution of the Douai Bible to the King James’ Bible was
considerable due to the zealous and often learned attacks upon it by English Protestants.
In Elizabeth’s reign a new Bible called the Bishop’s Bible was issued under the auspices of
Archbishop Parker. This was a revision of the Great Bible without its commentaries and
footnotes. Elizabeth appears on the frontispiece holding the orb and scepter with portraits of her
favorite minister the Earl of Leicester and her chief minister Lord Burghley. During Elizabeth’s
reign Protestantism took root in England; it was encouraged and popularized by the re-issue of
the martyred Cranmer’s ‘Book of Common Prayer’, which he wrote in the reign of Henry VIII
to simplify and shorten the medieval Latin services.
As King James (1566-1625) journeyed south from Scotland to take the English throne upon the
death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 (he was already king of Scotland, and head of the Scottish
Presbyterian church), he was met by a party of reforming Puritans putting their complaints about
the excessive ‘burdened of human rites and ceremonies’ in the English church to the new king.
He believed in the divine right of kings, and understood the Puritans thinking. He remembered in
a Scottish council a Genevan cleric told him that he was only ‘God’s silly vassal’ like the rest of
humanity. These Puritans wanted the leveling of the offices of the church, which would
relentlessly lead to leveling out King James as well. The King convened a clerical conference as
the Puritan petitioned at Hampton Court Palace in 1604. The only concession he agreed to with
Puritan John Reynolds, an Oxford don, was to a revised Bible; it was completed in 1611 as the
King James’ Bible that has served the English church for centuries. The work of revision was
never considered new or original; it was the work of six committees working at three centers, in
Westminster, Cambridge and Oxford; a total of 54 translators and editors, Hebrew professors
revised the Old Testament, Greek scholars the New, and each was allowed to consult any other
scholar ‘for his judgement’. They were paid by the week, not by King James’s stingy exchequer,
but by the Company of Stationers, the book trade which sold monopolies to print the Bishop’s
Bible in the previous reign. The king specified that all the familiar biblical names and popular
passages were to be kept, similarly all the chapters and verse divisions which had grown up in
the sixteenth century were to be retained. He further forbade any prefaces or marginal notes other
than explanations of Greek or Hebrew words, having found in ‘the Geneva translation, notes
partial, untrue, seditious, and savoring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits.’ Avoiding

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the ire of the king and the passions of the Puritans, the revisers maintained a true spirit of
compromise and took every advantage of all the translations. About ninety per cent of the King
James’ Bible is taken directly from Tyndale’s translation, there are also some powerful additions
– the occasional Latinism of the Douai Bible; the scholarly niceties of the Geneva texts and a
new and grander prose used for the passages that describe the Bible’s kings and courtiers and
presence of God. The success of the King James’ Bible shows the spirit of compromise that had
grown up in England after the years of burnings and executions. This proved to be an exception
in King James reign - his son King Charles I was executed on a Whitehall scaffold in January
1649. He died for refusing to dismantle the established English church and for refusing to deny
the divine right of kings. The arrival of the Renaissance also came to Gothic England, who saw
now as Petrarch before that life held a choice, its innocence was gone. The unquestioning
acceptance of Christendom’s integrity and sacredness, the world in which the Bible was honored
as a sacred ‘container’ of the word of God, was shattered. Charles’s son when re-instated as King
of England never asserted the divine right of the kings of Christendom for which his father died.
And so, too, the sacred Bible also died. Though it was cherished by all of England’s warring
parties, Protestant, Papist and Puritan alike, the great book lost its innate sanctity; it could be
approached and opened; now its style would be dissected along with its geography and history.
A New Heaven and a New Earth
Rome had recognized the challenge of the northern Reformers and their churches long before the
death of Luther, but its response had been slow and piecemeal. In 1537 Pope Paul III summoned
a Universal Council of the Church to discuss and define church doctrine and discipline and after
several false starts a Council finally convened in December 1545. Over a period of almost twenty
years, sometimes in large assemblies and sometimes in small rooms, the most ancient customs
and dogmas of the church were examined and systematized, voted upon, written down and issued
in a magisterial succession of decrees. This marks the beginnings of the modern Roman Catholic
church. At the same time, the role and content of the Bible in this renewed church were specified
and defined.
The northern Reformers had claimed the Bible as the sole source of Christian doctrine on earth
and that all men should have access to its words. In April 1546, the Council of Trent decreed that
the Bible was the word of God, but that its correct interpretation was dependent upon the
tradition of the Church; and these were defined as the wisdom of the church – the doctrine,
creeds and interpretations that had been passed on from the earliest days of the Church. This
directly opposed Protestant doctrine, and carefully defined the differences between Protestantism
and the Roman Church. Differences also emerged at Trent between conservative and moderate
humanists inside the Roman Catholic church itself; after long debates members agreed that not
all modern language Bible translations which were already widely used in churches should be
banned outright, but they did not have the same status as the Latin Vulgate Bible. In the sixteenth
century Jerome’s great Vulgate text was as accurate-sometimes more accurate-as many of the
known Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. As to the Apocrypha, the Old Testament books that the
early Christian churches had accepted as sacred but the rabbis of the period of the destruction of
Jerusalem had rejected, most were accepted into the Vulgate as sacred texts and only three were
excluded. At the ending of the Council session dealing with the Vulgate, it was also decided that
further debates about Bible matters be resolved by papal commissions; this was accomplished in
the later part of the century, and in 1592 the revised text of the authorized Catholic Bible was
fortified by a papal bull, and this text was again revised in 1904.
Nearly ninety years after the Council of Trent had decreed that the correct interpretation of the

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Bible’s words depended upon the traditional interpretations of the Church, the Florentine
scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was brought to his knees by those same words; for
challenging the traditional biblical cosmology; the old man was made to swear an oath that he
did not hold, nor would he spread, heretical opinion. And that he would submit to the
punishment of isolation from human society and the daily repetition of penitential Psalms for
what he had already written. The church had inadvertently created a hero, a scientific martyr, and
at the same time appeared to set itself against the march of progress. For many contemporary
churchmen God was in the sky and they regarded scientists, who gazed at the stars thru the
telescopes that Galileo had recently invented, as impious men. For such people religion itself
furnished a way of understanding the universe and its order. The sun and the stars, the
constitution of the earth, the hierarchy of men and animals and plants not only held physical
reality but also the moral order of Christendom; a mirror of the order of heaven so beautifully
and precisely described in the Bible; a single entity that held both heaven and the estate of men.
The burning of heretics who questioned this biblical order simply gave them a taste of the bigger
fires of hell that would inevitably come to them, and also protected the rest of mankind from the
earthly chaos that such people clearly promised.
How innocent these Renaissance scientist seem as they tried to bring this tremendous universe
down to size, like plumbers measuring the pipes in a nuclear power plant. Hauled up for the
crime of wrecking the cosmos; they protested that God was the proper mystery and not his
creation, and that ‘they’ were interested only in what their eyes and brains might see and
comprehend. But that was hardly good enough for the Church which, for the most part, did not
understand them.
The issue that exercised Galileo and his accusers revolved around several Bible passages that
seemed to imply that the sun moved thru the sky and that the earth itself was stationary, fixed.
The Bible text did not say this explicitly; it was just the traditional Church teaching base of
Aristotle and a few biblical allusions. Following the theories of the Polish astronomer Nicholas
Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo had long held that the sun stood still and the earth moved
around the sun. The pope had approved Copernicus’ theory when it first appeared in 1531, and
the topic of the true center of the universe was much discussed in both scientific and religious
circles. In about 1614 the new teaching of cosmic theory and Copernicus’ writings were placed
on the church’s Index of Forbidden Books. In 1632 Galileo wrote a book arguing for
Copernicus’ vision of the solar system. Denounced to the Florentine Dominicans, he was called
to Rome and judged by the inquisition. The trial represents a part of Europe’s fall from
innocence into modernity; where the ancient beliefs of churchmen and scientist alike, saw the
heavens as set in the enduring order of the universal hierarchy of Christendom, the universe was
unmoving, solid, enduring. The scientist Galileo saw a new world, both dynamic and mobile, a
system of balanced forces in which God did not sit atop a static universal pyramid but found
majestic expression in the interaction of a cosmos that he had invented and set in motion. Galileo
had tried to save his church from error.
At that time science was still taught in the universities were Aristotle’s theories with the biblical
statements and arguments of Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), and were focused on such concerns
as the exact dimensions of the Tower of Babel and Noah’s Ark and the exact dates of creation
and the flood. In 1679 a student of Edinburgh University was hung for asserting that Ezra and
not Moses had written the first five books of the Bible. In Spain the burning of heretics continued
into the mid-eighteenth century.
Within such diversities of attitude and opinion, Isaac Newton began his mathematical

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exploration of Copernicus’ solar system, carefully asserting at the beginning that God made this
terrestrial scheme and that his calculations would merely describe this divine order in scientific
terms. Slowly the educated laity also began to read the Bible critically, checking its statements
against their own experience and questioning some of its ancient morality. In 1792 Thomas
Paine (1737-1809), scandalized the public and caused the prosecution of his publisher with his
book ‘The Age of Reason’. By the time of Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) the avalanche of theory
and geologic data threatened the traditional interpretations of the Bible and its world. Biologist,
too, had developed theories about the mechanisms of change in plants and animals which were
quite independent of the notion of God’s creation of a perfect world. The publications of ‘The
Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in 1859 led to public debate between Bishop
Wilberforce (1805-1873) ((son of William Wilberforce (1759-1833) devoted member of Anti-
Slavery Society; passing laws to outlaw slavery in British overseen possessions in 1825)), and
biologist and advocate of agnosticism Huxley. This greatly diminished the Bible’s ancient role as
the guidebook to the physical universe into a puzzle.
Explorations and Autopsies
The Bible’s dissection was begun by a royal surgeon Jean Astruc, the physician of King Louis
XV (1710-1774), when he published a little book in 1753 (anonymously), stating that Genesis
had been compiled by Moses from two older and quite separate narratives. God is called
‘Elohim’ in one narrative and ‘Jehovah’ in the other. Also differences: in the accounts of
Creation, the contradictory ages of Sarah and the description of the Flood. In the nineteenth
century the debates about science and the Bible continued and developed into full-blown
academic disciplines, particularly at German universities where scholarship was not overseen by
religious authorities as in most other European countries. At the same time German academia
was undergoing a veritable philosophical explosion with many techniques and disciplines of
modern academic research coming into the process of formation. In the study of the humanities a
revolution was taking place; components of history, definitions, connections and
interconnections were established. These modern insights and methods had immediate impact
upon the study of the Bible. Four separate strands in the Book of Genesis were recognized and
analyzed; the attitude of specific groups in biblical Israelite descriptions of ancient songs and
religious rituals, Astrue’s two narratives and ghosts of authors like ‘The Priestly Narrator’ and
the ‘Deutero-Isaiah’. The New Testament was also similarly analyzed; several independent texts
were isolated inside the Four Gospels in terms of ethnic and religious attitudes. Some of the
ghostly authors were seen to reflect myths and rituals of other ancient religions. Other areas of
ancient history entered into the studies of the learned and energetic German Bible scholars.
Outside Germany many scholars and churchmen observed this scholarship with interest and
enthusiasm. But many others, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike, treated it with about the
same enthusiasm with which the inquisition in Rome had regarded Galileo. The British pubic
was largely uninformed about the details of the German scholarship, until articles on the Old
Testament appeared in the ninth edition (1881) of the ’Encyclopaedia Britannica’; written by an
eminent Scottish professor, who was subsequently put on trial in Edinburgh for libel (in reality
for heresy), and lost his university position. Public confusion continued.
As the debates of evolution and the Bible’s authorship rumbled around Europe, archaeologists
were beginning to dig up the remains of the real biblical world, the belongings and sometimes
even the written memorials of the Bible’s own people; the ancient East was re-discovered, and
the biblical kingdom of Israel was scientifically proved to have existed. But the confusion in the
relationship between history, faith and literature persists.

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Exodus II
Amid all the biblical confusions of the nineteenth century, one clear image of the Bible and its
world has continued to this day; the popular representation of the Bible in paintings and films.
This also has its history, its creators and its reformers; from pre-Raphaelite London to twentieth-
century Hollywood, where the word Exodus is likely to refer to a Paul Newman film as to
Moses’ biblical adventure.
The link between nineteenth-century paintings and Hollywood’s biblical movies is easily seen in
the great set-pieces of directors like Cecil B. de Mille and is documented in detail in the huge art
folios of reproductions brought from New York and Europe, which were used by Hollywood’s
costume and set designers; found until recently in the libraries of the great film studious.
Hollywood found its images of the ancient East in the visions of the European artists and
photographers who visited that region during the nineteenth century. The inadvertent inventors
of this popular European vision were a band of French artist and scientists who had sailed to
Egypt with Napoleon in the last years of the eighteenth century; on a campaign to virtually
exterminate the Mamluk army at the ‘Battle of the Pyramids’, followed by ‘The Battle of
Bethlehem’ and ‘The Siege of Acre’. The artists showed a fantasy land of golden sunshine,
Damascus silks, slaves, dusky courtesans, public executions, djinns and demons, a visible excess
of wealth and beggary, leading to a popular imagery of the ancient East and the Bible’s literary
world. This led to the Middle East becoming a tourist magnet for European and American artists
and photographers creating beautiful portraits and the pure light of God in the Holy Land. Their
popular images of Jesus made him into a human being operating in a political environment; his
miracles and Resurrection were reinterpreted in scientific or anthropological ways. The forms
were simple, the color super-real, and the symbolism literal and literary. Where Jesus looks like
Lawrence of Arabia, and the Jews and Romans remarkably similar. They reinvented the Bible
world. Ancient ways of thought, even those of the Bible writers, were largely ignored.
A Book of Revelations
The Bible has been translated into over a thousand languages, printed in hundreds of millions of
copies; its ritual and its stories have been sent round the world. The Bible is still the world’s
bestselling book. The immediate effect of this explosion of Bibles was a proliferation of
churches in the world of non-conformist Protestantism, many of them inspired directly by its
written words: precisely that fragmentation of faith which the Council of Trent and the
Inquisition, with their insistence upon the importance of traditions interpretation of the Bible,
were so concerned to prevent. Nowadays biblical prose and imagery is widely used outside the
church. It bolsters political rhetoric; it is re-interpreted in hundreds of diverse ways to back a
plethora of extravagant theories. These usages have popular force, because they tag on to the
familiar world of the Bible, of Adam and Eve, and Moses, Isaiah and Jesus, the Promised Land,
the Cross and the Apocalypse. Most Westerners believe that history has the shape given it by the
Bible, from the Creation to the Last Judgment, from Genesis to Apocalypse. The blessings and
curses of the Bible are still with us. Armageddon now has a nuclear ring about it. ‘These spirits
were evils with power to work miracles. They were sent out to muster all the kings of the world
for the great day of battle of God the sovereign Lord… So they assembled the kings at the place
called in Hebrew Armageddon. Then the seventh angel poured his bowl on the air; and out of the
sanctuary came a loud voice from the throne, which said, “It is over!” And there followed flashes
of lightning and peals of thunder, and violent earthquake, like none before it in human history, so
violent it was…the cities of the world fell in ruin’. (Revelation 16:14-19). And the kings of the
earth shall witness this ending, the Book of Revelation tells us, at Armageddon/Har-Megiddo,

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that soft hill sticking out of the low range which looks across the plain of Esdralon to Nazareth.
Ancient Megiddo was once a prosperous fortified Canaanite city lying on the route from ancient
Egypt up to Mesopotamia. And the kings of the world will all come here to fight at the end of
time because, no doubt, they have fought there so many times before. Several Egyptian texts tell
us of pharaohs fighting battles there in the fifteenth century BC. One of the Bible’s most ancient
texts, Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, celebrates an Israelite victory near Megiddo;
Solomon re-fortified the town; King Josiah was killed in battle on the green plains below it. For
St John, Megiddo and its plain was a suitable spot to end the Age of Kings; and his book is also
the end of the Bible. This desolate vision built entirely from older biblical images; the world’s
beginning, and of its ending.
The Canaanites of Megiddo used yet more ancient stories about the gods of a cosmos that was
made by the loves and hatreds of a single family of seven generations, and this, the Bible
changed into the abstract universe of Jehovah made in seven days. And this has changed again
into the universe of Copernicus and Galileo, down to us today. And the Bible too, has provided
the West with its active sense of historic destiny; provided it the struggle to attain it, that energy,
that lack of satisfaction, which is a hallmark of our culture.

TESTAMENT The Bible And History; John Romer; Henry Holt and Company, Inc.,
115 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011; 1989

John Romer b. 1941 Surrey, UK. British Egyptologist, historion and archeologist.
Educated in Ottershaw School near Woking, Surrey and Royal College of Art in London.
1966 Participated in the University of Chicago Epigraphic Survey at the temples and tombs
of the ancient Egypian sites at Thebes.
1977-79 Organized and carried out excavations in the Valley of the Kings.
1979 Headed the Broolyn Museum’s expedition to excavate the tomb of RAMESSES XI.
Published numerous books and made docoumentary films about Ancient Egypt and
Bible History.
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HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Ancient Greek and Roman

Monistic Cosmologies
Thales of Miletus (Greek living in western Anatolia, today in Turkey) of early 6th century BC
was one of the Seven Wise Men “Sophoi” (means inventiveness and practical wisdom). He
applied mathematical knowledge that he derived from the Babylonians for practical problems,
such as determining the distance of a ship as seen from the shore or of the height of the
Pyramids. He was considered the first Greek philosopher because he was the first to give purely
natural explanations of the origin of the world free from mythological explanations. Living in
Asia Minor they were surrounded by nations, and they all differed greatly with their
mythological explanations. These men decided to take a fresh approach, based on personal
observations.
Thales upheld that everything had come out of water, because he discovered fossil sea animals
far inland.
Thales’ disciple and successor, Anaximander of Miletus (mid 6th century) expanded the account
of the origin and development of the ordered world (the cosmos). It developed out of the
“apeiron”, something infinite and indefinite. From that arose the opposites of hot and cold (and
wet) partly dried up (becoming solid earth), partly remaining (as water), and by means of the hot
splitting into fiery rings, which surrounded the whole cosmos. These rings are enveloped by mist
with breathing holes remaining that appeared to men as Sun, Moon and stars. Anaximander was
the first to realize that downward means toward the middle of the Earth and upward away from
it. So the Earth had no need to be supported (as Thales had believed) by anything. Starting form
Thales’ observations, Anaximander thought life was closely bound to moisture and originated in
the sea. All land animals are descendents of sea animals, including the first humans. The sea
animals nurture the land animals until they could fend for themselves. Gradually the moisture
partially evaporated and then all things returned unto undifferentiated apeiron.
Anaximaner’s successor, Anaximenes of Miltus (second half of 6th century), thought that air was
the origin of all things. He declared that other types of matter arose out of air by condensation
and rarefaction. This acquired a new meaning of “principle”. Matter remains the same thru many
transmutations. It presupposes that nothing can come out of nothing, and all passing away that
men observe are nothing but transmutations of something that essentially remains the same
eternally. It is the basis of all conservation laws – of matter, force, and energy that has been the
basis in the development of physics.
The first three Greek philosophers did not clearly distinguish between kinds of matter, forces,
and qualities, nor between physical and emotional qualities. The same entity is sometimes called
fire and sometimes hot. Heat appears sometimes as a force and sometimes as a quality. There is
also no clear distinction between warm and cold as physical qualities and the warmth of love and
the cold of hate. These ambiguities are important to understand in certain later developments in
Greek philosophy.
Xenophanes of Colophon (born c. 560 BC) migrated from Asia Minor to Elea in southern Italy,
brought out more clearly what was implied in Anaximenes’ philosophy; he criticized the popular
notion that men made their gods in their own image. He argued there could only be one God, the
ruler of the universe who must be eternal. The argument rested on the axiom that nothing can
come out of nothing and that nothing that is can really vanish.

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Parmenides of Elea (first half of 5th century BC) founder of school of Eleatism, a student of
Xenophanes; wrote a philosophical poem on “what is” cannot have come into being and cannot
pass away, nothing by its very nature does not exist. There can be no motion to something else.
All is solid and immobile being. The familiar world where things move around, come into being,
and pass away, is a world of mere belief (doxa). The world of belief rests on construct distinction
between what is believed to be positive (real being such as light and warmth), and what is
negative (absence of positive being, such as darkness and cold).
Heracleitus of Ephesus, a contemporary of Parmenides tried to show: the positive and the
negative are different views of the same thing; death and life, day and night, or light and
darkness.
Pluralistic Cosmologies
Parnenides influenced further developments of philosophy.
Empedocles of Acragas (mid 5th century) declared there are four material elements (he called
them roots of everything) and two forces, love and hate, that did not come into being and would
never pass away or increase or diminish. The elements are constant, mixed with one another by
love and again separated by hate. Thus thru mixture and decomposition composite things come
into being and pass away. Love and hate are blind forces. In the process of mixture and
decomposition the limbs and parts of various animals would be formed by chance. But they
could not survive. By chance they came together to support and reproduce and survive. That is
how various species were produced and continued to exist.
Anaxagors of Clazomenae, a 5th century pluralist, believed everything must be contained in
everything, but in the form of infinitely small parts. First they were thoroughly mixed and not
distinguished. But the nous, or intelligence, began to set these particles into motion, then they
separated and recombined in various ways and produced the world in which men live. The nous
is not blind but foresees and intends the production of the cosmos including living and intelligent
beings. This is a combination of mechanical and nonmechanical explanations of the world.
The Atomists Leucippus (mid 5th century) and Democritus (in the following generation)
assumed there are empty and filled spaces in the world, the latter consist of atoms. Atoms are
indivisible and nothing can penetrate to split them. The heavier body contains more atoms
equally distributed and of rounded shape, the lighter body has fewer atoms hooked together into
rigid gratings. Democritus also developed a theory of evolution of culture. Civilization is
produced by needs of life, which compel men to work and to make inventions. When life
becomes easy, because all needs are met, then is danger that civilization will decay as men
become unruly and negligent.
Metaphysic of numbers
Toward the end of the 6th century an independently kind of philosophy arose, by Pythagoras of
Samos (island close to Asia Minor). He traveled extensively in the East and Egypt, returned to
Samos, and then emigrated to southern Italy because of his dislike of the tyranny of Policrates
(535-522). At Craton and Metapontum he founded a philosophical society with strict rules and
soon gained considerable political influence. His doctrine of the transmigration of souls probably
came from the East. More important for the history of philosophy and science was this doctrine
that “all things are numbers.” The essence and structures of all things can be determined by
finding the numerical relations contained in them. His examples included the harmonies of
different musical instruments such as strings, pipes, and discs. He also observed certain
regularities in the movements of celestial bodies, and the form of a triangle determined by the
ratio of the lengths of its sides. About 450 BC Hippasus of Metapontum discovered the

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Incommensurability (can not compare) of science that the quantitative relations between the side
and diagonal of simple figures like square and the regular pentagon cannot be expressed in a
ratio of numbers. This seemed to destroy the basis of Pythagorean philosophy, yet it led to the
foundation of quantitative science.
Anthropology and Relativism
In the middle of the 5th century BC was the advent of the Sophists (making a profession of being
inventive and clever). They differed from the philosophers so far, they asked money for their
instructions. They led a rebellion against the preceding development that implied a difference
between the real world and the phenomenal (known thru the senses) world. Protagoras of Abdera
(488-440) pronounced “Man is the measure of all things, of those which are that they are, and of
those which are not that they are not.” For man the world is what it appears to him to be, not
something else. The Sophists were skeptical of all traditions, including the philosophical. They
observed that different nations have different rules of conduct even in regard to things considered
most sacred – such as relations between the sexes, marriage, and burial – they concluded that
most rules of conduct are conventions. What is really important is to be successful in life and to
gain influence on others. This they promised to teach. The older Sophists were far from openly
teaching immoralities. But they gradually came under suspicion due to their sly ways of arguing.
One of the later Sophists, Thasymachus of Chalcedon (late 5th century) declared openly that
“right is what is beneficial for the stronger or better one.”
Socrates (470 BC-399)
Socrates was born of plebeian (common) origin and lived during the chaos of the Peloponnesian
War (431-404) (Spartan coalition vs Athens), with its erosion of moral values; he dedicated
himself to shore up the ethical dimensions of life by the admonition to “know thyself”.
Socrates was considered by many a Sophist because of his tricky arguments; he did not teach for
money and his aims were very different from the Sophists. He never tried to teach directly. He
constantly talked with everybody – old and young, high and low – trying to bring into the open
by his questions the inconsistencies in their opinions and actions. His activity rested on two
premises: (1) to never do wrong, even indirectly and (2 ) that anyone who knows what is good
and right could act against it. He demonstrated this by taking positions even when the majority
was against a fair trial; even risking his life under the Thirty Tyrants. He spoke up against
hypocrisy, that won the admiration especially among the young of all classes, but resentment
among leading politicians. Under the restored democracy he was accused of impiety and
corruption of the youth and finally condemned to death.
His influence continued after his death by way of his many adherents and disciples. One of his
disciples founded the sect of the Cynics.
 Plato (428 BC-348)
The most important disciple of Socrates was Plato; he came from one of the noblest Athenian
families, who could trace his ancestry back to the last king of Athens and to Solon (c.630BC-
c.560) the great social and political reformer. Contrary to Socrates, who always concerned
himself with the attitudes of individuals, Plato believed in the importance of political institutions.
In his early youth he had observed that the Athenian masses supported politicians engaged in
foolish conquests that ended up in defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Consequently democracy
was abolished and replaced by the Thirty Tyrants, then everything became worse. In 399BC
democracy was restored with a new law code with safeguards against rash political decisions.
Some years later, demagogy appeared again. Plato concluded that “things would not become
better in politics unless the philosophers would become rulers or the rulers philosophers.”

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In his dialog “Gorgias” he denounced political oratory and propaganda, and then traveled to
southern Italy to study political conditions there. He found the Greeks there, with the rich
exploiting the poor, much worse than the democracy in Athens. In Syracuse he met a young man,
Dion, brother-in-law of the local tyrant Dionysius I, who eagerly accepted his political ideas.
Plato returned to Athens, and founded the Academy; an institution for the education of
philosophers, and in the following years continued his writings. In his great work “Politeia” (The
Republic) he drew the outlines of an ideal state. The state must be ruled by an elite governed
exclusively by reason, and supported by a class of warriors obedient to them. Both ruling classes
must have no individual possessions and no families and lead an extreme austere life; they would
receive the necessities of life from the working population, which alone is permitted to own
private property. The elite would be strictly educated to fit the task.
At the death of Dionysius I, Dion induced Plato to come to Syracuse again to persuade
Dionysius’ successor to renounce his power in favor of Plato’s ideals. The attempt failed. In his
later political works, the “Politicus” (Statesman) and “Nomoi” (Laws), Plato showed only a god
could be entrusted with absolute power of the philosopher-rulers of his “Politeia”. Human ruler
must be controlled by rigid laws because life is too varied to be governed adequately by general
rules. But “Nomoi” still placed strong restrictions on property ownership.
Philosophy
In the field of theoretical philosophy, Plato’s most influence was in his theories of Ideas, which
he derived from Socrates’ method: Socrates is trying to bring out the inconsistencies in his
interlocutors’ opinions and actions, he often asks what makes men say that a certain thing or
action is good or beautiful or pious or brave; and he asks what are people looking at when they
make such statements. Plato sometimes made Socrates ask what is the Eidos (the Idea, the
image) before him when he calls something “good”. A vague abstract definition would be given;
this was good enough to make the interlocutor aware that such statements are indefinable.
Plato observed the theory of Ideas in mathematics also. No two things in the visible world are
perfectly equal, just as there is nothing perfectly good or perfectly beautiful. Yet equality is a
fundamental concept in mathematics and everyday life – the foundation of all measurements.
These notions are beyond our senses, Plato called it the world of Ideas.
Beyond the realm of senses, is the system of knowledge, constant comparisons go on in the
concepts of: more perfect to less perfect, sound logical conclusions to logical fallacy, elegant
scientific demonstration to clumsy one; without considering the former as good and the later bad.
According to Plato, all the things men perceive with their senses appear to be imperfect copies of
the eternal Ideas. The most important and fundamental of these is the Idea of Good. It is “beyond
being and knowledge”, yet it is the foundation of both. “Being” in this connection means
something specific – a man, a lion, or a house – recognizable by its shape.
Knowledge begins with the perception of earthly shapes, and ascends form there to higher realms
of Ideas, which are approachable to the human mind. In the famous myth of the cave in the
seventh book of “Politeia”, Plato likened the ordinary man sitting in a cave looking at a wall on
which he sees only the shadows of the real things that are behind his back, and he likened the
philosopher to a man who got out in the open and sees the real world of the Ideas. Coming back,
he may be less able to distinguish the shades because he has been blinded by the light outside;
but he is the only one who knows reality, and he conducts his life accordingly.
Aristotle (384 BC-322)
Aristotle was born in Stagira on the Chalcidic peninsula of Macedonia in northern Greece. His
father, Nicomachus, was court physician to Amyrtas III (king of Macedonia 393-370), father of

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Philip II (382-336, king 359-336) and grandfather of Alexander the Great (356-323, king 336-
323). As a physician, Nicomachus was a member of the guild of Asclepiaos, the so-called sons
of Asclepius, the legendary founder and god of medicine. As a doctor’s son, Aristotle was heir of
a scientific tradition some 200 years old. The case histories contained the “Epidemics” of
Hippocrates (c.460-c.377), the father of Greek medicine. Aristotle probably learned at home the
fundamentals and the practical skills he was afterward to display in his biological researches.
Medicine and its history were later studied at Aristotle’s Lyceum in Athens.
While Aristotle was still a youth, his father died, and he became a ward of Proxenus, probably a
relative of his father. He was sent to the Academy at Athens when he was 17 years old in 367
and remained there for 20 years. Aristotle was Plato’s greatest disciple.
After Plato died in 348 Aristotle left Athens with his friends to go to Assus in northwest Asia
Minor. The Greek ruler of that area asked graduates from Plato’s Academy to set up a small
branch there to help spread Greek rule and Greek philosophy to Asian soil. There Aristotle began
his book “Politics” where he sketched the connection between philosophy and politics, proposing
the purpose of a city-state (polis) is to secure the conditions in which the capable can live the
philosophical life. He espoused an enlightened oligarchy in the establishment of the noble
civilization created by Greeks. He clearly distinguishes the function of the philosopher from that
of the king. It is not necessary for a king to be a philosopher, even a disadvantage. Rather the
king should take the advice of a true philosopher. Then he would fill his reign with good deeds,
not with good words. After three years at the Assus Academy, Aristotle moved to the nearby
island of Lesbos. With his friend Theophrastus, a native of that island, he set up a philosophical
center patterned after the Athenian Academy. There his center of interest shifted to biology and
focused on teleological causation; it is related to aim, or end, of nature, that is distinct from
mechanical causation operating in the inorganic sphere, in natural organisms – plants and animal
- have ends or goals that determine their structure and development.
In his treatise Aristotle wrote that if facts have not been sufficiently established, credit must be
given to observations to have higher authority over theories. He also distanced himself from the
Platonic conception of the soul as an independently existing substance that is only temporarily
resident in the body; he suggested instead that the soul is the vital principle united with the body
to form the individual person.
In 343 or 342 Aristotle, at about age 42, was invited by king Philip II to the Macedonian court at
Pella (capital of Macedonia) to tutor his 13-year-old son, Alexander, to prepare him for his future
as a military leader. Using the model of the epic Greek hero, as in Homer’s “Iliad”, Aristotle
attempted to form Alexander as an embodiment of the classical valor of an Ajax or Achilles,
enlightened by the latest achievement of Greek civilization, philosophy. The resulting influence
on Alexander was negligible. After his pupil became king Alexander the Great, Aristotle retuned
to his parental property at Stagira (c.339). There he continued the associations of his
philosophical circle which included pupils of Plato. In 335, when Aristotle was nearly 50 years
old, he returned to Athens and founded the Lyceum school in a gymnasium attached to the
temple of Apollo Lyceus, situated in a grove outside of Athens. Aristotle gave instructions in the
“peripatos” the covered walkway of the gymnasium. The members of the school were called the
Peripatetics. He organized the school in the next 12 years as a center for speculation and research
in every field of inquiry, coordinating the work of a number of scholars, giving lectures on a
wide range of scientific and philosophical questions.
The main difference between the Academy and the Lyceum was that the scientific interest of the

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Platonists centered on mathematics while the main contributions of the Lyceum were in biology
and history.
On the death of Alexander the Great in 323 a brief but vigorous anti-Macedonian agitation broke
out in Athens. Aristotle had long-standing Macedonian connections and was friend with
Antipater, the Macedonian regent of Athens, and felt himself in danger. He therefore left the city
and moved to his mother’s estate in Chalcis on the island of Euboea. There he died the following
year at the age of 62 or 63. It was reported that he abandoned Athens in order to save the
Athenians form sinning twice against philosophy (referring to Socrates as the earlier victim).
Philosophy
Aristotle developed a philosophy somewhat different from his master Plato. He raised objections
to Plato’s theory of Ideas, and elaborated his own theoretical and formal analysis of the
arguments used in various Socratic discussions that led to his works on logic, a new science.
Writings of Aristotle
The writings of Aristotle that have generally survived are the treatises. They were meant for use
in his school and were written in a concise and individualistic style. Today the surviving 30
works fill some 2,000 pages. Ancient catalogs list more than 170 separate works. The existing
works contain several passages of polished prose, but for the most part their style is clipped.
Logic
The term was invented by Xenocrates of the Academy. Aristotle attributed extensive significance
to language (logos) and the rules of discourse. He emphasized that language is distinctive of the
human species. He defined man as a rational animal which, in the Greek also means an animal
possessing a language or speech or word. In Aristotle’s view, the purpose of language is to
express feelings and experiences of the soul, and consequently words are signs or symbols of
thoughts and other mental phenomena.
The logical treatises of Aristotle make up the collection know as “Organon” (tool), a title
adopted by later commentators. Aristotle’s own name for logic was “analytics”, immediately
after his death it took on the equivalence of dialectic. Other treatises in “Organon” include:
“Categories”, “On Interpretation”, “Prior Analytics”, “Posterior Analytics”, “Topics” and
“Sophistical Refutations”. Also the forth book of “Metaphysics” includes logical work.
Nature
In his treatise “Physics” Aristotle deals with natural bodies in general. Special material bodies
are discussed in “On the Heavens” or the “Meteorology”. His treatises on “Physics” are
contained in eight books, including topics like: “History of Animals”, “Parts of Animals”, and
the “Generation of Animals”, “Movement of Animals” and “Progression of Animals”.
Psychology
The relation between the active principle and the passive continuum that is operational in
sensitive and intellectual life is examined in “On the Soul”. After explaining the concept and the
conditions of life, Aristotle relates to biological and psychological phenomena while rejecting
Platonic transcendentalist and pre-Socratic theories on nature of the soul. The soul is just part of
the organic body that consists of such faculties as: nutritive, perceptual, intellectual, imagination
and desire.
In the “Parva Naturalia” a sequence of treatises includes: memory and reminiscence, sleeping
and waking, prophecy in sleep, length and brevity of life, youth and old age, life and death, and
respiration.
Metaphysics
In his “Metaphysics” Aristotle sometimes refers to doctrines as “wisdom” or “first philosophy”

