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 CONTENTS

VOLUME 1
INTRODUCTION xi

A.1. Early Humans and the Origins of Complex Systems:

to 8000 B C E 1
1.1 Images: Early Hominins 1
1.2 Map: Global Language Groups 3
1.3 Image: Hunter-Gatherers 4
1.4 Images: Cave Paintings 4
1.5 Steven Mithen, “Last of the Cave Painters” 5

A.2. Patterns and Parameters: Development of the Agrarian

World since 10,000 B C E 9
2.1 Images: Ötzi the Ice Man 9
2.2 Ground Plans: Early Settlements 10
2.2a Çatal Höyük 10
2.2b Early Proto-Indo-European settlements 10
2.2c Mohenjo Daro 11
2.2d A Temple Ziggurat 11
2.3 Epidemic Disease 11
2.3a Plague in Athens from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars 11
2.3b The Plague of Justinian from Procopius, History of the Wars 14
2.3c “Rat Death” in China, 1792 17

vii
viii contents

A.3. The World of Early Complex Societies: 4000 BCE to 600 BCE 19
3.1 Oracle Bone Inscriptions 19
3.2 The Code of Hammurabi 20
3.3 A Peace Treaty between Ramesses II and Hattusili III 24
3.4 The Hymn to Purusha 27
3.5 Harappan Unicorn Seal 29

A.4. The Axial Age: 600 BCE to 300 BCE 31

4.1 Medicine 31
4.1a Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease 31
4.1b Yellow Emperor’s Classic on Medicine 33
4.2 Confucius, Analects 35
4.3 The Baghavad Gita 38
4.4 The Buddha, The Four Noble Truths 40
4.5 Zoroastrianism: Yasna 19 42
4.6 The Bible: The Book of Isaiah 43
4.7 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 45

A.5. The Age of Empires: 500 BCE to 400 CE 49

5.1 Pliny the Younger: Correspondence with Emperor Trajan 49
5.2 Res Gestae Divi Augusti 52
5.3 Asoka, Rock and Pillar Edicts 55
5.4 Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian 57
5.5 Huan Kuan: Discourses on Salt and Iron 59

A.6. Societies and Peoples: Everyday Life in the Agrarian World 65

6.1 Ban Zhao, Lessons for Women 65
6.2 The Code of Manu 68
6.3 The Life of St. Thomaïs of Lesbos 70
6.4 The Byzantine Farmer’s Law 73
6.5 Land Reform in Song China 76
6.5a Su Hsün, The Land System 77
6.5b Wang An-Shih, Memorial on the Crop Loans Measure 78

A.7. The Salvation Religions: 200 BCE to 900 CE 81

7.1 Mahayana Buddhism 81
7.1a The Lotus Sutra 81
7.1b Mou Tzu, The Disposition of Error 85
 Contents ix

7.2 Devotional Hinduism: The Vishnu Purana 87

7.3 Christianity 89
7.3a Romans 1, 5, 10; Matthew 5, 6 89
7.3b Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks 92
7.4 Islam 94
7.4a Quran, Selections 94
7.4b The Pact of Umar 98

A.8. Contested Intersections: Networks, Hierarchies,

and Traditional Worlds to 1500 101
8.1 Intersections 101
8.1a Guibert of Nogent, Revolt of the Laon commune 101
8.1b Guild Regulations 106
8.2 Wise Practitioners: The Arabian Nights 107
8.3 Informed Officials: Zhau Rugua, Description of the Barbarous Peoples 112
8.4 Worldly Travelers: Ibn Battuta, Travels 114

A.9. Traditional Worlds I: Inner Circuit Eurasia, 400 to 1100 119

9.1 The Steppes 119
9.1a Han Shu: Descriptions of the Xiongnu 119
9.1b Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 123
9.2 China 125
9.2a Du Fu, Poems 125
9.2b Chu Hsi, Further Reflections on the Things at Hand 126
9.3 Islam: Al-Jahiz, The Merits of the Turks 129
9.4 India: Abdul Raiban al-Biruni, Description of India 131
9.5 Byzantium 134
9.5a Digenes Akritas 134
9.5b The Russian Primary Chronicle 139

A.10. Traditional Worlds II: Outer Circuit Afro-Eurasia,

400 to 1100 143
10.1 Japan: Murasaki Shikubu, Tale of Genji 143
10.2 Ghana: Abu Ubayd Allah al-Bakri, The Book of Routes and Realms 146
10.3 Western Europe: William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi 149
10.4 Mali: Sundiata 153
x contents

A.11. Traditional Worlds III: Separate Circuits, 400 to 1500 157

11.1 Popol Vuh 157
11.2 Bernard de Sahagun, General History of New Spain 160
11.3 Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites 163
11.4 Pedro de Cieza de Leon, Chronicles 167

A.12. War, States, Religions: 1100 to 1400 171

12.1 First Crusade 171
12.1a The Siege of Antioch: Fulcher of Chartres, Chronicle 171
12.1b The Siege of Antioch: Ibn Al-Athir, The Perfect History 176
12.2 Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople 179
12.3 The Poem of the Cid 182
12.4 The Tale of the Heike 186
12.5 The Investiture Controversy 188
12.5a Dictatus Papae 188
12.5b Letter of Henry IV to Gregory VII 189
12.6 Magna Carta 190

