(no subject)

Money does not occur in nature, says the historian Jack Weatherford.
Whether the first coins were used exactly as we use money now is open to doubt. The first coins would have been so valuable they could nvever have been anything like 'change'. The main breakthrough, to commodification, probably came with the introduction of bimetallic coinages, gold an silver and/or copper.
But the eventual change in life that the invention of money brought about was momentous. It was in a Lydian city, Sardis, that the first retail market was introduced, when anyone could come to the market and sell, for money, whatever they had.
More fundamentally, the advent of money enabled people to break out from their kin group. Money became the link between people, creating a nexus that had not been possible under the barter system. In the same way, money weakend traditional ties and that, in time, had profound political implications. Work and human labour became a commdity, with a coin-related value attached, and therefore time too could be measured in the same way. Ibid. p.71.

Money als vastly promoted international trade. This, more than anything, helped the spread of ideas around the globe. After Sardis, the great urban centres of the world were as likely to be market towns as places of worship, or the homes of kings. Ibid. p.72.

an alternative control mechanism emerges, one that allows for more flexible control of the flow of goods/services. Co-evolution of market-and-money is the greatest source of change in human society.

(no subject)

civilisation, as we now callit, occured only after early man had begun to live in cities. Cities were far more competitive, experimental environments than anything that had gone before. The city is the cradle of culture, the birthplace of nearly all our most cherished ideas. Ibid. p.74.
In the classical definition, civilisation consists of three or more of the following: cities, writing, the specialisation of occupation, monumental architecture, the formation of capital. But this, while not wrong, ingores the underlying principle. Sometime in the late fourth millenium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience for the new conditions rquired men and women to cooperate in ways they never had before. It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together - writing, law, bureacracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures. Ibid. p.75

not exactly. large scale systems do not survive unless they develop better distribution and control, which show up in different guises, like mass religion, education, storage (incl. writing as storage for ideas, banking as storage for control means), measurements ( as a standard interface for the goods flow control), money ( as a generic control means), etc.

(no subject)

it was the particular climatic conditions of Mesopotamia - where irrigation could markedly improve crop yiedls and where there is enough water available ( but in the wrong place) to allow this development [communal irrigation system] fairly easily and obviously. The crucial point wsa that though the land was now habitable, there was still so much water available that nearly every arable plot had easy and direct access to it. "This fact ... must have produced a "paradise", with multiple, high-yeld harvests each year'(check quote). An added factor was that the southern alluvial plains of Mesopotamia were lacking in other commodities, such as timber, stone, minerals, and metals. The food supply of this 'paradise' could be traded for these commdities, making for a dense network of contacts, and provided conditions for the development of specialist workers in the cities themselves. diverse population, going beyond simple kin groups. This was an exciting advance: for the first time people could become involved in activites not directly linked with food production. Yet this development would have raised anxiety levels: citizens had to rely on others, not their kin, for essentials. ... For these same reasons, religion may well have become more important in cities than in previous configurations. Ibid. p. 75

Emergence of food surplus created conditions for a large number of "synthesis" solutions, i.e. a lot of new supply systems had to be created from scratch. Temporal, spacial, and cultural differences between sources and destinations required a new system of trust. Thus personal religion became the foundation of a much more flexible/scalable control mechanism: mass religion.

(no subject)

calming a dying
cigarette - the coolness
of night grass

(no subject)

возраст неустойчивого равновестия, когда кажешься всесильным и детям и родителям.