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or even “theology” and then develops them in the following books:
Book 1 of “Metaphysics”, Aristotle gives a survey of explanations of his predecessors. The most
important sources for information are from pre-Socratics and certain aspects of Plato’s
philosophy.
Book 2 is a short essay on the principles of science.
Book 3 sets out a long series of metaphysical puzzles.
Book 4 explains Aristotle’s conceptions of “first philosophy”.
Book 5 is devoted to analysis and differentiation of some 40 ambiguous philosophical terms.
Book 6 returns to issues of Book 4.
Books 7-9 form a unit. Very difficult to understand topics, such as: matter and form, substance
and essence, change and generation, actuality and potentiality.
Book 10 is a self-contained essay on “oneness”- on unity, continuity, identity, and related
concepts.
Book 11 summarizes part of “Physics” and earlier parts of “Metaphysics”.
Book 12 gives Aristotle’s “theology” his conception of God, of the first or unmoved mover.
He is pure intelligence and as such is indifferent to the vicissitudes of the world.
The world was not created but has been in existence since eternity,
and God is the fountainhead of all motion.
Books 13+14 contain long discussions – mostly critical and directed against Plato –
of the nature of mathematical objects.
Ethics and Politics
At the start of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” he explains how the practical sciences can not
be as exact as theoretical sciences. They do not lend themselves to precise definitions, but
involve habits and skills, which can be acquired and lost, and associations and institutions, which
in their changes effect political actions and moral ends. Man varies as moral agent and as citizen
according to environmental determinants, educational background, the influence of family,
economic position, social class, means of livelihood, and even his association of his leisure.
In “Ethics” and “Politics” Aristotle demonstrates that morality and problems of political
associations can not be separated.
Aristotle’s approach to ethics is teleological, not in terms of absolute, but what is conducive to
man’s good. He arrives at a definition of happiness as activity of the soul in accordance to virtue.
He distinguishes moral virtues and intellectual virtues, which are determined, respectively, by
irrational and rational powers of the soul. The ideal happiness consists of a life of intellectual
contemplation. In “Politics” he raises the problem of human action and association leading to
communal life in living well.
Aristotle’s teleology was based on empirical observations; they formed the foundation of ethics
and political theory. He had his students make collections of the laws and political institutions
(and their historical developments) of all known cities and nations in order to find out how they
worked and at what points their initiators had been mistaken in the way they worked.
Art and Rhetoric
Aristotle relates rhetoric to its final goal, persuasion. Like dialectics it is not a science. It is
simply the faculty or power of available means of persuasion. The three modes of persuasion that
a speaker may exercise: the power of his character, the excitation of emotions in the audience,
and proof or apparent proof.
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history. It is also related to oratory in consideration of moral, political, and educational effects.
Tragedy is a kind of poetry in terms of persuasion and excitation. It imitates serious action of
great magnitude in a dramatic form to accomplish the purification (Katharsis) of emotion and
fear.
Disciples and Commentators
After Aristotle’s death his immediate disciples carried on the same kind of work, especially in
the historical fields. Theophrastus (c.372-c.287) wrote a history of philosophy and works on
botany and on mineralogy, Meno a history of medicine, and Dicaiarchus of Messene a history of
civilization and a book on types of political constitutions. The next two generations of the
Peripatetics spread out in two different directions: literary history of poetry, epics, tragedy, and
comedy, and biographies of famous writers; and physical science, Straton (d.c.270) of
Lampsacus a new physics based on experiments, and the astronomer Aristarchus (c.310-230) of
Samos invented the heliocentric system.
The school then faded into obscurity until the 1st century AD, after the rediscovery of Aristotle’s
lecture manuscripts, then arose a great school of commentators on his works, which had great
influence on medieval philosophy.
Hellenistic and Roman philosophy
The period after the death of Aristotle the Greek city-states lost their vitality, when they became
pawns in the power game of the Hellenistic kings who succeeded Alexander. Life became
troubled and insecure. In this environment two dogmatic philosophical systems came into being,
the Stoic and the Epicurean.
Stoics
The Stoic system was created by a Syrian, Zeno of Citium (c.335 BC Citium-c.263 Athens). He
went to Athens c. 312 and attended lectures by Cynic philosophers Crates of Thebes and Stilpon
of Megara, in addition to lectures at the Academy. Arriving at his own philosophy, he began to
teach in the public hall, the Stoa Poikile (hence the name Stoicism). Zeno’s philosophic system
included logic and theory of knowledge, physics, and ethics – the latter being central. In logic
and the theory of knowledge he was influenced by Antisthenes (c.445-c.365 a disciple of
Socrates) and Diodorus Cronus, in physics by Heracleitus (c.540-c.480). None of his many
treatises, written in harsh but forceful Greek, have survived save in fragmentary quotations.
Zeno’s thought comprised, essentially a dogmatized Socratic philosophy, with additions from
Heracleitus. The basis of human happiness is to “live in agreement with nature.” Stoic moral
theory is based on the view that the world is a unity as one great city. The only real good for man
is the possession of virtue; everything else (wealth or poverty, health or illness, life or death) is
indifferent. All virtues are based on right knowledge – self-control being the knowledge of the
right choice, fortitude the knowledge of what must be endured and what must not, and justice the
right knowledge “in distribution.” The passions, which are the cause of all evil, are the result of
error of judging what is real good and what is not. The world is governed by divine Logos – a
word originally meaning “word” or “speech,” then the laws of the universe, and, finally,
“reason.” This Logos keeps the world in perfect order. Man can deviate from or rebel against this
order, but by doing so cannot disturb it but can only do harm to himself.
Zeno’s philosophy was further developed by the second and third heads of the school. In the 2nd
century BC, Panaetius of Rhodes (c.180-109) adapted Stoic philosophy to the needs of the
Roman aristocracy and made impressions on some of the leading men of the time, who tried to
follow his moral precepts. In the periods of the rising monarchy and of its established rule,
Stoicism became the religion of the republican opposition. The most famous Stoic was the

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younger Cato (95-46). It was also the guiding philosophy of Seneca the Younger (c.4 BC-AD
65), the educator and adviser of Nero; he died on the Emperor’s orders. Stoicism gave
consolation, composure and fortitude in times of trouble to many proud men to the end of
antiquity and beyond.
Epicureans
The thought of Zeno’s contemporary Epicurus (341-270) also composed a philosophy of defense
in a troubled world. It is considered in many respects the opposite of Zeno’s. Zeno declared that
the wise man would try to learn from everybody and acknowledged his debt to earlier
philosophers; Epicurus insisted that everything he taught was based on his own thinking, though
it is obvious that his physical explanation of the universe is a simplification of Democritus’
(c.460-c.370) Atomism. Stoics taught that pleasure and pains are not important for a man’s
happiness; Epicurus made pleasure the essence of a happy life. The Stoics acted as advisors to
kings and statesmen; Epicurus lived in the retirement of his Garden, cultivated intimate
friendships with his adherents and was against participating in public life. Stoics believed in
divine providence; Epicurus taught that the gods pay no attention to humans.
The two philosophies also had some essential factors in common. Though Epicurus made
pleasure the criterion of a good life, he was far from advocating a life of indulgence and
sensuality. When in his old age he suffered great pains from prostates, he asserted that
philosophizing and the memory and love of his distant friends made pleasure prevail even in the
grips of such pain. He sincerely believed that it is important for humans to look at the gods as
perfect beings; since only in this way could men approach perfection. It was only later in Roman
times that people began to misunderstand Epicureanism, holding it to be an atheistic philosophy
justifying a dissolute life.
Skeptics
The Skeptic school was initiated by another of Zeno’s contemporaries, Pyrrhon of Elis (c.360-
c.272). He came to the conviction that no man can know anything for certain, nor be certain that
the things he perceives by his senses are real and not illusory. One of his later adherents of his
doctrine was Sextus Empiricus (2nd -3rd century AD) a medical doctor who headed a Skeptical
school during the decline of Greek Skepticism. He wrote a large work “Against the Dogmatists”
in which he tried to refute all the philosophers who had a more positive philosophy, quoting
extensively from their works, thus preserving much that otherwise have been lost. The
republication of his “Hypotyposes” in 1562 had far-reaching effect on European philosophical
thought.
Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists
All the philosophical schools and sects of Athens that originated in the 4th century BC and
continued into late antiquity until the emperor Justinian I (483-565 AD), who ordered them
closed in 529 because of their pagan character. Within that whole period of nearly 1,000 years
only two new schools were added, the Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists. They drew their
inspiration from early Greek philosophy, only the latter was of importance for the history of
philosophy. The Neoplatonist school began with Ammonius Saccas (1st half of 3rd century AD).
His pupil Platinus (205-270) did not publish anything; his philosophy is known thru the
“Enneads”, a collection of his writings by his disciple Prophyry (c.234-c.305) who also wrote a
biography of Plotinus.
The philosophy of Plotinus (and Ammonius) was derived from the study of Plato. It included
many philosophical terms first coined by Aristotle and adapted some elements of Stoic
philosophy as well. It is essentially a new philosophy, agreeing with the religious and mystical
tendencies of its time.
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Platinus assumed the existence of several levels of Being, the highest being that of the One, or
the Good, they are identical and indefinable in human language. The next lower level is the nous,
or pure intellect or reason; the third is that of the soul or souls. Following is the world
perceivable by the senses, at the lowest level is matter, which is the cause of all evil. The highest
bliss for man is union with the One, or Good, attained by contemplation and purification.
The further history of Neoplatonists is extremely complicated: one disciple founded a branch in
Syria, another branch was founded in Pergamum (western Asia Minor). In the 4th century
emperor Julian (c.331-363) attempted to revive paganism. In the 5th century the Athenian school
reached a new high point when Proclus (c.410-485) combined ideas of his predecessors into a
comprehensive system. In 529 Justinian I closed all philosophical schools in Athens, however, a
branch continued to exist in Alexandria.
The Athenian Neoplatonists found refuge at the court of the Persian king Khosrow (d.579), and
in 565 they were permitted to return to Athens. Gradually pagan philosophy as such died out,
though it continued to exist as an influence in the development of Christian philosophy and
theology.
Medieval Philosophy
Medieval philosophy refers to the Middle Ages in western Europe; from the fall of the Roman
Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries to the Renaissance of the 15th century. During this period it
remained in close conjunction with Christian thought, particularly theology; the chief
philosophers of the period were churchmen who were teachers. Greek philosophy ceased to be
creative after Plotinus in the 3rd century AD. A century later Christian thinkers such as Ambrose
(339-397), Victorinus, and Augustine (354-430) began to assimilate Neoplatonism into Christian
doctrine to give a rational interpretation of the Christian faith; it arose in confluence of Greek
(and to a lesser extend of Roman) philosophy and Christianity. Plotinus was already deeply
religious, from the influence of Middle Eastern religion. Medieval philosophy continued to be
religiously orientated first those of Plotinus and later those of Aristotle. Religion and philosophy
fruitfully cooperated in the Middle Ages and led to a rational understanding of faith. Faith, for its
part, inspired Christian thinkers to develop new philosophical ideas, some of which became part
of the philosophical heritage of the West.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the beneficial interplay of faith and reason started to break
down. Philosophy began to be cultivated for its own sake, apart from, and even in contradiction
to Christian religion. This divorce of reason from faith, became definite in the 17th century by
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and marked the birth of modern
philosophy.
Early Medieval Philosophy
The early medieval period extended to the 12th century, saw the barbarian invasion of the
Roman Empire, the collapse of its civilization and the gradual building of a new Christian culture
in western Europe. Philosophy in these troubled and darkened times was cultivated by the late
Roman thinkers such as Augustine (354-430) and Boethius (c.480-c.525), then by monks such as
Anselm (1033-1109). The monasteries were the main centers of learning and education until the
founding of the cathedral schools and universities in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Augustine
During these centuries philosophy was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism; Stoicism and
Aristotelianism played only a minor role. Augustine was awakened to the philosophical life by
reading Cicero (106-43BC), but the Neoplatonists mostly shaped his philosophical methods and
ideas. From them he learned that beyond the world of senses there is a spiritual, eternal realm of

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truth that is the object of the human mind and the goal of man’s strivings. This truth he identified
with the God of Christianity. This divine world of truth and beauty does not come by way of his
senses but by turning inward to his mind, and to the intelligible light, to see the truth. Augustine
demonstrates the existence of God with the proof of the existence of necessary immutable Truth.
He sees in mathematics and ethics also the necessary, immutable, and eternal Truth, or God; man
cannot doubt that he exists and knows and loves. Augustine sees man as a composite of two
substances, body and soul, with the later by far superior. The Soul’s immortality also possesses
eternal and unchangeable Truth. The body part of human nature also, will be resurrected from
the dead by Christian faith.
Augustine’s “Confession” (c.400) and “On the Trinity” (c.400-416), abound with psychological
analysis of knowledge, perception, memory, and love; his “The City of God” (413-426) presents
the drama of history as a progression of movement of humanity, redeemed by God, to its final
response with its Creator.
Boethius
He was one of the most important translators of Greek philosophy to Latin. Theodoric (454-526),
king of the Ostrogoths, had him killed by the time he had only translated the logical writings of
Porphyry and Aristotle. These translations and his commentaries passed on to the thinkers of the
Middle Ages, the beginning of Aristotelian logic. They also raised important philosophical
questions such as the nature of universals. Are they real or only mental concepts? If real, are they
corporeal or incorporeal; if incorporeal, do they exist in the sensible world or apart from it?
Boethius presents them as only mental abstractions. In his “Concerning the Consolation of
Philosophy” (c.525) he adopts the Platonic notion that they are innate ideas from a previous
existence. The book was very popular and influential in the Middle Ages. It also includes lively
treatment of providence, divine foreknowledge, chance, fate and human happiness.
Greek Fathers of the Church and Erigena
Another stream from Greek philosophy, mostly Neoplatonist thought, flowed into the Middle
Ages was the Greek Fathers of the Church, notably Origen (c.185-c.254), Gregory of Nyssa
(c.335-c.394), Nemesius (c.400), Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite (c.500), and Maximus the
Confessor (c.580-662). John Scotus, called Erigena (belonging to the people of Erin, in Ireland),
a master at the Carolingian court of Charles the Bald, translated into Latin some of the writings
of the Greek theologians, and his own major work “On the Division of nature” (862-866) is a
vast synthesis of Christian thought organized along Neoplatonic lines. For him, God is the primal
unity, unknowable and unnameable in himself, from which the multiplicity of creatures flow. He
so far transcends his creatures that he is most appropriately called superreal and supergood.
Creation is the process of division whereby the many derive from the One. The One descends
into the manifold of creation and reveals himself in it. By the reverse process the multiplicity of
creatures will return to their unitary source at the end of time, when everything will be absorbed
in God.
Anselm (1033-1109)
After the breakdown of the Carolingian Empire in the 10th century, intellectual speculation was
at a low ebb in western Europe. In the next century some political stability was achieved by
Otto I (912-973), who reestablished the empire, and Benedictine monasteries were revitalized by
reformers such as Peter Damian (1007-1072). Like Tertullian (c.155-220), Damian mistrusted
secular learning and philosophy as harmful to the faith. Other monks showed a keen interest in
dialectic and philosophy. Among the latter was Anselm, an Italian who became abbot of the
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faith and reason in his search for truth. Faith comes first, in his view, but reason should follow,
giving reasons for what men believe. Anselm wrote a model meditation on God in which
everything would be proved by reason and nothing on the authority of Scripture; in his
“Monologue” (1077) he gives three proofs of the existence of God, all of which are based on
Neoplatonic thought. The first proof moves from the awareness of a multiplicity of good things
to the recognition that they all share or participate more or less in one and the same Good, which
is supremely Good in itself, and this is God. The second and third proofs are similar: beginning
with their awareness of a multiplicity of beings that have more or less of being, and more or less
of perfection, men recognize that they share in One who is the supreme Being and perfect. In his
later work “Faith Seeking Understanding,” (1077-78) Anselm gives his famous proof of the
existence of God. This begins with a datum of faith: men believe God to be the Being, and none
greater can be thought of. Some, like the fool in the Psalms, say there is no God; but even the
fool, on hearing these words, understands them, and what he understands exists in his intellect,
even though he does not grant that such a Being exists in reality. But it is greater to exist in
reality and in the understanding than to exist in the understanding alone. Therefore it is
contradictory to hold that God exists only in the intellect, for then the Being of which none
greater can be thought is one than which a greater can be thought, namely, one that exists both in
reality and in the understanding. Philosophers still debate the meaning and value of this so-called
ontological argument for God's existence.
Bernard of Clairvaux and Abelard
Anselm's inquiry into the existence and nature of God, as also his discussion of truth, love, and
human liberty, aimed at fostering monastic contemplation. Other monks, such as the Cistercian
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), were suspicious of the use of secular learning and philosophy
in matters of faith. Bernard complained of the excessive indulgence in dialectic displayed by
contemporaries such as Peter Abelard (1079–1142). He himself developed a doctrine of mystical
love, the influence of which lasted thru the centuries. The monks of the Parisian Abbey of Saint-
Victor were no less intent on fostering mystical contemplation, but they cultivated the liberal arts
and philosophy as an aid to it. In this spirit, Hugh of Saint-Victor wrote his “Teaching” (c. 1127),
a monumental treatise on the theoretical and practical sciences and the trivium (grammar,
rhetoric, dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). During the
same period the School of Chartres, attached to the famous cathedral near Paris, was the focus of
Christian Neoplatonism and humanism. Urban development in the 12th century shifted the centre
of learning and education from the monasteries to the towns. Abelard founded several urban
schools near Paris and taught in them. A passionate logician, he pioneered a method in theology
that contributed to the later Scholastic method. His “Yes and No” (1115–17) cites the best
authorities on both sides of theological questions in order to reach their correct solution. In
philosophy his main interest was logic. On the question of universals he agreed with neither the
Nominalists nor the Realists of his day. His Nominalist teacher Roscelin held that universals,
such as “man” and “animal,” are nothing but words, or names. Abelard argued that this does not
take into account the fact that names have meaning. His Realist teacher William of Champeaux
taught that universals are realities apart from the mind.
Transition to scholasticism
In the 12th century a cultural revolution took place that influenced the whole subsequent history
of Western philosophy. The old style of education, based on the liberal arts and emphasizing
grammar and the reading of the Latin classics, was replaced by new methods stressing logic,
dialectic, and all the scientific disciplines known at the time. John of Salisbury, of the School of
Chartres, witnessed this radical change:
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Behold, everything was being renovated: grammar was being made over, logic was being
remodeled, rhetoric was being despised. Discarding the rules of their predecessors, (the
masters) were teaching the quadrivium with new methods taken from the very depths of
philosophy.
In philosophy itself, there was a decline in Platonism and a growing interest in Aristotelianism.
This change was occasioned by the translation into Latin of the works of Aristotle in the late
12th and early 13th centuries. Until then, only a few of his minor logical treatises were known.
Now his Topica, Analytica priora, and Analytica posteriora were rendered into Latin, giving the
schoolmen (the teachers of Western Christian philosophy in the 13th and 14th centuries) access
to the Aristotelian methods of disputation and science, which became their own techniques of
discussion and inquiry. Many other philosophical and scientific works of Greek and Arabic
origin were translated at this time, creating a “knowledge explosion” in western Europe.
Arabic Thought
Among the translations from Arabic were some of the writings of Avicenna (Ibn Sina in Arabig)
(980–1037) an Iranian physician. This Islamic philosopher had an extraordinary impact on the
medieval schoolmen. His interpretation of Aristotle's notion of metaphysics as the science of
“being as being”, his analysis of many metaphysical terms, such as “being,” “essence,”
“existence,” and his metaphysical proof of the existence of God were often quoted, with approval
or disapproval, in Christian circles. Also influential were his psychology, logic, and natural
philosophy. His “Canon of Medicine” was an authority on the subject until modern times. “The
Aims of the Philosophers” (1094) of the Arabic theologian al-Ghazali (Algazel in Latin) (d. c.
1111), an exposition of Avicenna's philosophy written in order to criticize it, was read as a
complement of Avicenna's works.
The commentaries of the Arabic philosopher Averroës (Ibn Rushd in Arabig) (1126 Spain-1198
Morocco) were translated along with Aristotle's works. As Aristotle was called “the Philosopher”
by the medieval philosophers, Averroës was dubbed “the Commentator.” These two taught the
Scholastics philosophy as a purely rational discipline, divorced from revealed religion. The
Christian schoolmen often attacked Averroës as the archenemy of Christianity for his rationalism
and his doctrines of the eternity of the world and the unity of the intellect for all men; i.e., the
doctrine that intellect is a single, undifferentiated form with which men become reunited at
death. This was anathema to the Christian schoolmen because it contravened the Christian
doctrine of individual immortality.
Jewish Thought
Of considerably less influence on the Scholastics was medieval Jewish thought. Ibn Gabirol
(c.1022-c.1058), known to the Scholastics as Avicebron or Avencebrol, was thought to be an
Arab or Christian, though in fact he was a Spanish Jew. His chief philosophical work, written in
Arabic and preserved only in a Latin translation entitled “Fountain of Life” (c. 1050), stresses the
unity and simplicity of God. All creatures are composed of form and matter, either the gross
corporeal matter of the sensible world or the spiritual matter of angels and human souls. Some of
the schoolmen were attracted to the notion of spiritual matter and also to Ibn Gabirol's analysis
of a plurality of forms in creatures, according to which every corporeal being receives a variety
of forms by which it is given its place in the hierarchy of being—for example, a dog has the
forms of a corporeal thing, a living thing, an animal, a dog. Maimonides (1135-1204), or Moses
ben Maimon, was known to Christians of the Middle Ages as Rabbi Moses. His “Guide of the
Perplexed” (c. 1190) helped to reconcile Greek philosophy with revealed religion. For
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apparent contradiction is due to a misinterpretation of either the Bible or the philosophers. Thus,
he showed that creation is reconcilable with philosophical principles and that the Aristotelian
arguments for an eternal world are not conclusive because they ignore the omnipotence of God,
who can create a world of either finite or infinite duration. While Western scholars were
assimilating the new treasures of Greek, Islamic, and Jewish thought, universities that became
the centers of Scholasticism were being founded. Of these the most important were Paris and
Oxford (formed 1150–70 and 1168, respectively). Scholasticism is the name given to the
theological and philosophical teachings of the schoolmen in the universities. There was not one
Scholastic doctrine; each of the Scholastics developed his own, which was often in disagreement
with that of his fellow teachers. They had in common a respect for the great writers of old, such
as the Fathers of the Church, Aristotle, Plato, Boethius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and Avicenna.
These they called “authorities.” Their interpretation and evaluation of the authorities, however,
frequently differed. They also shared a common style and method that developed out of the
teaching practices in the universities. Teaching was done by lecture and disputation (a formal
debate). A lecture consisted of the reading of a prescribed text followed by the teacher's
commentary on it. Masters also held disputations in which the affirmative and negative sides of a
question were thoroughly argued by students and teacher, before the latter resolved the problem.
Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon
The newly translated Greek and Arabic treatises had an immediate effect on the University of
Oxford. Its first chancellor, Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168–1253), commented on some of
Aristotle's works and translated the “Nicomachean Ethics” from Greek to Latin. He was deeply
interested in scientific methods, which he described as both inductive and deductive. By the
observation of individual events in nature, man advances to a general law, called a “universal
experimental principle,” that accounts for these events. Experimentation either verifies or
falsifies a theory by testing its empirical consequences. For Grosseteste the study of nature is
impossible without mathematics. He cultivated the science of optics (perspectiva), which
measures the behavior of light by mathematical means. His studies of the rainbow and comets
employ both observation and mathematics. His treatise “On Light” (1215–20) embodies
metaphysics of light, presenting light as the basic form of all things and God as the primal
uncreated light. Grosseteste's pupil Roger Bacon (c. 1220–c. 1292) made the mathematical and
experimental methods the key to natural science. The term experimental science was popularized
in the West thru his writings. For him, man acquires knowledge thru reasoning and experience,
but without the latter he can have no certitude. Man gains experience thru the senses and also
thru an interior divine illumination that culminates in mystical experience. Bacon was critical of
the methods of Parisian theologians such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. He strove to
create a universal wisdom embracing all the sciences and organized by theology. He also
proposed the formation of a single worldwide society, or “Christian republic,” that would unite
all men under the leadership of the pope.
William of Auvergne
At the University of Paris, William of Auvergne (c. 1180–1249) was one of the first to feel the
impact of the philosophies of Aristotle and Avicenna. As a teacher, and then as bishop of Paris,
he was concerned with the threat of pagan and Islamic thought to the Christian faith. He opposed
the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world as contrary to the Christian notion of
creation. His critique of Avicenna centered around the latter's conception of God and creation.
The God of Avicenna, who creates the universe eternally and necessarily, thru the mediation of
Ten Intelligences, was opposed by William of Auvergne with the Christian notion of a God

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who creates the world freely and directly. Creatures are radically contingent and dependent on
God's creative will. Unlike God, they do not exist necessarily; indeed, their existence is distinct
from their essence and accidental to it. God has no essence distinct from his existence; he is pure
existence. In stressing the essential instability and noneternity of the world, he attributed true
existence and causality to God alone. William of Auvergne was a follower of Augustine, but,
like others at the time, he was compelled to rethink the older Augustinian notions in terms of the
newer Aristotelian and Avicennian philosophies.
Bonaventure
The Franciscan friar Bonaventure (c. 1217–74) reacted similarly to the growing popularity of
Aristotle and his Arabic commentators. He admired Aristotle as a natural scientist, but he
preferred Plato and Plotinus, and, above all, Augustine, as metaphysicians. His main criticism of
Aristotle and his followers was that they denied the existence of divine ideas. As a result,
Aristotle was ignorant of exemplarism (that is, God's creation of the world according to ideas in
his mind) and also of divine providence and government of the world. This involved Aristotle in
a threefold blindness: he taught that the world is eternal, that all men share one agent intellect
(the active principle of understanding in man), and that there are no rewards or punishments after
death. Plato and Plotinus avoided these mistakes, but, because they lacked Christian faith, they
could not see the whole truth. For Bonaventure, faith alone enables men to avoid error in these
important matters. Bonaventure did not confuse philosophy with theology. Philosophy is the
knowledge of the things of nature and the soul innate in man or acquired by his own efforts,
whereas theology is the knowledge of heavenly things based on faith and divine revelation.
Bonaventure, however, rejected the practical separation of philosophy from theology. Philosophy
needs the guidance of faith; far from being self-sufficient, it is but a stage toward the higher
knowledge that culminates in the vision of God.
For Bonaventure, every creature to some degree bears the mark of its Creator. The soul has been
made in the very image of God. Thus, the universe is like a book in which the triune God is
revealed. His “The Soul's Journey into God” (1259) follows Augustine's path to God, from the
external world to the interior world of the mind, and then above the mind from the temporal to
the eternal. Thruout this journey, men are aided by a moral and intellectual divine illumination.
The mind has been created with an innate idea of God, so that, as Anselm pointed out, man
cannot think that God does not exist. In a terse reformulation of the Anselmian argument for
God's existence, Bonaventure states that if God is God, he exists.
Albertus Magnus
The achievement of the Dominican friar Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–80) was of vital importance
for the development of medieval philosophy. A man of immense intelligence and curiosity, he
was one of the first to recognize the true value of the newly translated Greco-Arabic scientific
and philosophical literature. Everything he considered valuable in it, he included in his
encyclopedic writings. He set out to teach this literature to his contemporaries and in particular to
make the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he considered to be the greatest philosopher,
understandable to them. He also proposed to write original works in order to complete what was
lacking in the Aristotelian system. In no small measure, the triumph of Aristotelianism in the
13th century can be attributed to him.
Albertus' observations and discoveries in the natural sciences advanced botany, zoology, and
mineralogy. In philosophy he was less original and creative than his famous pupil Thomas
Aquinas. Albertus produced a synthesis of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, blending together
the philosophies of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Ibn Gabirol, and, among Christians, Augustine and
Pseudo-Dionysius.
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Thomas Aquinas
Albertus Magnus' Dominican confrere and pupil Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) shared his
master's great esteem for the ancient philosophers, especially Aristotle, and also for the more
recent Arabic and Jewish thinkers. He welcomed truth wherever he found it and used it for the
enrichment of Christian thought. For him reason and faith cannot contradict each other because
they come from the same divine source. In his day conservative theologians and philosophers
regarded Aristotle with suspicion and leaned toward the more traditional Christian
Neoplatonism. Thomas realized that their suspicion was due, in part, to the fact that Aristotle's
philosophy had been distorted by his Arabic commentators; so he wrote his own commentaries
on Aristotle to show the essential soundness of his system and to convince contemporaries of its
value for Christian theology.
Thomas' own philosophical views are best expressed in his theological works, especially his
“Summa theologiae” (1265/66–1273) and “Summa Against the Gentiles” (1258–64). In these
works he clearly distinguishes between the domains and methods of philosophy and theology.
The philosopher seeks the first causes of things, beginning with data furnished by the senses; the
subject of the theologian's inquiry is God as revealed in sacred Scripture. In theology, appeal to
authority carries most weight; in philosophy, it carries least.
Thomas found Aristotelianism and, to a lesser extent, Platonism useful instruments for Christian
thought and communication; but he transformed and deepened everything he borrowed from
them. For example, he took over Aristotle's proof of the existence of a primary unmoved mover,
but the primary mover at which Thomas arrives is very different from that of Aristotle; it is in
fact the God of Judaism and Christianity. He also adopted Aristotle's teaching that the soul is
man's form and the body is his matter, but for Aquinas this does not entail, as it does for the
Aristotelians, the denial of the immortality of the soul or the ultimate value of the individual.
Thomas never compromised Christian doctrine by bringing it into line with the current
Aristotelianism; rather, he modified and corrected the latter whenever it clashed with Christian
belief. The harmony he established between Aristotelianism and Christianity was not forced but
achieved by a new understanding of philosophical principles, especially the notion of being,
which he conceived as the act of existing. For him, God is pure being, or the act of existing.
Creatures participate in being according to their essence; for example, man participates in being,
or the act of existing, to the extent that his humanity, or essence, permits. The fundamental
distinction between God and creatures is that creatures have a real composition of essence and
existence, whereas God's essence is his existence.
Averroist
A group of masters in the Faculty of Arts at Paris welcomed Aristotle's philosophy and taught it
in disregard of its possible opposition to the Christian faith. They wanted to be philosophers, not
theologians, and to them this meant following the Aristotelian system. Because Averroës was the
recognized commentator on Aristotle, they generally interpreted his thought in an Averroistic
way. Hence, in their own day they were known as “Averroists”; today they are often called
“Latin Averroists” because they taught in Latin. Their leader, Siger de Brabant (1240-84), taught
as rationally demonstrated certain Aristotelian doctrines that contradicted the faith, such as the
eternity of the world and the oneness of the intellect for all men. They were accused of holding a
“double truth”—of maintaining the existence of two contradictory truths: one commanded by
faith, the other taught by reason. Although Siger never proposed as true philosophical
conclusions contrary to faith, other members of this group upheld the right and duty of the
philosopher to follow human reason to its natural conclusions, even when they contradicted the
truths of faith.
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This growing rationalism confirmed the belief of theologians of a traditionalist cast that the
pagan and Muslim philosophies would destroy the Christian faith. They attacked these
philosophies in treatises such as Giles of Rome's “The Errors of the Philosophers” (1270). In
1277 the Bishop of Paris condemned 219 propositions based on the new trend toward rationalism
and naturalism. These included even some of Thomas' Aristotelian doctrines. The same year, the
Archbishop of Canterbury made a similar condemnation at Oxford. These reactions to the novel
trends in philosophy did not prevent the Averroists from treating philosophical questions apart
from religious considerations. Theologians, on their part, were increasingly suspicious of the
philosophers and less optimistic about the ultimate reconciliation of philosophy and theology.
Philosophy in the late Middle Ages
In the late Middle Ages earlier ways of philosophizing were continued and formalized into
definite schools of thought. In the Dominican order, Thomism (theology and philosophy of
Thomas Aquinas) was made the official teaching, though the Dominicans did not always adhere
to it rigorously. Averroism, cultivated by philosophers such as John of Jandun (d.c. 1328),
remained alive, though sterile, movement into the Renaissance. In the Franciscan order, the
Englishmen John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham developed new styles of theology and
philosophy that vied with Thomism thruout the late Middle Ages.
Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308)
John Duns Scotus opposed the rationalists' contention that philosophy is self-sufficient and
adequate to satisfy man's desire for knowledge. In fact, he claimed, a pure philosopher, such as
Aristotle, could not truly understand the human condition because he was ignorant of the Fall of
man and his need for grace and redemption. Unenlightened by Christian revelation, Aristotle
mistook man's present fallen state, in which all his knowledge comes thru the senses, for his
natural condition, in which the object of his knowledge would be similar with all beings,
including the being of God. The limitation of Aristotle's philosophy is apparent to Duns Scotus
in the Aristotelian proof of the existence of God as the primary mover of the universe. More
adequate than this physical proof, he contended, is his own very intricate metaphysical
demonstration of the existence of God as the absolutely primary, unique, and infinite being. He
incorporated the Anselmian argument into this demonstration. For Duns Scotus, the notion of
infinite being, not that of primary mover or being itself, is man's most perfect concept of God. In
opposition to the Greco-Arabic view of the government of the universe from above by necessary
causes, Duns Scotus stressed the contingency of the universe and its total dependence on God's
infinite creative will. He adopted the traditional Franciscan voluntarism, elevating the will above
the intellect in man.
Duns Scotus' doctrine of universals justly earned him the title “Doctor Subtilis.” Universals, in
his view, exist only as abstract concepts, but they are based on common natures, such as
humanity, which exist, or can exist, in many individuals. Common natures are real, and they
have a real unity of their own distinct from the unity of the individuals in which they exist. The
individuality of each individual is due to an added positive reality that makes the common nature
to be this individual; for example, humanity to be Socrates. Duns Scotus calls such a reality an
“individual difference,” or “thisness”. It is an original development of the earlier medieval
realism of universals.
William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347)
In the late 14th century, Thomism and Scotism were called the “old way” of philosophizing in
contrast to the “modern way” begun by such men as William of Ockham, no less than Duns
Scotus, wanted to defend the Christian doctrine of the freedom and omnipotence of God and the

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contingency of creatures against the necessitarianism of Greco-Arabic philosophy. But for him
the freedom of God is incompatible with the existence of divine ideas as positive models of
creation. God does not use preconceived ideas when he creates, as Duns Scotus maintained, but
he fashions the universe as he wishes. As a result, creatures have no natures or essences in
common. There are no realities but individual things, and these have nothing in common. They
are more or less like each other, however, and on this basis men can form universal concepts of
them and talk about them in general terms.
The absolute freedom of God was often used by Ockham as a principle of philosophical and
theological explanation. Because the order of nature has been freely created by God, it could
have been different: fire, for example, could cool, as it now heats. If he wishes, he can give us
the sight, or “intuitive knowledge,” of a star without the reality of the star. The moral order could
also have been different. God could have made hating him meritorious instead of loving him. It
was typical of Ockham not to put too much trust in the power of human reason to reach the truth.
For him, philosophy must often be content with probable arguments, for example, in establishing
the existence of the Christian God. Faith alone gives certitude in this and in other vital matters.
Another principle invoked by Ockham is that a plurality is not to be posited without necessity.
This principle of the economy of thought, later stated as beings are not to be multiplied without
necessity, is called “Ockham's razor.”
Ockhamism was censured by a papal commission at Avignon, France, in 1326, and in 1474 it
was forbidden to be taught at Paris: it spread widely in the late Middle Ages nevertheless, and
rivaled Thomism and Scotism in popularity. Other Scholastics in the 14th century shared
Ockham's basic principles and contributed with him to skepticism and probabilism in
philosophy. John of Mirecourt (c. 1345) stressed the absolute power of God and the divine will
to the point of making him the cause of man's sin. Nicholas of Autrecourt (c. 1347) adopted a
skeptical attitude regarding such matters as man's ability to prove the existence of God and the
reality of substance and causality. Rejecting Aristotelianism as inimical to the Christian faith, he
advocated a return to the Atomism of the ancient Greeks as a more adequate explanation of the
universe.
Meister Eckehart (c. 1260–1327/28)
The trend away from Aristotelianism was accentuated by the German Dominican Meister
Eckehart who developed a speculative mysticism of both Christian and Neoplatonic inspiration.
Eckehart depicts the ascent of the soul to God in Neoplatonic terms: by gradually purifying itself
from the body, the soul transcends being and knowledge until it is absorbed in the One. The soul
is then united with God at its highest point, or “citadel.” God himself transcends being and
knowledge. Sometimes Eckehart describes God as the being of all things. This language, which
was also used by Erigena and other Christian Neoplatonists, leaves him open to the charge of
pantheism (the doctrine that the being of creatures is identical with that of God); but for Eckehart
there is an infinite gulf between creatures and God. Eckehart means that creatures have no
existence of their own but are given existence by God, as the body is made to exist and is
contained by the soul. Eckehart's profound influence can be seen in the flowering of mysticism
in the German Rhineland in the late Middle Ages.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64)
Nicholas of Cusa also preferred the Neoplatonists to the Aristotelians. To him, the philosophy of
Aristotle is an obstacle to the mind in its ascent to God because its primary rule is the principle
of contradiction, which denies the compatibility of contradictories. But God is the “coincidence
of opposites.” Because he is infinite, he embraces all things in perfect unity; he is at once the

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maximum and the minimum. Nicholas uses mathematical symbols to illustrate how, in infinity,
contradictories coincide. If a circle is enlarged, the curve of its circumference becomes less; if a
circle is infinite, its circumference is a straight line. As for man's knowledge of the infinite God,
he must be content with conjecture or approximation to the truth. The absolute truth escapes
man; his proper attitude is “learned ignorance.”
For Nicholas, God alone is absolutely infinite. The universe reflects this divine perfection and is
relatively infinite. It has no circumference, for it is limited by nothing outside of itself. Neither
has it a centre; the Earth is neither at the centre of the universe nor is it completely at rest. Place
and motion are not absolute but relative to the observer. This new, non-Aristotelian conception
of the universe anticipated some of the features of modern theories.
Thus, at the end of the Middle Ages, some of the most creative minds were abandoning
Aristotelianism and turning to newer ways of thought. The philosophy of Aristotle, in its various
interpretations, continued to be taught in the universities, but it had lost its vitality and creativity.
Christian philosophers were once again finding inspiration in Neoplatonism. The Platonism of
the Renaissance was in direct continuity with the Platonism of the Middle Ages.
 The Renaissance and early modern period
The philosophy of a period arises as a response to social need, and the development of
philosophy in the history of Western civilization since the Renaissance has, thus, reflected the
process in which creative philosophers have responded to the unique challenge of each stage in
the development of Western culture itself.
The career of philosophy—how it views its tasks and functions, how it defines itself, the special
methods it invents for the achievement of philosophical knowledge, the literary forms it adopts
and utilizes, its conception of the scope of its subject matter, and its changing criteria of meaning
and truth—hinges on the mode of its successive responses to the challenges of the social
structure within which it arises. Thus, Western philosophy in the Middle Ages was primarily a
Christian philosophy, complementing the divine revelation, reflecting the feudal order in its
cosmology, devoting itself in no small measure to the institutional tasks of the Roman Catholic
Church. It was no accident that the major philosophical achievements of the 13th and 14th
centuries were the work of churchmen who also happened to be professors of theology at the
universities of Oxford and Paris.
The Renaissance of the late 15th and 16th centuries presented a different set of problems and
therefore suggested different lines of philosophical endeavor. What is called the European
Renaissance followed upon the introduction of three novel mechanical inventions from the East:
gunpowder, block printing from movable type, and the compass. The first was used to explode
the massive fortifications of the feudal order and thus became an agent of the new spirit of
nationalism that threatened the rule of churchmen—and, indeed, the universality emphasis of the
church itself—with a competing secular power. The second, printing, made the propagation of
knowledge widespread, secularized learning, reduced the intellectual monopoly of an
ecclesiastical elite, and restored the literary and philosophical classics of Greece and Rome. The
third, the compass, increased the safety and scope of navigation, produced the voyages of
discovery that opened up the Western Hemisphere, and symbolized a new spirit of physical
adventure and a new scientific interest in the structure of the natural world.
Each of these inventions with its wider cultural consequences presented new intellectual
problems and novel philosophical tasks within a changed political and social environment. For,
as the power of a single religious authority was slowly eroded under the influence of the
Protestant Reformation and as the prestige of the universal Latin language gave way to