A.13. The Crisis of the Mongol Age: 1200 to 1400 195

13.1 The Mongols 195
13.1a The Secret History of the Mongols 195
13.1b Ibn al-Athir, The Perfect History 199
13.2 The Plague 201
13.2a Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah 201
13.2b Ahmad al-Maqrizi, The Plague in Cairo 203
13.2c Boccaccio, Decameron 204
13.3 Tradition Reasserted: Dee Goong An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) 208

A.14. Innovation and Tradition: 1350 to 1550 213

14.1 Western Europe in Crisis 213
14.1a The Statue of Laborers of 1351 213
14.1b Froissart, Chronicles 215
14.2 China at Sea 218
14.2a Zheng He, Inscription of World Voyages 218
14.2b Ma Huan, Overall Survey of the Ocean Shores 221
14.3 Europe at Sea 223
14.3a Vasco da Gama, A Journal of the First Voyage 223
14.3b Christopher Columbus, Letter 226
14.4 Framing Innovation: Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists 229
 INTRODUCTION

T his is a book of primary sources designed to accompany Frameworks of World History.

Primary sources are the basic working material for working historians, including student
historians. Historical sources are pieces of the past that have come down to us today and that
allow us to reconstruct, at least partially, a model of the time and place of their origin. They
are the evidence that historians use to construct hypotheses of the past. But sources do not
really speak for themselves: historians must interpret them, and historical interpretation in-
volves many possible steps. Two sources can corroborate each other, if they agree, assuming
that they are truly independent sources (i.e., that one is not a copy of the other or that both
are copies of a lost original). Interpreting any source requires an explanatory model of the
world to guide that interpretation. The Frameworks model of networks, hierarchies, and
cultural frames and screens is one such model, and the text makes the model explicit so that
you can examine it, determine whether you agree with it, and use it to interpret the evidence
in this book. You can also invert the use of the evidence and the model by using the evidence
to test and refine the Frameworks model. That’s how science works—including historical
interpretation.
Let’s help you get into this process by exploring two questions. First, what is a primary
source? Second, how do you go about interpreting a primary source?

W H AT I S A P R I M A RY S O U RC E ?

Historians generally talk about two kinds of sources, primary sources and secondary sources.
“Primary” and “secondary” do not refer to the importance of a given source, either in general
or for the purposes of a particular historical investigation. In the most basic terms, primary
sources are sources from the time, place, and people under investigation. Thus, Abbot
Guibert of Nogent’s autobiography, which he wrote himself during his life in the early 1100s
(to be utterly clear to the point of silliness), is a fine primary source for Guibert’s life and even
for the events he reports on and the people he tells us about. We can even consider him a
primary source for aspects of the First Crusade, even though he did not witness it personally,

xi
xii introduction

because the information he gives us come from the time of the First Crusade. When his
reports are secondhand, however, we must be skeptical of the reliability of his information
more than we are of his personal narrative, and other sources, ideally eyewitnesses, should
corroborate any such information in his story. (We are skeptical of the reliability of his personal
narrative as well, but one person’s own biases about his or her own life are easier to assess than
the biases of any secondhand information.)
This definition of a primary source is idealized, of course. Things are not always simple or
straightforward. Sometimes we accept certain accounts as primary sources because they are as
close to the time period as we can get. Our sources for the life of Alexander the Great include
only a handful of truly primary sources: a brief inscription that mentions him in passing, a
handful of coins he issued, and the archaeological remains of his activities, including cities
and, in one spectacular case, a coastline that he altered. (He built a causeway out into the
Mediterranean during his siege of the island city of Tyre in 332 BCE. It remained after the
siege, silted up, and the island is now a peninsula.) But the major narratives we have of his life
and campaigns are Roman, they date from several hundred years after Alexander’s time, and
they do not show a particularly good understanding of his time. They refer to and sometimes
even incorporate bits and summaries of narratives written during Alexander’s time. We still
accept these Roman sources as “primary sources” for Alexander’s life because they are the
closest we can get.
What we’ve just said about sources for Alexander also demonstrates that primary sources
need not be written sources. Anything from the time and place we are studying can be a pri-
mary source: works of art, archaeological finds, scientific data about the natural world (the
natural world being, after all, an aspect of a time and place), and so forth. Even written evi-
dence comes in many forms beyond self-conscious narratives. Government documents, fic-
tional writing, daily newspapers, and mundane bits of writing such as grocery lists or restau-
rant menus—all of these can be primary sources.
Primary can of course still have its ordinary, non-history–specific meaning of “chief” or
“main”: “The primary source for my paper on Abraham Lincoln is the movie Abraham Lin-
coln: Vampire Hunter.” Primary here indicates that the film was the main source of informa-
tion you consulted. However, this would not a primary source in terms of types of historical
sources (nor would using primarily that source be a very good idea).
What then is a secondary source, if so many things can count as primary sources? Secondary
sources are sources that discuss the topic, the time, place, and people under study, but on the
basis of primary sources or of other second-hand accounts. Thus, if you were writing a paper
about Alexander the Great, any biography of him written by a current day historian (indeed,
any biography written after the Roman accounts that we characterized above as “just about
almost primary”) would be a secondary source, no matter how useful, informative, or well-
written a secondary source. And of course, like primary sources, not all secondary sources are
created equal. A scholarly biography of Alexander might be a good secondary source; a medi-
eval epic poem about Alexander consisting mostly of legends or a movie such as Oliver Stone’s
2004 Alexander? Not so much. To introduce a further complication, however: what if your
research topic were on “the historical reception of Alexander the Great from medieval times
to the present”, in which you examine what people at different times and places thought
 Introduction xiii

of Alexander, whether what they thought were true or not? In that case, both that legend-
encrusted medieval epic and today’s Hollywood dreck would be excellent primary sources.
And what if your research topic is something going on today (or close enough to be called
“contemporary history”—topics involving people who are still alive)? In that case you gain
the possibility of oral interviews, news footage, and so forth, as primary sources. But another
historian’s synthesis of such information, even though it is from the time of the topic, has al-
ready become a secondary source. Journalism, sometimes called “the first draft of history,”
lies in an interesting gray zone here.
Confused? Let’s sum up. Primary sources are sources whose information about a topic
comes, as closely as possible, from the time, place, and participants in the topic. For most
purposes, that will work for you. But this definition says nothing about the quality of the in-
formation a source offers. To evaluate that, we need to say a few things about how to read and
evaluate a primary source.

H OW TO R E A D A P R I M A RY S O U RC E

There are, as we have noted, many different kinds of primary sources. The interpretation of
some primary sources, such as the archaeological remnants of buildings and, even more, an-
cient bones and other natural substances, requires at least some specialized knowledge. We will
focus here on the most common kinds of sources selected for inclusion in this book, written
documents. The principles for reading these works for many visual sources as well, especially
ones such as paintings or drawings that tell a story.
Reading a source is like interrogating a witness in a trial. Reading a source productively—
so that its story gets you closer to understanding “what happened”—requires answering two
fundamental questions. First, how reliable is the source, that is, does its story give us a reason-
ably accurate representation of the reality it describes? Second, what information can we
derive from the source? These questions of assessment and interpretation are tied together.
Assessing the reliability of a source that purports to tell a factual story involves answering
the same questions you would ask of a living witness. Who is the witness? In other words, who
wrote or compiled the source? Sometimes we can’t answer this question precisely, as with a routine
government document (author: nameless bureaucrat) or an oral epic poem (author: many people
in a culture). But we can get a sense of what kind of person or persons created the source.
When and where did the author create the source? Were they close, temporally and chron-
ologically, to the events the source describes? Generally, the closer the better.
Finally, what can we know about why the author wrote the document? What audience did
the author intend to address and for what reason? How do these factors shape the story the
author tells? What you are trying to figure out with such questions is what the author’s
perspective is and whether the author has a bias. As the “Issues in Doing World History” box
in Chapter 27 of Frameworks says about historians, everyone has a perspective that comes from
where that person exists in time, place, social position, and so forth. The world will look dif-
ferent to an elite male author than to even a privileged woman, to any peasant, to a slave, or
to a member of an ethnic or religious minority. That an author has a perspective does not
mean the source is unreliable. Perspective is inevitable: a historian has to account for what
xiv introduction

a source author’s perspective allows him or her to see well, and what conversely that per-
spective might obscure. An author with a bias, on the other hand, is intentionally telling a
distorted story, such as an author writing a very partisan account from within a heated
political battle.
Once you have done a rough assessment of the reliability of the source, you can begin to
extract information from your witness. (These two steps often occur at the same time, of
course, because evidence from within the source can tell you about the source’s reliability.)
What can the source tell us?
One basic division among sources is between those that purport to tell a factual story and
those that are overtly fictional. In some ways, fictional sources are easier to deal with (includ-
ing sources that purport to tell a true story but obviously do not), because you can stop wor-
rying about the “truth” of the story. Instead, if the story comes from the time and place you
are studying and is reasonably representative of its time (and yes, that’s another hard ques-
tion), you can generally get two sorts of information fairly easily. First, what was “normal” at
the time in terms of everyday life? This is the social history question. You see this by ignoring
the main story and looking at the background details, the ones that are there because that’s
what the author assumed was normal about the world without thinking much about it.
Suppose, for example, you read the following passage in a murder mystery.
Investigator: Where were you on Thursday evening last week between 7 and 10?
Suspect: I was home watching The Simpsons on TV.
What do we know? We know nothing about what the suspect might actually have been
doing. Maybe he was at home, maybe he was out committing the heinous murder at the heart
of the plot. He’s an unreliable witness. But his very unreliability means that he will want his
story about what he was doing to sound plausible. Thus, we know about the people in this
society at this time that they had an easily observed system of timekeeping, that they had TVs,
that watching TV was a normal activity, that The Simpsons was probably a well-known show,
and that living in a private home was probably normal. So we know quite a bit.
The other thing we can learn from fictional sources is even more obvious. What did the
society believe? This is the cultural history question. From our brief passage above we can
infer something about beliefs regarding privacy, for example. But even more, if we step back
and observe that the passage came from a best-selling mystery novel, we can infer that myster-
ies were a form of popular entertainment. You can then interpret the whole story for at least
some of the beliefs, concerns, and outlooks of the culture from which the story came.
You can ask these same questions about nonfiction sources. But you can also ask further
questions about the particular events the source narrates. What happened? Who wanted what
to happen to whom? Why? When it comes to such factual questions, there are ways to assess
how reliable this particular information is. The two main ways are to test the source against
physical reality and against what other sources say. The physical reality test is especially good at
evaluating the often unreliable numbers in older sources: Herodotus claims that the Persian
king Xerxes marched a million men across a pontoon bridge on his way to invading Greece.
Not possible. Testing against other sources can mean using not just individual sources, but
what other similar sources say in general. This is what the Frameworks model is: a generalization
based on many primary sources. So test a source against the model. Does what it describes fit
 Introduction xv