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vernacular tongues, philosophers became less and less identified with their positions in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy and more and more identified with their national origins. The works of
Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus had been
basically unrelated to the countries of their birth; but the philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli was
directly related to Italian experience, that of Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes was English
to the core, and that of René Descartes set the standard and tone of French intellectual life for
200 years.
Dominant strands of Renaissance philosophy Knowledge
Knowledge in the contemporary world is conventionally divided between the natural sciences,
the social sciences, and the humanities. In the Renaissance, however, fields of learning had not
yet become so sharply departmentalized: in fact, each of these divisions arose in the
comprehensive and broadly inclusive area of Renaissance philosophy. For, as the Renaissance
mounted its revolt against the reign of religion and therefore reacted against the church, against
authority, against Scholasticism, and against Aristotle, there was a sudden blossoming of interest
in problems centering on civil society, man, and nature. These three interests found exact
representation in the three dominant strands of Renaissance philosophy: (1) political theory, (2)
humanism, and (3) the philosophy of nature.
Political theory
As secular authority replaced ecclesiastical authority and as the dominant interest of the age
shifted from religion to politics, it was natural that the rivalries of the national states and their
persistent crises of internal order should raise with renewed urgency philosophical problems,
practically dormant since pre-Christian times, about the nature and the moral status of political
power. This new preoccupation with national unity, internal security, state power, and
international justice stimulated the growth of political philosophy in Italy, France, England, and
Holland.
In early 16th-century Italy, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), sometime state secretary of the
Florentine republic, explored in “The Prince” (1512–13) and in his “Discourses on the First Ten
Books of Livy” (completed by 1521), the techniques for the seizure and retention of power in
ways that seemed to exalt “reasons of state” above morality and codified the actual practices of
Renaissance diplomacy for the next 100 years. In fact, Machiavelli was motivated by patriotic
hopes for the ultimate unification of Italy and by the conviction that the low estate of Italian
Renaissance morality needed to be elevated by restoring the ancient Roman virtues. More than
half a century later in France, Jean Bodin (1530-96), magistrate of Laon and a member of the
Estates-General, insisted that the state must possess a single, unified, and absolute power; he thus
developed in detail the doctrine of national sovereignty in all of its administrative consequences
and in its role as the source of all legal legitimacy.
In the 17th century in England, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who was to become tutor to the
future Charles II, developed the fiction that in the “state of nature” that preceded civilization life
was “nasty, brutish, and short” with “every man's hand raised against every other,” and that a
“social contract” was thus agreed upon to convey all private rights to a single sovereign in return
for general protection and for the institution of a reign of law. Because law is simply “the
command of the sovereign,” Hobbes at once turned justice into a by-product of power and denied
any right of rebellion except when the sovereign becomes too weak to protect the commonwealth
and hold it united.
In Holland, a prosperous and tolerant commercial republic in the 17th century, the issues of
political philosophy took a different form. Thus, when the Dutch East India Company

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commissioned a great jurist, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), to provide a defense of their trade rights
and of their free access to the seas, the resulting two treatises, “The Freedom of the Seas”(1609)
and “On the Law of War and Peace”(1625), were the first significant codifications of
international law. Their philosophical originality lay, however, in the fact that, in defending the
rights of a small, militarily weak nation against the powerful absolutisms of England, France,
and Spain, Grotius was led to a preliminary investigation of the sources and validity of the
concept of “natural law”- the notion that inherent in human reason and immutable even against
the willfulness of sovereign states are imperative considerations of natural justice and moral
responsibility, which must serve as a check against the arbitrary exercise of vast political power.
In general, the political philosophy of the Renaissance was dualistic: it was haunted, even
confused, by the conflict between political necessity and general moral responsibility.
Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes asserted claims that justified the actions of Italian despotism
and the absolutisms of the Bourbon and Stuart dynasties. Yet Machiavelli was obsessed with the
problem of human virtue; Bodin insisted that even the sovereign ought to obey the law of nature-
that is, to govern in accordance with the dictates of natural justice; and Hobbes himself found in
natural law the rational motivation that causes a man to seek for security and peace. In the end,
though Renaissance political necessity required that the philosophical doctrines of Thrasymachus
(who held that right is what is in the interest of the strong) be implemented, it could never finally
escape a pinch of Socratic conscience.
Humanism
The Renaissance was characterized by the renewed study of mathematics, medicine, and
classical literature. The first two sparked the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries;
the last became the foundation of the philosophy of Renaissance humanism. From its origin,
humanism—suspicious of science and generally indifferent to religion—emphasized anew the
centrality of man in the universe, his supreme value and importance. Characteristic of this
emphasis was the famous “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486) of a late 15th-century
Platonist, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), a leading member of Lorenzo de' Medici's Platonic
Academy of Florence. But the new emphasis upon man's personal responsibility and on the
possibility of his self-creation as a work of art was in no small part a consequence of the
rediscovery of a series of crucial classical texts, which served to reverse the trends of medieval
learning. Renaissance humanism was predicated upon the victory of rhetoric over dialectic and
of Plato over Aristotle, as Quintilian and Cicero had triumphed over Abelard and as the cramped
format of Scholastic philosophical method gave way to a Platonic discursiveness.
Much of this had been prepared by Italian scholarly initiative in the early 15th century. The
recently discovered manuscript of Quintilian was used by Lorenzo Valla, an antiauthoritarian
humanist, for the creation of modern rhetoric and the principles of textual criticism. But even
more important was the rebirth of an enthusiasm for the philosophy of Plato in Medicean
Florence and at the cultivated court of Urbino, a dukedom east of Florence. Precisely to service
this enthusiasm, Marsilio Ficino, head of the Platonic Academy, had translated the entire
Platonic corpus into Latin by the end of the century.
Except for Pico and Giordano Bruno, a late 16th-century Italian philosopher, the direct influence
of Platonism upon Renaissance metaphysics is difficult to trace. The Platonic account of the
moral virtues, however, was admirably adapted to the requirements of Renaissance education
and gave new support to the Renaissance ideal of the courtier and the gentleman. But Plato also
represented the philosophical importance of mathematics and the Pythagorean attempt to
discover the secrets of the heavens, the earth, and the world of nature in terms of number and

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exact calculation; and this aspect of Platonism spilled over from humanism into the domain of
Renaissance science. The scientists Nicolaus Copernicus (1432-1543), Johannes Kepler (1571-
1630), and Galileo (1564-1642) owe more to the general climate of Pythagorean confidence in
the explanatory power of number than does Renaissance metaphysics.
But Platonism also had the effect of influencing the literary form in which Renaissance
philosophy was written. Although the very early medieval Platonists St. Augustine and John
Scotus Erigena occasionally had used the dialogue form, later Scholasticism had abandoned it in
favour of the formal treatise, of which the great “Summas” of Alexander of Hales and St.
Thomas Aquinas are pristine examples. The Renaissance rediscovery of the Platonic dialogues
suggested the literary charm of this conversational method to humanists, scientists, and political
theorists alike. The humanist philosopher Bruno put forth his central insights in a dialogue,
“Concerning the Cause, Principle, and One” (1584); Galileo presented his novel mechanics in his
“Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic (127-145) and Copernican”
(1632) and even the politician Machiavelli wrote “The Art of War” (1521) as a genteel
conversation taking place in a quiet Florentine garden.
Renaissance humanism was primarily a moral and a literary, rather than a narrowly
philosophical, movement. And it flowered in figures with broadly philosophical interests, such as
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536), the learned citizen of the world; Sir Thomas More (1477-
1535), the learned but unfortunate chancellor of Henry VIII; and, in the next generation, in the
great French essayist and mayor of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). But the
recovery of the Greek and Latin classics, which was the work of humanism, had profound effects
upon the entire field of Renaissance philosophy and science thru the ancient schools of
philosophy to which it once more directed attention. In addition to Platonism, the most notable of
these were Greek Atomistic Materialism, Greek Skepticism, and Roman Stoicism. The discovery
of the manuscript of Lucretius and the Atomistic doctrines of Democritus finally came to
influence Galileo, Bruno, and, later, Pierre Gassendi, a modern Epicurean, thru the insights into
nature reflected in this work. The recovery of the manuscript of Sextus Empiricus, with its
carefully argued Skepticism presented in a printed text in 1562, produced “a skeptical crisis” in
French philosophy, which dominated the period from Montaigne to René Descartes (1596-1650).
And the Stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus became almost the official ethics of the Renaissance—
to appear prominently in the “Essais” (1580–88) by Montaigne, in the letters that Descartes
(1596-1650) wrote to the princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and to Queen Christina of Sweden, and
in the later sections of the “Ethics” by Benedict de Spinoza (1675).
Philosophy of nature
Philosophy in the modern world is a self-conscious discipline. It has managed to define itself
narrowly, so as to differentiate itself on the one hand from religion and on the other from exact
science. But this narrowing of focus came about very late in its history—certainly not before the
18th century. The earliest philosophers of Greece were theorists of the physical world;
Pythagoras and Plato were at once philosophers and mathematicians; and in Aristotle no clear
distinction between philosophy and natural science can be maintained. The Renaissance
continued this breadth of conception characteristic of the Greeks. Galileo and Descartes were
mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers at once; and physics retained the name of “natural
philosophy” at least until the death of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727.
Had the Renaissance been painstakingly self-aware in the matter of definition (which it was not),
it might have defined philosophy, on the basis of its actual practice, as “the rational, methodical,
and systematic consideration of man, civil society, and the natural world.” The areas of its

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interests would in no case have been in doubt. But exactly what constitutes “rational, methodical,
and systematic consideration” would have been extremely controversial. For knowledge
advances through the discovery and advocacy of new philosophical methods; and, because the
diverse methods advocated depend for their validity upon the acceptance of different
philosophical criteria of truth, meaning, and importance, the crucial philosophical quarrels of the
16th and 17th centuries were at bottom quarrels in the advocacy of methods. It is this issue rather
than any disagreement over subject matter or areas of attention that separated the greatest
Renaissance philosophers—such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650),
and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1676).
The great new fact that confronted the Renaissance was the immediacy, the immensity, and the
uniformity of the natural world. But what was of primary importance was the new perspective in
which this fact was interpreted. To the Middle Ages the universe was hierarchical, organic, and
God-ordained. To the Renaissance it was pluralistic, machinelike, and mathematically ordered.
In the Middle Ages scholars thought in terms of purposes, of ends, of divine intentions; in the
Renaissance they thought in terms of forces, mechanical agencies, and physical causes. All of
this had become clear by the end of the 15th century. Within the early pages of the Notebooks of
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the great Florentine artist, scientist, humanist, and mechanical
genius, occur the following three propositions: (1) the principle of Empiricism, (2) the advocacy
of mechanistic science, and (3) the faith in mathematical explanation; and it is upon these three
formulations, as upon a rock, that the science and philosophy of the Renaissance built their
foundations. From each of Leonardo's theses descended one of the great streams of Renaissance
philosophy: from the empirical principle the work of Francis Bacon; from mechanism the work
of Thomas Hobbes; and from mathematical explanation that of René Descartes.
Any adequate philosophical treatment of scientific method surely contains both an empirical
principle and a faith in mathematical explanation; and, in Leonardo's thinking, as in scientific
procedure generally; there need be no conflict between them. Yet they do represent two poles of
emphasis, each capable of excluding the other. Moreover, the peculiar accidents of Renaissance
scientific achievement did present some evidence for their mistaken separation: for the revival of
medical studies on the one hand and the novel blooming of mathematical physics on the other
emphasized opposite virtues in scientific methodology. This polarity was represented by the
opposing figures of Vesalius (1514-1564) and Galileo (1564-1642).
In the mid-16th century Andreas Vesalius, a Belgian physician, was astounding all of Europe
with the unbelievable precision of his anatomical dissections and drawings. Having invented new
tools for this precise purpose, he successively laid bare the vascular, the neural, and the
musculature systems of the human body; and this procedure seemed to demonstrate the virtues of
empirical method, of physiological experiment, and of the precision and disciplined skill in
sensory observation that made his demonstrations classics of inductive procedure.
Only slightly later the Italian physicist Galileo, following in the tradition already established by
Copernicus and Kepler, founders of modern astronomy (but without their more mystical and
metaphysical eccentricities), attempted to do for terrestrial and planetary movements what
Vesalius had managed for the structure of the human body—creating his experiential dynamics,
however, with the help of hypotheses supplied by the quantitative calculations of mathematics.
In Galileo's work all of the most original scientific directions of the Renaissance came to a head:
the revival of Alexandrian mathematics, the experimental use of new instruments, like the lens
and the telescope, the search for certainty in physics based upon the undoubted applicability of
mathematical theory, and the underlying faith that the search for absolute certainty in science

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was reasonable because matter in motion accorded with a model of mathematical simplicity.
Galileo's work also deals with some of the recurrent themes of 16th- and 17th-century
philosophy: an atomism that relates changes in the relations of physical bodies to the corpuscular
motion of their parts, the reduction of all qualitative differences to quantitative reasons, and the
resultant important distinction between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. The former—
including shape, extension, and specific gravity—were considered to be in fact a constituent part
of nature and therefore “real.” The latter—such as color, odor, taste, and relative position—were
taken to be simply the effect of bodily movements upon perceiving minds and therefore
ephemeral, “subjective,” and essentially irrelevant to the nature of physical reality.
Rise of Empiricism and Rationalism
The scientific contrast between Vesalius' rigorous observational techniques and Galileo's reliance
upon mathematical theory received further expression in the contrast between the respective
philosophies of Francis Bacon and René Descartes. And, indeed, in its more abstract formulation
as the contrast between Rationalism and Empiricism, it was to dominate the philosophical
controversies of the 17th and 18th centuries and to present a dilemma hardly to be resolved
before the advent of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
The Empiricism of Francis Bacon
Flourishing about the turn of the 17th century, Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was the
outstanding apostle of Renaissance Empiricism. Less an original metaphysician or cosmologist
than the advocate of a vast new program for the advancement of learning and the reformation of
scientific method, Bacon conceived of philosophy as a new technique of reasoning that should
reestablish natural science upon a firm foundation. In his “Advancement of Learning” (1605) he
charted the map of knowledge: history, which depends upon the human faculty of memory;
poetry, upon that of imagination; and philosophy, upon man's reason. To reason, however, Bacon
assigned a completely experiential function. Fifteen years later, in his “Novum Organum”, he
made this clear: because, he said, “we have as yet no natural philosophy which is pure, . . . the
true business of philosophy must be . . . to apply the understanding . . . to a fresh examination of
particulars.” A technique for “the fresh examination of particulars” thus constituted his chief
claim to philosophical distinction.
Bacon's hope for a new birth of science hinged not only upon vastly more numerous and varied
experiments but chiefly upon “an entirely different method, order, and process for advancing
experience.” This method consisted in the construction of what he called “tables of discovery.”
He distinguished three kinds: tables of presence, of absence, and of degree (i.e., in the case of
any two properties, such as heat and friction, instances in which they appeared together,
instances in which one appeared without the other, and instances in which their amounts varied
proportionately); and the ultimate purpose of these tables was to order facts in such a way that
the true causes of phenomena (the subject of physics) and the true “forms” of things (the subject
of metaphysics—the study of the nature of Being) could be inductively established.
Bacon's was no raw Empiricism; his profound sense of fact and his belief in the primacy of
observation led him to elicit laws and generalizations. Also, his conception of forms was quite
un-Platonic: a form for him was not an essence but a permanent geometric or mechanical
structure. His enduring place in the history of philosophy lies, however, in his single-minded
advocacy of experience as the only source of valid knowledge and in his profound enthusiasm
for the perfection of natural science. It is in this sense that “the Baconian spirit” continued as a
source of inspiration: his elaborate classification of the sciences inspiring the French
Encyclopaedists of the 18th century and his Empiricism inspiring the English philosophers of

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science of the 19th century.
The Materialism of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was acquainted with both Bacon and Galileo.
With the first he shared a strong concern for philosophical method, with the second an
overwhelming interest in matter in motion. His philosophical efforts, however, were more
inclusive and more complete than those of either of these contemporaries. He was a
comprehensive thinker within the scope of an exceedingly narrow set of presuppositions, and he
produced one of the most systematic philosophies of the early modern period—an almost
completely consistent description of nature, man, and civil society according to the tenets of
mechanistic Materialism.
Hobbes's account of what philosophy is and ought to be clearly distinguished between content
and method. As method, philosophy is simply reasoning or calculating by the use of words as to
the causes of phenomena. When a man reasons forward from causes to effects, he reasons
synthetically, and, when he reasons from effects backward to causes, he does so analytically.
(His strong deductive and geometric bias favored the former.) Hobbes's dogmatic metaphysical
presupposition was that the basic reality is matter in motion. The real world is a corporeal
universe in constant movement, and the phenomena, the causes and effects of which it is the
business of philosophy to lay bare, are either the mutual action of bodies or the quaint effects of
bodies upon minds. From this assumption follows Hobbes's classification of the fields that form
the content of philosophy: (1) physics, (2) moral philosophy, and (3) civil philosophy. Physics is
the science of the motions and actions of natural bodies conceived in terms of cause and effect.
Moral philosophy (or, more accurately, psychology) is the detailed study of “the passions and
perturbations of the mind”—that is, how minds are “moved” by desire, aversion, appetite, fear,
anger, and envy. And civil philosophy concerns the concerted actions of men in a
commonwealth—how in detail the wayward wills of men are constrained by power (force) in the
prevention of civil disorder and the maintenance of peace.
Hobbes's philosophy was a bold Renaissance restatement of Greek Atomistic Materialism with
applications to the realities of Renaissance politics that would have seemed strange to its ancient
originators. But there are also elements in it that make it characteristically English. For Hobbes's
conventionalist account of language led him to a nominalistic position—that is, to a position
denying the reality of universals (general or common concepts)—in much the same fashion as
did Bacon's exaggerated emphasis on particulars. Moreover, Bacon's general emphasis upon
experience also had its analogue in Hobbes's sensationalist theory of knowledge: the notion that
all knowledge has its origin in sense impressions and that all sensations are caused by the action
of external bodies upon the organs of sense. Empiricism has been a basic and recurrent
expression of British mentality, and its nominalistic and sensationalist roots were already clearly
evident in both Bacon and Hobbes.
Rationalism of Descartes
But it was not their philosophy that was to dominate the last half of the 17th century but rather
that of René Descartes (1596–1650), a French gentleman who signed himself “Lord of Perron”
and who lived the 20 most productive years of his life in the tolerant and hospitable Dutch
republic. Descartes, a crucial figure in the history of philosophy, combined (however
unconsciously or even unwillingly) the influences of the past into a synthesis that was striking in
its originality and yet congenial to the scientific temper of the age. In the minds of all later
historians he counts as the progenitor of the modern spirit in philosophy.
From the past there seeped into the Cartesian synthesis doctrines about God from Anselm and

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Aquinas, a theory of the will from Augustine, a deep sympathy with the Stoicism of the Romans,
and a skeptical method taken indirectly from the ancient Skeptics Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus.
But Descartes was also a great mathematician, who invented analytic geometry, who made many
physical and anatomical experiments, who knew and profoundly respected the work of Galileo,
and who withdrew from publication his own cosmological treatise “The World” after Galileo's
condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633.
Each of the maxims of Leonardo, which constitute the Renaissance worldview, found its place in
Descartes: the Empiricism of his physiological researches described in his “Discourse on
Method” (1637), the mechanistic interpretations of the physical world and human action detailed
in the “Principles of Philosophy” (1644) and “The Passions of the Soul” (1649), and the
mathematical bias that dominates his theory of method in the “Rules for the Direction of the
Mind” (published 1701) and his metaphysics in the “Meditations on the First Philosophy” (2nd
ed. 1642). But of these three, it is the mathematical strain that clearly predominates.
Bacon and Descartes, the founders of modern Empiricism and Rationalism, respectively, shared
two pervasive Renaissance tenets: an enormous enthusiasm for physical science; and the belief
that knowledge means power—that the ultimate purpose of theoretical science is to serve the
practical needs of men.
In his “Principia” Descartes defined philosophy as “the study of wisdom” or “the perfect
knowledge of all one can know.” Its chief utility is “for the conduct of life” (morals), “the
conservation of health” (medicine), and “the invention of all the arts” (mechanics). He expressed
the relation of philosophy as theoretical inquiry to practical consequences in the famous
metaphor of the tree of philosophy whose root is metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose
branches are, respectively, morals, medicine, and mechanics. The metaphor is revealing for it
indicates that, for Descartes (as for Bacon and Galileo), the major concern was for the trunk
(physics) and that he busied himself with the roots only in order to provide a firm foundation for
the trunk. Thus the “Discours de la méthode”, which provides a synoptic view of the Cartesian
philosophy, shows it to be not (as with Aristotle or Whitehead) a metaphysics founded upon
physics but rather—that more characteristic product of the 17th century—a physics founded
upon metaphysics.
Descartes's mathematical bias was expressed in his determination to ground natural science not
in sensation and probability (as did Bacon) but in a principle of absolute certainty. Thus his
metaphysics in essence consisted of three principles:
From the indisputable of the self, Descartes deduced the existence of a perfect God; and, from
the fact that a perfect being is incapable of falsification or deception, he made the inference that
those ideas about the corporeal world that he has implanted within man must be true. The
achievement of certainty about the natural world was thus guaranteed by the perfection of God
and by the clear and distinct ideas that are his gift.
The Cartesian metaphysics is the fountainhead of Rationalism in modern philosophy, for it
suggests that the mathematical criteria of clarity, distinctness, and absence of contradiction
among ideas are the ultimate test of meaningfulness and truth. This stance is profoundly
antiempirical. Bacon, who had said that “reasoners resemble spiders who make cobwebs out of
their own substance,” might well have said so of Descartes, for the Cartesian self is just such a
substance from which the idea of God originates and with which all deductive reasoning begins.
Yet for Descartes the understanding is vastly superior to the senses, and, in the question of what
constitutes truth in science, only man's reason can ultimately decide.
Cartesianism was to dominate the intellectual life of the Continent until the end of the 17th

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century. It was a fashionable philosophy, appealing alike to learned gentlemen and highborn
ladies; and it was one of the few philosophical alternatives to the decadent Scholasticism still
being taught in the universities. Precisely for this reason it constituted a serious threat to
established religious authority. In 1663 the Roman Catholic Church placed Descartes's works on
the Index of Forbidden Books, and the University of Oxford forbade the teaching of his
doctrines. Only in the liberal Dutch universities, such as Groningen and Utrecht, did
Cartesianism make serious headway.
Certain features of the Cartesian philosophy made it an important starting point for subsequent
philosophical speculation. Being the meeting ground of the medieval and the modern
worldviews, it accepted the doctrines of Renaissance science while attempting to ground them
metaphysically in the medieval notions of God and the human mind. Thus a certain dualism
between God the Creator, and of God and the human mind; between God the Creator and the
mechanistic world of his creation and between mind as a spiritual principle and matter as mere
spatial extension was inherent in the Cartesian position; and a whole generation of French
Cartesians (among them Arnold Geulincx, Nicolas Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle (1647-1706))
wrestled with the resulting problems of the interaction and reconciliation between the
counterposed entities.
Rationalism of Spinoza and Leibniz
Two philosophers of genius carried on the tradition of continental Rationalism: the Dutch Jew
Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) and his younger contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646–1716), a Leipzig scholar and polymath. Bacon's philosophy had been a search for method
in science, and Descartes's basic aim had been the achievement of scientific certainty; but
Hobbes and Spinoza provided the most comprehensively worked out speculative systems of the
early modern period. In certain respects they had much in common: a mechanistic picture of the
world, with its events guided by a strict determinism, and even a political philosophy in each
case looking for political stability based upon centralized power. Yet Spinoza introduced a
conception of philosophizing that was new to the Renaissance: Philosophy became a personal
and moral quest for the wisdom of life and for the achievement of human perfection.
In conducting this search, Spinoza borrowed much of the basic apparatus of Descartes: the aim at
a rational understanding of principles, the terminology of “substance” and of “clear and distinct
ideas,” and a mathematical method that seeks to convert philosophical knowledge into a
complete deductive system using the geometric model of Euclid's (c. 300BC, Alexandria)
Elements. Spinoza viewed the universe pantheistically as a single infinite substance, which he
called “God,” with the dual attributes (or aspects) of thought and extension, and which he
differentiated into plural “modes” (or particular things); and he attributed to this world as a
whole the properties of a timeless logical system—of a complex of completely determined
causes and effects. In so doing Spinoza was simply seeking for man the series of “adequate”
ideas that furnish the intellect and constitute human freedom. For ultimately, for Spinoza, the
wisdom that philosophy seeks is achieved when one perceives the universe in its wholeness, thru
the “intellectual love of God,” which merges the finite individual with the eternal unity and
provides the mind with the pure joy that is the final achievement of its search.
Whereas the basic elements of the Spinozistic worldview are given in his one great work, “the
Ethics”, Leibniz' philosophy has to be pieced together from numerous brief expositions or
fragments, which seem to be mere intermissions, or philosophical interludes, in an otherwise
busy life. But the philosophical form is deceptive. Leibniz was a mathematician and jurist
(inventor of the infinitesimal calculus and codifier of the laws of Mainz), diplomat, historian to

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royalty, and court librarian in a princely house; yet he was also one of the most original
philosophers of the early modern period. His chief contributions were in the fields of logic, in
which he was a truly brilliant innovator, and metaphysics, in which he provided a third
alternative to the Rationalist constructions of Spinoza and Descartes. Leibniz saw logic as a
mathematical calculus. He was the first to distinguish “truths of reason” from “truths of fact” and
to contrast the “necessary” propositions of logic and mathematics (which express identities),
which hold for all possible worlds, with the “contingent” (or empirical) propositions of science,
which hold only for certain existential conditions; and he saw clearly that, as “the principle of
contradiction” controls the first, so “the principle of sufficient reason” governs the second.
In metaphysics Leibniz espoused pluralism (as opposed to the dualism of Descartes's thought and
extension and the monism of Spinoza's single substance, which is God). There were for him an
infinite number of spiritual substances (which he called “monads”), each different, each a
percipient of the universe around it, and each mirroring that universe from its own point of view.
The chief significance of Leibniz, however, lies not in his differences from Descartes and
Spinoza but in the extreme Rationalism that all three shared. In the “Principles of Nature and of
Grace Founded in Reason” (1714) he stated the maxim that can stand for the entire school.
The Renaissance and early modern period
Literary forms and sociological conditions
The literary forms in which philosophical exposition was couched in the early modern period
ranged from the scientific principles of Bacon and the autobiographical meditations of Descartes
to the systematic prose of Hobbes and the episodic propositional format of Leibniz. Two basic
tendencies, however, can be discerned:
The concept of serial order stressed by geometry, in which the reasoner passes from more
universal axioms to more specific derivative propositions, influenced in turn the style of Hobbes,
Descartes, and Spinoza. The order of presentation in Hobbes's Leviathan and in Descartes's
Principia Philosophiae reflects this serial concern, while Spinoza's Ethics utilizes the Euclidean
method so formalistically as almost to constitute an impenetrable barrier to the basic lucidity of
his thought.
Medieval philosophy with its texts, readings, learneded authorities, Disputed Questions,
Quodlibetal Questions (brief academic discussions), and its Summas was characteristically
associated with the medieval university. It is a singular fact, therefore, that from the birth of
Bacon in 1561 to the death of Hume in 1776—i.e., for 200 years—not one first-rate
philosophical mind in Europe was permanently associated with a university.
The fact is that, as the age of the saint passed into that of the gentleman, philosophers too
reflected this profound change in their titles, their social status, and their economic situation. Sir
Francis Bacon was a lawyer, judge, and attendant upon the royal court. Thomas Hobbes was the
tutor and companion of young noblemen. René Descartes, son of a noble family, traveled and
studied at leisure, retiring to Holland to live out his life on inherited income. Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, courtier, diplomat, and scholar, became a privy councilor and baron of the Holy Roman
Empire. Thus philosophers often belonged to the lesser nobility or were closely associated with
the nobility, to whom—like poets—they dedicated their works; and they lived not by philosophy
but for it—either independently, by pensions, gifts, inherited income, or in the households of the
nobility.
Thus, philosophy in the 16th and 17th centuries was clearly the preoccupation of a widely
scattered elite; and this meant that, despite the printed essay, much philosophical communication
took place within a small but at the same time loose and informal circle. Treatises were

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circulated in manuscript; comments and objections were solicited; and a vast polemical
correspondence was built up. Prior to its publication, Descartes prudently sent his Meditationes
to the theologians of the Sorbonne for comment; and, after its publication, his friend Mersenne
sent it to Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Gassendi, among others, who returned formal
“objections,” to which Descartes in turn replied. In addition, the 17th century possessed a rich
repository of philosophical correspondence, such as the letters that passed between Descartes and
the scientist Christiaan Huygens, between Spinoza and Henry Oldenburg (one of the first
secretaries of the Royal Society), and between Leibniz and Arnauld. But philosophers were also
familiar with the great monarchs and administrators of the age: Descartes gave philosophical
instruction to Queen Christina of Sweden, Leibniz was an intimate of Queen Sophia Charlotte of
Prussia, and Spinoza enjoyed the personal friendship of the Dutch politician Johan de Witt.
The chief fact, however, remains the sharp separation of creative philosophers from the formal
centers of learning: Hobbes expressed extreme contempt for the decadent Aristotelianism of
Oxford; Descartes, despite his prudence, scorned the medievalists of the Sorbonne; and Spinoza
refused the offer of a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg with polite aversion. It was to be
another 100 years before philosophy returned to the universities.
The Enlightenment
Although they both lived and worked in the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke
were the true fathers of the Enlightenment. Newton was the last of the scientific geniuses of the
age, and his great “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (1687) was the culmination
of the entire movement that had begun with Copernicus and Galileo—the first great physical
synthesis based upon the application of mathematics to nature in every detail. The basic idea of
the authority and autonomy of reason, which dominated all philosophizing in the 18th century,
was, at bottom, the consequence of Newton's work.
Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes—scientists and methodologists of science—
performed like men urgently attempting to persuade nature to reveal her secrets. Newton's
comprehensive mechanistic system made it seem as if at last she had done so. It is impossible to
exaggerate the enormous enthusiasm that this assumption kindled in all of the major thinkers of
the 18th century from Locke to Kant. The new enthusiasm for reason that they all instinctively
shared was based not upon the mere advocacy of propagandists like Descartes and Leibniz but
upon the conviction that for the intellectual conquest of the natural world reason had really
worked.
Classical British Empiricism and its basic tasks
Two major philosophical problems remained: to account for the genetic origins of the reason that
had proved so successful and to shift its application from external nature to man. John Locke's
Essay “Concerning Human Understanding” (1690) was devoted to the first; and David Hume's
“Treatise of Human Nature” (1739–40), “being an attempt to apply the method of experimental
reasoning to moral subjects,” was devoted to the second.
These two basic tasks reflect a shift away from the direction in which philosophizing had moved
in the late Renaissance. The Renaissance preoccupation with the natural world had represented a
certain “realistic” bias. Hobbes and Spinoza had each produced a metaphysics. They had been
interested in the real constitution of the physical world. Moreover, the Renaissance bias in favor
of mathematics had generated the profound interest in rational principles, necessary propositions,
and innate ideas that was so prevalent in the philosophies of Leibniz and Descartes. On the other
hand, the Enlightenment, in turning from the realities of nature to account for the structure of the
mind that knows it so successfully and in attempting an experiential account of the furnishings of

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that mind, settled on the sensory components of knowledge rather than on the merely
mathematical. Thus the school of so-called British Empiricism (John Locke, George Berkeley,
and David Hume) dominated the perspective of Enlightenment philosophy until the time of Kant.
And this school philosophized in terms of ideas rather than things and of experience rather than
innate necessary principles. Whereas the philosophy of the late Renaissance had been
metaphysical and Rationalistic, that of the Enlightenment was epistemological and Empiricist.
Origin and nature of reason in Locke and Berkeley
Locke's Essay “Concerning Human Understanding” thus marked a decisively new direction for
modern philosophizing because it proposed what amounts to a new criterion of truth. The design
of his essay was “to inquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge,” which
involved three tasks:
What was crucial for Locke, however, was that the second task is dependent upon the first.
Following the general Renaissance custom, Locke defined an “idea” as a mental content, as
“whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks”; but, whereas for Descartes and
the entire Rationalistic school the certainty of ideas had been a function of their self-evidence—
i.e., of their clarity and distinctness—for Locke their validity hinged expressly upon the mode
and manner of their origin. A genetic criterion of truth and validity replaced an intrinsic one.
Locke's exhaustive survey of mental contents is useful, if elaborate. Though he distinguished
between ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, the whole thrust of his efforts and those of his
Empiricist followers was to reduce the latter to the former, to minimize the originative power of
the mind in favor of its passive receptivity to the sensory impressions received from without.
Locke's classification of ideas into simple and complex was an attempt to distinguish mental
contents such as blueness or solidity, which come from a single sense like sight or touch, and
those such as figure, space, extension, rest, and motion, which are the product of several senses
combined, on the one hand, from those complicated and compounded (complex) ideas of
universals such as triangle or gratitude, of substances, and of relations such as identity, diversity,
and cause and effect, on the other.
Locke's Essay was a dogged attempt to produce the total world of man's conceptual experience
out of a set of elementary sensory building blocks, moving always from sensation toward
thought and from the simple to the complex. The basic outcome of his epistemology was
therefore:
It was a theory of knowledge based upon a kind of sensory atomism, which sees the mind as an
agency of discovery rather than of creation and views its ideas as “like” the objects that are the
sources of the sensations it receives. But it sees also that an important distinction must still be
made between those “primary qualities” such as solidity, figure, extension, motion, and rest,
which are the actual characteristics of objects themselves, and those “secondary qualities” such
as color, taste, and smell, which are simply the internal consequences of how the mind is affected
by them. This important Lockean distinction (already found in Galileo) was only a mirroring in
the theory of knowledge of the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, which was its contemporary.
It was precisely this dualism presupposed by the science of the time between primary qualities,
which belong to matter, and secondary qualities, which belong to mind, that Locke's successor
George Berkeley (1685–1753) sought to overcome. Though Berkeley was a bishop in the
Anglican Church who wanted to combat “atheistic Materialism” and to sustain the power of God
and spirituality, his importance for the theory of knowledge lies rather in the way in which he
demonstrated that, in the end, primary qualities are reducible to secondary qualities. His
Empiricism led to a denial of abstract ideas because he believed that general notions are simply

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fictions of the mind and vehemently denied that one may validly distinguish between objects and
the sensory impressions that repose in the mind. Science, he argued, can easily dispense with the
concept of matter: nature is simply that which men perceive by their senses, and this means that
sense data can be considered as “objects for the mind” rather than as “qualities adhering in a
substance.” A thing is simply a recurrent group of sense qualities. With this important reduction
of substance to quality, Berkeley thus became the true father of the epistemological position
known as phenomenalism, which has remained an important influence in British philosophizing
to the present day.
Classical British Empiricism and its basic tasks
Basic science of man in Hume
The third, and in many ways the most famous, of the British Empiricists was the Skeptic David
Hume (1711–76). Hume's philosophical intention was to reap, humanistically, the harvest sowed
by Newtonian physics, to apply the method of natural science to human nature, and to create a
basic science of man. The paradoxical result of this admirable purpose, however, was to create a
skeptical crisis more devastating than that of the early French Renaissance and to reduce human
certainty once more to the state that it was in before Descartes had reached the dogmatic halting
point in his procedure of methodical doubt.
Hume followed Locke and Berkeley in approaching the problem of knowledge from a
psychological perspective. He too found the origin of knowledge in sense impressions. But
whereas Locke had found a certain trustworthy order in the compounding power of the mind, and
Berkeley had found mentality itself expressive of a certain spiritual power, Hume's relentless
analysis discovered as much contingency in mind as in the external world. All uniformity in
perceptual experience, he held, comes from “an associating quality of the mind.” The
“association of ideas” is a fact, but the relations of resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect
that it produces have no intrinsic validity because they are the product of an inexplicable “mental
habit.” Thus the causal principle upon which all knowledge rests indicates no necessary
connections between things but is simply the accident of their constant conjunction in men's
minds. Moreover, the mind itself, far from being an independent power, is simply “a bundle of
perceptions” without unity or cohesive quality. Hume's denial of a necessary order of nature on
the one hand and of a substantial or unified self on the other precipitated a philosophical crisis
from which Enlightenment philosophy was not to be definitely rescued until the work of Kant.
Nonepistemological movements in the Enlightenment
Though the school of British Empiricism represented the mainstream of Enlightenment
philosophy until the time of Kant, it was by no means the only type of philosophy that the 18th
century produced. The Enlightenment, which was based upon a few great fundamental ideas—
such as the dedication to reason, the belief in intellectual progress, the confidence in nature as a
source of inspiration and value, and the search for tolerance and freedom in political and social
institutions—produced many cross-currents of intellectual and philosophical expression.
Materialism and scientific discovery
The profound influence of Locke spread to France, where it not only produced the skeptical
Empiricism of Voltaire but also united with the mechanistic side of the teachings of Descartes to
create an entire school devoted to a sensationalistic Materialism. Julien de La Mettrie in “Man a
Machine” (1747), Étienne de Condillac in his “Treatise on the Sensations” (1754), and Paul,
baron d'Holbach, in his “The System of Nature” (1770) represented a limited worldview in
which matter in motion is the only reality, determining the functioning of the human brain and its
sensations according to ironclad and necessary laws. This position even found its way into many