the model? If so, that suggests a reliable source. If it doesn’t, perhaps the source is unreliable,
or perhaps the model needs some modification. Your call.
Let’s finish this with a brief example of extracting information from a source. These are a
well known pair of judgments from The Code of Hammurabi:

196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.
199. If he put out the eye of a man’s slave, or break the bone of a man’s slave, he shall
pay one-half of its value.

This is the famous “eye for an eye” judgment and a less well-known but similar clause.
What do they tell us? The easy answers are that the Babylonians dealt with crime by means of
physical punishment, and that their society had slaves, and that the punishment for a crime
varied with the status of the victim. In other words, this was a society with class divisions.
Other pieces of the Code confirm and extend those conclusions, which fit the general patterns
of early state-level complex societies.
What else can we learn? Well, we know that the “code” looks on close reading more like a
set of judgments or precedents than a set of laws, so we can safely assume that the crimes
mentioned not only happened, but probably happened frequently enough that is was worth
the king’s while to advertise the punishment. They were carved into a massive pillar set in the
middle of Hammurabi’s city. We can therefore infer that at least some people in the society
could read. Those who couldn’t, we can guess, might have been impressed by the size and
complexity of the pillar. The Code therefore served to display royal power—again, a common
theme for early states (and later ones, too).
There is even more to learn from these passages (see Chapter 3 of Frameworks for what
this passage says about limiting vengeance, for example). The sources collected here, in other
words, are rich in information about many of the people and places of the past. Dig in and
enjoy doing history.
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 SOURCES FOR
FRAMEWORKS OF
WORLD HISTORY
This page intentionally left blank
 C H A P T E R 1

Early Humans and the Origins

of Complex Systems: to 8000 bce

INTRODUCTION

Written sources do not exist for the period covered by this chapter. In their place, we examine
various kinds of visual evidence and one modern reconstruction of the lives of people living in the
late Hunter-Gatherer Era. Interpreting visual evidence is not as different from interpreting written
evidence as you might think, especially when you are viewing works of art that have authors,
intended audiences, and points of view. But ancient archaeological artifacts, which are simply sur-
viving physical evidence of the past, are more complicated. To be comprehensible, scientific study
of the objects must be brought to bear. These sources illustrate both kinds of objects that survive and
the kinds of conclusions different scientists can draw from them.

HOMININ RECONSTRUCTIONS

The remains of our predecessors in the primate-hominin-homo part of the evolutionary bush are usually pre-
sented as fragmentary skeletal remains: femurs (thighbones, which can give clues about whether the species in
question walked upright, for example), teeth (the toughest and thus most common kind of remain, which can tell
us about diet), and, most interestingly, skulls. But imagining the humanity, the sense of relatedness, of one of our
predecessor species from a skull is difficult. Combining a number of strands of forensic paleoarchaeology and
medical advances, a team at Yale created reconstructions of twenty two extinct species of “humans” from such
skeletal remains. We present four here in chronological order.

1.1a: Australopithecus 1.1b: Homo Erectus Georgicus

East Africa, between 4 and 2 million years ago. Caucasus, 1.8 million years ago; a subspecies of Homo
erectus.
1.1c: Homo Floresiensis
Island of Flores (Indonesia), c. 100,000 to 12,000 years 1.1d: Homo Neanderthalensis
ago; probably a speciation from homo erectus by Europe and Southweast Asia; c. 500,000 to 27,000
island dwarfism. years ago.

1
2 sources for frameworks of world history

a b

c d
From: Deak,Viktor, The Last Human, (Yale UP, 2007), pp. 75, 155, 181, 213.
 Early Humans and the Origins of Complex Systems: to 8000 BCE 3

QUESTIONS:

1. What physiological changes from Australopithecus to Neanderthals stand out most clearly in these recon-
structions? How do these changes seem significant?
2. How “human” does each reconstruction seem? If modern humans are a “10” on the humanity scale, where
does each of these rate? If forced into a yes/no answer, which ones would you give a “yes” to?

1.2: Movements of Early Human Language Groups

Two kinds of evidence converge to support the “out of Africa” hypothesis of the origins of the modern human
species. The first is genetic: genetic diversity is far higher in Africa than anywhere else in the world, with the rest
of the world therefore presumably descending from a subset of Africans who migrated. The second is linguistic,
with the evidence of language diversity telling the same story that genetics does. One specific part of that evi-
dence has to do with the number of distinct sounds, or phonemes, languages have. The languages with the most
separate phonemes, as this map shows, are African. Those with the fewest are those farthest from their African
origins. Linguists have found that new sounds are rarely added to languages, but that sounds are regularly lost.
The implication is that language, and the entire Cognitive Linguistic Revolution, started in Africa.