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of the articles of the great French encyclopaedia edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert,
which was almost a complete compendium of the scientific and humanistic accomplishments of
18th-century intellectual life.
Though the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had not referred to themselves by these names, the
18th century called itself “the Enlightenment” with self-conscious enthusiasm and pride. It was
an age of optimism with a sense of new beginnings. Great strides were made in chemistry and
biological science. Jean-Baptiste, chevalier de Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, and Georges-Louis
Leclerc, comte de Buffon, were perfecting a system of animal classification. And, in the eight
years between 1766 and 1774, Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen; Daniel Rutherford,
nitrogen; and Joseph Priestley, oxygen. It was the period when foundations were being laid in
psychology and the social sciences and in ethics and aesthetics. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the
marquis de Condorcet, and Montesquieu in France, Giambattista Vico in Italy, and Adam Smith
in England marked the beginning of history, economics, sociology, and jurisprudence as
sciences. Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and the British moral sense philosophers were turning ethics
into a specialized field of philosophical inquiry; and Anthony Ashley, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury,
Edmund Burke, Johann Gottsched, and Alexander Baumgarten were laying the foundations for a
systematic aesthetics.
Social and political philosophy
But, outside of the theory of knowledge, the most significant contribution of the Enlightenment
came in the field of social and political philosophy, as Locke's “Two Treatises of Civil
Government” (1690) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “The Social Contract” (1762) proposed a
justification of political association grounded in the newer political requirements of the age. The
Renaissance political philosophies of Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes had centered on the
absolute power of kings and rulers. But the Enlightenment theories of Locke and Rousseau
turned instead to the freedom and equality of citizens. It was a natural historical transformation.
The 16th and 17th centuries had constituted the age of absolutism; the political problem had been
largely that of internal order, and political theory had been presented in the language of national
sovereignty. But the 18th century was the age of the democratic revolutions (including the
French Revolution); the political problem was that of freedom and the revolt against injustice,
and political theory was expressed in the idiom of natural and inalienable rights.
Locke's political theory was an express denial of the divine right of kings and the absolute power
of the sovereign as contained in the doctrines of Hobbes. Instead, he insisted that all men have a
natural right to freedom and equality. The state of nature in which men originally live is not, as
in Hobbes, intolerable, but it has certain inconveniences. Therefore men band together to form
society, as Aristotle had taught, “not simply to live, but to live well.” Political power can never
be exercised apart from its ultimate purpose, which is the common good; for men enter the
political contract in order to preserve life, liberty, and property.
Locke thus stated one of the fundamental principles of the liberal tradition: that there can be no
subjection to power without consent, although once political society has been founded, there is
an obligation to submit to the decisions of the majority. It is the legislature that makes these
decisions, although the ultimate power of choosing the legislature rests with the people; and even
the powers of the legislature are not absolute, because the laws of nature remain as a permanent
standard and as principles of protection against any arbitrary authority.
Rousseau's more radical political doctrines were built upon Lockean foundations. For him, too,
the convention of the social contract formed the basis of all legitimate authority among men,
although his conception of citizenship was much more organic and much less individualistic than

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of the articles of the great French encyclopaedia edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert,
which was almost a complete compendium of the scientific and humanistic accomplishments of
18th-century intellectual life.
Though the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had not referred to themselves by these names, the
18th century called itself “the Enlightenment” with self-conscious enthusiasm and pride. It was
an age of optimism with a sense of new beginnings. Great strides were made in chemistry and
biological science. Jean-Baptiste, chevalier de Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, and Georges-Louis
Leclerc, comte de Buffon, were perfecting a system of animal classification. And, in the eight
years between 1766 and 1774, Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen; Daniel Rutherford,
nitrogen; and Joseph Priestley, oxygen. It was the period when foundations were being laid in
psychology and the social sciences and in ethics and aesthetics. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the
marquis de Condorcet, and Montesquieu in France, Giambattista Vico in Italy, and Adam Smith
in England marked the beginning of history, economics, sociology, and jurisprudence as
sciences. Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and the British moral sense philosophers were turning ethics
into a specialized field of philosophical inquiry; and Anthony Ashley, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury,
Edmund Burke, Johann Gottsched, and Alexander Baumgarten were laying the foundations for a
systematic aesthetics.
Social and political philosophy
But, outside of the theory of knowledge, the most significant contribution of the Enlightenment
came in the field of social and political philosophy, as Locke's “Two Treatises of Civil
Government” (1690) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “The Social Contract” (1762) proposed a
justification of political association grounded in the newer political requirements of the age. The
Renaissance political philosophies of Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes had centered on the
absolute power of kings and rulers. But the Enlightenment theories of Locke and Rousseau
turned instead to the freedom and equality of citizens. It was a natural historical transformation.
The 16th and 17th centuries had constituted the age of absolutism; the political problem had been
largely that of internal order, and political theory had been presented in the language of national
sovereignty. But the 18th century was the age of the democratic revolutions (including the
French Revolution); the political problem was that of freedom and the revolt against injustice,
and political theory was expressed in the idiom of natural and inalienable rights.
Locke's political theory was an express denial of the divine right of kings and the absolute power
of the sovereign as contained in the doctrines of Hobbes. Instead, he insisted that all men have a
natural right to freedom and equality. The state of nature in which men originally live is not, as
in Hobbes, intolerable, but it has certain inconveniences. Therefore men band together to form
society, as Aristotle had taught, “not simply to live, but to live well.” Political power can never
be exercised apart from its ultimate purpose, which is the common good; for men enter the
political contract in order to preserve life, liberty, and property.
Locke thus stated one of the fundamental principles of the liberal tradition: that there can be no
subjection to power without consent, although once political society has been founded, there is
an obligation to submit to the decisions of the majority. It is the legislature that makes these
decisions, although the ultimate power of choosing the legislature rests with the people; and even
the powers of the legislature are not absolute, because the laws of nature remain as a permanent
standard and as principles of protection against any arbitrary authority.
Rousseau's more radical political doctrines were built upon Lockean foundations. For him, too,
the convention of the social contract formed the basis of all legitimate authority among men,
although his conception of citizenship was much more organic and much less individualistic than

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Locke's. The surrender of natural liberty for civil liberty means that all individual rights (among
them property rights) become subordinate to the general will. For Rousseau the state is a moral
person whose life is the union of its members, whose laws are acts of the general will, and whose
end is the liberty and equality of the citizens. It follows that, when any government usurps the
power of the people, the social compact is broken; and not only are the citizens no longer
compelled to obey but they also have an obligation to rebel. Rousseau's defiant collectivism was
clearly a revolt against Locke's systematic individualism; for him the fundamental category is not
“natural person” but “citizen.” Nevertheless, however much they differed, in these two social
theorists of the Enlightenment is to be found the germ of all modern liberalism: its faith in
representative democracy, in civil liberties, and in the basic dignity of man.
Professionalization of philosophy
In his “Elements of Philosophy” (1759) Jean d'Alembert, an 18th-century French mathematician
and Encyclopaedist, wrote that the 18th century was clearly the “century of philosophy par
excellence” in a more technical sense. For it was the period in which philosophizing first began
to pass from the hands of gentlemen and amateurs into those of true professionals. The chief sign
of this shift was the return of reputable philosophy to the universities.
This transformation first occurred in Germany and is chiefly associated with the University of
Halle (founded 1694). In the time of the generation that lies between Leibniz (died 1716) and
Kant (born 1724), the philosophical climate changed profoundly. The chief representative of this
change was Christian Wolff, who taught philosophy at Halle and was the intermediary between
the ideas of Leibniz and those of Kant and the profoundly different conceptions of
philosophizing for which they stood.
Kant later called Wolff “the real originator of the spirit of thoroughness in Germany”; and Wolff
was indeed a pioneer in those techniques that transform philosophy into a professional
discipline—the self-conscious adoption of a systematic approach and the creation of a
specialized philosophical vocabulary. Wolff carefully distinguished the various fields of
philosophy; wrote textbooks in each of them, which were used in the German universities for
many years; and created many of the specialized philosophical terms that have survived to the
present day.
The German Enlightenment was the first modern period to produce “specialists in philosophy.”
In England philosophizing in the universities did not become serious until well after the time of
Hume, but already philosophical fields had been sufficiently distinguished to be represented by
distinct professorships. The titles professor of mental or moral or metaphysical philosophy, as
they arose at Oxford and Cambridge, were the product of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Two additional factors of the German Enlightenment are relevant: (1) the founding of the first
professional journals and (2) the rising concern of philosophy with its own history. The learned
journal, like the scientific society, was an innovation of the 17th century. But what had begun as
a general intellectual endeavor became in 18th-century Germany a specifically philosophical
enterprise. Journals were published in great numbers; e.g., Acta Philosophorum (Halle, 1715–
26), “The Philosophical Book Room” (Leipzig, 1741–44) and the short-lived Neues
philosophisches Magazin (Leipzig, 1789–91), devoted exclusively to the philosophy of Kant.
More interesting still is the flowering of voluminous German histories of philosophy after 1740.
By the 18th century there was already a vast accumulation of historical materials, and the self-
conscious feeling that philosophy constitutes a specific field the past of which is worth
examination and careful ordering combined with the German spirit of thoroughness to produce a
series of massive histories such as Johann Brucker's “The History of Philosophy”, 6 vol. (1742

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–1744); Johann Buhle's “Textbook on the History of Philosophy”, 8 vol. (1796–1804); Dietrich
Tiedemann's “The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy from Thales to Berkeley”, 6 vol. (1791–97;
and Gottlieb Tennemann's “The History of Philosophy”, 11 vol. (1789–1819).
Critical examination of reason in Kant
All of these developments led directly to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), professor at Königsberg,
the greatest philosopher of the modern period, whose works mark the true culmination of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment. Historically speaking, Kant's great substantive contribution
was to relate both the sensory and the a priori elements in knowledge and thus to mend the
breach between the extreme Rationalism of Leibniz and the extreme Empiricism of Hume. But in
addition to the brilliant content of his philosophical doctrines, Kant was responsible for three
crucial philosophical innovations: (1) a new definition of philosophy, (2) a new conception of
philosophical method, and (3) a new structural model for the writing of philosophy.
Kant's definition of philosophy culminated the Enlightenment, for it took reason to be the very
heart of the philosophical enterprise. Philosophy's sole task, in his view, is to determine what
reason can and cannot do. Philosophy, he said, “is the science of the relation of all knowledge to
the essential ends of human reason”; and its true aim is both constructive “to outline the system
of all knowledge arising from pure reason” and critical “to expose the illusions of a reason that
forgets its limits”. Philosophy is thus a calling of great dignity, for its aim is wisdom, and its
practitioners are themselves “lawgivers of reason.” But in order for philosophy to be “the science
of the highest maxims of reason,” the philosopher must be able to determine the source, the
extent, and the validity of human knowledge and the ultimate limits of reason. And these tasks
require a special philosophical method.
Sometimes Kant called this the “transcendental method,” but more often the “critical method”;
for his purpose was to reject the dogmatic assumptions of the Rationalist school, and his wish
was to return to the semi skeptical position with which Descartes had begun before his dogmatic
pretensions to certainty took hold. Kant's method was to conduct a critical examination of the
powers of an a priori judging reason and to inquire what reason can achieve when all experience
is removed. The method was based upon a doctrine that he himself called “a Copernican
revolution” in philosophy (by analogy with the change from geocentric to heliocentric
cosmology): the assumption not that man's knowledge must conform to objects but that objects
must conform to man's apparatus of knowing. The question then became: What is the exact
nature of that knowing apparatus?
Unlike Descartes, Kant could not question that knowledge exists. Mathematics and Newtonian
physics were too real for any Enlightenment mentality to entertain this doubt. Kant's
methodological question was rather: How is mathematical and physical knowledge possible?
What must be the structure of man's knowing process to have made these sciences secure? The
attempt to answer these questions was the task of Kant's great “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781).
But Kant's great aim was to examine reason not merely in one of its domains but in each of its
employments, according to the threefold structure of the human mind that he had taken over
from Wolff. Thus the critical examination of reason in thinking (science) is undertaken in
the “Critique of Pure Reason”, that of reason in willing (ethics) in the “Critique of Practical
Reason” (1788) and that of reason in feeling (aesthetics) in “Critique of Judgment” (1790).
Literary forms
The literary format of Enlightenment philosophizing was essentially simple and straightforward.
Except for an occasional reversion to the dialogue form, as in Berkeley's “Three Dialogues
Between Hylas and Philonous” (1713) and in Hume's “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”

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(1779), it consisted of inquiries, discourses, treatises, dissertations, and essays, generally well
written in clear, relatively nontechnical prose. But Kant not only introduced a formidable
technical philosophical terminology into his works but was, in fact, the originator of a new
philosophical form—the “critique” or “critical examination”—which had its own special
architectonics. Each of Kant's three critiques consists of the same division into three parts: (1) an
“Analytic,” or analysis of reason's right functioning; (2) a “Dialectic,” or logic of error, showing
the pitfalls into which a careless reason falls; and (3) a “Methodology,” which is an arrangement
of rules for practice. It is a form that was unique to Kant, but it raised certain problems of
“oppositional” thinking, to which 19th-century philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, and
Kierkegaard were subsequently to turn.
 The 19th century
Kant's death in 1804 formally marked the end of the Enlightenment. The 19th century ushered in
new philosophical problems and new conceptions of what philosophy ought to do. It was a
century of great philosophical diversity. In the Renaissance the chief intellectual fact had been
the rise of mathematics and natural science, and the tasks that this fact imposed upon philosophy
determined its direction for two centuries. In the Enlightenment attention had turned to the
character of the mind that had so successfully mastered the natural world, and Rationalists and
Empiricists had contended for mastery until the Kantian synthesis. As for the 19th century,
however, if one single feature of its thought could be singled out for emphasis, it might be called
the discovery of the irrational. But many philosophical schools were present, and they contended,
one with another, in a series of distinct and powerful oppositions: Pragmatism against Idealism;
Positivism against irrationalism; Marxism against liberalism.
Politically the 19th century began with the consulate of Napoleon and ended with the Golden
Jubilee of Queen Victoria; but it is the intellectual and social changes that fell in between that
have philosophical consequences. These changes were chiefly the Romantic movement of the
early 19th century, which was a poetic revolt against reason in favor of feeling; the maturation of
the Industrial Revolution, which caused untold misery within society and called forth a multitude
of philosophies of social reform; the Revolution of 1848 in Paris, Germany, and Vienna, which
symbolized class divisions and first implanted in the European consciousness the concepts of
“the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat”; and, finally, the great surge in biological science with
Darwin and the publicizing of the idea of biological evolution. Romanticism influenced both
German Idealism and philosophers of irrationalism. Experiences of economic discord and social
unrest produced the ameliorative social philosophy of English Utilitarianism and the
revolutionary doctrines of Karl Marx. And the developmental ideas of Darwin provided the
prerequisites for American Pragmatism.
A synoptic view of philosophy in the 19th century reveals an interesting chronology. The early
century was dominated by the German school of absolute Idealism (Johann Fichte, Friedrich
Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegel). The midcentury was marked by a rebirth of interest in science and
its methods (Auguste Comte in France and John Stuart Mill in England) and by liberal (Mill) and
radical (Marx) social theory. The late century saw a second flowering of Idealism, this time in
England (T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet) and, with Charles Sanders Peirce
and William James, the rise of American Pragmatism. The new philosophies of the irrational in
the highly individual thinkers Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche
ran through the century in its entirety.
German Idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
The Enlightenment, inspired by the example of natural science, had accepted certain bounds to

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the possibility of knowledge; that is, it had recognized certain limits to reason's ability to
penetrate ultimate reality because that would require methods that surpass the boundaries of
scientific method. In this particular modesty, the philosophies of Hume and Kant were much
alike. But the early 19th century marked a resurgence of the metaphysical spirit at its most
ambitious and extravagant extreme. German Idealism reinstated the speculative pretensions of
Leibniz and Spinoza at their height. This turn was partly a consequence of the Romantic
influence but, more importantly, of a new alliance of philosophy not with science but with
religion. It was not accidental that all of the great German Idealists were university professors
whose fathers were Protestant pastors or who had themselves studied theology: Fichte at Jena
and Leipzig (1780–84); Schelling and Hegel at the Tübingen seminary (1788–95). And it is
probably this circumstance that gave to German Idealism its intensely serious, its quasi-religious,
and its dedicated character.
The consequence of this religious alignment was that philosophical interest shifted from Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason (in which he had attempted to account for natural science and denied the
possibility of certainty in metaphysics) to his Critique of Practical Reason (in which he had
explored the nature of the moral self) and his Critique of Judgment (in which he had questioned
the purposiveness of the universe as a whole). For absolute Idealism was based upon three
premises:
Thus, to understand the self, self-consciousness, and the spiritual universe became for Idealistic
metaphysics the task of philosophy.
From the point of view of doctrine, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had much in common. Fichte
(1762–1814), professor of philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin (1809–14) and a
great symbol of German patriotism thru the Napoleonic Wars, combined in a workable unity the
subjectivism of Descartes, the cosmic monism of Spinoza, and the moral intensity of Kant. He
saw human self-consciousness as the primary metaphysical fact thru the analysis of which the
philosopher finds his way to the cosmic totality that is “the Absolute.” And, just as the moral will
is the chief characteristic of the self, so also is it the activating principle of the world. Thus
Fichte provided a new definition of philosophizing that made it central in dignity in the
intellectual world. The sole task of philosophy is “the clarification of consciousness.” And the
highest degree of self-consciousness is achieved by the philosopher because he alone recognizes
“Mind,” or “Spirit,” as the central principle of reality.
This line of thought was carried further by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831),
Fichte's successor at Berlin and perhaps the single most comprehensive and influential thinker of
the 19th century. Kant's problem had been the critical examination of reason's role in human
experience. For Hegel, too, the function of philosophy is to discover the place of reason in
nature, in experience, and in reality; to understand the laws according to which reason operates
in the world. But whereas Kant had found reason to be the form that mind imposes upon the
world, Hegel found it to be constitutive of the world itself—not something that mind imposes but
that it discovers. As Fichte had projected consciousness from mind into reality, so Hegel
projected reason; and the resultant Hegelian dictates—that “the rational is the real” and that “the
truth is the whole”—although they express an organic and a totalitarian theory of truth and
reality, tend to blur the usual distinctions that previous philosophers had made between logic and
metaphysics, between subject and object, and between thought and existence. For the basic tenet
of Idealism, that reality is spiritual, generates just such a vague inclusiveness.
To the Fichtean foundations, however, Hegel added one crucial corollary: that the Absolute, or
Whole, which is a concrete universal entity, is not static but undergoes a crucial development in

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time. Hegel called this evolution “the dialectical process.” By stressing it, Hegel accomplished
two things: (1) he indicated that reason itself is not eternal but “historical,” and (2) he thereby
gave new meaning and relevance to the changing conditions of human society in history—which
added to the philosophical task a cultural dimension that it had not possessed before.
The philosopher's vocation, in Hegel's view, was to approach the Absolute thru consciousness, to
recognize it as Spirit expressing and developing itself (“realizing itself” was his own phrase) in
all of the manifold facets of human life. For struggle is the essence of spiritual existence, and
self-enlargement is its goal. For these reasons the various branches of intellect and culture
become stages in the unfolding of the World-Spirit:
What began, therefore, in Hegel as a metaphysics of the Absolute ended by becoming a total
philosophy of human culture.
Positivism and social theory in Comte, Mill, and Marx
The absolute Idealists wrote as if the Renaissance methodologists of the sciences had never
existed. But if in Germany the Empirical and scientific tradition in philosophy lay dormant, in
France and in England in the middle of the 19th century it was very much alive. In France,
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) wrote his great philosophical history of science, “The Positive
Philosophy” (1830–42) by Auguste Comte [abridged] in six volumes. Influenced by Bacon and
the entire school of British Empiricism, by the doctrine of progress put forward by Turgot and
Condorcet during the 18th century, and by the very original social reformer Henri de Saint-
Simon, Comte called his philosophy “Positivism,” by which he meant a philosophy of science so
narrow that it denied any validity whatsoever to “knowledge” not derived thru the accepted
methods of science. He made his point not by dialectic but by an appeal to the history of thought,
and here Comte presented his two basic ideas:
Comte's permanent contribution was to initiate an antireligious and an antimetaphysical bias in
the philosophy of science that has passed into the 20th century.
In mid-19th-century England the chief representative of the Empirical tradition from Bacon to
Hume was John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Mill's theory of knowledge, best presented in his
“Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy” (1865), was not particularly original but
rather a judicious combination of the doctrines of Berkeley and Hume; but it symbolized his
mistrust of vague metaphysics, his denial of the a priori element in knowledge, and his
determined opposition to any form of intuitionism. It is in his enormously influential “System of
Logic” (1843), however, that Mill's chief theoretical ideas are to be found.
This work, as part of its subtitle, the “Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific
Investigation,” shows, was concerned less with formal logic than with scientific methodology.
Mill made here the fundamental distinction between deduction and induction, defined induction
as the process by which men discover and prove general propositions, and presented his “four
methods of experimental inquiry” as the heart of the inductive method. These methods were, in
fact, only an enlarged and refined version of Francis Bacon's “tables of discovery.” But the most
significant section of “A System of Logic” was its conclusion: book 6, “On the Logic of the
Moral Sciences.”
Mill had taken men's experience of the uniformity of nature as the warrant of induction. Here he
reaffirmed the belief of Hume that it is possible to apply the principle of causation and the
methods of physical science to moral and social phenomena. These may be so complex as to
yield only “conditional predictions,” but in this sense there are “social laws.” Thus Comte and
Mill agreed upon the possibility of a true social science.
Mill's Logic was extremely influential, and it continued to be taught at Oxford and Cambridge

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well into the 20th century; but in the end his importance lay less in logic and theory of
knowledge than in ethics and political theory. For Mill was the great apostle of political
liberalism in the 19th century, a true follower of John Locke. And, just as Locke and Rousseau
had represented the liberal and the radical wings of social theory in the early modern period, so
Mill and Karl Marx represented the liberal and the radical approaches to social reform 100 years
later.
Raised by social reformers (his father, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham) to be a social reformer
himself, Mill's social theory was an attempt, by gradual means arrived at democratically, to
combat the evils of the Industrial Revolution. His ethics, expressed in his “Utilitarianism”
(1861), followed the formulations of Bentham in finding the end of society to consist in the
production of the greatest quantity of happiness for its members, but he gave to Bentham's cruder
(but more consistent) doctrines a humanistic and individualistic slant. Thus, the moral self-
development of the individual becomes the ultimate value in Mill's ethics.
This trend was also expressed in his essay “On Liberty” (1859) and “Considerations on
Representative Government” (1861). In the former he stated the case for the freedom of the
individual against “the tyranny of the majority,” presented strong arguments in favor of complete
freedom of thought and discussion, and argued that no state or society has the right to prevent the
free development of human individuality. In the latter he provided a classic defense for the
principle of representative democracy, asked for the adequate representation of minorities, urged
renewed public participation in political action for necessary social reforms, and pointed up the
dangers of class-oriented or special-interest legislation.
A radical counterbalance to Mill's liberal ideas was provided by Karl Marx (1818–83), a German
philosopher, social revolutionary, and political economist. Taking over from Hegel the idea of
estrangement (which Hegel had used in a metaphysical sense), Marx used this notion prior to
1848 to indicate the alienation of the worker from the enjoyment of the products of his work, the
crass treatment of human labor as a mere commodity (and man as a thing), and, in fact, the
general dehumanization of man in a selfish, profit-seeking capitalist society.
In the famous “Communist Manifesto” (1848), Marx, yielding to the revolutionary temper of the
times, called (as Rousseau had done before the French Revolution) for the violent overthrow of
the established order. All of history, Marx said, is the struggle between exploiting minorities and
the underlying population, that is, between bourgeois and proletarians; and he advocated the
formation of a Communist Party to stimulate proletarian class consciousness toward the seizure
of power and the institution of a just and democratically managed Socialist society.
Marx's revolutionary fervor may have tended to dampen his philosophical reputation in the West,
and his philosophical achievement remains a controversial point; but certain of his ideas (some
Hegelian in inspiration, some original) have endured. Among these are the ideas:
Independent and irrationalist movements
The end of the 19th century saw a flowering of many independent philosophical movements.
After Hegel was almost forgotten in Germany, his influence migrated to England, where T.H.
Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet initiated a new Hegelian renaissance. Bradley's
“Appearance and Reality” (1893) constituted the high-water mark of the rediscovery of Hegel's
dialectical method. In America a strong reaction against Idealism led to the beginnings of the
Pragmatic movement initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Peirce was an
exact logician who recognized that the function of all inquiry is to eradicate doubt and that the
meaning of a concept consists in the practical consequences that the concept might be said to
have. James transformed Peirce's pragmatic theory of meaning into a pragmatic theory of truth

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and, in his “Will to Believe” (1897), asserted that men have a right to believe even in the face of
inconclusive evidence and that, because knowledge is an instrument for the sake of life, the true
test of a belief is the practical consequences that it entails. Meanwhile, in Austria, Franz
Brentano, who taught at Vienna from 1874 to 1895, and Alexius Meinong, who taught at Graz,
were developing an empirical psychology and a theory of objects, which were to have
considerable influence upon the new philosophy of Phenomenology.
It was not, however, any of these late 19th-century developments but, rather, the emphasis upon
the irrational, which started almost at the century's beginning, that gave the philosophy of the
period its peculiar flavor. Hegel, despite his commitment to systematic metaphysics, had,
nonetheless, carried on the Enlightenment tradition of faith in human rationality. But soon his
influence was challenged from two different directions. The Danish Christian thinker Søren
Kierkegaard (1813–55) challenged the logical pretensions of the Hegelian system; and one of his
contemporaries, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), himself a German Idealist and constructor
of a bold and imaginative system, contradicted Hegel by asserting that the irrational is the truly
real.
Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel was an appeal to the concrete as against the abstract. He
satirized Hegelian Rationalism as a perfect example of “the academic in philosophy”—of
detached, objective, abstract theorizing and system building, blind to the realities of human
existence, to its subjective, living, emotional character. What a man requires in life, said
Kierkegaard, is not infinite inquiry but the boldness of resolute decision and commitment. Man's
essence is not contained in thinking but in the existential conditions of his emotional life, in his
anxiety and despair. The titles of three of Kierkegaard's books— “Fear and Trembling” (1843),
“The Concept of Dread” (1844), “The Sickness unto Death” (1849)—indicate his preoccupation
with states of consciousness quite unlike the usual philosophical concentration on cognition and
the validity of knowledge.
Schopenhauer, even though for a short time, he competed unsuccessfully with Hegel at the
University of Berlin, soon withdrew and thereafter waged a lifelong battle against academic
philosophy. His own system, though orderly and carefully worked out, was written in a vivid and
engaging style. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that the world of appearances, of phenomena, is
governed by the conditions of space, time, and causality. But he held that science, which
investigates this world, cannot itself penetrate the real world behind appearances, which is
dominated by a strong, blind, striving, universal cosmic Will that expresses itself in the vagaries
of human instinct, in sexual striving, and in the wild uncertainties of all animal behavior.
Everywhere in nature one sees strife, conflict, and inarticulate impulse; and these, rather than
rational processes or intellectual clarity, are man's true contacts with ultimate reality.
Schopenhauer's great work “The World As Will and Idea” was published in 1819, and
Kierkegaard's uneven masterpieces appeared between 1843 and 1849. But Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900), the third of the irrationalist triumvirate, wrote between 1872 and 1889. A prolific
but unsystematic writer, presenting his patchwork of ideas in swift atoms of thought, Nietzsche
saw the task of the philosopher as that of a man who destroys old values, creates new ideals, and
thru them a new civilization. He agreed with Schopenhauer that mind is an instrument of instinct
to be used in the service of life and power, and he held that illusion is as necessary to man as
truth. Nietzsche spent much time in the analysis of such states as resentment, guilt, bad
conscience, and self-contempt.
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche provided for the 19th century a new, nonrational
conception of human nature, and they viewed the mind not with the rational clarity of Locke and

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Hume but as something dark, obscure, hidden, deep. But, above all, they initiated a new style of
philosophizing. Schopenhauer wrote like an 18th-century essayist; Kierkegaard was a master of
the methods of irony and paradox; and Nietzsche used aphorism and epigram with conscious
literary intention. For these three, the philosopher should be less a crabbed academician than a
man of letters.
The 20th century
Despite the tradition of philosophical “professionalism” established during the Enlightenment by
Wolff and Kant, philosophy in the 19th century was still largely created by men outside of the
universities. Comte, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer were not professors. Only the
German Idealist school was rooted in academic life. Today, however, most well-known
philosophers are associated with universities. (George Santayana after his early years and Jean-
Paul Sartre are the notable exceptions.) The agencies of professionalism—the philosophical
congress, the national philosophical societies, the narrowly specialized journals—have become
increasingly important. Philosophers more and more employ a technical vocabulary and deal
with specialized problems, and they write not for a broad intellectual public but for one another.
Professionalism also has sharpened the divisions between philosophical schools and made the
definition of what philosophy is and ought to be a matter of the sharpest controversy. Philosophy
has become extremely self-conscious about its own method and nature.
Intellectual competitiveness, moreover, has been further sharpened by geographic and political
considerations. The tradition of clear analysis, inaugurated by Locke and Hume, still dominates
the Anglo-Saxon world; the Hegelian tradition of speculative metaphysics and the Nietzschean
tradition of bold psychological generalization still dominate the Continent. And the special
framework of thinking established by Karl Marx dominated philosophy in the Socialist world.
Individual philosophies of Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead
Except, then, for philosophical Marxism and a few individual philosophers such as Henri
Bergson, John Dewey, and A.N. Whitehead, who evade easy classification, the main currents of
contemporary philosophy are (1) Analytic philosophy with its two chief branches, (a) Logical
Positivism and (b) Linguistic Analysis; and (2) Continental philosophy with its two branches, (a)
Existentialism and (b) Phenomenology.
Henri Bergson (1859–1941), John Dewey (1859–1952), and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–
1947) have been called the three most important speculative philosophers of the first half of the
20th century. The French Bergson and the American Dewey shared an instrumental theory of
mind; that is, influenced by Darwinism, they both held that mind has emerged in the course of
biological evolution as an instrument of man's adaptation to his environment and, therefore, that
man's mental functions are chiefly utilitarian agencies of action. Bergson and the English
Whitehead were both adherents of a process philosophy; that is, each held that actuality is, like a
river, fluent, that ultimate reality is mobile and dynamic. Yet, in fact, each of the three defined
philosophy differently and saw it as performing a uniquely different task. Bergson's vision of
philosophy was intuitional, Whitehead's was speculative, and Dewey's was pragmatic.
Bergson, in the “An Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903) and in his masterpiece, “Creative
Evolution” (1907), distinguished between two profoundly different ways of knowing: the method
of analysis, which is that of science; and the method of intuition, which is just that intellectual
sympathy by which men enter into objects and persons and identify with them. All basic
metaphysical truths, Bergson held, are grasped by philosophical intuition. This is how men know
their deepest selves, the duration, which is the essence of all living things, and the vital spirit,
which is the mysterious creative agency in the world.

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For Whitehead, philosophy was primarily metaphysics (or “speculative philosophy”), the effort
“to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element
of our experience can be interpreted.” Whitehead's philosophy was, thus, an attempt to survey
the world with a large generality of understanding, an end toward which his great trilogy,
Science and the “Modern World” (1925), “Process and Reality” (1929), and “Adventures of
Ideas” (1933), was directed.
While Bergson and Whitehead were principally metaphysicians and philosophers of culture,
Dewey was an all-around philosopher who dominated the fields of ethics, metaphysics, and
methodology in the United States for many years and who stressed the unity, interrelationship,
and organicity of all forms of philosophical knowledge. He is chiefly notable, however, because
his notion of philosophy stressed so powerfully the conceptions of practicality and moral
purpose. One of the guiding aims of Dewey's philosophizing was the effort to find the same
warranted assertibility for ethical and political as for scientific judgments. Philosophy, he said,
should be oriented not to professional pride but to human need.
The social thought of Mill and Marx presented opposed solutions to the social problems of the
19th century; that of Dewey and Lenin presented opposed solutions to the problems of the 20th
century. Not revolution but the continuous application of intelligence to social affairs was
Dewey's answer. He believed in social planning, in conscious intelligent intervention to produce
desirable social change; and he proposed a new “experimentalism” in social affairs as the guide
to enlightened public action to promote the aims of a democratic community. His pragmatic
social theory is the major social philosophy that liberal democracy has produced in the modern
world.
Marxist thought
The framework of 19th-century Marxist thought, augmented by the philosophical suggestions of
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, served as the starting point of all philosophizing in the Socialist countries
of eastern Europe. To Marx's conception of the dialectic (that the social world progresses
through the rise and fall of oppositions), Lenin added a strong tinge of metaphysical Materialism
(material things and their systems of relations exist independently of mind, and the laws of
nature are objective) and a naively Realist theory of knowledge (ideas and sensations are true
copies of independently existing things). But much of Lenin's thinking was also devoted to rather
practical issues, like the tactics of violence and the role of the Communist Party in bringing
about and consolidating the proletarian revolution.
Later Marxism continued this concern with practical issues, because it represented the basic
Marxist conception of what philosophy is and ought to be. For Marxism (like Pragmatism) tried
to assimilate theoretical issues to practical needs. It asserted the basic unity of theory and
practice by finding that the function of the former was to serve the latter. Marx and Lenin both
held that theory was always in fact expressive of class interests; consequently, they wished
philosophy to be transformed into a tool for furthering the class struggle: not abstractly to
discover the truth but concretely to forge the intellectual weapons of the proletariat was
philosophy's dominant task. Thus philosophy became inseparable from ideology.
Since the discovery and publication in 1927 and 1932 of some of Marx's early writings, many
have sensed a breath of fresh air in Marxist philosophizing outside Russia. The concern of the
young Marx with alienation, with a theory of the nature of man, and with moral values has given
Marxism a new humanistic dimension and has inspired some notable revisionist thinking in
Poland, Hungary, and the Balkan region.
Analytic philosophy
Logical Positivism
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Logical Positivism, or Logical Empiricism, the earliest branch of modern Analytic philosophy,
was jointly inspired by Hume and by the new logic of Russell and Whitehead, authors of the
“Principia Mathematica” (3 vol., 1910–13). The school, formally instituted at the University of
Vienna in a seminar of Moritz Schlick in 1923, continued there as the Vienna Circle until 1938.
Its great period began in 1926 when Rudolf Carnap, who became a leading semanticist and
philosopher of science, arrived at the University. Its manifesto of 1929, “Scientific Conception of
the World: The Vienna Circle”, and its journal “Knowledge” founded a year later, marked its
self-consciousness as a philosophical movement.
Logical Positivism's basic contribution has been a profound alteration in the conception of the
role that philosophy itself must play. Philosophy, it claimed, must henceforth be scientific. It
should seek less a content than a function: it should produce not complicated pictures of the
world but clear thinking. This was best stated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his “Logische-
philosophische Abhandlung” (1921):
Despite this emphasis upon philosophy as a pure activity, Logical Positivism did propound, at
the same time, a series of revolutionary theses:
Logical Positivism's radical denial of the meaningfulness of metaphysics and of assertions of
value at first produced something of a philosophical scandal. But meanwhile Bertrand Russell
and his student Wittgenstein (who had emigrated from Austria) were propounding similar
doctrines in England; and, after the Nazis overran Austria and Carnap, Hans Reichenbach (a
Berlin Positivist), and many others from the Vienna Circle moved to America, this philosophy
proved remarkably influential in the Anglo-American world. The Logical Positivists were mainly
interested in three basic themes: logic, language, and perception. Whereas Russell began with
logic, turned to problems of perception, and ended with semantics, Carnap, having begun with
perception in “The Logical Structure of the World” (1928), turned to problems of semantics in
“The Logical Syntax of Language” (1934) and ended with logic in “Meaning and Necessity”
(1947). But of these three themes it was that of language that proved most enduring. This
emphasis Logical Positivism shared with its successor, Linguistic Analysis.
Linguistic Analysis Sometimes called “ordinary language” Analysis or even “Oxford
philosophy” from its later stronghold, this movement was, in fact, largely the product of two
philosophers of the first half of the 20th century who were associated with the University of
Cambridge, G.E. Moore (1873–1958) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Moore made the
examination of the assertions of other men philosophically popular—i.e., the practice of
directing the philosopher's critical energies to the mistakes of his contemporaries. The major
subjects of his interest were ethics and the theory of knowledge; his thought was always Realistic
and commonsensical, and he introduced into philosophy an unbelievably precise and closely
applied analytical method. It was Moore's passion for clarity and his infinite pains “to get
everything exactly right” that served as moral inspiration to a succeeding generation of younger
men who had attended his Cambridge lectures over a span of 30 years.
Wittgenstein had begun as a kind of adjunct to the Vienna Circle. There was a time when his
philosophical position was much like that of Russell and Carnap; but as he later became more
skeptical of the foundations of mathematics and logic, his interest turned from logic and artificial
language systems toward a critical examination of ordinary natural language. This change was
principally registered in his “Philosophical Investigations”, posthumously published in 1953,
which has become the true bible of Linguistic Analysis. For it is here that Wittgenstein showed
how a man's entire world is constituted by his linguistic experience and suggested that “all
philosophy is critique of language.” Wittgenstein thought that to ask “Why do we use this