GERMAN MANDARIN
41 32
phonemes phonemes

HAWAIIAN
13
phonemes

!XU
141
phonemes GARAWA PIRAH
22 11
phonemes
phonemes

From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1377150/Every-language-evolved-single prehistoric-mother-tongue-

spoken-Africa.html.

QUESTIONS:

1. What does the high density of separate phonemes in African languages suggest about early language and the
communication systems that preceded it?
2. In later languages in perfectly complex cultures but with far fewer phonemes (such as Hawaiian), what
mechanisms, linguistic or cultural, might enable a language/culture to make up for the paucity of phonemes
in allowing people to express themselves as fully as anyone else?
4 sources for frameworks of world history

1.3: Hunter-Gatherers
Studies of the few remaining hunter-gatherer peoples of today’s world can provide some evidence of what life
might have been like for our pre-agricultural ancestors, though interpreting that evidence is fraught with dangers.
(In a nutshell, we cannot simply read today’s hunter-gatherers back into the past because inevitably they have
been affected by contact, however tenuous, with the industrial world, if only through anthropologists studying
them!) But the evidence is not useless, and can help us ask better questions of the archaeological evidence we
have. These pictures are of a Hadzabe hunter in Tanzania, in the East African Rift region where the modern human
species may have first evolved, and a Huaorani Indian carrying hunted howler monkeys and coati in Yasuni
National Park, Amazon rainforest, Ecuador.

1.3a: Bow Hunter 1.3b: Hunter

QUESTIONS:

1. What can you infer about life among hunter gath-

erers from these photographs?
2. Anthropologist Daniel Everett, who lived among the
Pirahá, another Amazonian hunter-gatherer group,
describes them as the happiest people he has ever
met. What about the lifestyle you see here might
contribute to high levels of personal satisfaction?

1.4: Cave Paintings

The Cognitive Linguistic Revolution made humans not only better hunters, as the Hadzabe and Huaorani dem-
onstrate, but also gave us the capacity to make art, religion, and other forms of meaning (though not all people
automatically invent all such forms: the Pirahá have no belief in the supernatural, it seems). Among the earliest
and most impressive evidence for “modern” cognitive-linguistic capacities among early Homo sapiens popula-
tions are the cave paintings in parts of France and Spain. These paintings of a horse and a bull in Lascaux cave in
France are excellent examples.
 Early Humans and the Origins of Complex Systems: to 8000 BCE 5

1.4a: Lascaux Bull 1.4b: Lascaux Horse

From: Art Resource, NY.

QUESTIONS:

1. Based on these two pictures, make a list of what you know about the people who made them.
2. What do you think of these paintings as art? What does your answer assume about what art is for?

1.5: Last of the Cave Painters

The question of what the cave paintings were for has generated debate among experts for decades. In this brief
selection, anthropologist Steven Mithen offers his answer. It comes from his book After the Ice, which surveys the
changes in habitation, lifestyle, technology, and culture among various human communities in the period from
about 20,000 years ago, when the last Ice Age began to give way to global warming, to about 10,000 years ago
on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution.

LAST OF THE CAVE PAINTERS The tradition of painting and carving animals,
Economic, Social and Cultural Change especially horse and bison, together with abstract
in Southern Europe, 9600–8500 BC signs and human figures, had lasted for more than
20,000 years. It had extended from the Urals to
The date is 9500 BC. Somewhere in southern
southern Spain, and produced masterpieces by the
Europe the last of the ice-age cave artists is at work.
score: the painted bison of Altamira, the lions of
He or she is mixing pigments and painting upon a
Chauvet, the horses of Lascaux, the carved ibex
wall, perhaps a horse or a bison, perhaps a line of
from Mas d’Azil. For more than 800 generations,
dots or merely touching up a painting made long
artists had inherited the same concerns and the
ago. And that will be it: more than 20,000 years of
same techniques. It was by far the longest-lived art
cave painting—perhaps the greatest art tradition
tradition known to humankind, and yet it virtually
humankind has ever known—will have come to
disappeared overnight with global warming.
an end. . . .
6 sources for frameworks of world history
Had the closed woodlands also closed people’s
minds to artistic expression? Was the Mesolithic a
time when ancient knowledge was forgotten—‘the
dark age’ of the Stone Age? Well, no, not at all. The
cave art tradition ended simply because there was
no longer a need to make such art. The paintings
and carvings had never been mere decoration; nor
had they been the inevitable expression of an inher-
ent human creative urge. They had been much
more than this—a tool for survival, one as essential
as tools of stone, clothes of fur, and the fires that
crackled within the caves.
The ice age had been an information age—the
carvings and paintings the equivalent of our CD-
ROMs today. Ambush and bloody slaughter had
been easy: as long as the right people were in the
right place at the right time, ample supplies of food
could be acquired. Rules were then required to
ensure distribution without conflict. An abundance
of food in one region had meant scarcity elsewhere—
groups had to be willing to join together and then
to split apart; to do so they needed to know which
group was where, and to have friends and relations
that could be relied upon in times of need. Because
herds of animals are prone to unpredictable extinc-
tions the hunters required alternative hunting
plans, always ready to put into practice.
To solve such problems, information was
crucial—knowledge about the location and move-
ments of animals, about who was living and hunt-
ing where, about future plans, about what to do in
times of crisis. The art, the mythology and the reli-
gious ritual served to maintain the constant acqui-
sition and flow of information.
When groups joined together once or twice a
year for ceremony, painting and ritual, such as at
Pech Merle, Mas d’Azil and Altamira, they also ex-
changed vital information about animal move-
ments. Such groups would have spent the previous
year living apart, some in the uplands, some on the
coastal plains; some had made long treks to visit
distant relations, others had watched for the arrival
of migratory birds. There was a lot to tell and
even more to find out. The religious beliefs of
the hunter-gatherers provided sets of rules for the
sharing of food when necessary. Cave paintings had
not only depicted the tracks of animals, but had
shown them in the act of defecating, and with their
antlers and fatty parts exaggerated. Such pictures
were the stimulus for accounts of what had been
seen, for teaching the children; they contained the
signs that a hunter must look for when searching
for prey and selecting a victim in the months to
come. The mythological stories contained survival
strategies for those inevitable but unpredictable
years of hardship.
So, for as long as the annual ceremonies and
rituals were performed, and people had opportuni-
ties to gossip, to swap ideas and observations, to
recount tales of hunters’ exploits, to reaffirm social
bonds, to learn yet more about the animals around
them, information flowed and society flourished—
as far as it could under the constraints of an ice-age
climate.
Life in thick woodland after 9600 BC did not
exact the same demands. Animals were now largely
hunted on a one-to-one basis; with no mass kills
there were no surpluses to manage. Narrow valleys
and river crossings no longer had the same signifi-
cance; there was no longer a need to have people in
precisely the right place at the right time. Neither
was there the need to know what was happening
many miles away, either in the natural or in the
social world. Hunting could effectively take place
anywhere, any time, by anyone. And if animals
could not be found, there were plenty of plant
foods to gather and limpets to collect. Just like the
red deer, people began to live in smaller, more scat-
tered groups, becoming increasingly self-sufficient.
Periodic gatherings still took place but these
were to solve problems of maintaining social ties,
to allow people to marry, to exchange raw materials
and food, to learn and teach new techniques of
basketry and weaving. There was no longer the
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Corning
Egg Farm book, by Corning himself
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: The Corning Egg Farm book, by Corning himself

Author: Edward Corning

Gardner Corning

Release date: November 5, 2023 [eBook #72042]

Language: English

Original publication: Bound Brook: The Corning Egg Farm, 1912

Credits: deaurider, Harry Lamé and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

CORNING EGG FARM BOOK, BY CORNING HIMSELF ***
Please see the Transcriber’s Notes
at the end of this text.
Most illustratons may be enlarged
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 CORNING STRAIN UTILITY COCKEREL
Four Months and Twenty Days Old

THE CORNING
E G G FA R M B O O K
BY CORNING HIMSELF

BEING THE COMPLETE AND AUTHENTIC

STORY OF THE CORNING EGG FARM
FROM ITS INCEPTION TO DATE

TOGETHER WITH FULL DESCRIPTION OF THE

METHOD AND SYSTEM THAT HAVE MADE
THIS THE MOST FAMOUS POULTRY
FARM IN THE WORLD

BOUND BROOK, NEW JERSEY

T H E C O R N I N G E G G FA R M
PUBLISHERS
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
GARDNER CORNING
 CONTENTS

PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 13

CHAPTER I
The Building of the Corning Egg Farm 21
Started with 60 Buff Rock Eggs 22
More Money in Eggs 25
Adopted White Leghorns 25
First Use of Roosting Closets 27
We Count only Livable Chicks 30
Percentage of Cockerels Low 31
The Great Flock System Succeeds 33
Foreigners Visit the Farm 34
Investigated for Germany 35
Selection of Cockerels 36
Pullets Lay in 129 Days 37
Keeping Down Labor Bill 39
Adopted Hot Water Incubators 40
Why Great Farms Fail 41

CHAPTER II
Egg Farming the Most Profitable Branch of Poultry
Keeping 43
Developing the Great Layer 43
Corning Method in Small Flocks 44
On Large Farms 46
 CHAPTER III
What is a Fresh Egg? An Egg Should be Sanitary as
Well as Fresh 48
Manure Drainage to Drink 48
Diseased Meat to Eat 49
As the Food, so the Egg 49
A Perfect Egg a Rarity 50
Unlimited Demand for Quality Eggs 50

CHAPTER IV
Preparation of Eggs for Market 54

CHAPTER V
Selection of the Breed.—The Strain is of Utmost
Importance 58
S. C. White Leghorns Outclass All 59
Line Breeding—Not Inbreeding 61
How Corning Farm Produces Unrelated Cockerels 62

CHAPTER VI
Advantages of Large Flock System—Reduces Cost of
Housing and Economizes in Time and Labor 64
Draughts the Stumbling Block 65
2,000 Birds to a House 66

CHAPTER VII
What is a Winter Layer?—The Properly Hatched and
Reared Pullet 68
Must Feed Green Food 69
 CHAPTER VIII
A Great Laying Strain—The Selection of Breeders to
Produce It 71
Eighteen Months Old 71
Trap Nests a Failure 72
Type Reproduces Type 73

CHAPTER IX
Best Time to Hatch 76
Experiment in Late Hatching 78

CHAPTER X
Succulent Green Food—Satisfactory Egg
Production Impossible Without It 80
Sprouted Oats Best 82
How They are Grown on the Farm 82
Timothy and Clover Cut Green 84