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particular word or expression?” was the crucial philosophical question since a focusing of
philosophy not upon the world but upon the mechanisms of linguistic use would solve most of
the perplexities that have plagued philosophizing. Thus Linguistic philosophy was to perform a
therapeutic function.
Wittgenstein's example found many followers in the United States and, particularly, in England.
There philosophers Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, and P.F. Strawson have examined “category
mistakes,” “systematically misleading expressions,” “mental-conduct concepts” (such as “other
minds”), and all of the major “perception words” such as “looking,” “seeing,” “sensing,”
“feeling,” and the like. The effect of this concentration not upon things or ideas but upon words
has, for members of this school, turned the customary works on ethics, aesthetics, or the
philosophy of religion into treatises entitled “The Language of Ethics” or “The Language of
Aesthetics” or “The Language of Religion.” And these efforts are all, in Wittgenstein's terms, “a
battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
Continental philosophy
The Analytic philosophy that by the mid-1970s had come to dominate Anglo-American
philosophical thinking for almost half a century has had comparatively little influence on the
continent of Europe. There the metaphysical and speculative traditions have remained strong;
and in the 1950s and 1960s the interest in both, but particularly in Phenomenology, posed an
increasing threat to philosophical Analysis in Britain and the United States. Continental
philosophy may be divided into Phenomenology and Existentialism, but the division is not sharp.
Thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty combine the
two strands. And the phenomenological method has been one of the formative forces in
Existentialism.
Phenomenology of Husserl and others
Edmund Husserl (1859–1939), a German mathematician turned philosopher, was the true father
of Phenomenology. He was an extremely complicated and technical thinker whose views
changed considerably over the years. His chief contributions were the phenomenological
method, developed early, and the concept of the life-world, appearing only in his later writings.
Husserl proposed the phenomenological method as a technique for conducting phenomenological
analyses—that is, for making possible “a descriptive account of the essential structures of the
directly given.” The emphasis here is upon the immediacy of experience, the attempt to isolate it
and set it off from all assumptions of existence or causal influence and to lay bare its actual
intrinsic structure; for it is this structure that constitutes its essence. Phenomenology restricts the
philosopher's attention to the pure data of consciousness uncontaminated by metaphysical
theories or scientific assumptions. Husserl's concept of the life-world expressed this same idea of
immediacy. It is the individual's personal world as directly experienced, with the ego at the
centre and with all of its vital and emotional colorings.
With the appearance of the “Annual for Philosophical and Phenomenological Research” (1913–
30) under Husserl's chief editorship, his personal philosophizing flowered into an international
movement. Its two most notable adherents were Max Scheler, a scholar of life-philosophy,
whose “Formalism in Ethics and the Material Value-Ethics” was published in the Jahrbuch
(1913–16), and the ontological Existentialist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose famous
“Being and Time” appeared in the Jahrbuch in 1927. Despite the differences in their individual
philosophies their work showed clearly the influence of the phenomenological method: in
Scheler's careful explorations of the role that emotion plays in men's moral values and in his
descriptive analyses of the human attitudes of resentment, sympathy, and love; and in

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Heidegger's startlingly original investigations of human existence with its unique dimensions of
being-in-the-world, dread, care, and being toward death. In all of these painstaking and
enormously detailed inquiries, however, both Scheler and Heidegger held to the
phenomenological principle that philosophy is not empirical but is the strictly self-evident insight
into the structure of experience. Later, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French student of philosophical
psychology, in his “The Phenomenology of Perception” (1945), took over Husserl's conception
of the life-world and used the notions of the lived body and its facticity to build up a hierarchical
order of man's lived experience.
 Existentialism of Jaspers and Sartre
Continental Existentialism, true to its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, is oriented toward two
major themes: (1) the analysis of human Being and (2) the centrality of human choice. Thus its
chief theoretical energies are devoted to ontology and decision. Existentialism as a philosophy of
human existence found its best spokesman in the German Karl Jaspers, who came to philosophy
from medicine and psychology. As a philosophy of human decision, its spokesman was the
French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre. These two preoccupations of Existentialism
lead to two different conceptions of philosophy's function.
For Jaspers (1883–1969), as for Dewey (1859–1952), the aim of philosophy is practical; for
Dewey, however, it guides human doing, whereas for Jaspers its purpose is the achievement of
human Being. Philosophizing is an inner activity by which the individual finds and becomes
himself: it is a revelation of Being. It is an attempt to answer the question of what man is and
what he can become; and this activity, wholly unlike that of science, is one of mere thought, thru
the “inwardness” of which a man becomes aware of the deepest levels of Being. But if, for
Jaspers, philosophy is devoted to “the illumination of existence,” that illumination is achieved
when a person recognizes that human existence is revealed most profoundly in his experience of
those “extreme” situations that define the human condition—conflict, guilt, suffering, and death.
It is in man's confrontation with these extremes that he achieves his existential humanity.
Sartre (1905–80), too, has some concern for man's Being and his dread before the threat of
Nothingness. But Sartre finds the essence of this Being in man's liberty—in his duty of self-
determination and his freedom of choice—and therefore spends much time in describing the
human tendency toward “bad faith”—reflected in man's perverse attempts to deny his own
responsibility and to flee from the truth of his inescapable freedom. Sartre, like Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche, considered himself less an academic philosopher than a man of letters and also
wrote novels and plays that assert the Existential dogma of human freedom and explore the
inexhaustible mechanisms of bad faith. It is not that Sartre overlooks the legitimate series of
obstacles to freedom a human being has to face in the givens of place, past, environment,
fellowmen, and death; but his Existentialist bias demands that man surmount these limitations by
acts of conscious decision. For only in acts of freedom does human existence achieve
authenticity.
Concluding comments
It seems clear that, in the 50 years around the mid-20th century, philosophizing has become
uncommonly concerned with problems of language, symbolism, and communication.
Renaissance philosophy was primarily preoccupied with nature, with an external physical world
and the objects contained within it. The Enlightenment turned to the mind that knows the world;
its philosophy spoke of the genesis of ideas, the relation of concepts, the quality of appearances.

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But 20th-century philosophizing largely states its problems in terms of symbolic manipulation
and the characteristics of words.
Nor is this merely the preoccupation of Analytical philosophy: Dewey was interested in social
communication; Whitehead wrote a little volume on “Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect”
(1927); Heidegger turned to poetry and the etymology of words for the revelation of Being; Ernst
Cassirer, a German Neo-Kantian, produced a “philosophy of symbolic forms”; and Jaspers tried
to decipher the meanings reflected in human speech and gesture.
Apart from this underlying tendency there seems little prospect for philosophical unification. The
scientific and the metaphysical tempers still pursue their opposite courses, and the subjectivity of
Existentialism and the objectivity of Logical Positivism still express their opposition in mutual
contempt. Thus, in the contemporary philosophical universe, multiplicity and division still reign.

Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002, Standard Edition CD

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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

Human beings are born into a community, cooperation comes naturally and they are shaped by
environment, ideas and culture. The level of social cooperation is based on kin relationship and
reciprocal altruism. This is so even among animals, such as chimpanzees. Human and chimp
gnomes overlap by 99 percent, the one percent difference relates to language, abstract thought
and anatomical characteristics. Chimps also recognize authorities in their respective hierarchies,
build coalitions and choose allies based on trustworthiness; they even display feelings of guilt
and embarrassment. In the last 5 million years of Homo sapien development, the brain size
increased three times. This resulted in greater intelligences and cognitive abilities. The
emergence of language led to new opportunities of cooperative and cognitive development,
beyond direct experiences to social learning from others. Development of language also led to
abstract and theory formations; also to mental models, observing correlations between observed
events and inferring causations from them. The ability to create mental models and to attribute
causality to invisible forces led to emergence of religion. Religion is the belief in invisible,
supernatural forces. Religion has generally been a source of social cohesion leading to wider
cooperation, beyond rational self-centeredness. Religion usually includes rewards and
punishment to reinforce the gains from cooperation at the present. Religious beliefs are accepted
by the adherents to be unconditionally true, with severe penalties imposed on claims of
falsehood.
Ideas regarding manipulating the world lead to rituals of repetitive acts to influence supernatural
forces over the environment. Rituals also help delineate communities from one another and build
social solidarity. Modern science in contrast requires systematic testing of theories, which allows
more effective manipulation of the environment.
Religion is not the only way to encourage group solidarity; nationalism and secular ideologies
serve the same goal. Neither religious believers nor secularists can really prove or falsify
religious beliefs. Religious ideas and secular rules are invested with great emotion to protect
tradition, rituals and customs; leading communities to become conservative and to strongly resist
challenges to their dominant ideas.
The human brain has rational, but primarily emotional components. Emotional responses are like
an autopilot to promote social behavior, such as gratitude for kindness or anger to a felt harm.
These emotional responses make humans conformists and norm followers. Just like language
varies across cultures but has a universal human faculty. Human emotions like anger, shame,
guilt, and pride are innate qualities that are re-enforced socially. So much emotion can be
invested in following norms that they become irrational, even to self-interest. Rules and
institutions generated in response to environmental circumstances, sometimes become
dysfunctional under later conditions and are very difficult to change due to people’s heavy
emotional investments in them.
One of the strongest emotions is the quest for recognition; the intrapersonal valuation of worth,
respect, customs and ideologies. It differs from economic exchange, because in social hierarchies
there is always a higher or lower status. Humans constantly evaluate the worth or dignity of other
people or institutions and place themselves into hierarchies with others. Political power is based
on the leader or institution being regarded as legitimate, and to command the respect of a group
of followers. Every society was organized at its beginning on the basis of kinship. Most societies
then went on to develop states and impersonal forms of administration. Agrarian societies from
China and Middle East to Europe and India all developed centralized monarchies and
increasingly bureaucratized forms of government. In more recent times, democratic
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accountability and popular sovereignty has become widespread, but unevenly implemented.
Basic Human Qualities
Humans have always lived in kin-based social groups of various sizes and will act altruistically
toward genetic relatives.
The basis for human principals of sociability is based on kin selection and reciprocal altruism.
They develop relationships of mutual benefit or mutual harm as they interact with others over
time. Reciprocal altruism depends on repeated personal interactions and resulting trust
relationships. These forms of social cooperation are the default human interactions in social
organization based on either of these two principals.
Humans tend to create and follow norms or rules.
Institutions are essentially rules that limit individual freedom of choice.
Following rules is often based on emotions (such as guilt, shame, pride, anger, embarrassment
and admiration) rather than reason. Rules are basically culturally transmitted and lead to
conservatism in societies. Rules evolve as useful adaptations to particular environmental
conditions, when conditions change, rules may become irrelevant or even dysfunctional.
Humans have a natural propensity for violence. Social institutions have always existed to control
and channel violence.
The acknowledgment by others of one’s dignity, worth, status can be of great individual
importance. Status means one is higher than another. Recognition is often more important than
material wealth. In modern times there is a recognized demand for equal recognition of human
rights.
Ideas as Cause
People create mental models of reality. These models attribute causality to various factors, often
invisible ones, to allow the world to be more understandable, predictable, and manipulated. In
earlier time these invisible factors were attributed to spirits, demons and gods. Later the factors
were recognized as nature. Today they may be explained in abstractions like gravity, radiation,
economics or social classes. All religious beliefs constitute mental models of reality, where
observable events are attributed to non-, or dimly-observable forces. Since the rise of modern
natural science we can at least disprove theories of causation by way of controlled experiments
or statistical analysis. The sharing of beliefs and cultures improves cooperation by promoting
common goals and arriving at solutions to shared problems, going beyond kin and friends; and
bind communities together as a whole, or a particular social class. Secular ideologies or
nationalism have partially displaced religious beliefs in contemporary societies. Religions also
prescribe moral laws and rules that are enforced on their followers. These laws and rules are
invested with powerful emotional meaning. While religious beliefs cannot be verified, they are
also difficult to falsify. This also reinforces the fundamental conservatism of human societies, as
mental models of reality once adopted are difficult to change, even when new evidence becomes
available. Like language is part of all human societies, but vary greatly, so it seems to be a
propensity in religious beliefs.
Religion evolves from shamanism and magic, to ancestor worship, to poly- and monotheistic
religion with highly developed doctrines.
Legitimacy of leaders of states is also related to ideas people hold about God, justice, man,
society, wealth, and virtue…
Another development is the biblical idea that man was made in the image of God. This led
slowly to the ideas of equal dignity of all people, even classes, women, racial, religious and
ethnic minorities.
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The passage from band- and tribal-level societies to state-level, is really a setback for human
freedom and loss of dignity to great portions of the people. Modern democracy gives all people
the opportunity to rule themselves, on the basis of mutual recognition of the dignity and rights of
their fellow humans. This seeks to restore what was lost in the large and complex societies that
got lost in the transition to state. The emergence of accountable government is closely tied to
these concepts.
The earliest and most simple social organization was on the band-level hunter-gatherer societies.
Such societies still exist today in marginal environments such as the Eskimos, the Bushmen of
the Kalahari Desert and the Australian Aborigines. They are highly egalitarian. The major social
distinctions are by age and sex, men hunt and women gather. There is little difference between
families, no permanent leadership, and no hierarchy. Leaders arise based on group consensus.
Apart from parents to their children, coercion is very limited. Women marry outside their social
group and move to the husbands’ place of residence. This practice encourages movement and
contact with other groups.
The transition from band-level to tribal societies was made possible by the development of
agriculture. This started 9 to10 thousand years ago with the domestication of wild grasses and
seeds, gradually leading to large increases in population. With population densities of 0.1 to 1
person per square km for hunter-gatherers, to 40 to 60 persons per square km for agriculturalists.
This resulted in changes of social organization. Tribal societies are divided by segmentary, and
on the principle of common descent. Segmentary refers to societies that replicated as identical
small-scale social units, like segments of an earthworm. Such societies grow by adding
segments, but have no overall centralized political structure, and are not subject to modern
division of labor. Each segment is a self-sufficient unit, to feed, clothe and defend itself. They
can come together for common purposes, like self-defense. In tribal societies, the units are based
on the principal of common descent, a common ancestor who lived many generations ago. The
most common is by the male line. Most tribal societies are also segmented, that means a segment
may feel closely related to the respective segment; but segments may aggregate to a higher level
when specific needs arise, such as a conflict with another tribe.
All human societies started out on the band-level. That is where religious beliefs also started,
with the worship of dead ancestors. Within each group there may be shamans or religious
specialists whose job is to communicate with those ancestors. Duties and obligations are to each
person’s ancestors. The dead were buried with clothing, utensils and food, offered by the nearest
living relatives. The living is tied both to the dead ancestors and to unborn descendants. That was
one of the main reasons for getting married to have children (particularly male) to look after
one’s soul after one’s death.
In tribal society, these religious beliefs bound the individual with the community in their
common rituals. Land of tribal societies was usually owned by the community, with individual
families having the right to cultivate specific portions of the land. In sedentary farming
communities where land was individually owned there were social obligations toward the kin
living, dead, and yet to be born. Tribal societies have weak centralized sources of authority; they
have no system of third-party enforcement of rules associated with modern legal systems. Blood
feuds are a tribal institution, in which reparations are obtained. There are rules about how blood
feuds are to be pursued. Certain authorities mediate disputes as a neutral party in a non-binding
system of arbitration. Agriculture made higher population densities possible; this created a need
for organizing societies on a larger scale. Agriculture led to the need of private property. The

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transition to tribal societies also involved warfare. Sedentary agriculture societies led to human
groups living in much closer proximities. In case of emergency they could scale up rapidly and
mobilize into tribal federations. It is only in tribal societies where a separate caste of warriors
and a leader with armed retainers arise. This continues to this day of warlords with their
followers of militias and gangs, who then use their power of coercion and predation that did not
exist at the band level of organization.
The loose, decentralized system of organization of tribal societies is both their strength and
weakness. The most famous were the pastoral nomads, the Mongols with their horses. In the 12th
century they conquered Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, part of Eastern Europe, northern
India and China, in a little over a century. They lacked permanent leadership and no clear rules
of succession lead to their decline and disintegration. When tribal-level societies were succeeded
by state-level societies, tribalism did not simply disappear. In China, India and the Middle East,
and pre-Columbian America, state institutions were merely layered on top of tribal institutions
and existed in an uneasy balance with them for a long time.
Tribalism from the beginning was defined in terms of kinship. With time tribal societies evolved
by accepting members that were not kin members. With the inclusion of patrons and clients
linked by reciprocity and personal ties, tribalism remains part of ongoing political development
from the time of the Roman Republic to the Latin-American banana republic.
To the present time in China, India and Middle East family and kinship remain strong as sources
of social organization and identity. Tribal affiliations remain omnipotent in the Arab Middle
East, particularly among the Bedouins.
In Europe the exit from kinship occurred shortly after the Germanic tribes overran the Western
Roman Empire and were converted to Christianity by the Catholic Church. The church took a
strong stand against the practices of marriage between close kin, marriage to widows of dead
relations (levirate), adoption of children, concubinage, and divorce. This was a church strategy to
discourage property to be reconveyed to the tribe, but to donate it to the church. By end of the
7th century one third of the productive land in France was held by the church, by the 8th and 9th
centuries church holdings doubled in North France, German lands and Italy. Large property
holdings helped the church become a formidable economic and political institution later on. This
helped the church in its mission of feeding the hungry, care for the sick, expanding the
priesthood, and establishing monasteries and convents. This also helped the church to set up
internal managerial hierarchies and establish rules. As German, Norse, Magyar and Slavic tribes
converted to Christianity in two or three generations the kinship tradition ceased. This also led to
the diminishing of blood feuds.
Feudal relationships of vassalage followed, these were based on contracts voluntarily agreed to
between stronger and weaker individuals, with legal obligations on both sides. Legal titles could
be held by the strong and the weak.
State–level societies differ from tribal ones in several important respects:
They possess a centralized source of authority, such as king, president, or prime minister. This
source of authority deputizes a hierarchy of subordinates to enforce the rules on the whole
society. All administrative levels of lesser chiefs and administrators are subordinates to the
central authority.
The source of authority is backed by a monopoly of legitimate means of coercion (army and/or
police). The power of the state prevents segment tribes or regions from separating themselves.
The authority of the state is territorial rather than kin based, and can grow much larger than a
tribe.

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States are much more stratified and unequal then tribal societies, with rulers and his
administrative staff often separated from the rest of society. Sometimes they become a hereditary
elite. Slavery and serfdom can also be greatly expanded.
States are legitimated by more elaborate religious practices with a separate priestly class as
guardian. Sometimes the priestly class takes power directly (called theocracy). Sometines the
secular ruler controls or the two share the power (called caesaropapist).
With the beginning of the state, kinship is left behind. Kinship becomes a hindrance to political
development, tending to return political relationships to small–scale, personal ties of tribal
societies.
Factors contributing to the development of states:
Access to areas by roads or waterways.
Charismatic authority such as Prophet Muhammad.
Population densities around river systems. Egypt, Mesopotamia, China developed high yield
agriculture. This also leads to specialization, division of labor with technological and intellectual
innovations.
Loss of freedom at the tribal level and more organized violence, both for protection and
aggression.
Circumscription geography, such as mountains, deserts and oceans.
Early European states dispensed justice, not necessarily law. Law was rooted in religion or the
customs of tribes or other local community. The states’ authority rested more on their authority
and legitimacy for their ability to impartially enforce established laws.
In premodern societies law was understood to be mostly by divine authority, immemorial
customs or by nature. Legislation is a political power (by king, baron, president, legislature,
warlord). This leads to tension, sometimes conflict between law and political authority.
Modern-day courts originated from the interclan assemblies used to mediate blood feuds. The
Anglo-Saxon tribes called them moots. They heard testimony from the accuser and the accused,
deliberated and recommended compensation. But could not enforce their decision. Here also the
Christian concepts of universal community and equality replaced honor–based tribal society. As
the customary rules were compiled under royal authority they became the Common Law, and
applied by a network of judges. As a result of the Norman Conquest (1066, the Normans
replaced the older Danish and Anglo-Saxon nobility) it became a centralized authority, and even
the king was under the Common Law.
Christianity was first persecuted by Jewish, then by Roman political authorities for the first 300
years. With the conversion of Constantine in 313AD, Christianity was officially tolerated, and
later became the state religion of the Roman Empire. As the western part of the Roman Empire
was conquered by the pagan barbarians, religion and political authority were again separated.
The weakness in political authority gave the Catholic Church opportunity to extend itself. Pope
Gelasius (492-496) proclaimed that prelates had legislative authority above the king. During the
Dark Ages (500-1000) the political power became fused again.
Religion was always subordinated under the state in China, in the Muslim world (except where
Shiism prevailed), and the Eastern Roman Empire (Orthodox Christianity). This was also so in
western Christianity by the 11th century. The emperors, kings, and feudal lords thruout Europe
appointed bishops of the church. They also called church councils and made church law. Of the
25 popes holding office before 1059, twenty-one were appointed by emperors and five were
removed by them. The Catholic Church declared independence from political authority under
Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085). This culminated as a reaction to Holy Roman Emperor

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Henry III (1041-56) who deposed three rival popes to the one of his choosing. Pope Gregory VII
insisted on reforming the church. The most important reforms were to deny bishops and priests
to marry and have children, and forbade church offices to be bought and sold and turned into
heritable property. This was to avoid corruption and assure loyalty to the Church hierarchy. A
struggle persisted between the pope and emperors. The matter was finally settled in 1122 by the
concordant of Worms, where the emperor gave up the right of investiture and the church
recognized the emperor’s authority of temporal matters. The pope became the chief executive
officer over the church hierarchy.
The church was searching for a source of law to support its claim for universal authority of the
church. They re-discovered the Justinian Code in an Italian library at the end of the 11th century.
This Code was a highly sophisticated compilation of Roman law written in Constantinople under
emperor Justinian in the 6th century. This Code still serves as the civil law thruout continental
Europe and many other countries. The revival of the Roman law emerged as legal studies in
modern universities. At the end of the 11th century the University of Bologna became a leading
institution with other cities following at Paris, Oxford, Heidelberg, Krakow and Copenhagen.
The Roman law was like the English Common Law, it replaced the mass of particularistic
Germanic customary law. The study of Roman law also encouraged later the study of classical
philosophers such as Plato. The new universities produced separate classes of lawyers in both
ecclesiastic and lay areas; such as commercial, contract and property rights concerns.
Church law consisted of a diverse range of decrees of church councils and synods; writings of
church fathers, papal decrees, decrees by kings and emperors; mixed up with remnants of Roman
and Germanic law. The monk Gratian, trained in legal studies, analyzed thousands of canons
issued over the past centuries; he reconciled and synthesized them into a single body of canon
law. It was published in 1140 in a massive treatise of some 1400 pages. In the following century
canon law was greatly expanded and divided into various topics. With a single canon law the
Catholic Church established a modern bureaucratic state organization. The new offices like the
Papal Chancery soon became the model for secular rulers.
The political order of Europe at the time of the Gregorian reform started to develop, beyond the
decentralization after the break up of the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century. A series of
regional leaders (royal houses) arose above local lords who built strong castles in the 10th
century. These royal houses formed territorial states adopting the bureaucratic models of the
Gregorian reform. In the 11th century the three hierarchical orders of the aristocracy, the
ecclesiastics and the commons were recognized. They formed three representative estates which
rulers called together periodically to grant taxes and to deliberate on other important issues.
Several distinct domains of law were developed related to feudalism, the manor, the city, and
long distance trade. The rise of independent cities with free populations and external trade were
of great importance. The growing state institutions depended on early law, both in terms of
motive and process. State legitimacy and authority was based from the beginning on the
administration of justice. England was an early example on projection of justice across the whole
realm. By 1200 the king’s court had a permanent staff of officials dealing with land titling and
taxation over the whole realm. In 1215 the barons imposed on King John the Magna Carta where
they expected the king‘s court to respect their rights as representatives of a larger community.
Modern rule of law is based on religion in Christian, Muslim and Indian states. Today religion
plays a more restricted role; social consensus is determined in other ways, such as voting in
democratic elections. The religious law that emerged from the 12th century in Western

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Christianity helped to institutionalize and rationalize the law. The law has to be coherent and
expressed clearly in a body of rules to limit the executive authority of the state. It was more
rationalized and independent of the state, then Indian or Sunni Muslim law and the Eastern
Orthodox Church.
State building concentrates political power and the rule of law limits the power. In Europe the
rule of law survived. The Reformation undermined the authority of the church, and secular ideas
of the Enlightenment eroded belief in religion. Authority of king, nation, or people, began to
replace the sovereignty of God as the basis for legitimacy, and law came to be identified with
democratic community.
 Political Accountability
Rulers believe they are responsible to the people they govern and put interest of people above
their own. Moral conviction is also a form of accountability. Formal accountability is a
procedure where the government agrees to submit itself to specific limits to do as it pleases. The
procedures are usually stated in the constitution, and allow the citizens of the society to replace
the government for malfeasance, incompetence, or abuse of power. The earliest form of political
accountability in modern European state formation took place between the 15th to 17th centuries.
The rulers were forced to seek allies and compromisers with the landed nobility and autonomous
cities, which had their own rules and their own military forces. By that time the concept of law as
a limit to the power of the monarch and the state was already established. The rulers also had
limited taxing power and resorted to borrowing money from bankers to finance their wars. This
later European state building, with established rules of law and accountability, lead to political
liberty later on. Also the legitimacy of aristocracy (superiority by birth) was being questioned.
Many other influences surface during this period:
The spread of literacy and the invention of the printing press.
The Protestant Reformation and the emphasis of individuals reading and interpreting the
Bible.
The recovery of the classics and the rise of the Renaissance.
Modern natural science, with the practice of abstracting general rules based on empirical data
and experiments, led to the institutionalizing of universities, that could not be controlled
by rulers.
People became increasingly conscious of their own worth, leading to demands of political rights,
insisting on a share in common decision–making power. This led to the mobilization of social
groups, like the bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the urban people of the French Revolution in
1789, which had been passive subjects before. From this period rose the modern accountable
government premise that “all men are created equal”. The Enlightenment ideas that are the basis
of modern democracy were widely disseminated across Europe. Their impact varied widely
among the differing countries, depending on how different political actors saw these impacting
on their own interests.
By the end of the 17th century much of Europe was transformed into tax states; where the king
not only collected from his domain, but the whole territory. States increased in size by absorbing,
conquering, marriage, or diplomacy; including also weaker and less viable political units;
ecclesiastical properties were also seized and taken over as state lands. The states became more
unified by reducing the number of local dialects in favor of one used at court, harmonizing social
customs, and creating legal and commercial standards. The early European states were based on
their ability to provide justice; from the 16th century onwards it was mostly by the need to
finance wars. The administration of these states required the creation of much larger state

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bureaucracies, beginning with chanceries and finance ministry to control the collection and
disbursement of revenues. Castile took 1.5 million ducats in 1515 and 13 million by 1598. The
Bavarian government had 162 officials on its payroll in 1508, and 866 by 1571. The wars in this
period were fought on larger and larger scales, almost on a continues basis. Conflict between
France and Spain over Italy; Spain to subdue its Dutch provinces; England, Spain, Portugal,
Netherlands and France over colonies in the New World; the attempted invasion of Spain over
England; prolonged conflict in Germany following the Reformation ending with the 30 Years
War; Swedish expansion into Central and Eastern Europe and Russia; and ongoing conflict
among the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires. The British budget increased sixteen fold
from 1590 to 1670. The size of the French army increased from 12,000 in 13th century, to 50,000
in 16th century, to 400,000 in late 18th century.
From this time forward the centralized monarchical states of Europe had to deal with four
resisting social groups: the upper nobility; the broader gentry class (small landowners, knights
and other free individuals); the city dwellers (bourgeoisie); the peasants (great majority of
population, not significant because they were not socially mobilized).
The interactive relationships between the state and the social groups can be summarized as:
Weak absolutism; the French and Spanish monarchies. These states were centralized and
dictatorial but were not able to fully dominate the powerful elites in society, resulting on
heavier taxation on the least able to resist. The centralized administration remained
patrimonial (derived from one’s father or ancestors ).
Successful absolutism; the Russian monarchy. Co-opted both its nobility and gentry, turning
them into a service nobility, completely dependent on the state. They did this by binding the
peasantry as serfs to the land and imposed the tax burdens on the later. The government
remained patrimonial.
Failed oligarchy; the aristocrats of Poland and Hungary. The aristocrats (noble, superior of its
kind) imposed such a strong constitutional power on the king, to keep him weak and unable to
build a strong state. The weak monarchy was not able to protect the peasants from the ruthless
noble class, neither was it able to build a strong enough state to resist external aggression.
Accountable government; England and Denmark developed both strong rule of law and
accountable government. While building a strong centralized state capable of national
mobilization and defense. England developed parliamentary institutions; the Scandinavians
developed a social-democratic state.
The Bankrupt Spanish State
The modern Spanish state emerged briskly following the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in
1469, resulting in the union of Aragon and Castile including territories in Italy. They conquered
the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492, the same year Columbus discovered America.
Their grandson Charles V (1500-1558) added to these possessions the Netherlands and part of
France, and after his election to Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, Austrian Hapsburg also. By 1520
he controlled the largest world empire at that time. Because the empire was acquired thru
dynastic alliances, not by conquests, it had severe fiscal constraints. The secure tax base of
Charles V and his son Philip I was only Castile (including the valuable New World possessions).
Exercising control over the European territories involved continues warfare; with France over
parts of Italy, eighty years of war with Netherlands and the devastating 30 Years War in German
lands. Warfare was becoming more expensive, and 80% of these war costs were borne by the
taxpayers of Castile. Government expenses always exceeded income, in spite of the wealth form
the gold and silver mines in the American colonies. The Spanish Crown borrowed the needed

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money from elites of Castilian society such as the clergy, nobility, gentry (upper ruling class)
and bureaucracy. The state declared bankruptcy ten times between 1557 and 1662, they were not
full dept repudiations, but negotiated rescheduling of terms; and periodic adjustments in interest
rate and principal repayments. The various kingdoms that formed Spain each had medieval
institutions of estates known as Cortes (representative assemblies). They varied in terms of
authority and representation. The Cortes of Castile had three estates from the beginning: the
nobles, the clergy, and representatives of municipalities. Their authority was required for special
taxes of the crown. The king only called the representatives of the oligarchic factions ruling over
18 municipalities into session. Each municipality collected taxes, and sent portions of it on to the
king, which was always very short of the state’s needs. Charles V decided on new taxes (general
excise, customs duties, mines and salt taxes) and hired his own proprietary (exclusive legal right)
office holders (30,000 individuals by 1650) that also included tax collectors and administrators
of justice. These positions were actually sold to the individuals, eventually leading to loss of
control by the central government. The municipalities staged armed revolts against the king, who
eventually reestablished military control over the municipalities.
Patrimonialism affected the military organizations also. They fought the Muslims for centuries,
after the Crowns of Castile and Aragon united and conquered all former Muslim areas that they
also modernized and reformed. These military forces conquered the indigenous empires in the
New World under Cortes and Pizarro. They served in other parts of the Empire also: Italy,
Netherlands, even in defense of Vienna against the Ottomans in 1533. Spanish sailors
participated in the attack on Tunis in 1535 and the great Battle of Lepanto in 1571. By the 17th
century raising of armies and navies was increasingly outsourced to private individuals with
financing from Genoese financiers, resulting in loss of control by the Spanish monarchy over
their armed forces.
Yet the rule of law based on the tradition of Roman law and the recovery of Justinian Code
remained to be regarded as divine and natural law. Royal commands that were contrary to
customary rights or privileges were resisted by the practice of “obey, but do not put into effect”.
The Conquistadores in the New World followed this practice. Spanish monarchs tried various
ways to raise cash within the framework of existing laws: they also debased the currency, leading
to higher inflation; this tends to hurt ordinary people more than the elites with their real assets.
When the Spanish conquered the New World, they brought existing institutions with them. They
faced very few constraints from the entrenched interests in Europe, as well as other economic
opportunities and natural resources. Cortes campaign against the Aztecs was like the ones used
against the Muslims, similar strategies of divide and conquer. Also their practice of settlement,
colonization, and political organization were like the colonization in southern Spain. The early
expeditions were sponsored by the Spanish king, but driven by entrepreneurial private
individuals who organized them. The Encomienda legal system by the Spanish crown was based
on the practice of exacting tribute from Muslims and Jews during the “reconquest” of Muslim
Spain. The original intent was to reduce the abuses of forced labor employed shortly after
discovery of the New World, in practice it led to a form of enslavement. To end these abuses in
the colonies the Laws of Burgos (1512-13) and New Law of the Indies (1542) were established
by the Crown, but failed in the face of colonial opposition. Encomienda was gradually replaced
by the hacienda system of landed estates, were the natives were theoretically free wage earners;
in practice they were bound to the land by their employers, basically keeping them in an indebted
state. Land was now heritable; the Hispanic settlers and their Creole offsprings claimed tax
exemptions for themselves, a status enjoyed in Spain only by nobles and hidalgos (lower gentry).