CHAPTER XI
Anthracite Coal Ashes—A Substitute for Many More
Expensive Necessities 86
Better Than Charcoal 87

CHAPTER XII
Eggs for Breeding Should be Laid by a Real Yearling
Hen 89
90,000 Orders for 40,000 Eggs 90

CHAPTER XIII
Policing the Farm with Bloodhounds, etc. 92
Shoot First—Investigate Afterward 92
Socrates, the Great Bloodhound 93

CHAPTER XIV
Necessity for Pure Water—An Egg is Chemically 80%
Water 96
Automatic Fountains Essential 96
Hot Water in Cold Weather 97
Hens Drink More in Afternoon 97

CHAPTER XV
Hard Coal Ashes, Oyster Shell, and Grit 99

CHAPTER XVI
Beef Scrap and Green Bone Substitutes for Nature’s
Animal Food 101
Green Cut Bone Nearest Nature 101

CHAPTER XVII
A Time for Everything—Everything on Time 103
Fixed Feeding Hours 103
Four Collections of Eggs Daily 105
Mash Fed in Afternoon 105

CHAPTER XVIII
Incubation on the Corning Egg Farm 106
Hen Reigns Supreme 106
Livable Chicks—Not Numbers 107
Uniform Temperature Most Important 108
Ventilation and Moisture Next 108
 Hot Water Machines Best 110
Corning Incubator Cellar Unequaled 111
Eggs Turned from Third to Eighteenth Day 112
103 Degrees Maintained 112
Cool But Never Cold 113
Cover Glass Doors 114
All Good Chicks Hatch in 20 Days 114
Set Incubators Toward Evening 115
Tested Only on Eighteenth Day 116
Moisture 117
Chicks Handled Only Once 117
Baby Chick Business Cruel 118

CHAPTER XIX
Rearing Chicks in Brooder House—The Following
Two Years’ Results Depend Upon Success
in Brooding 121
Corn Not Proper Chick Food 122
Follow Nature’s Teaching 122
A Balanced Food 123
Never Build a Double House 126
Must Drain Chick Runs 127
Concrete Floors Mean Dampness 127
Corning Heated Brooder House 128
Corning Feeds Dry Food Only 129
Three Feeds Daily 129
Green Food Third Day 130
Animal Food Tenth Day 130
Avoid Moving Chicks Often 132

CHAPTER XX
Handling Birds on Range—The Youngsters Must be
Kept Growing All the Time 134
 A Corning Wrinkle 135
Grain and Mash Once a Day 137
Plenty of Shade 139
Removed to Laying House Middle of September 140

CHAPTER XXI
Feeding for Eggs—Wholesome Nourishment—Not
Destructive Stimulants 143
Easy Assimilation 143
Perfect Health or No Eggs 144
Abundant Animal Food 144
The Corning Mash the Secret 145
“Egg Foods” Kill Layers 146
Mustard Increases Egg Laying 147
Mustard Increases Fertility 148
4,000 Layers Fed Mustard 149
Mustard Maintains Health 150
Keep Appetite Keen 150

CHAPTER XXII
Breeding Hens During Moult—Coming Breeders Must
be Kept Exercising Through This Period 153
Do Not Overfeed 154

CHAPTER XXIII
Feeding the Breeding Cockerels 156

CHAPTER XXIV
Preparing Surplus Cockerels for Market 157
Must Have Green Food 158
 CHAPTER XXV
$6.41 Per Hen Per Year 159
$6.41 Not Extravagant Claim 160
Corning Farm Makes More Than $6.41 161

CHAPTER XXVI
The Buildings on the Corning Egg Farm 163
No. 1, Brooder House, Incubator and Sprouted
Oats Cellars 164
Building No. 2, Work Shop, etc. 167
Building No. 9, Horse Stable 169
Building No. 10, Wagon Shed 170
Building No. 12, Office Building 170

CHAPTER XXVII
Construction of Laying, Breeding, and Breeding
Cockerel Houses 171
Nearly Six Feet from Ground 172
Double Floors 173
Canvas Windows 174
Double Doors 176
Draught-Proof Roosting Closets 177

CHAPTER XXVIII
The Colony Houses—There are Forty-one on the
Farm 180
Cotton Duck Windows 181

CHAPTER XXIX
Materials Required for Laying Houses 182
 Bill of Material for the Construction of Colony 183
House

CHAPTER XXX
The Original Thirty Hens 184

CHAPTER XXXI
Egg Records 186
How Corning Farm is Able to Get Great Egg
Records 187
Highest Percentage of Fertility 188

CHAPTER XXXII
Prevention and Treatment of Diseases 190

CHAPTER XXXIII
A Word in Closing 192
Nothing to Hide 193
Illustrations are Photographs 193
The Corning Success 193
Our Advice to Beginners 194
Single Comb White Leghorns Only 194
It’s “Strain” You Want 194
Utility, Not Show Birds 195
Corning Largest Specialty Farm in World 195
Points That Mean Success 196
BUILDINGS ON THE CORNING EGG FARM AND MANY
HANDY DEVICES 198
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Corning Strain Utility Cockerel Frontispiece

FACING PAGE
1. Lay-Out of Farm 16
2. Interior Sterile Laying House No. 3, in 1910 22
3. Entrance to Farm in 1909 24
4. As You Approach the Farm, 1911 28
5. Office Building 30
6. Breeding Cockerels, Fall of 1909 34
7. Interior Laying House No. 2, in 1910 38
8. Panoramic View of the Farm 46
9. Thirty Dozen Corning Sanitary Fresh Eggs Ready to
Ship 54
10. The Strain that Makes the Corning Egg Farm
Famous 58
11. Three Sterile Laying Houses Containing 4,500
Pullets 64
12. Interior Laying House No. 1, in 1910 68
13. One of the Breeding Houses just after Mating, 1910 72
14. Sprouted Oats Cellar 78
15. Two-Weeks-Old Chicks in Brooder House Runs 84
16. Yearling Hens in Breeder House before Mating 90
17. “Socrates,” the Great Bloodhound Which Heads the
Corning Kennels 92
18. “Socrates II” and “Diogenes” 94
19. Buster, America’s Greatest Ratter 94
20. Corning Automatic Drinking Fountain 96
21. Part of the Old Incubator Cellar 104
22. Brooder House, Showing Chick Runs 120
23. Old Arrangement of Brooder House 124
24. Chicks Six Weeks Old 128
25. Colony Range Feed and Water Wagon with “Billy” 136
26. Feeding on the Colony Range 140
27. Baskets of Eggs 150
28. Breeding Cockerels, Fall of 1911 156
29. No. 3 Laying House Filled with 1,500 Pullets 158
30. The Workshop on the Corning Egg Farm 162
31. The Celebrated Corning Large-Flock Laying House
No. 3 170
32. Laying House Prepared to Receive 1,500 Pullets
from Range 172
33. One of the Breeding Houses in 1911 174
34. The Corning Colony House 178
35. Breeding House in 1907—The Original Corning
House 182
36. Pullets in Laying House No. 2, Fall of 1911 184
37. Diagrams and Detailed Plans of Buildings, etc. 199
 INTRODUCTORY
The Method, and the style of the buildings, evolved and worked
out on The Corning Egg Farm, when put into book form proved so
helpful to so vast a number of poultry keepers, that the sale of this
first literature, which for a time was added to as the months went by,
reached the enormous total of over 140,000 copies in eighteen
months.
The writings were the simple, plain statements of facts, and
enabled others who followed them to reach a success which, until
this System was used, may have been dreamed of, but was never
realized.
The literature from this Farm has gone out over the entire civilized
World, and the visitors, who arrive in ever increasing numbers from
month to month, come from every quarter of the Globe.
The Corning Egg Farm has been written of in periodicals of every
nature, and in almost every language the World over. For the last
twelve months the requests for further, and more explicit, detailed
information relative to breeding and feeding for eggs, the specialty
from which The Corning Egg Farm has never swerved, have become
a demand. So that, after mature deliberation, it was decided to write
the history of The Corning Egg Farm, from its inception to date,
including the work of the last two years, which has never before
been fully published.
“The Corning Egg Farm Book by Corning Himself” is to-day the
only publication giving facts in regard to the Farm and its unique
Method right up to date.
As the book is read it must be borne in mind that, in breeding to
produce a great layer, at first very marked increases in the number of
eggs during the first ten months of laying may be gained. The
general average number of eggs laid each year, from official reports,
is less than 100 per hen. On The Corning Egg Farm, when the
average had reached 143.25 eggs, the next jump, in the following
year, was more than had been expected, and the record of 145.11
eggs for each hen for ten months, though showing an increase
apparently small, in reality was a very great advance indeed.
From this time on, the gain, although representing a narrower
margin of increase, was in reality a much greater achievement. The
trotting horse may serve as an illustration. When Dexter trotted his
famous mile he clipped off a number of seconds from the previous
record, and it seemed as if it would be a matter of considerable time
before his mark would be lowered. But within a comparatively short
time a number of trotters turned off a mile in two-ten, and from this
figure, within a short period, a large company of famous horses had
reached the two-five mark, but every quarter of a second which
reduced this mark meant greater achievement in breeding than was
represented by the reduction of records from two-sixteen to two-five,
and we have not yet seen the horse which, in single harness, without
a running mate, can turn the mile track in two minutes flat.
The Corning Egg Farm realizes that from this on improvement will
be shown by fractional figures, but these fractions will represent a
greater progress than the figures which have gone before.
Two years ago the unequaled results of The Corning Egg Farm
had seemed unsurpassable, but to-day we are able to look back
from higher ground and see the road over which we have traveled to
reach a point very considerably beyond the unequaled position of
two years ago.
It is our hope and aim, year by year, to improve the present
position. The man who believes he has learned all there is to learn is
a failure. The successful man is the one who is sure there is an
opportunity to advance considerably beyond the point he has already
attained, and The Corning Egg Farm believes this to be true, and
has constantly worked with that idea before it.
With an experience back of them of nearly six years the Builders
of The Corning Egg Farm know that this Book furnishes the
necessary guide for success in poultry culture. What has been, and
what is being, done at The Corning Egg Farm is not experimental
work. Successful results follow the Method and System employed as
surely as day follows night. It is no longer necessary for the novice to
try out the various plans proposed to him by the literary poultryman,