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The Spanish authorities transferred their Roman legal system, establishing high courts
(Audiencias) in ten communities, including Mexico, Peru and later Manila. They also sent over
lawyers and judges with long experience in law.
To raise more money for European war expenses, the Crown sold more and more government
offices, even in the New World. From 1591 city councils were sold, from 1559 notarial posts
were sold, from 1606 almost all local offices were sold, from 1633 treasury offices were sold,
from 1687 even posts of Audiencias were systematically sold. Patrimonialism expanded; leading
to erosion of boundaries between public and private interests. The elites succeeded in penetrating
and controlling the state and passing the social and political privileges to their children.
By the 16th century the gold and silver treasures of Mexico and Peru encouraged the life of
renters and government subsidies rather than industrial development. No effective ruling class
arose. King Philip III (1578-1621) and his minister Duke de Lerma (1553-1625) maintained the
lavish dispensations of royal patronage to their high nobility. Beginning 1609 they expelled
300,000 Moriscos over a five-year period, who relocated to Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. In
1526 Islam was officially prohibited. Moriscos were Spanish Muslims who subsequently became
baptized Christians, but continued to speak, write and dress like Muslims. The Old Christians,
who retained their Christian faith under Muslim rule, were afraid of the Moriscos joining with
the Algerians and Turks and fomenting a Jihad (holy war). 1599-1600 a plague epidemic resulted
in 500,000 deaths in Castile, leading to short labor supply and sharp rise in wages and then
renewed inflation. In 1610 the French king Henry IV was assassinated; with the French
becoming preoccupied with internal problems, this gave Spain 20 years of peace (at least with
France). Prime minister Olivares (1587-1645) under King Philip IV (1605-1665) attempted to
engender national unity among the separate kingdoms, attempted many economic reforms and
reverse the industrial and commercial decline; instead of support he was exiled. The increase in
taxation by Castile led in 1639 to a revolt in Catalonia. In 1640 the Portuguese declared
independence. In 1641 a conspiracy was formed to separate the Andalusian kingdom. Calamities
continued under Charles II (1665-1700), the economy declined; even the population went down
in Castile, from 6.5 million at the end of the 16th century to under 5 million by 1680, mostly due
to military casualties and recurrent plagues. Wars broke out again with France, Spain losing in
1678 the last French territories. The War of Spanish Succession (1701-14) included wars with
France and Austria, resulting with Spain losing all its European possessions: Belgium,
Luxemburg, Milan, Sardinia, Sicily and Naples.
After 1749, Spain adopted French administrative practices, with royal control over provincial
governments. Rationalized the tax structures and increased royal receipts; this allowed the built
up of infrastructures, such as: postal system, road building, factories, botanical gardens, and
observatories. Under Charles III (1716-88) reforms continued vigorously, striving toward the
philosophy of the European Enlightenment. Adam Smith became popular with Spanish
liberalism reformers. The economy was booming, the population increased during the 18th
century from 8 million to 12 million. The crown tried land reforms, and controls over the church;
in 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and America. Education and welfare was taken
over by the state from the church, but this was a failure. To the church the ideas of the
Enlightenment (Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau…) were foreign, dangerous and heretical. The next
king, Charles IV (1748-1818) was weak and entrusted the government to others; it was also the
turbulent period of the French Revolution (1789). His support of the First Coalition against
Revolutionary France led to a French invasion in 1797, resulting in Spain becoming a satellite of
France. In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain again, deposed Charles IV and his son Ferdinand

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(1784-1833), and placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne. In 1809 the
Portuguese rose against Napoleon and with British help (the Duke of Wellington), the French
were defeated. In 1810 the Spanish Central Junta summoned a Cortes and drew up the
Constitution of 1812; with a strict limited monarchy, single chamber of Parliament and no
representation of church or nobility; a modern centralized administration based on provinces and
municipalities, inspired by the 1791 constitution of revolutionary France. Napoleon released
Ferdinand in 1813; as Ferdinand VII, he resumed with absolute power and tried to recover
Spanish America, now partly independent. His ministers could not reinforce his armies in
America. In 1820 a liberal revolution restored the Constitution of 1812; and Ferdinand accepted
that. In 1823 Louis XVIII of France sent a large army to release Ferdinand from radical
ministers. Ferdinand’s new government arrested the radicals and sent them into exile. By 1826
Spanish possessions in America became independent. Ferdinand depended on a militia and
French forces of occupation. Ferdinand did not have any sons, only a daughter named Isabella
(1830-1904); so the brother of Ferdinand, Don Carlos (1788-1855; more rural, extreme
conservative and a religious bigot) demanded that he be the next king. When Ferdinand died in
1833, Isabella II (more urban, conservative liberal) was proclaimed queen, and the savage Carlist
War followed from 1833-39. A compromise constitution was agreed upon in 1837. This included
the expropriation and sale of church lands to finance the war. Under Isabella much political
unrest and a series of uprisings continued until the deaths of her supporters Gen. O’Donnell in
1867 and Gen. Narvaez in 1868; this drove her into exile. In 1870 she abdicated in favor of her
son Alfonso (1857-85). The generals became more active in government. The Federal
Republicans and Democratic intellectuals (influenced by the teachings of Proudhon (1809-1865)
of France) put demands on the military oligarchy. A new Constitution was established in 1869,
with universal male suffrage and complete freedom of religion; it was a model for a modern
secular state. More confrontations between the Republicans and the Carlists; the Cortes
proclaimed Spain a republic in 1873. In Cuba and Puerto Rica an independence movement rose
in 1868, against the captains general and the Spanish tariff. The Ten Years’ War (1868-78)
involved 100,000 men by 1870, and great cost; resulted in a monarchical reaction, leading to
Alfonso XII being proclaimed king in 1874. The Carlists were defeated, a Cuban peace
settlement was reached in 1878, and the restored monarchy led to the most stable Spain since
1833. The architect to the restoration of the monarchy and the Constitution of 1876 was Antonio
Canovas del Castillo (1828-97), a highly educated and experienced government official. He also
contrived the rotation in office of Liberal and Conservative party representatives. This system
worked well until the 1890’s. The economy improved very well until the late 1880’s. When King
Alfonso XII died in 1885, Canovas secured the peaceful transmission of power to Queen Maria
Cristina (1858-1929) and the future accession to the throne of Alfonso XII. A Cuban revolution
in 1895 set off another costly war. Canovas failed to give Cuba any liberal reforms, but rather
sent General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau in 1886, using such harsh methods of repression that
he was recalled in 1887. An Italian anarchist killed Castillo in 1897. The loss of Cuba, Puerto
Rico and the Philippines in 1898 became known as “the Disaster”.
Taxation and Representation
England also was first a tribal, then feudal society, later leading to a centralized state, beginning
to accumulate power in the late 16th early 17th centuries. The English Parliament represented
three estates: the aristocracy, the clergy and the Commons (gentry, townspeople, property
owners). English parliament started meeting regularly since the 13th century. The Parliament
was strong enough to hinder the king from raising taxes, to build up the military, or to bypass the

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Common Law. Parliament even raised its own army, defeated the king in a civil war, and
executed him (Charles I) in 1649; and then appointed constitutional monarchs who formally
conceded to parliamentary accountability. Under the early Stuarts in the early 17th century
corruption came back with venal (bribery) office holdings and patrimonial (inherited)
appropriations. Parliament again instituted reforms to establish a modern bureaucratic
administration that increased the power and efficiency of the state.
Early individualism of English society led to a social solidarity more explicit in political than
social form. The English kingdom was actually the amalgamation of many independent
kingdoms that were presided by hereditary elder chiefs. These little kingdoms were later named
counties with justice administered by the county courts. As the English king became more
established he replaced the elder chiefs with his appointed sheriffs, and also appointed royal
courts with higher authority than feudal courts. Even common people could get justice in the
royal courts when confronted by their lords. The rule of law became well established; the king
was recognized as a neutral arbiter of all kinds of disputes. By the 15th century the English
judicial system became a “third branch” of government, competent to judge even constitutional
issues.
The controversy of religious affiliations of the rulers and Parliament (between Catholic kings and
Protestant subjects) helped to unify Parliament, to form their own army and defeat the king. The
emergence of free cities and an urban-based bourgeoisie played a key role in Parliament, and
gained substantial economic and political power even long before the Civil War (1641) and the
Glorious Revolution (1688-89). They were a powerful counterweight to the great lords and the
king; and often the townsmen supported the king against the great lords. In the cities a capitalist
market economy appeared where productivity increases became routine, leading to political
development also. The free cities’ original function was judicial, but later other concerns such as
taxation were also added. Most of the members of Parliament were landowners whose assets and
income served as the bases for national taxation. Tax burden fell largely on the wealthier
individuals represented in Parliament. Political corruption was creeping in beginning in Tudor
times (later 15th century), with patrimonialism and venal office holding, as the basis of political
patronage; advancement was not based on merit but on one’s membership in patron–client
relationships. Also during the early Stuarts period (early 17th century), tax farming (for customs
duties) and inside financing was established. Parliament action again led to reforming the
Treasury Department, where new bonds could be sold to the general public and eliminated the
sale of offices; and made possible the expansion of the English state. The establishment of the
Bank of England in 1694 revolutionized public finance. Also the king could not raise an army, or
raise new taxes without Parliament’s consent. Thus the fundamental principal was established
that the government could legitimately rule only with the consent of the governed.
Government spending increased greatly from 11% of GDP in 1689-1697, to 17% GDP 1741-
1748, to 24% GDP 1778-1783. Taxation was legitimated by consent; England was engaged in
two expensive wars, with France (1689-1697) and the War of Spanish Succession (1702-1713).
The higher rates of British taxation did not stifle the capitalist revolution.
The components of modern political order: a strong and capable state, the state’s subordination
to a rule of law and a government accountable to all citizens came together.

The Origins of Political Order; Francis Fukuyama; Farrar, Straus and Giroux;
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011; 2011

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Francis Fukuyama b. 1952 Chicago, Illinois. Political Scientist, Polital Economist.
PhD in Political Science from Harvard University.
1979 Joined the global policy think tank RAND Corportion.
Since 2010 Senior Fellow at Stanford University Center of Democracy Development
and the Rule of Law.
Published numerous books and extensive research papers from 1966 onward.

COLUMBUS, MAGELLAN, LEGAZPI

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) born in Genoa. In 1470 he started working on Genoese
merchant ships. This brought him to the Aegean Sea, north Africa, and northern Europe. During
that time his brother Bartolomeo worked in cartographic workshops in Lisbon. In the 1480s the
Columbus brothers thought of going to India via west across the Atlantic. Celestial navigation,
using the sun and stars for reference, was beginning to be used by mariners. Columbus also
understood the trade-winds, the “easterlies” going straight west from Spain and the “westerlies”
returning in the northern latitudes on northern Europe. His proposal to go the western route to the
Orient was rejected by the King of Portugal in 1485, the King of England, and Queen Isabella I
of Castile in 1486. After continuing lobbying at the Spanish court, in 1492 Ferdinand II of
Aragon and Isabella I of Castile approved the expedition, after the last Muslim stronghold of
Granada was conquered. He made four round trip voyages between 1492 and 1503. The first trip
in 1492 was with three ships; he landed in the Bahamas, and also went on to Cuba. He found the
natives to be friendly, and left some Spaniards there while he went back to Spain with gold and
natives to report to the King. On his second trip in 1493 he came with seventeen ships, 1,200
men and supplies to establish permanent colonies, and he was also promoted to governor of
Hispaniola. On his third Trip in 1498 with six ships, he found the Spanish settlers rebellious
against his rule and charged him with cruelty and enslavement of natives in Spanish court. This
led to his arrest and loss of governor position. On his fourth trip in 1502 he continued exploration
of the Caribbean and Central America, and returned to Spain in 1504. The Spanish ships were
already bringing immense cargoes of gold to Spain. One of the Spaniards who came to the West
Indies in 1502 was De Las Casas (1474-1566), he was given an “encomienda” (royal land grant
including Indian inhabitants). In 1513 he took part in the bloody conquest of Cuba. That year he
was also ordained to the priesthood. In 1515 he returned to Spain to plead for better treatment of
the Indians. In 1519 Charles V was sympathetic to him for political reforms in Latin America; he
even signed the New Laws, specifying that “encomienda” NOT to be a hereditary grant and that
the Indians were to be free after a single generation. In 1545 De Las Casas returned to America
with 44 Dominicans to enforce the New Laws. He was vehemently opposed and returned to
Spain in 1547. He continued his historical writings of books and petitions in defense of the
American Indians until he died at the age of 92.
Charles V (1500-58), King of Spain (1515-56), Holy Roman Emperor (1519-56); grandson of
the “Catholic Kings” Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. His father Philip I, King of
Castile, died when Charles was six years old. He was raised by his aunt Margaret, regent of
Netherlands. His spiritual guide was the theologian Adrian of Utrecht (later Pope Adrian VI),
who was also the teacher of the great Humanist Erasmus (1469-1536).
In the meantime the Portuguese explored the west coast of Africa, leading Vasco da Gama
(1460-1524) to go with a fleet of four ships around South Africa and reached India in May of
1498. He returned to Lisbon in July 1499 with only two ships, loaded with spices, of greater
value than the cost of all the ships.
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Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) was born in Portugal. In 1505 he sailed with a fleet of 22
Portuguese ships to India and participated in 1511 in the conquest of Malacca, and then returned
to Portugal in 1512. His close friend Francisco Serrao continued on the expedition to find the
Spice Islands in the Moluccas, where he married a local woman and became a military advisor to
the Sultan of Ternate. He sent a letter to Magellan and told him more about the Spice Islands.
Magellan implored for help from the King of Portugal for sailing westwards, but was denied. He
studied the most recent charts in partnership with cosmographers. Finally Charles V, the King of
Spain agreed to send him on his way to the Spice Islands by way of the westward route. He left
Seville with five ships and 270 men in August 1519. He went by the Canary Islands in the
direction of Brazil, and continued south along the Argentine coast, turned into the Pacific Ocean
in March 1520, reached the Marianas and Guam, and came to Cebu in April 1521. His native
friend Enrique, who joined him from the time in Malacca translated for him. They became
friends with Rajah Humabon, who convinced Magellan to kill Lapu-Lapu on Mactan. The
shoreline of Mactan was shallow and very rocky. While the 49 Spaniards waded in the water,
1,500 natives charged against them, targeting Magellan and killed him. The Spaniards left Cebu
in May with two ships and reached the Spice Islands in November with 115 men. They traded
with the Sultans of Tidore and Ternate. They left with one boat only, loaded with spices, and
arrived in Spain in September 1522 with only 18 men.

Philip II (1527-98), the son of Charles V (1500-58), was King of Spain (1556-98), and very
dedicated to the traditions of Castile and the Catholic Church. He put the friars into power after
he read the reports of De Las Casas and others, who described the inhuman degradations by the
conquistadores in the Americas.
Miguel Lopez de Legazpi (1502-72), born in Spain and migrated to Mexico in 1528, where he
also served as civil governor of Mexico City until 1559. In 1564 he was commissioned by the
Viceroy of New Spain (Mexico) to lead an expedition to the Spice Islands, like Magellan in
1521. He left with five ships, 500 soldiers, six Augustinian missionaries, survivors from the
Magellan expedition, and Fr. Andres de Urdaneta as a navigator (he was for eight years around
the Spice Islands before). They landed in the Mariana Islands and reached Cebu in February
1565. By April Legazpi established a colony in Cebu. In June Legazpi sent Urdaneta back to
New Spain to get help for the colony, and to find an effective return route across the Pacific. By
October Urdaneta discovered the northerly eastbound return route (that served for the Manila-
Acapulco Galleon trade form 1565 to 1815). In 1567, 2,100 Spaniards and Mexicans arrived in
Cebu and built the Fortress of San Pedro. In 1569, 300 Spaniards and native allies left Cebu to
explore the northern Visayas and encountered Chinese merchants. In May 1570 they arrived in
the Manila bay and formed an alliance with the Muslim chief Rajah Sulaiman III, but disputes
and hostilities erupted. In 1571 Legazpi formed a peace pact with the Rajahs of the Manila area
and proclaimed the town the seat of the Spanish government of the East Islands. With the
Augustinian and Franciscan friars he started construction of the walled city of Intramuros.
Legazpi was the first Spanish governor of the Philippines; he died of heart failure in Manila in
1572.
King Philip II decided to entrust his last major imperial acquisition largely to the religious
Orders. Remote Philippines had no attractions like the Potosi mines, so the Orders largely ran the
colony, especially outside Manila. With time the Dominicans and Augustinians acquired vast
properties in Manila real estate and hacienda agriculture. They also learned and used the native
languages, and opposed the spread of the Spanish language.

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This gave them more power over the natives and the secular Spaniards. By the time of Prime
Minister Canovas (1828-97), the friar power in Spain was very diminished, but in the Philippines
the friar power was more supreme then ever.

Encyclopedia Britannica 2001, Standard Edition, CD-ROM

19TH CENTURY PHILIPPINES

The French political journalist Charles Benoist reported about the Philippines in 1896:
Of the 7 or 8 million people about 500,000 were mestizos (mixed foreign), 100,000 Spanish–
Filipinos and 12,000 peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain).
The head of the government was the all-powerful Governor General who was the head of the
military, the civilian policies and as vicar of the Crown was also the head of the Church. Since
1824 the Governor General was always a military officer. The archbishop was next in charge and
both were expected to comply with the Audiencia (royal justice).
The provinces were headed by a civilian governor or a military governor. Civilian governors
were only in certain areas of Luzon, all other areas and islands were under military governors.
Municipalities were headed by natives. The barangay captains were also natives; they were the
tax collectors in the name of Spain. These officials received no salary, but somehow were able to
retire comfortably. Whatever misdeeds they engaged in, they blamed on Spain. The Spanish also
employed native civilian guards, who were poorly organized and inadequately armed. They
pursued the tulisanes (bandits) but failed to apprehend them, so the infantry had to get involved.
Taxes were not so high; half tribute was 7.50 franks per person and full tribute was 15 per
household. The annual contribution of 40 days of work (corvee (unpaid) labor) was equivalent of
15 franks. There were also taxes on consumption of alcohol, branding of livestock etc. The
annual taxes were 70 million francs; 33 million derived from direct taxes, 23 million from
customs duties, 5 million from monopolies, etc. In expenditures, 1+1/2 million went to Madrid, 6
million for the clergy, 20 million to the army, 12+1/2 million to the marine, 15 million to civil
services and only 3 million to public works, and most of the later went to pay the staff.
Primary education consisted of reading and writing in a mechanical way, Spanish was read
without hearing the language and writing limited to forming letters.
For higher education: the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas (established by the
Dominicans in 1611) teaching theology, jurisprudence, medicine, pharmacy and law; Ateneo
Municipal established by the Jesuits in 1859; and College of St. Joseph by the secular clergy.
Freemasonry came to the Philippines around 1860 by way of the lodges from Singapore, Hong
Kong, Java, Macao and the freeports of China. Germans, English, Americans and Dutch were
long associated with the Freemasons. Convoys of prisoners were deported to the Philippines for
taking part in the Spanish civil wars. First came the Carlists who were welcomed with open arms
by the religious orders. After them came the Federalists, followed by the Cantonalists
(Socialists), who were more attracted to the Freemasons. Freemasons subscribed to the principals
of the equality of men, like a modern state; in social, religious, political, local, and international
aspects. They also have attractive and mysterious symbolic images (triangle, Trinity) rituals and
ceremonies.
There were some 180 lodges in the provinces of Luzon and the Visayas with 25,000 initiated
members. The membership consisted of Spanish government officials with Republican
sympathies, foreign business men and natives, particularly the rich and influential (such as

215
Aguinaldo, Llaniero, and Bonifacio), later the lower echelons joined in large numbers (leading to
the formation and membership of the Katipunan, with 20,000 members). There were two types
of lodges: the Grand Orient of Spain (with 16 lodges affiliated in Manila), and foreign Lodges
(German, English, American, Belgian, French, Dutch). The Freemasons empowered the natives
to be equal to the Spaniards and priests, so they no longer feared the later.
The foreigners tended to be distrustful toward the Spanish, and the religious orders thought of the
Freemasons as conspirators.

THREE ILUSTRADOS
Joaquin Pardo de Taveras (1829-1884) was born in San Roque, Cavite. His father was an
immigrant from Spain with a proud ancestry in Toledo. He and his elder brother Felix married
sisters who came from a wealthy family of land owners and industrialists in Manila and Cavite.
He studied canonical law at Manila’s University of Santo Tomas and then began another law
course at the same university and finished in 1857. By the age of 28 he was licensed to practice
law in Manila. His older brother Felix preceded him at the university and in Manila’s
professional circles. When Joaquin was 35 years old, Felix died, and Joaquin adopted the three
children of Felix immediately. Joaquin and his wife did not have other children. Like his brother
Felix, Joaquin was now appointed to the governor general’s advisory council by the Spanish
Crown. The advisory council included the archbishop of Manila, the admiral of the Navy, the
Army’s commander in chief, the president of the Royal Audiencia, the director general of the
Civil Service, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the fathers superior of the religious
orders, six delegates representing regions of Luzon and Visayas, and the four at-large members
of notables, appointed by the Spanish Crown. At age 37 he was named to the law professorship.
Among his students were members of the next generation to lead in the struggle for Philippine
independence. Joaquin wanted liberal reforms, justice, constitutionalism; plus control over the
parishes, peninsulares (immigrants from Spain), and the religious orders. He supported Fathers
Pelaez, Ponce and Bugos. The university students staged a strike to demand the use of Spanish
instead of Latin in classes.
In 1868 the government of Isabel II was overthrown, and a liberal constitution was declared. In
June 1869 the rich and liberal General Carlos Maria de la Torre was appointed Governor General
and sent to the Philippines, which horrified many of the peninsulares colonial elite. De la Torre
invited creoles (persons born in Spanish colonies of Spanish parents) and mestizos (persons of
mixed ancestry, Chinese or European) to his palace to drink to “liberty” and strolled on the
streets of Manila in everyday clothes. He also abolished press censorship, encouraged freedom of
speech and assembly, stopped flogging as punishment in the military, and ended an agrarian
revolt in Cavite by pardoning the rebels. The Manila liberals were happy, they also wanted
certain reforms in the primary and secondary instructions, the establishment of a School of Civil
Administration in Manila instead of having to go to Europe; and also the abolition of the tobacco
monopoly. De la Torre was also a suspicious individual, and kept the Filipino liberals under
surveillance for anti-Spanish tendencies such as coveting independence. He even prohibited the
entry of Spanish newspapers. As a result of another change of government in Spain, in 1871 the
new Governor General Rafael Izquierdo y Gutierrez was sent to Manila, with a “policy of
persecution”. He suspended the opening of Manila’s new School of Arts and Trades. He
abolished the exemption from corvee labor of the workers in the naval shipyards of Cavite. He
dismissed a great numbers of mestizos and natives from important positions, and even

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peninsulares who were too zealous for reforms. In February 1872 a mutiny broke out in the
shipyards in which seven Spanish officers were killed. It was quickly suppressed, and Izquierdo
proceeded to arrest 100’s of creoles and mestizos, many were eventually deported to Guam and
beyond. To further terrorize the public, the three liberal secular priests Jose Burgos, Jacinto
Zamora and Mariano Gomez were strangled to death before 40,000 people.
Joaquin Pardo de Taveras was arrested, charged with the “crime of proclaiming the
establishment of the republic” and sentenced to four years of imprisonment. In April 1872
Joaquin, his wife and twenty one other prisoners were taken into exile to Guam in the Mariana
Islands.
In September 1872 almost 1,200 workers in the Cavite shipyards and arsenal went on the first
recorded strike in Philippine history. Many arrest were made, no mastermind was found; all were
released. Izquierdo blamed it on the “International” (organization of socialists, communists,
anarchists and trade unions based on working class and class struggle, the first congress was held
in 1866 in Geneva).
In January 1875 the exiles in Guam were pardoned and allowed to leave, but not to return to the
Philippines. Joaquin and his wife chose Paris, city of liberal thoughts and republicanism. Soon
his brother Felix’s oldest son, 18 year old T.H. (Trinidad Hermenegildo, 1857-1925) joined them
in Paris, he had a baccalaureate from San Juan de Letran and had just begun medical studies at
the University of Santo Tomas. Eventually T.H.’s mother Juliana and his younger brother Felix
and sister Paz moved to Paris also. T.H. earned a Doctor of Medicine from the Sorbonne, and a
diploma in Malay languages from Ecole National. His research in medicine was published in
French and translated into Spanish and German. In 1887 T.H. returned to Manila, more
Frenchman than Spanish and more humanist than French. He was married the same year in
Manila and joined the faculty of medicine at the Univesidad de Santo Tomas in 1894. He also
continued his research in medicine and the Tagalog language. In May 1899 T.H. launched a daily
newspaper “La Democratia”, promoting peace, separation of church and state, and autonomy of
the Philippines.

Jose Rizal (1861-96) (Jose Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso) was the seventh child among
eleven children. His family was cultivated and the most prosperous family in the town of
Calamba. They did not own much land, but rented 340 HA of 3rd class (low productive land)
from the huge local Dominican hacienda. Rizal was of a brooding, sensitive, introspective,
impractical disposition and aware of his genius. He graduated from the Ateneo Municipal de
Manila and studied medicine (ophthalmology) at the University of Santo Tomas. He left for
Europe in 1882 without his parent’s permission; but with the support of his brother Paciano and a
sympathetic uncle. He enrolled in the Central University in Madrid.
The Spaniards seemed to be very ignorant about the Philippines and Cuba; they had no
understanding of malay, mestizo, creole, or peninsulares. All were either filipinos or americanos
to the Spaniards. At that time he also started writing “Noli me tangere“. The book presents the
late 19th century colonial society in the Philippines, written in realist style. Rizal’s first vacation
to Paris was in 1883. He was greatly impressed and became aware of imperial Spain’s profound
backwardness: economically, scientifically, industrially, educationally, culturally and politically.
Another significant event occurred during Rizal’s senior class when his history professor Miguel
Morayta, a Grandmaster of Spanish Masonry, delivered an address that was a blistering attack on
clerical obscurantism (opposition to the spread of knowledge) and an aggressive defense on
academic freedom. The scholar was promptly excommunicated for besmirching Spanish

217
tradition and culture. The students went on a two-month strike on Morayta’s behalf, and were
quickly supported by the big Universities of Spain. In 1885 Rizal received his doctorate in
philosophy and letters. In 1885-86 Rizal lived in Paris with T.H. Pardo de Tavera and painter
Juan Luna. He wrote one fourth of “Noli me tangere” at that time.
He also studied in the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg where he earned a
degree with a famous ophthalmic surgeon. “Noli me tangere” was published in the spring 1887
in Berlin.
His second book “El filibusterismo” is very strange. The central person in the book is the
surviving hero who becomes rich in his wanderings in Cuba and Europe; upon his return home
he plans to sabotage the corrupt regime, but something goes wrong and he dies on a lonely shore.
Nothing in “real” Philippine history corresponds to this scheme. What inspired Rizal to write in
such a peculiar way? He was an avid reader, and his writings show the influence of many
novelists such as Sue, Larra, Dumas, Dekker, Galdos, Poe, Hysmans, Cervantes and others. It is
really the story of Europe and the world. This book was written in his travels from Paris to
Berlin. By that time he was also fluent in German, French, and some English.
Rizal returned to the Philippines in August 1887. News of “Noli me tangere” preceded him and
the Orders with the Archbishop of Manila demanded that the book be prohibited as heretical,
subversive, and slanderous; and the author be severely punished.
Emilio Terrero y Perinat was Captain General in the Philippines from 1855 to 1888. He was a
33rd degree Mason, and started many reforms in Luzon; he had electric lights installed along the
Pasig River to allow steamer passage after dark and started the railroad construction from Manila
to Dagupan, both in 1887. Upon Rizal’s arrival, Terrero summoned him and they talked about
“Noli me tangere”, but it was not banned. By September 1887 Rizal returned home to Calamba
to his family and opened a medical practice. Rizal also wrote a petition on behalf of the tenants
of Calamba, in regards to the dramatic increase in rent by the Dominicans. The court upheld the
position of the Dominicans, leading to the evictions of the leaseholders, including the Rizal
family; and later the destruction of their homes by the Spanish military. Soon his enemies started
to harass him and his family; accusing him of being a German agent, a Protestant, a Freemason, a
sorcerer. Terrero sent word to Rizal that he could no longer protect him. Rizal left the country in
February 1888, sailing first to Japan, a rapidly self-modernizing independent Asian power, and
then stopping a few days in the United States, and on to England. There he did extensive
research in the British Museum on Philippine pre-colonial written records and the rising tides of
nationalism within the dynastic empires of Europe, Cuba, the Ottoman Empire and the East. His
book “First Filipino” was published in Paris in 1889. During that time in 1888 Terrero was
replaced by the Sagasta (Liberal Party, prime minister on eight occasions 1870-1902)
government, under heavy political pressure from conservatives in Spain and the Philippines. The
new Governor General was Valeriano Weyler (1888 to 1896), who served previously in Cuba,
and was called the “Butcher of Cuba”. By 1887 Sagasta liberalized laws; Barcelona had active
political organizations that published their own journals: the anarchists, the (Marxist) Socialist
Party, and the more serious Filipinos published their “La Solidaridad”. By that time a vigorous
and legal anarchist press flourished in Cuba, but nothing like that was tolerated in the
Philippines. Cuba had representation in the Cortes for a long time; Philippines lost that right in
1837. After the abolition of slavery in 1886, Cuba had basically the same legal system as Spain;
was Spanish–speaking with a basically secular state-provided educational system, and little
political power by the Church. Yet Cuba was in the middle of a ten year revolution. In February
1896 Valeriano Weyler was sent again to Cuba as military governor. By 1889 Rizal was

218
becoming a “filibusterismo” dedicated to his country’s full independence. He wrote regularly for
“La Solidaridad” until 1891 and then concentrated on his second novel “El filibusterismo”. Also
friction was building up between the Pilaristas and the Rizalistas. Rizal was certain that
assimilation with Spain was useless. “El filibusterismo” was written in Spanish and printed in
1891 in Ghent. He sent a few copies of his book to his friends in Spain and the rest of the entire
edition he sent to his trusted old friend Basa in Hong Kong.
Rizal left Europe in October 1891, and ended up settling in Hong Kong. He opened a successful
ophthalmologic practice. Soon his parents and brothers and sisters joined him there. He was also
besieged with letters from his more radical comrades still in Europe; what was he going to do
“next”? In November 1891 Governor General Valerio Weyer was replaced by General Eulogio
Despujol, a much less ferocious career staff officer; who sacked corrupt officials and kept a
distance from the powerful religious Orders. Some of Rizal’s comrades in Europe suggested to
him a settlement in Sandakan, Sabah (today a state of Malaysia). In January 1892 he received a
pleading letter from his close friend Ferdinand Blumentritt, in Austria-Hungary, not to get
involved in revolutionary agitation. Rizal wrote a letter to Despujol of his ideas of a settlement in
Sandakan, Sabah, Despujol did not agree. Rizal decided to return to the Philippines in June 1892.
Within a few days upon his arrival he proclaimed his founding of the Liga Filipina in the private
home of a wealthy supporter. The principals of the organization were within existing colonial
Philippine legality, and within the bounds of more liberal 1880’s Cuban and Masonic ideas.
Rizal became a member of a Masonic lodge in Manila in 1888. Among the many in attendance
was Andres Bonifacio. A few days later mass police raids took place in houses where Rizal had
visited since his arrival in Manila. They found copies of his novels, Masonic tracts and anti-friar
pamphlets. The next day he saw Despujol, to assure him he was ready to return to Hong Kong.
Despujol put him under arrest and confined him in Fort Santiago. The next day he was ordered
into internal exile in Dapitan, Mindanao; where he remained for almost four years. Shortly after
the deportation of Rizal the Liga Filipina collapsed and Bonifacio founded the underground
revolutionary Katipunan in July 1892, which included principals of the Liga Filipina and
Masonic ideas.
In summer 1893 a new Captain General, Ramon Blanco, arrived in Manila to replace Despujol.
In November 1894 Blanco dropped by Dapitan, back from a small battle with the Maranaos, and
discussed ideas about Rizal returning to Spain, Luzon, even Ilocos, but no change resulted.
Rizal’s friends wrote to him about the severe shortage of doctors in Cuba and yellow fever
ravaging there (the revolution was heating up again). In November 1895 Rizal wrote to Blanco
offering his services in Cuba. Blanco promptly sent Rizal’s letter to Madrid with his approval. In
July 1896 a letter from Spain gave permission for Rizal to go to Cuba. He left Manila in August
and arrived in Barcelona on October 3, 1896 and was imprisoned. A few days later he saw
General Despujol (they met in 1892 in Manila before); who was at the time Commander of the
city of Barcelona under marshal law. Marshal law was declared after a huge bomb exploded and
killed 46 people during the annual Corpus Christi procession on June 7, 1896, this was also
blamed on the “International”; resulting in the imprisonment of more than 300 people in
Muntjuich prison. Despujol ordered Rizal returned to Manila. On Rizal’s arrival in Manila in
middle December he was imprisoned by the newly appointed Governor General Camilo
Polavieja and put on trial for sedition and treason before a military court.
Blanco was replaced by the extremist Catholic General Polavieja on December 2, 1896 because
of the revolutionary uprising of the Katipunan on August 29. Blanco was already informed of
Katipunan plans in June 1896 and responded immediately, but the Spaniards with the powerful

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Orders panicked, and demanded immediate and violent repression. The military judges
recommended execution, and Polavieja approved. On December 30, 1896 Rizal was shot to
death before the eyes of thousands of spectators. He was just 36 years old. Twenty four other
men were also executed. Rizal’s exemplary death greatly strengthened the revolutionary
movement. Bonifacio and the Katipunan were pushed out of Manila and into Cavite where 27
year old Emilio Aguinaldo was the mayor of Kawit. His family was well connected in the Cavite
region. He joined the Katipunan only in March 1895 and demonstrated to be a capable soldier. In
March 1896 Aguinaldo was elected to the presidency of the Katipunan and appointed a cabinet
entirely composed of fellow Cavitenos, who looked down on Bonifacio. Bonifacio in turn started
to rally his supporters around him. The Aguinaldo group arrested him, tried him in April and
sentenced him to death for treason. Bonifacio and his brother were executed on May 10, 1896.
The Spanish military continued their campaign against the Katipunan. In April 1897 Polavieja
resigned his post in disgust at Madrid’s failure to send the military reinforcement to finish off the
revolution. The same month Fernando Primo de Rivera became the Governor General. Rivera
proceeded to retake Cavite, but Aguinaldo escaped to the rocky mountains north of Manila. In
May Rivera made a conciliatory gesture, he pardoned 636 people who had been in prison since
the time of Blanco and Polavieja.
The July 1897 proclamation of the Filipinos:
Expulsion of monks and reinstatement of their property to either the community or the former
owners.
Religious tolerance.
Equality of Filipinos and Spaniards before the law and in public offices.
Liberty of the press.
Representative institutions, administrative and economic autonomy.
Abolition of deportation by police action.
Spanish repression did not stop.
Negotiations went along slowly, but by the end of 1897 Aguinaldo and Rivera agreed: the rebels
lay down their arms and receive full pardon; Aguinaldo and his officers would leave for Hong
Kong with $400,000 (Mexican) and receive another $400,000 when the surrender of arms was
complete.

Jose Julian Marti (1853-1895) Cuban poet, essayist, patriot and martyr was imprisoned and then
exiled by the Spanish out of Cuba in 1871. He traveled to Spain, France, and Venezuela and
lived in New York City from 1881 onward where he helped form the “Cuba Revolutionary
Party”. After careful planning, the invasion started in April 1895, Marti died in battle in May.
The revolutionary army declared Cuba a Republic in September. The fighting was so terrible and
hopeless that the Spanish Captain General decided to leave Cuba. Prime Minister Canova did not
want to lose Cuba, so he sent Valeriano Weyler there as Military Governor in February 1896. In
short order 200,000 Spanish troops were shipped to Cuba. With military discipline he turned the
tide, but at enormous costs. The Cuban population declined form 1,800,000 to 1,500,000
between 1895 and 1899. Most of the casualties were children in the island wide concentration
camps, dieing of malnutrition and disease. The economy was in ruin. These atrocities were
widely reported in Europe and USA. Consequently, in 1897 Spain recalled Weyler; offered home
rule to Cuba, and ended the concentration camps in 1898.
In November 1897 Theodore Roosevelt informed the American Asiatic Squadron, based in
Japan, with Commodore George Dewey in charge: that in the event of war with Spain over Cuba,

220
to be prepared to go to Manila. In February 1898 Dewey was ordered to move his base of
operation to Hong Kong. After the curious explosion of the warship USS Maine in Havana’s
harbor on April 25, US Congress declared war on Spain. Dewey was sent to Manila and on
May 1, 1898 he destroyed the Spanish fleet along the Manila shoreline. Also the US intervened
in Cuba; and then occupied the island until 1902, when Cuba became a Republic.
At the invitation of Dewey, Aguinaldo and his men followed from Hong Kong on May 19, but
were not allowed to enter Manila. On May 21 Aguinaldo resumed hostilities against Spain.
Aguinaldo could not deliver the declaration of independents of the Philippines on June 12 in
Manila, but from the balcony of his home in Kawit. On August 13 the Spanish surrendered to US
forces, on the condition that Filipino forces would stay out of Manila. On September 10 the
Philippine Republic was proclaimed in Malolos, Bulacan. The Filipino–American War broke out
in February 1899. The treaty of Paris, between Spain and the United States with the US agreeing
to pay $20 million to Spain, was signed on December 10, 1898; and ratified by the US Senate on
April 11, 1899. The war was officially over in May 1901 when Aguinaldo was betrayed and
captured in the Luzon Cordillera and swore allegiance to the US. Other generals fought on for
another year and armed popular resistance continued for another ten years.

Isabelo de los Reyes (1864-1938) was born in Vigan, Ilocos. His mother Leona Florentino was a
recognized poet. He attended grammar school attached to an Augustinian seminary. He
experienced abuse by the Peninsular Spanish friars, arousing in the boy hatred toward the
Catholic religious Orders. At the age of 16 he went to Manila, and acquired a BA at Colegio de
San Juan de Letran (1620 Dominican); then studied law, history and paleography at the
Pontifical University of Santo Tomas (1611 Dominican). To support himself he wrote for the
Manila newspapers. He was a practical, energetic man, not given much to introspection. He got
married when he was 20 years old. His first wife gave birth to six children and then died in 1897.
In response to an appeal in a Manila Spanish language newspaper he started writing about his
native Ilocos customs. He discovered a “new science” from Europe; invented in 1846 by the
English antiquarian William Thoms with the first folk-lore society in London. The French and
the Germans followed shortly, and the Spanish established the journal “El Folk-Lore Espanol”.
Reyes wrote with confidence and pride as an indigene (native) Ilocano with scholastic topics of
prehistory, a brother of the forest people, the Aeta and the Igorots. He spoke of his province as a
big “pueblo” and a “patria adorado”. In 1887 he won a silver medal at the Exposicion Filipina in
Madrid for his huge Spanish–language manuscript “El folk-lore filipino”; the same year Jose
Rizal published his “Noli me tangere” in Berlin. With a big family to feed, he engaged in literary
and cultural journalism, folklore studies and small business sidelines.The outbreak of the 1896
Philippine Revolution surprised him, as provinciano in Manila he was feeling generally fine. He
was arrested in January 1897 and held in Bilibid (Manila) prison, in April the newly appointed
Governor General Fernando Primo de Rivera deported Reyes to the torture fortress on Montjuich
in Barcelona. He was released from Montjuich in Barcelona in 1898, employed by the Spanish
government, and married a Spanish woman in Madrid. While he was working in Madrid he was
influenced by European socialists and Marxists, and also published critical articles of the
American government in the Philippines. Reyes returned to the Philippines in 1901, the first
Filipino Marxist. He started organizing Manila workers, based on his free-wheeling union
experience in Barcelona; first the printers, then others, and in 1902 he founded the first trade
union federation in the Philippines the “Union Obrera Democratica”. That year he also
cofounded the Philippine Independent Church (Aglipayan Church). He set out to radicalize and

221
organize the working class and helped organize huge waves of strikes in Manila and
surroundings; the “Manila Times” denounced him as a dangerous agitator and bloody anarchist.
In June 1902 he was arrested and tried for “labor conspiracy” and sentenced for four months in
prison. He resigned his leadership, but other experienced men continued. The UOD collapsed in
1903, but other labor organizations arose. The Socialist and Communist parties merged in 1938,
led the Hukbalahap to revolutionary activities against the government.
In 1910 his second wife died with her 9th child birth. In 1912 he married a Chinese/Filipino
woman, who died in 1923 also during child birth. In 1912 he was elected councilor of the city of
Manila until 1919. In 1923 he was elected to the Senate for the Ilocos region. After the death of
his third wife he returned to private life and engaged mostly in religious writings for the
Aglipayan Church.

Under Three Flags; Benedict Anderson; New Left Books. Anvil Publishing, Inc. 2006

From Revolution to a Second Colonilazation: The Philippines under Spain and the United States;
Translated from the French by Marietta E. Guerrero; National Historical Institute, 1998

Benedict Anderson b. 1936 Kunming, China.

PhD Cornell University Department of Government.
Published widely, books on Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines.

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IMPACT OF FOREIGN TRADE UPON LOCAL SOCIETIES

Tagalog Region
The Philippines entered the World Trade system in the late 18th century. Since the 1560’s the
Philippines was the remotest outpost of Spain’s Latin American empire, marginally linked to
Europe by the Trans-Pacific galleon trade. It was too lightly populated for mining and for
plantations. During the late 16th and early 17th century approximately 120 Spaniards received
land grants within a 100 km radius of Manila. Generally a land grant consisted of 1,742 HA with
smaller ones also. Spanish law required that the land grant not encroach on areas already
occupied by natives. This principal was pretty well disregarded. There were so many violations,
that King Philip II issued a decree in 1596 against any further usurpations of the natives’ land.
By that time the land was established with haciendas. Spanish landowners sold their land to other
Spaniards, mortgaged it, or donated it to religious orders. Soon Spaniards abandoned agriculture
and left the land to the religious orders, as they were more interested in the more lucrative
Manila galleon trade. Filipino donors and sellers also contributed to the religious estates. In 1697
the government required the friars to present their titles in civil court; they refused, claiming
ecclesiastical immunity. This led to ongoing disputes. The administration and use of the land
evolved over time. Initially cattle-ranching was predominant, later rice, sugar and tropical fruits
became more important. Sugar was grown more widely by the Jesuits. The other orders
cultivated what they brought from the New World. The land was cultivated by laborers and /or
tenant sharecroppers, it varied among the haciendas. Rice was the main crop. In some places
sharecroppers were used on the estates. Eventually the estates were rented to tenants for a fixed
annual fee, who paid in kind at harvest time. Sometimes a fixed amount of money, but then
converted to in kind, this would reflect the market value of rice at the time of harvest. The
tenants could also acquire cash, this way without going thru the hacienda market. This also
changed in the later 18th century due to the Philippine export trade. At harvest time the tenants
could also repay to the hacienda their dept incurred for seed, tools and carabaos. Sometimes the
Audiencia (royal court) would get involved to established fair and prompt payments.
The transfer of estates from unsuccessful Spanish landowner to monastic orders was easy. The
transformation to profitable enterprises was difficult. The cost of improvements was very high:
dams, irrigation works, money advances to prospective tenants and laborers. In addition to their
own efforts the monastic orders asked for help from the colonial government. The government
drafted corvee labor (40 days a year) for state projects such as cutting lumber and building ships
for the galleon trade. It was very disruptive if the peasants were drafted during the planting or
harvesting season. To pay for replacement workers was also expensive. Subsequently the
landowners petitioned the government to exempt some of their charges from forced labor; this
would also be an additional attraction to recruit natives to the estates. In the 17th century the
colonial government granted limited exemptions to haciendas. The number of exemptions
increased with time, and by the 1730s the entire peasant populations on large haciendas were
exempted. This helped these haciendas to be most profitable. The exemptions on the haciendas
meant the burden of conscripted labor became more burdensome to the natives living outside of
the haciendas. This was one of the contributing factors to the 1745 agrarian revolt. The basic
issues were the land usurpations by the haciendas and the closing of the haciendas’ land for
common use for pasturage and forage, a right established in the Laws of the Indies and the
traditional practices on the haciendas.

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“Social banditry” was an endemic disturbance in the large estate areas in the 18th and 19th
centuries. A judge of the Audiencia was sent to the troubled provinces with a 27 armed
cavalrymen, who concluded that most of the natives’ grievances were justified. He promised that
all religious haciendas would be surveyed and to return free access for pasturage and forage in
the hacienda uplands. The combination of firmness and concessions was effective, with only
isolated cases of violence. The Augustinians abandoned their hacienda of Meysapan in southern
Tondo because of continual bandit deprivation. Toward the end of the 18th century the two-
tiered hierarchy of “hacenderos” with cultivating tenants shifted to the three-tiered, with non-
cultivating tenants and sharecroppers under them.
In 1762 to 1764 the British invaded and occupied Manila, this also led to a relaxing of Spanish
colonial policy, slowly allowing world trade; so that in early 19th century foreign commercial
firms (British and American) were allowed in the islands. In 1765 Chinese were expelled from
the Philippines; with no more large numbers re-entering until the 1840’s. Chinese mestizos,
offsprings of Chinese men and native women, also became active in the export trade, exporting
crops (particularly sugar) for manufactured goods from abroad. Rapid population growth
increased competition for land; also declining fertility of rice lands led to rising rents and
decreasing crop share for tenants. The intensified monetary economy led to the spread of
moneylenders and usury in the rural society; sharecropping became institutionalized and fixed
rental payment by tenants to hacienda administrators. Rinderpest epidemics and locust plagues
were also common. Sharecroppers suffered the most from sharp seasonal fluctuations in crop
yields, even losing the tools and animals that they had rented from the tenants; the tenants’
position also became a precarious squeeze. Rental cost on land (rice and sugar) continued to
rise. Complex rent contract agreements were drawn up, particularly for clearing land for sugar
production, where the rent was deferred for three or four years, until the land became fully
productive. Land was also bought with mortgages, if the buyer fell behind, land would go back
to the holder of the mortgage.
Between 1808 and 1826 Spain lost all their South American colonies, except Cuba and Puerto
Rico, and abandoned the galleon trade in 1820 due to their loss of the silver mines. In 1832
Manila became an open city for international trade, with further development after the opening
of the Suez Canal in 1869.

Church Lands in the Agrarian History of the Tagalog Region, Dennis Morrow Roth
Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, Edited by Alfred W. McCoy
& Ed. C. de Jesus, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1981

Central Luzon Plain, Nueva Ecija

Until 1800 the Central Plain’s population was largely concentrated on the coastal margins at each
end of the valley with the interior almost unpopulated. It contains a flat sedimentary basin some
200 km long and 50 to 60 km wide, opening to the Ligayen Gulf in the north and the Manila Bay
in the south. The Agno River drains the northern watershed, and the Pampanga River drains the
southern watershed. The western margin is rimmed by the Zambales mountains and the east by
the Sierra Madre mountains.
The Plain was a continuous belt of swamps and lakes that have disappeared as a result of
deforestation, but still results in flood hazards during the annual raining season due to poor

224
drainage. The soil in the Plain consists of clay and silty loams, fertile, well-drained and yet
moisture retentive; loose and easily ploughed, perfect for wet–rice cultivation. The biotic
landscape consisted of buri palms growing in the swamps and near the rivers, then mixing with
molave trees at higher elevations and molave forests nearer the mountains where the land
remained dry during the long dry seasons. The central lowland was divided between three
provinces Pampanga, Bulacan and Pangasinan. In 1705 the easternmost segment of Pampanga
was organized into a military “comandancia” to intimidate the warlike pagans of the Sierra
Madre range and to facilitate their conversion to Christianity. The boundaries of the district
fluctuated between 1705 and 1848. In 1848 the “comandancia” was abolished and Nueva Ecija
was organized as a province independent of Pampanga. Over the next decade the boundaries
were adjusted again, changing Nueva Ecija from a mountain district to a lowland province in the
heart of the Central Plain. Since 1858 the boundaries stayed the same except for minor changes
with Pangasinan. The province of Tarlac was established in 1874 from portions of Pangasinan
and Pampanga.
To encourage wet-rice cultivation the Augustinian friars established missions and towns in the
1590s at Gapan and Cabiao, which came to a standstill thruout the 17th century. Their priority
was to convert the mountain heathens along the edge of the Plain. By 1720 they gave up due to
malaria-bearing mosquito infestation. They struggled another 40 years in the lowlands; some of
the converts from the mountains stayed and practiced shifting cultivation in the lowlands, leading
to small scale second-growth woodlands and some shrub and cogon grass areas. The next change
came 150 years later with the arrival of Ilocano pioneers from their home on the narrow
northwest coast of Luzon thru Pangasinan.
The Ilocanos started moving into the Plain due to their rapid population growth and consequent
deteriorating environment. The migration began to accelerate after 1810, coming from the
northwest corner and spreading out into the southerly and easterly directions. They came by
wagon caravans following existing roads and cart trails and slowly along natural river levees to
some likely sites and established their villages. They brought with them various resources:
domesticated animals, seeds, cuttings, tools, and extended family members; and would start out
with kaingin farming and cutting down of trees. They could also supplement their provisions by
catching fish, hunting and gathering fruits, roots and greens. There were already thin veneers of
settlements stretched across the length and breath of the central lowlands. It was common for
groups of four to 20 families to migrate together under the leadership of a headman. The land
was acquired in his name, even though everyone in the group contributed. They worked together
to build houses and cleared land. Every family had a private parcel, but planting and harvesting
was done communally. With the communal labor practice also survived the social stratification
by patron-client relationships. Once a village was established, the inhabitants would welcome
other settlers, and the village would become a staging center for further migration. Sometimes
itinerant merchants from the coast would reconnaissance the areas to locate places for
settlements in unoccupied land. Individual land ownership became more pronounced with the
gradual commercialization of the economy.
The interior settlements had no traditional gentry class (principalia). By the second half of the
19th century a principal elite emerged in Nueva Ecija, land speculators who came into the area
mostly from Bulacan and Pampanga, predominantly Chinese mestizos; together with Spanish
mestizos they became the principal landowners in Nueva Ecija. They acquired land by royal
grants or purchased from royal domains of original Spanish grantees. At the initial period of
claiming land the principalia would recruit ambitious tenants on the basis of free or nominal rent

225
of occupancy, in exchange for clearing designate land. Chinese mestizos acquired land by
foreclosing on mortgages they held on medium and small land parcels.
After Spain lost their New World colonies, many Spaniards came to the Philippines and acquired
haciendas in the interior of the Plain. They could not get sufficient agricultural workers, so they
stocked their land with grazing animals; and were able to provide most of the meat for the
Manila market by the middle of the 19th century. Livestock-raising collapsed after 1890 due to
rinderpest and foot-and-mouth epidemics. The Spaniards then switched mostly to growing sugar.
After 1899 Spanish land was temporarily seized by the revolutionary government, and then
followed the uncertainties under the Americans; leading them to selling their land to the
provincial elites, who mostly grew rice.
The government Tobacco Monopoly brought commercial agriculture in the south western area.
Tobacco grew best on sandy terraces and levees. With the end of the Tobacco Monopoly in 1881
that land was more suitable for sugar cane and maize.
Conflicts arose between the northward expansion of the haciendos and the southward expansion
of the Ilocano subsidence smallholders. The Spanish administration made attempts to systemize
property rights by issuing land titles by royal decrees in 1880 and 1894. The peasants were
ignorant, illiterate and accustomed to traditional concepts of land rights, which prevented most
from acquiring legal titles. The principalia responded promptly and often made claims to
adjacent lands with their claims. During the early years of the American administration a
homesteading program was initiated in 1903. This attracted the last rush of Ilocano immigrants
to Nueva Ecija. Registration of titles and cadastral surveys of whole municipalities followed.
Procedural delays and public corruption were again detrimental to the homesteaders and long-
established smallholders. Of all lowland agricultural land the haciendas covered about one half,
and the homesteads and scattered holdings the other half.
The central feature of hacienda operations is rent capitalism, which place the peasant cultivator
into perpetual dept to the gentry class. By the time all forests were cleared from the Plain, the
hacenderos raised the fixed rents, and then switched to sharecropper rental. Tenants were also
charged for compulsory use of threshing machines, trucks and house lots. In extending credit to
the tenants the power to the landowner was even more important than profits. The tenant may be
forced to do al kinds of extra work, even to vote for the landlord’s candidate. The propensity is to
divide the cultivated land into as many tenancies as possible. For wet-rice cultivation this was
three hectares for a nuclear family. Many lots were much smaller. In postwar (WWI) years some
of the worst abuses were abated, but still the poverty and debt continued for the tenant farmers
and many smallholders.
By the end of the 1920s:
Forest clearance in the Plain was complete.
Public land suitable for agriculture was gone, the frontier was over.
Nueva Ecija became the new rice granary of the Central Plain, surpassing Pampanga and
Pangasinan.
Land speculation increased by the Tagalogs from the south, mostly thru purchase of mortgage
foreclosures, further integrating Nueva Ecija into the national economy.
With the completion of the railroad from Manila to Cabanatuan and the American road building
program, the Central Plain became part of an integrated commercial relationship system; with the
Chinese dominating the rice milling and distribution network to Manila; and also supplying rice-
deficit areas of Bicol and the islands of Cebu, Leyte, Samar, Negros and Masbate.

226
Changing Human Ecology on the Central Luzon Plain: Nueva Ecija, 1705-1939, Marshall D.
McLennan
Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, Edited by Alfred W. McCoy
& Ed. C. de Jesus, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1981

Abaca in Bikol

The rainfall pattern, the volcanic slopes, and the plains nearby provide the ideal environment for
abaca and rice growing. There were also handicaps: the land route to Manila was torturous, the
sea route (on the Pacific side) passed thru the dangerous rocky San Bernandino Strait, and the
“Moro” raiders between 1750 and 1825. The provincial maritime militias finally defeated the
raiders in a sea battle in 1818. Before the 19th century the Spanish colonial policy was
restrictive, only two galleons a year went from Manila to Mexico.
After the loss of the Spanish colonies of South America and Mexico around 1810 the galleon
trade between Manila and Mexico also came to an end. This was due to the end of silver coming
from Mexico to Manila. With the loss of the Spanish colonies and the upheavals of the Spanish
government many Spanish bureaucrats and professionals transferred to the Philippines, requiring
higher taxation for their support.
Now the technically illegal visits of English and American merchants were welcomed to the
Spanish mercantile economy and the Philippines became part of the world market system. The
first ship carrying abaca to the West left Manila in 1818, in an unprecedented era of expansion.
Abaca proved to be the finest cordage initially for the whaler and clipper ships, and later for the
binder twine for the mechanical grain harvester. A number of British and American merchant
houses were established in Manila. The price of abaca depended heavily on world events: the
Crimean War, the American Civil War, the industrial depressions of 1857, 1873, 1893,
1907…The prices fell during world depressions (1907-1912) and rose during wars (1914-1918).
There was also the periodic destruction by drought, typhoons, plant diseases and rinderpest. The
abaca boom of Bicol came to an end in the 1930’s. The contributing factors were: the growth of
the industrially organized Japanese in Davao, the mechanized harvesting of henequen fiber in
Mexico and the invention of nylon fiber.
Abaca business went up and down depending on outside forces, but the most important product
was always rice, grown in the plains in paddy fields. It was locally grown and locally consumed.
The production doubled in the 19th century, but could not keep up with population growth. By
the 1870’s the region imported rice from Saigon and Pangasinan by way of Manila. Rice and
abaca complemented each other in many ways. Abaca was grown on the slopes. Rice growing
was seasonal, abaca all year round. The Bicolanos continued to engage in many other subsistence
activities, growing mais and root crops, fruits and vegetables, fishing, livestock; and making
their own pots, tools, textiles, boats and houses from local materials. In bad abaca years they
grew more root crops. The basic social organization continued to be subsistence oriented
agriculture, with commercial agriculture of secondary importance. Some other commercial
products were coal, cattle, horses, timber, rattan, ships and gold, shipped to the Manila market.
As the abaca trade diminished, the coconut industry arose as the most important export
commodity. As abaca grew, infrastructure also developed: steamer traffic to and from Manila,
roads and bridges improved, a railroad link was started.
Commerce grew also: the Spanish department stores in the provincial capitals, the Chinese

227
merchants everywhere (dominated the trade and retail), but Bicolanos and other outsiders were
also active.
Spanish bureaucracy grew together with transportation and commerce; leading to greater
attention to taxation and government services, such as education, communication (the telegraph
spread), law enforcement, public scribes, even religious, medical services and construction
services. With commercial and bureaucratic growth the influx of outsiders to some urban centers
also arose; Naga City in Camarines and the port communities of Legazpi and Tabaco in Albay.
Toward the end of the century these towns became provincial centers with 10,000 inhabitants
living in their poblaciones. These became the cultural centers with secondary schools,
seminaries, provincial bureaucracy and centers of internal trade. Provincial offices, courts, the
“reformed” municipal governments opened to Spaniards and Filipinos, newspapers, lawyers, tax-
farmers and professional witnesses. In these centers were also most of the merchants, banking
facilities (connected with Manila), major warehouses and abaca presses; such employees as
bakers, barbers, carpenters, clerks, coachmen, and tailors; hosts of gambling; floating laborers
for docks, construction and warehouses.
Manila supplied the banking and marketing facilities together with higher education and
machinery (screw presses, steamboats, sawing machines). From Manila also came the skilled
labor, the Tagalog clerks and technocrats, the Spanish bureaucrats, the Anglo-American
merchants and Chinese shopkeepers. These immigrants were concentrated in the urban areas, the
place for quick profits. The abaca-based prosperity was drained off to Manila by merchant
houses, taxation, importation of goods and remissions with salaries. Socially and politically the
lines between ethnic and linguistic groups were blurred by intermarriage and acculturation.
During the rise of the abaca industry the Bicolanos responded to economic incentives, but their
traditional values of rice growing and local politics remained. To be someone in Bicol society
involved the control of rice lands and to have power as a patron to do favors for friends. With
population pressure the position of the landlords was further enhanced.
The office of the notary public was for sale; at the beginning of the century Spaniards held that
post, as time passed Filipinos purchased more of these positions leading to promotions of
political favors and obligations. Certain Bicolano families rose to political prominence in the
20th century, but did not lead to national influence.

Abaca in Kabikolan: Prosperity without Progress, Norman G. Owen

Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, Edited by Alfred W. McCoy
& Ed. C. de Jesus, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1981

Cebu

From olden times Cebu was an entrepot linking local trades with those of the Malay archipelago
and the South China Sea. The island Cebu is long and narrow, with a rugged interior porous
limestone mountain range. Because of this poor soil condition, the staple food has always been
the dry crop millet and mais. After the Spanish established themselves these commercial
relations with the Malay world eventually ceased. Also contributing to the commercial
stagnation of Cebu were the raids of the Muslim seafarers for slaves and plunder beginning in the
17th century and the Spanish practice of restricting the trans-Pacific trade to Manila.
Cebu re-emerged as a major entrport in the beginning of the 19th century, this time as a major

228
link in the extensive commercial network for the markets of Europe and North America.
In spite of the economic decline, Cebu continued as an administrative military and religious
center of the Spanish colony. In 1595 Cebu became the seat of the largest Philippine diocese for
the Augustinians, Jesuits and Recollects. Each monastic order had its own church, convent (or
monastery) and large landholdings in the city and extending 20 km both north and south. First
the land was used for Cattle-raising, but by 1850 the land was mostly used for growing sugar for
export.
Legazpi established Cebu in 1565 as the colonial capital from the beginning, basically as a
Spanish settlement; the south side as a native (Cebuano) area, and on the north side the Chinese
quarter (the Parian) emerged. The Cathedral remained the exclusive church of the Spanish
community. The whole urban area was governed by a Spanish municipal council, presided over
by the governor. Legazpi moved the capital to Manila in 1571; consequently the number of
Spaniards decreased in Cebu in the 17th and early 18th century. The Spanish city council became
defunct and Cebu ceased to be a Spanish city; and was replaced by three independent municipal
jurisdictions (pueblos); each with its own set of officers and subdivided by tax-collecting units
(barangays). The city proper was populated by Cebuanos and a small number of Spaniards and
Spanish mestizos, the Parian was mostly Chinese and Chinese mestizos, the Lutaos (outside of
the city proper and Parian) a sprawling area was Cebuano.
The Cathedral continued to serve the Spaniard and Spanish mestizos and the Cebuanos living in
the old city. The Parian-Lutaos parish church, built in 1614 served all people outside the city
proper; with the church of San Juan Bautista, centered in Parian constructed in the end of the
18th century. In essence there were three municipal districts and two parishes, the Cathedral
(dominated by the Spanish: Augustinians, bishop and governor) and the Church of San Juan
Bautista (dominated by the Chinese mestizos).
By 1820 Cebu began to regain as a major entrepot for central and eastern Visayas and northern
Mindanao. Muslim raids were effectively curtailed, especially Cebu’s east coast. The Chinese
mestizos dominated the Cebu area trade with Manila and the island collection of various
commodities. By the end of the 18th century the mestizo community was substantially
Hispanized in the Philippine sense of the term. They spoke Cebuano, no more Chinese, and
many also spoke Spanish. Per Spanish colonial policy they were treated racially distinct, they
were taxed at a higher rate than natives.
In 1834 about two thirds of the inhabitants of Cebu joined with the Parian-Lutaos parish, Parian
was their focus of religious and social life. About 30 wealthy mestizos comprised the elite of the
Parian and its parish and they dominated the city socially. Most of them were in commercial
activities and inter-island trading. The more numerous and less prosperous mestizos in the urban
area were ship captains, supercargoes, artisans, warehousemen, retailers and owner of small
stores.
Cebu’s mestizos began to enter the colonial intelligentsia relatively early. Some families sent
their sons to the local seminary, others were sent to Manila for studies. By the 1830s, one Parian
mestizo was provincial notary public, one of the highest appointed positions open to Filipinos.
From its inception the Parian parish was secular, initially by Spanish secular priests directly
under the bishop of Cebu. By the end of 18th century the mestizo priests took over. Fr. Pedro de
San Rafael even served as the highest secular clergy of the diocese (1818-1825; 1827-1829).
He sponsored the major renovation of the Parian church. It consequently out-shined in beauty the
Cebu Cathedral and the Augutinian church (Iglesia de Santo Ninyo).
By the 1820s the Augustinians administered the parishes surrounding Cebu, possessed the largest

229
estates in the province (including those encircling the city), owned much of the best urban
property, enjoyed Cebu’s largest church complex and administered the cult of the Santo Ninyo.
Their only rival for the control over the urban area and parts of its hinterland were the mestizos
of the Parian. The Augustinians found the Parian parish and the mestizo elite a threat to them,
and wanted overall unquestioned authority over the city and the outside areas. The bishop of
Cebu and the Spanish bureaucracy supported them in this. In 1830 the bishop of Cebu wrote a
letter to the governor-general urging the suppression of the Parian-Lutaos parish and
incorporation into the Cathedral. The Spanish governor concurred and further proposed that the
municipal jurisdiction of Cebu be reorganized into a single unit. This was a direct challenge to
the existence of the municipality and parish of the Parian. The governor-general agreed with the
request of the bishop and the proposal of the governor and issued a decree accordingly.
In December 1830 the governor-general decreed the suppression of the Parian parish and union
with the Cebu Cathedral. The mestizo community responded by hiring a legal representative in
Manila and prepared a lengthy appeal, answering each of the bishop’s allegations and presented
a strong well-documented defense. To expedite matters in Manila the “principales” of Parian also
enclosed P1,000 with their appeal to be given to the governor-general to demonstrate their
“recognition and gratitude”. The prosecuting attorney of the “Real Audiencia”, the colony’s
highest court, reversed his opinion regarding the suppression of the parish. In July 1831 the
suspension order was issued. By the end of 1831 nearly thirty members of the parish applied for
permission to go to Manila to present the case in person. After eight years of litigation the
authorities in Manila ruled in favor of the mestizos’ representative. The bishop of Cebu
responded by establishing the new parish Opon in the Auguastinian estates of Banilad and
ordered all inhabitants to be affiliated with Opon; and restricting the Parian parish to a thin strip
of land around the city proper. The mestizos immediately began their struggle to regain
jurisdiction over the disputed area, which by the 1840s was being converted to commercial sugar
lands.
Since the early 19th century the Spanish were already concerned about the mestizos’ growing
wealth and influence over the native population, especially in areas like Central Luzon and Cebu.
After the loss of the colonies of Mexico and South America, the Spanish conservatives were
haunted by the fear of an “indio” revolution led by the mestizos. In 1847 the new regional
governor of the Visayas arrived in Cebu, with a hostile attitude toward mestizos; he drafted a
proposal enlarging the city of Cebu, integrating the Cathedral as the only parish and demolishing
the Parian church. The new Dominican bishop endorsed the proposal in 1848. In January 1849
the governor-general signed a decree which adopted the proposal, including the demolition of the
Parian church. The bishop then balked when it came to him to order the demolition of the Parian
church. He thought it would by “too extreme” for the natives to witness. The Attorney-general
was outraged; but the bishop’s opinion was respected. The demolition order was suspended, but
not revoked; and the church could not have its own priest. In despair, the mestizos mounted a
simultaneous appeal in Manila and in Madrid. The effort proved futile. The Parian never re-
emerged as an independent municipality and ceased to be the seat of an independent parish. The
church was finally torn down at the bishop’s order 25 years later.
While legal controversies were raging, the city and the province of Cebu were beginning to
transform economically. This began in the 1820s when Cebu was re-emerging as a Visayan
entrepot. In 1834 Manila was officially opened to foreign trade, leading to widespread
cultivation of commercial crops that were in increasing demand in world markets. By 1850 Cebu
became the distribution center for a rapidly rising commercial sugar production; where most of

230
the lowland plains on the east coast of Cebu province was turned over to sugar cultivation. The
sugar was shipped to Manila for world export, and Cebu City became a major center of
commerce. The mestizos were the prime movers in the Cebu sugar production, together with a
few influential Spanish merchants. Extending credit to primary producers and middlemen, the
Spanish merchants interacted closely with the leading mestizo merchants and settled
permanently in Cebu and also in the Parian. Members of the Cebuanos also took an active part in
the economic changes. Mestizos from Parian also settled actively in Cebuano communities and
started buying and leasing large tracts of land for sugar. To stimulate sugar cultivation, urban-
based merchants began extending credits to provincial landowners under mortgage agreements.
Failure to comply with the terms of the contracts, such as failure to deliver agreed upon
quantities of sugar or other products, led to land falling into the hands of moneylenders; with
former owners becoming tenants.
Wealthy merchants started reclaiming the marshlands near the city, building estuary dikes for
additional port facilities. About 80% of the city proper was owned by the Augustinian order, the
Diocese of Cebu, the seminary of San Carlos and the City of Ccbu. They leased lots at fixed
annual fees; houses and other buildings could be built and sold at will, but the leaseholder had to
pay the rent.
In 1860 the Spanish government issued a decree to open the port of Cebu for direct foreign trade.
Mainly British and American commercial houses were set up to ship out sugar and hemp. The
mestizo and Spanish merchants concentrated on collecting sugar and hemp from Cebu, other
Visayan islands and northern Mindanao and transporting them to Cebu, to sell to the foreign
business houses. Foreign merchant houses became the port’s leading creditors. This money and
local capital went to sugar, abaca and later tobacco growing areas thru agents responsible for
supervising, collecting, shipping to Cebu and processing, weighing, storing and selling to foreign
merchants for export. This made local merchants and agriculturalists increasingly dependent on
distant foreign markets, with demand and prices set in Europe and North America. Now the
investment of land and property became the main preoccupation of the leading city merchants,
whether mestizos, Spaniards and later migrant Filipinos.
The western coastal plains of Cebu and Bohol became also cultivated with sugar. The more
rugged coastal plains of western and southern Leyte and northern Mindanao were developed into
abaca-growing regions. Nearly all sugar and hemp from these areas was transported to Cebu for
export. Large-scale sugar and abaca production attracted many newcomers who emerged as
wealthy and influential residents of the provinces who maintained close contact with the elite of
Cebu. Also the offsprings of the elite of Cebu migrated to provincial lands, as they acquired
lands there, and fed into the business of their wealthy merchant families in Cebu, leading to
province and region-wide elites.
The influx of Chinese into the coming urban economy were perceived as a threat by the mestizos
and Spanish merchants, leading to protest in 1859 against Chinese participants in the Manila
trade, and tried to restrict them to retail shop keeping. The Chinese in Cebu city increased from
30 in 1857, to 611 in 1870, to 1,400 in 1890s. They settled in the new crowded stores and
warehouses in the Lutaos and remained non-Christian. They had a great impact on the trade and
distribution, purchased on credit in Manila and shipped to Cebu city and villages in outlaying
districts. The leading Chinese merchants also became important moneylenders and ship owners
and their own “cabecilla”-agent system.
The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy in the late 19th century brought many more Spaniards
to Cebu. In 1860 Manila established a regional Political-Military Government for the Visayan

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Islands at Cebu, and within a decade established seven new administrative departments in the
city. The number of Spaniards rose from 17 in 1857, to 224 in 1870, creating a distinct Spanish
colony for the first time in the city’s history. Many combined bureaucratic posts or professional
practices (medicine and law) with commercial activities. Even without much wealth they
enjoyed considerable prestige in the larger society. For the first time in three centuries Spaniards
became models for Filipinos.
The indigenous urban elite continued to dominate. Young men from elite background availed of
the growing educational opportunities in Cebu and Manila. With degrees and knowledge of
Spanish they found employment at all levels of the colonial government: as magistrates,
solicitors, clerks of the courts, justices of the peace; in city and provinces, municipal teachers and
private tutors. Sons of prominent families, particularly of Chinese mestizos became leaders in the
secular clergy under the Spanish hierarchy. Many wealthy and influential prominent individuals
were able to sustain long litigations against government officials and win in court.
The life style of the City was also changing: with elaborate religious festivals, parades with
bands and banners, dramatic public representations and horseraces; more attractive plazas with
kerosene lamps. In 1867 the local seminary became a “colegio” for young men. In 1880 came a
similar school for young women. In 1886 a “Real Audiencia” (higher court) was inaugurated and
the first newspaper was established in the City.
By the 1890s an urban aristocracy of less than 75 families included 30 to 40 Chinese mestizo
families from the old Parian, descendents of the pre-1860 period. The Parian church was gone
for more than a decade. The association with the “mestizo community” was less important than
membership in “urban aristocracy”; which was multi-ethnic, mestizo roots (both from Chinese
and Spanish) and a few purely Cebuano. Another small, but important, part of the urban and
provincial elite of 1890s were a number of immigrants, mainly Spanish and Chinese mestizos
from Manila. They came initially to fill posts in the bureaucracy and some came for economic
opportunities, and then solidified their ties thru intermarriage and “compadrazzo” relationships.
Few Cebuanos attained enough wealth, property or prestige to achieve urban elite status. Very
few Chinese participated in Cebu’s urban elite.
The multi-ethnic nature of the urban aristocracy was also reflected in Cebu’s city council, re-
established in 1890. Between 1890 and 1898, the 61 members of the council (15 to 20
concurrently in office) were appointed semi-annually by the Spanish governor, who also
presided over the body; 25 peninsular Spaniards (nine had lasting commitments to Cebu), 17
Chinese mestizos, eight Spanish mestizos (from Cebuano communities), four immigrant
Filipinos, only one Cebuano from the Cebuano community. They represented the wealthiest and
most prominent families of Cebu.
The social life of the elite revolved around the extended family. The large house or compound,
was the focal point of the family life, which served their relatives, associates or dignitaries for
such occasions as weddings, baptisms, elaborate banquets and even dances, complete with
musical and dramatic presentations; all of this required substantial wealth. Almost all expected
attributes of the elite; such as illustrious, honorable, good standing, charitable, extravagance;
depended on wealth. Wealth was also the prerequisite for Spanish office-holdings. In 1895 the
first permanent theatre building was completed in Cebu.
The response of Cebu’s elite to the news of the Tagalog rebellion in August 1896 was immediate
and enthusiastic support for the Spanish colonial government. Almost all its young men joined
the Loyal Volunteers, a local militia, to protect the province from Tagalog-inspired subversives,
and later the invasion by the “treacherous” Americans. During the early years of unrest in Luzon

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life in Cebu continued normally. In April 1898 a violent outbreak occurred near the city that
spread quickly into the city and down the south coast. Led by a charismatic leader with alleged
Katipunan contacts, and supernatural attributes; held sway over the city for four days. When
Spanish reinforcements arrived, they drove the rebels into the hills, after a bloody encounter. The
tranquil life of colonial Cebu came to an end.
The Spanish-American War spread to the Philippines in May 1898, Manila fell to the Americans
several months later, but Cebu continued to be ruled by a Spanish general to the end of
December. The Spanish departed in December, leaving the city and province to a small group of
hand-picked rulers. In February 1899 an American gunboat appeared and presented the rulers
with an ultimatum: surrender the city or prepare for war. Within 24 hours the Cebu elites decided
to surrender. A small detachment of U.S. Marines landed, raised their flag, and American rule
began in Cebu.
By the end of 1898 members of the urban elite emerged as the local leaders of the “nationalist”
struggle against American colonial expansion. They slowly adjusted; by the end of 1901 the elite
came to fully collaborate. The major elements of the old aristocracy came to control the city and
province. By 1904 the most promising candidate for future political leadership was the young
attorney Sergio Osmenya, a direct descendent of one of the wealthiest and most prominent
leaders of the old Parian. He expounded nationalist sentiments in his local newspaper. With the
support of the dominant socio-economic elements of the city and province, the Catholic Church,
and agents of the colonial government, he emerged in 1905 as the most powerful Cebuano
politician; by 1906 one of the most important national leaders. For the next 35 years he and his
law school classmate Manuel Quezon ruled Philippine national politics.

The Changing Nature of the Cebu Urban Elite in the 19th Century, Michael Cullinane
Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, Edited by Alfred W. McCoy
& Ed. C. de Jesus, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1981

Bukidnon Plateau

Until World War II the spacious plateau of rolling grasslands between the mountains and central
Mindanao was thinly populated by the native people of the mountains, the Bukidnon, and the
Visayan people (somewhat hispanized) of the north coast, called “dumagats” (people of the sea)
by the native people.
It was like an open frontier area for 70 years before World War II. South of the mountains was
the Muslim world of Cotabato, east was the densely forested mountain chain and the Agusan
River valley, west was the rugged high country of Lanao, occupied by the Maranaos. Travel
from the north was very difficult before the World War II because of the swift flowing Tagoloan
and Cagayan rivers and the precipitous canyons. In the south were the even more treacherous
canyons of the Pulangi and Mulita rivers.
Two tribal groups: the Bukidnon concentrated in the northern forest areas of the Cagayan and
Tagaloan rivers, the Manobos concentrated in the forest areas along the Pulangi and Mulita
rivers and also close to the Maranaos on the west along the Lanao border. The Bukidnon traded
with the Visayan who lived along the north coast. The Manobos traded with the Magindanao in
the south, such forest products as rubber and guta-percha (latex of certain trees). The natives
lived in small settlements widely dispersed from one another. A settlement consisted of about 40

233
nuclear families interrelated by marriage or blood. The head of the settlement was the datu,
chosen and recognized for his ability to settle disputes based on customary law and the epics. In
their oral epics they share common ancestors and relate how the Bukidnon repelled the dumagats
and the Hispanic influence along the coast, and the Manobo relate their trek inlands with the
liberation from slavery from the Magindanao in the south. They lived in the forest and along the
edge of the grasslands, by means of shifting slash-and-burn agricultural methods. They used the
grasslands mostly for hunting, not for agriculture.
By about 1870 the Visayan and Chinese came from the coastal towns to exchange their sugar,
salt, cloth and liquor for a variety of crops, the main one being abaca. Other crops were coffee,
rice, cacao, copra and tobacco. The Bukidnons also became middlemen linking with the Manobo
people farther to the south.
The Jesuits began making regular visits in the 1870s, contributing to the establishment of towns,
such as Malaybalay, Sumilao, Bugcaon and Linabo. These towns were very similar to the
Visayan towns along the coast. The towns were all linked together from Cagayan to Agusan
town, and going farther south to Linabo and Maramag. Bugcaon was established in 1888-1889 as
a Spanish garrison with 30 Guardia Civil to turn back Maranao Muslim influence on the plateau.
In the 1890s, Bukidnons who settled in Mailag, Linabo and Malaybalay were organized by the
Jesuits into a militia, supplied with guns, with the approval of the governor general, to push the
Maranaos west of the Cagayan River headwaters and south of Manupai.
The ties cultivated between the Bukidnons and the lowlanders in the late 19th century led to
changes: in religious practices, economic development and demographic patterns. These came to
a temporary halt at the turn of the century. First the Philippine Revolution stopped Jesuit
activities, and then the Philippine-American War disrupted the life in the new settlements.
Finally, American arrival set in motion the freeing of Bukidnon society from the dominance of
powerful interests of the coastal city of Cagayan de Oro, including the governor of the province.
The Americans were shocked when they learned that these traders from the city sold the abaca
they bought from the Bukidnons for 20 times that price in Cebu. Secretary of the Interior, Dean
Worcester came to the plateau in 1907, determined to protect the Bukidnons from “dumagat”
domination; while educating and training them so that they could function as equals in the
rapidly expanding world of lowland Philippine culture. To achieve these goals a number of
policies were installed: separate the political control of the plateau from the coast, resettle the
Bukidnons again on the plateau, justice for all (including the Bukidnons) in courts of law,
establish government trading posts as alternatives to rapacious private traders, employ
Bukidnons in municipal and provincial offices, utilize as much land as possible by Bukidnons,
and cattle ranches rather than crowds of migrant homesteaders.
The Sub-Province of Bukidnon became within the Province of Agusan, no longer under the old
Misamis elite, but under an American appointee. For the next seven years the administrators
were Frederick Lewis and Manuel Fortich. In 1914 Bukidnon became a full-fledged province,
also expanded to the south to include many Manobos. Fortich was a former Constabulary officer
from a strong family in Cebu. He inaugurated forceful efforts to settle the Bukidnons and
Manobos in the grasslands, begin plough agriculture, have children attend the settlement schools,
and control lawless elements with the Constabulary soldiers. New towns formed were Maluko,
Impasugong, Kalasungay, and Malaybalay. Some of the datus were against the re-settlement
efforts. The weakening of the datu leadership became already evident in late 19th century due to
the pressure from the coastal influences; and as the status of the datus declined that of the
baylans (religious mediums) increased. Slowly more and more disputes among the Bukidnons

234
came to the court system rather than the traditional datu arbitrators.
Government exchanges and trading posts began in 1910, where cloth, utensils, needles, salt,
blankets, ornaments and sugar were traded for curios, handicrafts, abaca, timber, coffee, cacao
and other forest products.
As early as 1912 Bukidnon men and women were sent to Philippine Normal College in Manila
and the agricultural school in Munjoz, Nueva Ecija. By 1916, 1,766 pupils were enrolled in 22
settlement schools plus the high school. A normal school was opened in Bukidnon in 1924. By
1934 all the local police were natives and ten of eleven municipal “presidentes” were Bukidnons.
The Bukidnons also learned up-to-date agricultural techniques like the use of the wooden, iron-
tipped plough. The rolling grassy land became more productive in corn and rice than the
kainging system in the mountain sides and along the canyons; but most natives continued to
maintain hillside plots at the same time.
By 1918 only about 1% of the grasslands were cultivated with corn and rice. The land was still
unoccupied and open for settlement. The Americans did not encourage the spread of coastal
migrants.
In the late 1920s Del Monte Corporation found the rainfall and soil conditions along the northern
edge of the plateau superb for growing pineapples and leased about 20,000 hectares for that
purpose.
Beginning 1913-14 thousands of hectares were leased by Americans and their Pilipino allies as
pasture lands. Bukidnon developed as the premier cattle-ranching province in the Philippines.
Cattle had virtually died out in Bukidnon between 1890 and 1905 due to the rinderpest. By 1911
the quarantine effort began to bring the disease under control. After Dean Worcester retired as
Secretary of the Interior in 1918 he imported the first disease-resistant Nellore Brahmin bulls,
and helped establish Bukidnon’s first ranch. By 1920 the Diklum Ranch had a herd of 6,000
heads. Worcester set up a 2,500 head herd and Manuel Fortich built up a herd of 4,000. Others
were also among the pioneers of cattle ranching. The Bokidnons became cowboys on the cattle
ranches, but did not become folk heroes like the American cowboys.
By the 1920s the Americans pretty well left Bukidnon and sold their ranches to wealthy Filipinos
from Manila and Cebu. The road from Cagayan de Oro to Malaybalay was finally completed,
making automobile traffic possible. With closer and easier ties between the plateau and the coast,
the migrant population swelled Bukidnon to 57,561 by 1939.
The government exchanges closed in the early 1920s, and then most of the retail stores
proliferating on the plateau were financed by Chinese from Cagayan de Oro or Agusan. The
Bukidnons then brought there abaca directly to these stores, or directly to the store owners on the
coast, and bartered for coastal products such as salt, sugar and cloth. By that time the plateau
economy remained independent from the merchants of the coast. Cattle, the principal export of
the province were driven from the ranges directly to Bugo on the coast, and then shipped directly
to slaughterhouses in Manila. The economy blossomed in the two decades before World War II,
and this was led by the emergence of a new elite comprised of civil service migrants who arrived
in the Malaybalay area in 1907-1920, coming from various provinces but especially from the
Ilocos region. Many of these established some of the larger ranches. The common languages in
the church sermons in the active Catholic and Protestant churches were English, Spanish side by
side with Visayan, and the poorer class Bukidnon who only understood Binukid. The Bukidnons
continuing in positions with the provincial government and owned some of the most desirable
land around the plaza and along the main street; and were able to elect Binukid–speaking mayors
in every election until 1971 and freely married into migrant families.

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Farther way from Malaybalay, in barrios such as Sumilao, Bukidnons typically remained poor
peasants who continued to employ swidden agricultural practices, together with plough
technology and continued to depend on dumagats in trading their crops; they continued to use
Binukid at home and most spoke Visayan as well and rarely intermarried with non-Bukidnons,
and regarded themselves as second-class citizens. Conditions changed rapidly after World War II
when the Bukidnon population jumped from 63,470 to 532,818 in just 27 years, as the frontiers
of the plateau came to a close with new tensions and adjustments.

Frontier Society on the Bukidnon Plateau: 1870-1941, Ronald K. Edgerton

Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, Edited by Alfred W. McCoy
& Ed. C. de Jesus, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1981

Magindanao

The region of Cotabato and South Cotabato cover almost the whole southwest Mindanao,
covering 2,491,580 hectares. The region is cut in half by the Pulangi river.
This area is roughly divided into three regions:
I. One fourth, “level valley land”. The traditional home of the Muslim Magindanao. The lower
valley of the Pulangi river, down to the sea, at Cotobato City, it is swampy, including two large
swamp areas (Libungan Marsh and Liguasan Swamp). It rises imperceptibly some 35m, over a
distance upstream of 80 km. The water area of this swampy area is about 259,000 hectares
during normal water levels, and expands beyond that area during heavy rains.
II. One half, “undulating plateau lands” average elevation of 300m, was mostly forest.
III. One fourth, “mountainous”, was forest.
The Muslim Maranao and Iranon lived in the north.
The non Muslim tribal Tiruray, Manobo and Bila’an lived in the coastal and central parts.
Population:
1903 1940
Total 125,875(0.05*) 298,835(0.12*) * people/HA
Muslim 113,875 (90%) 162,996 (55%)
Non Muslim Tribal 12,000 70,493
Cotabato City few hundered 10,000 end of American period

Magindanao Political Organization:

Sultans of Magindanao title holders in lower valley.
Rajahs of Buayan title holders of upper valley (Sultans in 18th century).
In politics just another datu.
The basic building blocks of the system were the local datus, autonomous in theory, but often
dependent on others for access to resources like salt and iron; and articulated into wider alliances
for attack or defense. Datu means ruler, the force to keep the community united, that also tends
to be fluid. He has to struggle to maintain his following, to counter the forces of separation and
against predatory datus. The personal power became its own legitimation to be strong enough to
enforce folk-Islamic or adat law, and also strong enough to transgress it. The followers may be
entitled to leave him, but may be afraid to do so. Finally, a datu was what a datu did.
The size of the datu’s following depended on his personal qualities and his control of economic

236
resources. The power of the upper valley datus was based on the production of rice with slave
labor, collection of dues from Muslim peasants and taking of tribute from upland Tribals. Going
downstream on the Pulangi to the sea with trade goods, datus along the river exacted tolls. The
datus at the mouth of the Pulangi at the sea would organize fleets for coastal trading and raiding.
In the 1870s the two datus of the upper valley Utu of Buayan and the Sultan of Kabuntalan had
several thousand slaves besides other followers. This changed with time according to the
followers of lesser datus. The state of the Magindanao consisted of competition for followers,
slaves and resources according to certain ideological principles; the qualification for the
recognition of the ranking of the datus. The rank of the mother and father determined the honor
due to rank (maratabat) of the claimant datu. The ranking system was based on the ancestry to
Sarip Kabongsoan, the preacher of Islam who was the son of an Arab who married the daughter
of the Sultan of Jahore (near Singapore), who came to Cotabato in 1511. The Sultans of
Magindanao claimed descent from a son of the Sarip, the Rajahs of Buayan from a daughter.
Most of the Magindanao datus claim membership to one of these stocks and some claim by way
of both parents. The Maranao datus also claim descent of the Sarip, and similar common origin is
asserted for all the datus of Brunei and Sulu. The Maranao did not centralize power under one
sultan.
The level of nobility is assessed according to the number of links traced to the Sarip, according
to the written genealogy or tarsila, and determines the entitlement to rule. The degree of nobility
of a woman also determines the size of her bride price and the importance of the subsequent
alliance. A woman must marry a man of equal or higher rank. A man may marry a woman of
equal or lower status. Important datus had wives of many degrees, including concubines who
were slaves. All sons were called datu, but not of equal standing.
The existence of the datu class was part of a social hierarchy with the powerful over the
dependent and the powerless. The commoners could identify with a line of datus by claiming
decent of a royal line, but volunteered to “give way” to a succession, they were the voluntary
supporters. The ones most exploited came from the outside of Magindanao society, captives
from Christian settlements or tribute payers from the non Muslim Tribals.
Power and nobility tended to coincide for the Sultanates of Magidanao, Buayan, and from the
18th century Kabuntalan. The focus of political organization was not in the titleholder himself,
but on the line he belonged to. The titleholder was often a child or an old man, real power was in
the hands of close kinsmen of lesser rank. The Sultanates were segmentary states, intermittently
capable of uniting for offence or defense, but always liable to internal dissention. In conflicts,
factions readily accepted outside help, even from Holland and Spain.
In 1851 Spain established a presence in Cotabato and occupied the delta in 1861, even entering
into the upper valley over the next 25 years. They exploited rivalries, after Sultan Kudarat II died
in 1857, Spain nominated Makawa as successor. Three years later he asked for Spain’s help to
shore up his insecure position, resulting in further alienation from his supporters. The Spanish
could not control the area, only to neutralize the Sultan. In the meantime a powerful alliance
formed in the upper valley around Datu Utu of the Rajah Buayan line, he resisted the Spaniards,
under great strain, holding his alliance together by terror. His subjects remembered his cruelty,
cunning, caprice and his refusal to open his granaries to them during a time of famine, even
seventy years after his death. By 1888 Spain broke the alliance, but left Utu in his place in the
upper valley. In 1890 Utu came downriver to spend his last years under Spanish protection.
Datu Ayunan, of obscure origin, was head of an alliance that included some defectors of Utu,
about 20 km upriver, where he stayed while Utu fought with the Spanish. He cooperated with the

237
Spaniards, who conferred the title of gobernadorcillo on him; when he died in 1898, the title was
passed on to his brother Balabaran.
The Spaniards maintained sizable garrisons on the coast and smaller ones in the interior. They
only administered the small delta towns of Tamontaca and Cotabato. They pursued a “policy of
attraction”, by avoiding interference in religious practices or the datus’ rights over their
followers. They formally abolished slavery, and a Jesuit establishment offered sanctuary to Utu’s
runaway slaves, but many datus still had slaves. In the lower valley the highborn became local
dignitaries and some were seeking escape in opium and gambling. Political marriages were still
contracted, but within narrower spans. In the hinterlands political alliances were still important
and reinforced by marriage, though the ranking system was already in disarray.
Utu’s onetime trusted servant Piang formed a new alliance, which included Utu’s nephew and
others of the house of Raja Buayan. Datu Piang was a Chinese mestizo with no claim of nobility.
He was also son-in-law to Datu Ayunan. He was described as “kind to the people”, but ready to
prosecute independent-minded datus, displacing them or taking away their followers. He got
along with the Spaniards and established useful ties with the Chinese traders at the river mouth.
When the Spanish withdrew in the beginning of 1899, they left Cotabato under the triumvirate of
datu Piang representing the Magindanao; Ramon Vilo, representing the 600 Christian Filipinos
living in the delta; and another, representing the Chinese trading community. Within a few
months, men of Piang and Ali invaded the lower valley and killed Vilo and subjected the
Filipinos to outrages; the Chinese were under Piang’s protection. When the Americans arrived at
the end of the year, the upriver datus withdrew. Datu Ali challenged the American rulers with a
force of 15,000 men, Piang did not support him; Ali was defeated and killed in 1904. His forces
fragmented into guerilla bands. The Americans found 204 Chinese in the town of Cotabato
mainly engaged in the sale of rice, wax, coffee, rubber and gutta-percha to Singapore. The bulk
of the products came from the upper valley, subject to the control of Datu Piang. He personally
organized the collection of forest products and maintained a monopoly with his Chinese
connections. Magindanaos were only concerned with agricultural production. The Americans
thought Piang to be the richest Muslim in Mindanao and the most influential chief of the island.
The Americans left the datus as they were, making friends out of former enemies. Piang
cooperated with American programs. He also convinced Datu Ampatuan, a former lieutenant of
Datu Ali, who still controlled 1,500 families in the upper valley, to join the American side.
Piang led the way in developing commercial agriculture, and supported modern education. He
sent his sons to study in Manila; one became an agriculturist, another an educator and one
became the first Muslim attorney. He gave his backing to settlements of immigrants from the
Visayas. Settlers from other parts of the Philippines were few until the 1930s. By 1935 Cotabato
was becoming the rice bowl of the Philippines, basically due to Magindanao labor.
Before the 1930s all public offices were appointed. Datus became town mayors and barangay
captains. Datu Piang was one of the first members of the National Assembly. After he died in
1933 his eldest son Abdullah became a member of the National Assembly. Datu Sinsuat (son of
Balabaran) represented Mindanao and Sulu in the negotiation of the Jones Act in 1916. Between
1923 and 1931 he served as special advisor to Governor Gutirrez. He was appointed to senator in
1935. In the first election for the National Assembly in 1936 Sinsuat won with 312 votes over
Attorney Menandang Piang with 128 votes. Ungalingan Piang regained the seat in the next
election, when the franchise increased to over 20,000 votes. The Magindanao election politics
again became a matter of large scale alliance formation.
The Americans wanted all to be equal before the law, and also wanted to show respect to Muslim

238
and religious law. They asked datus to advise judges in this matter, and wanted to separate
religious from secular cases. In reality the Magindanaos continued to bring all cases to the datus.
The Spaniards did not register native landholdings. The US cadastral survey began in 1926 and
was finished in 1941. Less foresighted occupants trusted traditional rights or were unwilling to
pay taxes. Some of the land was registered in other names. In disputes, the court recognized land
that was actually occupied. Consequently most of the titles were less than five hectares, few
datus got more than 20 hectares, and areas above 100 hectares went to large-scale
agriculturalists, such as Piang’s son Ugalingen and datus Sinsuat and Dilangalen of the Rajah
Buayan house.
The final separation of power and rank was clear as early as 1902 when Datu Utu died, leaving
the highborn Raja Putri, daughter of Sultan Kudarat II a widow. With her death in 1919, the last
vestiges of courtly life disappeared. As the old datus died the slaves were able to be free and also
to disperse. Some of the old nobility also allowed their sons to go to school; others rejected the
opportunity for fear of covert Christianization. The mass of the population remained illiterate and
ignorant of English, so they were dependent on leaders who could deal with the government on
their behalf. The young datus could still build up a following in terms of personal service and
contract. Tenancy also made its appearance, but land was so plentiful that the cultivators could
move easily to the available land. A new type of datu arrived, who prospered and his power
became entrenched, similar to the elite families of the Christian Pilipino.

The Defiant and the Compliant: The Datus of Magindanao under Colonial Rule, Jeremy Brackett
Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, Edited by Alfred W. McCoy
& Ed. C. de Jesus, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1981
 The Sulu Sultanate 19th Century

The Sulu Sultanate emerged as a strong state during the late 18th and 19th century within the
Sulu trading zone; it encounterd the southern rim of the Sulu Sea and the whole Celebes Sea
basin. The Sulu state included the material and social conditions for the recruitment and
exploitation of slaves. The dominant ethnic group in the Sulu Archipelago are the Taosug
(people of the current) living on Jolo Island, the historical seat of the Sultanate. They were
originally fishermen, traders and agriculturists. With the introduction of Islam in about the 15 th
century they developed a highly organized political and economic system, dominating the nearby
indigenous Samalan speaking people. The Samal communities predominate on the coralline
islands in the northern and southern part of the Sulu archipelago, Northern Borneo and Celebes.
They live as sedentary agriculturalists, shore-dwellers and nomadic boat-dwellers. They
occupied non-contiguous territories along the southern Mindanao shore, on the south shore and
near interior of Basilan and on the islands of the Tapian Tana group, Cagayan de Sulu and the
Balangingi cluster. They were expert boat builders and sea voyagers with fixed bases of
operation on a series of coral and sand islands on the northern side of Jolo, which served as
springboards for launching seasonal raids against coastal villages from Luzon to Celebes. The
island of Balangingi was the organizational center for retailing slaves for the Sulu Sultanate in
the first half of the 19th century. Another group of marauders were the Iranon, Maranao-
speaking migratory strand dwellers, living along river mouths of the southern coast of Mindanao.
The marine merchants coming to Jolo were mostly the Chinese coming in their junks and the
Makassarese-Buginese in their prahus (light sail craft up to 25m long) in search of local products
of the sea.
239
By 1800 the regional redistribution was the main economic basis for the Sulu Sultanate, directly
related to the insatiable demand for tea by Europe. During the 18th century tea replaced ale as
the national beverage in England. These merchants recognized the potential of participating in
the long-standing Sino-Sulu trade to redress the one-way flow of silver from India to China:
marine and jungle products that were highly valued in China such as tripang (sea cucumber),
birds nest, wax, camphor (for incense), mother-of-pearl and tortoise shell. Sulu’s ascendancy
towards the end of the 18th century developed out of the expanding trade between India,
Southeast Asia and China. For Sulu the important products were textiles, opium, guns and
gunpowder to bolster the Sultante’s power. The Tausug merchants developed dominance over
the Sultanates of Brunai and Cotabato, who were traditionally also part of the redistribution
network. This also involved trade with the Bugis of Samarinda and Berau in the south, with
Manila in the north, and with Singapore and Lubuan in the west; leading to the segmented state
of Sulu over the outlying areas along northeast Borneo and western Mindanao coasts. The
Sultanate needed more manpower to facilitate the collection and distribution of marine and
jungle produce; to accomplish this Jolo became the nerve center for the coordination of slave
raiding. The population of the Sulu zone became more heterogeneous, socially, economically
and ethnically; with the captives from the Philippines and various parts of the Malay world,
primarily from Celebes and Molluccas. Power and wealth in Sulu were of secondary importance.
The most important was the leader’s power and status from his control of dependents, slaves or
retainers; that could be mobilized at a given moment for commercial or political purposes. The
accumulation of wealth and the transmission of power and privilege in Sulu were facilitated by
the ownership of slaves. The datu who could acquire large numbers of slaves could engage more
people in procurement activities and trade; with the resulting wealth he could attract others to
join him, leading to more profits. The Iranun and Balangingi, the slave raiders of the Sulu sea,
procured the additional labor. To a large extend the slaves held the Taosug society together
during this period. In contrast to industrial-plantation slavery of the West, the slaves in Sulu were
not solely defined the status as property. In the Sulu Sultanate, the banyaga (chattel-slaves) could
have family roles as husband or wife, they could own property, and often filled such political and
economic roles as bureaucrats, farmers, raiders, concubines and traders; with rights and
privileges as other members of the community. They were predominantly Visayan, Tagalog,
Minahassan and Buginese speakers, almost every major ethnic group of insular Southeast Asia
were found among them. Some were inherited, some were tax obligations, and some were dept
obligations. But all banyaga, or their ancestors, had been seized by professional slave raiders and
retailed in communities thruout the Sulu zone. Another form of slavery was the kiapangdilihan,
from the ranks of commoner Taosug, whose servility was the result of personal debt. A person
could also be reduced to slavery by legal process, for conviction for criminal offences such as
stealing and acts of sexual impropriety, particularly adultery, were punishable by heavy fines.
Inability to pay, or offer some form of security for the fine imposed, reduced the person to the
status of kiapangdilihan. The kiapangdilihan became an integral part of the creditor’s following,
but with a lower status then a freeman who voluntarily attached himself to a leader. In return for
subsistence a kiapangdilihan was obligated to work for his creditor, but not toward repayment of
the debt. Many kiapangdilihan became dependent for life and their families may be obligated for
generations. Debt bondage as an economic institution in Sulu was most fully developed toward
the end of the 19th century when the raids were curtailed and banyaga were no longer available
in sufficient numbers. The legal position of a banyaga was determined by Sulu code, based on
custom and Islamic law. Officially he had not legal personality, he could not hold property, could

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be transferred, bought or sold at will, and a master held the power of life and death over him. The
punishment was much more severe for banyaga than members of other social classes. Usually he
was socially and economically indistinguishable from freemen and in some respects more secure.
Banyaga were encouraged to adopt Islam and marry, and some could purchase their freedom and
assume a new status and ethnicity. The children of a female banyaga and a freeman inherited the
status of their father. The relationship of slaves among the Taosug varied, from follower and
lord, to slave and master. A master was constrained to feed and clothe his slaves or give
sufficient opportunities to earn a living, rather than risk desertion of even escape to Zamboanga
or Menado. Before 1780 the internal demand for slaves at Jolo was on a much smaller scale then
by the 19th century. The impact of the West’s commercial intrusion in China led to the formation
of the Sulu state.
Among the Taosug, the banyaga were used for trading ventures, in diplomatic negotiations, as
slave raiders, as concubines and wet nurses, as tutors to their masters, as craft workers and as
peasants and fishermen. Male banyaga helped to clear forests, harvested timber, built and
maintained boats and hauled water. They also worked in fisheries and in search of mother-of-
pearl shells and tripang, in the manufacturing of salt, joined in trading expeditions, and sailed as
crew on Balangingi prahus. Female banyaga sowed and weeded rice fields; threshed and
pounded rice; gathered and prepared strand products; attended to their mistresses and some
enjoyed positions of trust as concubines of leading datus.
After 1770 writing was required for diplomatic and trade correspondence with the Spanish,
Dutch and English; for recording land grants and terms of treaties, and to keep track of account
of datus’ commercial enterprises. Few Taosug aristocrats could read and write so banyaga with
education who could serve as scribes, interpreters and language tutors were in great demand.
By 1830s mother-of-pearl shell became the most profitable export used; for manufacturing of
jewelry, cutlery and furniture for Europe. Tripang continued as a very important export also from
Jolo. From east Borneo came bird nest and wax.
Slaves regularly traded from Jolo to Balangingi and Palawan on behalf of their masters.
Banyaga also manned the slave-raiding prahus; they were not armed, but were an integral part of
the crew with their tasks to row, bail, clean and repair prahus. Some banyaga advanced to fleet
leaders, and even squadron commanders.
Dispersed farming communities of banyaga dotted the interior of the larger fertile islands such as
Jolo, Tapul and Pata, where they built bamboo huts for their families and had farm plots for their
own needs. All men were liable to be called upon for military service.
Slave artisans also made jewelry, tools, weapons and armor.
Slaves were often called upon to perform instrumental music and sing, sometime in Spanish, or
recite Visayan poetry for religious festivals when Europeans visited Jolo.
Banyaga were not only chattel but had currency value, In the 1850s a slave was worth ten kayus
(pieces of coarse cotton cloth 20 fathoms long), or two bundles of ten kin (sarongs), or 200-300
gantangs (approx 50 kg each) rice. A prahus could be purchased for 6-8 slaves, while a boat
could be rented for 2 or 3 slaves. Slaves were exchanged over and over again. Datus rarely
traded their own followers, especially the younger ones.
Many banyagas ultimately achieved a status and living standard higher than under their former
colonial over lords. A minority were able to become wealthy, and maintaining their own
households in towns. A banyaga of standing had a prahu and owned a few other slaves to do his
trading.
Slaves were needed by the datus to obtain new luxury products brought by the trade. By the

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beginning of the 19th century the Jolo market offered British manufactured brassware and
glassware; Chinese earthenware and ceramics; fine muslin, silk and satin garments; Spanish
tobacco and wines; and opium from India. These were luxury goods for personal adornment and
pleasure, and to the household they were power and prestige features of the aristocracy to
indicate social superiority. Another indicator of political and commercial growth for the Sulu
state was the enormous increase in war stores in the Jolo market at the end of the 18th century
with lead, iron, shot, gunpowder and cannon. It helped the Taosug to advance their commercial
interests to promote raiding on a larger scale; and keep the zone free from undesirable intruders
and competitors. The economic forces pressing the Taosug aristocracy to acquire more and more
slaves were the demands for products from external trade. To secure more slaves they went on
long-distance raiding; consequently Jolo became the principal center in the importation of slaves
and the outfitting of marauders. This was highly organized; there were several types of
expeditions: those equipped by the Sultan and his kindred; those independently recruited with the
encouragement of the Sultan; and those conducted without the sanction of the Sultan. The
military and economic activities of the Samal-Balangingi were regulated by their Taosug
patrons. They also provided credit to the Iranun with advances in boats, powder and ball, cannon,
rice, opium and additional crew. Everything was to be repaid with captured slaves. Banyaga
familiar with distant coasts and local conditions often accompanied the Balangingi on long slave
raids, southward to Celebes and north to Luzon, which caused considerable anxiety to the
colonial governments as late as 1870s.
Slave imports to the Sultanate average about:
2,000 to 3,000 per year; 1780 to 1835
3,000 to 4,000 per year; 1836 to 1848, apex at 1848
 1,200 to 2,000 per year; 1849 to 1869
Collapse in the 1870s
The Western navies cooperated against the slave raider during the second half of the 19th
century and became effective with their steam vessels. The Spanish destroyed Balangingi and
Jolo between 1846 and 1852; and then continued to systematically annihilate all prahu shipping
in the Sulu Archipelago in the last three decades of the century.
The Taosug were compelled to settle down in villages as agriculturists. Large numbers of Straits
Chinese merchants immigrated to Sulu and continued trading with their contacts in Singapore.
The traditional Taosug redistribution role came to an end; the zone fragmented and the life
pattern of life altered by the ending of slavery.

Slavery and the Impact of External Trade: The Sulu Sultanate in the 19th Century, James Warren
Philippine Social History: Global Trade and Local Transformations, Edited by Alfred W. McCoy
& Ed. C. de Jesus, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, Metro Manila, 1981

Alfred W. Mc Coy b. 1945.

PhD from Yale University.
Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Extansive research and writing about Philippine history and Southeast Asia.

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POST SCRIPT

I was born in February 1941 (during World War II) in the Saxon farming town Mettersdorf
(Romanian Dumitri), Transylvania (now part of Rumania). The town is 10km north of the Saxon
city Bistritz (Romanian Bistrita). My ancestors lived there for 800 years.
In September 1944 all people of the town were forced to leave, going west by wagon train, and
ended up in Austria and Germany in December 1944.
We lived as refugees in Munderfing, Austria until June 1956. This is a farming town with a large
forest nearby. The native people were friendly and accommodating. My father worked as a
carpenter on construction projects. All children went to public schools. At home we spoke
Saxon, the local language is Baverian, and the national language is German. There were many
other refugees from other East European lands also there.
My parents decided to immigrate to America (we had relatives in Canada, but they were not
willing to sponsor us). In June 1956 we came to the industrial City of Detroit Michigan. I
completed my Engineering education there and then proceeded to work in all phases of design,
construction and management. I worked with confidence and interacted freely with all people
(white, black, German, Polish, Italian, Irish, Jew, Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Iraqis,
Iranians, Africans…).
I met my wife Carmelita Garcia Hansel in Detroit in 1990. She was on a study leave from
Mindanao State University, pursuing a PhD in Biology at Wayne State University in Detroit. She
grew up in Ginobatan, Albay. She completed her studies in 1991 and returned to Mindanao State
University in Marawi City, where she had been teaching since 1975.
I resigned from my work in Detroit in 1992 and came to Iligan City to marry her. I was surprised
to find such strong prejudices between “Christians” and “Muslims”; they look the same, and
their languages are related too. I soon started teaching in the College of Engineering in the Iligan
Institute of Technology (part of the Mindanao State University). I befriended neighbors, faculty
members of the University, and joined community organizations to try to understand these
prejudices. Over the years I received much help from personal interviews, publications, and
research. I concluded there are broad cultural differences, not clearly articulated, mostly based on
ignorance of each group’s own cultural history and changes of other people nearby.
We develop our cultural awareness subconsciously from the influence of our families and
immediate community, the environment and social conditions. Even from early age we believe
that our culture is more reasonable and superior to other cultures, leading to alienation from one
another. To overcome this, we need to know our own culture in a broader and historically deeper
and comprehensive measure, so we can even explain it to others.
The problem arises when people from distant cultures or changing nearby cultures live in the
same space. To allow toleration, people need to understand their own individual culture and then
the culture of the individuals of the others; then they have to communicate with each other so
they can understand each other. The next step is to establishing a consensus of values, goals, and
objectives of the community. Then cooperate to achieve, by measures satisfactory to the
community.
Your sense of community? Babies are completely self-centered, and then we develop sensitivity
to our mother, then other family members. Then…the clan…the tribe…language/religious
group…people living nearby….distant people? The environment?
Your planning horizon? Time frame, today…the week…the planting/harvest season…the
year…our lifespan…the next generation? John Hansel 243
APPENDIX

HUMAN BEGINNING
JAVA MAN (fossils) 1,000,000-500,000 years ago; 900ccm (cranial capacity)
PEKING MAN (fossils) 900,000-130,000 years ago; 1,075ccm
Tools, Communal living, Fire domesticated
NEANDERTHAL (bones) 300,000-30,000 years ago; 1,250-1,725ccm
Small groups, move frequently, stone tools, wood spears, hunt small and medium
animals, eat raw meat and some plants, use fire in cold areas, bury their dead, use
simple personal decorations, few lived over 40 years.
CRO-MAGNON 35,000-10,000 years ago; 1,590-1,880ccm
Blade tools, spear heads, bone tools, caves, rock shelter, houses, fairly settled;
hunters: reindeer, bison, mammoth. Engravings, cave paintings, sculptures, female
figures-fertility symbol? Ornaments, tools and weapons.
MODERN HUMAN, 50,000 years ago; 1,400-1,500ccm; from Sub-Sahara Africa
METAL AGES
Copper Age, from 3,200 BC
Bronze Age, from 2,300 BC
Iron Age, from 1,100 BC
UNIVERSAL MORAL CONCERNS
HARM vs. HELP
FAIRNESS (reciprocate favors, reward benefactors, punish cheaters)
LOYALTY (to the group, solidarity to members, conform to norms)
AUTHORITY (respect high status)
PURITY (cleanliness; sanctity vs. defilement, contamination, carnality)
(Richard Shweder, Alan Fiske)

LIFE EXPECTANCY
USA
1500 22 years
1700 34
1800 46
1900 49
1960 71
1900 1950 1990
Austria 38.8 64.5 77.0
Japan 43.6 61.4 79.2
USA 49.7 68.8 75.6

PHILIPPINES (NSO)
1975 59.9
1981 61.9
1997 68.8
2000 68.9
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INTERCULTURAL DIALOG

INTRODUCTION
The basis for major conflicts is the failure to adjust to changes in culture. The two major groups
of people living in the Lanao Provinces on the island of Mindanao, the Meranao and the Bisaya,
are sensitive to prejudices and mistrust toward each other. This has led to a lack of cooperation,
even to full scale violence on and off since the 1970s. This condition of mistrust and even
fighting has also become evident in on other parts of Mindanao, between various other cultural
groups. This of course works against development and progress in light of a growing population,
and aspirations for a better way of life for the population as a whole.

What were/are some of these differences and changes in culture?

Political power: From Datu/Sultan lead local autonomy and final authority, to elections
controlled from the outside with vague and uncertain authority.
Environmental changes: Destruction of the rainforest and other fragile eco-systems.
Money economy: From barter and exchange of services in kind, to money for everything.
Land use/ownership: From shifting subsistence cultivation on communal land to
 sedentary farming on private land ownership.
Religious believes/expressions: Varies from spirit conscientiousness in the environment
and of ancestors, to historic authoritative dogmas.
Transportation: From foot and animal to motor/engine vehicles. Easy travel even far distance.
Medical care: From hilot/homecare and herbs to expensive medicine and hospital stays.
Education: From learning practical knowledge, local customs and skills at home and
the clan, to formal education, from outside sources, many times with little
personal meaning to youth.
Mass media: Newsprint, radio, TV, telephone, cellphone, videogames, movies.
Outside warfare and proliferation of weapons: WWII, Viet Nam, Afghanistan…
Alcohol and illegal drugs: From home made sugarcane or palm fermentations to
manufactured products and proliferation of other addictive substances.
Livelihood: From local self-sufficiency, to interdependent distant and even global trade.
Energy: From local energy sources, to electricity and petroleum products.

Population Changes:
The population increased in the Philippines
from 0.6 million (1606), to 7.6 million (1903) 13 X increase
from 7.6 million (1903), to 76.5 million (2000) 10 X increase
The population increased in Mindanao
from 0.7 million (1903), to 18.1 million (2000) 26 X increase
The population increased in Lanao del Norte
from 8.2 thousand (1903), to 751.3 thousand (2000) 91 X increase

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Population density changes (people / HA):

1903 2000
Philippines 0.25 2.55 (10.2 X increase from 1903 to 2000)
Mindanao 0.07 1.90 (27.1 X increases ‘’ )
Cebu 1.42 5.38 (3.8 X increases ‘’ )
Bohol 0.70 2.95 (4.2 X increases ‘’ )
Layte 0.44 2.21 (5.0 X increases ‘’ )
Siquijor 1.72 2.83 (1.6 X increases ‘’ )

Philippine Poverty Statistics 2006:

Magnitude POOR Annual Income Per Capita % of Population

Povery Threshold (P) in Poverty
Philippines 15,057 32.9
Lanao del Norte 15,225 52.2

Magnitude Annual Income Per Capita % of Population

SUBSISTENCE POOR Povery Threshold (P) in Poverty
Philippines 10,025 14.6
Lanao del Norte 10,196 30.9
National Statistics Office

INTERCULTURAL DIALOG

DIALOG PLAN AND SCHEDULE OF ACTIVITIES

One day participative seminar

20 participants (multicultural, balanced, include male & female)
Subdivide into groups of 4 individuals, in proportion of multicultural representation
Dialog will be divided into five discussion segments
The subgroups may communicate in the language that each group agree to
Each subgroup shall select a recording secretary who takes notes of the dialog, and later
reports to the whole group.

8:00 – 8:30 Registration and introduction

8:30 – 9:15 First segment

Subgroups discuss portions of topics of individual experiences and ideas.
9:15 – 9:45 Subgroups report to the whole group.
Whole group clarification and discussion.

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9:45 – 10:30 Second segment
Subgroups discuss subsequent portions of topics of individual experiences and ideas.
10:30 – 11:00 Subgroups report to the whole group
Whole group clarification and discussion
11:00 – 11:45 Third segment
Subgroups discuss subsequent portions of topics of individual experiences and ideas.
11:45 – 12:00 Subgroups report to the whole group
Whole group clarification and discussion
Lunch

12:30 – 1:15 Fourth segment

Subgroups discuss subsequent portions of topics of individual experiences and ideas.
1:15 – 1:45 Subgroups report to the whole group
Whole group clarification and discussion

1:45 – 2:30 Fifth segment

Subgroups discuss last portions of topics of individual experiences and ideas.
2:30 – 3:00 Subgroups report to the whole group
Whole group clarification and discussion

3:00 – 4:00 Overall review, evaluations, clarifying discussion, comments, suggestions,

future plans.
This will be published for distribution.

DISCUSSION TOPICS

CULTURE: How a community copes with and solves basic practical problems.
Includes values (beliefs, morals, customs), laws, knowledge, art and other
capabilities and habits by members of society.

DIALOG, the first step in dealing with personal and community interests and concerns, for
purposes of UNDERSTANDING ONESELF AND ONE ANOTHER.
THE OTHER STEPS:
SEE IF WE CAN MUTUALLY RESPECT AND ACCEPT ONE ANOTHER.

AGREE ON VALUES AND GOALS:

Which values and variants will be tolerated and respected.
Which values will be enforced, fairly and consistently on everyone.
WHAT ARE THE NEEDS AND PROBLEMS OF THE COMMUNITY
WE the people of Mindanao will face our needs and problems and address
them ourselves with our own resources, instead of one group blaming
the other and waiting for Manila or some outsiders to solve our
problems.
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RULES FOR DIALOG: Try to speak from personal experiences, observations and ideas.

You can disagree with others, but without attacking or embarrassing.

TOPICS OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES AND IDEAS

ME, MY FAMILY, MY COMMUNITY

Where born, date, town, city, home, hospital
Name (how chosen, meaning), nickname, birth order
All family members, their roles and functions, male and female
Language spoken at home and in the community
Duties and responsibilities for everybody in the family; work, free time,
entertainment…is it different for male and female
All members, age, where born,
How many people in home, size of house, compound
Privacy, openness
Food, usually eaten
Number of brothers and sisters in family of parents, grandparents
Important occasions in the family (birth, weddings, death….)
Attitude, care, family planning, infants, children, aged, sickness
Helping, encouraging, entertaining, supporting, obligations
Explain Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Secularism
Reading material in house
How informed about changes in community
 How keep busy; positive, negative
Courting, marriage, relations of couple with their parents after marriage
Standing on own two feet, independent, dependent
Separation, divorce
Family discussions, disagreements, toleration
Quarrels, conflict, criticism, anger, fights. How deal with, resolve
Immoral, Illegal activities
Hospitality to relatives, strangers
How did I relate to everybody in the family
Joys, problems, difficulties, discipline, order, fear and punishment
Was I important, in what way
Shame, respect, extravagance, pride, social control
Are there spirits and unseen beings around us, who, where, what are their powers and
characteristics
Illness, causes, what to do
Death, care for the dead
Rituals and ceremonies
NATURE: trees (baliti), forest, mountains, rivers, lakes, typhoon, thunder, lightning,
rainbow, eclipse, earthquake

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ME GOING TO SCHOOL (elementary, high school)
Teacher competence, diligence, motivated
Priorities, purpose of school
My classmates, boys, girls
What did I learn, the other classmates, interesting, relevant
Problems with teachers, classmates, parents/relatives of classmates, arguments, fights
Social activities Community activities
Religious activities

ME GOING TO COLLEGE AND WORK

Importance of physical labor, intellectual engagement
MY EXTENDED FAMILY (cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews), MY CLAN, MY
RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY, MY FRATERNAL ORGANIZATION MEMBERS
Attitude to money
Generate wealth, individual, community
Begging in public
Land dispute
Financial need, laziness
Prejudices to those outside my clan, is OK to be prejudiced?
Gossip and rumors
Corruption, lawlessness
Alcohol and other drug abuse
Unemployment

MY CLAN TRIBE, TOWN, CITY

Leadership, formation, present, future planning, authority, power
Land availability and land ownership
Livelihood and creation of wealth
Class/cast consciousness and practice
What do people do as a community?
Important community events (weekly, monthly, yearly)
Strengths of the community
Problems in the community. How dealt with?
Relationship, prejudices to outsiders of the community
Food
Infrastructure (roads, sanitation, water), how/who planned, financed, build
What to do about the poor, sick, ignorant, helpless
Health care (maintenance and treatment)
Public education and literacy, reading, writing
Knowledge of own history, formal communication, books
Abuse of women and children
Law and law enforcement
Environmental preservation
Energy availability and use

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