Part 1. "Manaus"
The logistic theory of civilization provides the basis for an objective and impartial study of the history of civilization from ancient times to the present.
The name of the theory is determined by the main object of research - the history of logistics of commodity flows, that is, it is based on natural, obvious, objectively verifiable phenomena and facts that have an exact geographic reference: places of extraction of resources, routes of their transportation and places of consumption by civilization.
Let's start with obvious examples: the “speaking” names of the cities of Shakhty and Marganets in Donetsk region, Apatity in Murmansk region, Magnitogorsk, Nefteyugansk and others seem to suggest what kind of resource they were created for. The curious state of Panama was created as a service area for the Panama Canal.
The city-forming enterprises of many newly emerging cities are fairly easy to find and their relationship with the emergence / development of the city is not particularly surprising.
How "civilizations flourish and collapse" is best seen on the example of the now little-known Brazilian city of Manaus, which is located right in the middle of South America in the real jungle at the confluence of the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers.
In the forests surrounding Manaus, you can find overgrown palaces with the remains of luxurious furniture, pianos and other junk. People left these places suddenly. And a person who does not know history could reason that a mighty civilization once existed here, which was destroyed by barbarians / epidemic / aliens, and also make other guesses, which are customary to do when some ancient structures were discovered.
Promotional video:
Indeed, more than a hundred years ago, civilization came here, and about twenty years later it left. But the reasons are more mundane.
As you know, civilization comes somewhere under the following conditions:
- civilization knows that there is some resource here;
- this resource was suddenly required by civilization;
- there are communication routes to the resource that allow you to take it out of the mining site;
- at the moment it is more profitable to extract the resource in this place
With point number 3, i.e. By means of communication, Manaus is more than good - it is a seaport in the heart of the South American continent, the depth of the Amazon allows ocean-going ships to pass through there.
Condition No. 1 also seems to have been known to civilization for a long time, almost from the 16th century - in the forests surrounding Manaus, hevea trees grow, the juice of which is the source of natural rubber.
It is not very clear why condition number 2 unexpectedly worked and civilization suddenly fell on natural rubber. Most cite the increased demand for tires for carriages, cars, bicycles and other vehicles. Someone mentions the insulation of electrical cables and wires. One way or another, since 1879, the Latin American countries of the Amazon basin have been seized by the so-called "rubber fever".
Until this moment, Manaus existed almost in suspended animation, at least in 1856, when it was renamed from Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Barra do Rio Negro to more similar to the modern name Manáos, it had as many as 1200 inhabitants. There is no information that anything has changed there before 1879.
And suddenly, everything began to stir. In Manaus, enterprising businessmen came in large numbers who hired local residents to collect rubber. It's nothing that many have died from snakebites.
The export of rubber raw materials led to an inflow of foreign currency to these countries, but up to 90% of the proceeds were spent by the Brazilians on the consumption of imported goods (especially luxury goods), and not on strengthening their own industries.
The golden age of Manaus began in 1890 - the city became the capital of the export of rubber, which was collected in the Amazonian forests. On the proceeds from rubber In 1895, the first electric tram in South America was launched, on October 22, 1896, some residential buildings were electrified, on December 31 of the same year, the world's largest theater, Amazonas, was opened. On January 17, 1909, the country's first university was opened. In just 20 years, Manaus has gagged all sorts of Rio de Janeira and other Buenos Aires. But here the fairy tale ends. In 1910, rubber prices began to fall and the golden age ended - condition # 4 disappeared.
Poor organization of Latin American producers, unsanitary working conditions, the emergence of new viruses infecting rubber trees, and increased competition from the UK, seeking to start rubber production in its equatorial colonies, put an end to the first phase of the Latin American boom, which ended as suddenly as it began. Many fabulously wealthy planters went bankrupt, abandoned their homes, and the workers were naturally also abandoned in the jungle to their fate. Nevertheless, the rubber fever gave rise to the modern development of the region: then new cities were laid, railways were built, the rudiments of infrastructure were created.
In 1879 the Englishman Henry Wickham exported about 40 thousand seeds of Hevea to London. By 1914, vast hevein plantations occupied significant areas in British Malaysia, later also in other equatorial countries of Asia and, to a lesser extent, Africa. Their greater success was due to the high density of plantations, as well as the absence of Amazonian fungi, which in the Amazon naturally control the number of a single species in order to preserve the biological diversity of species in the jungle.
In 1942-1945. pro-fascist Japan took over most of the European colonies in southeast Asia. The industry of the USA and Great Britain was in dire need of rubber during the war years. Therefore, demand arose even for Brazilian raw materials. During these years, the Brazilians built the Belensky Grand Hotel with the proceeds from the sale of rubber.
For the first time in the world, rubber synthesis on a large factory scale was carried out in 1932 in the USSR according to the method developed by S. V. Lebedev. In 1938, the industrial production of styrene-butadiene rubbers was organized in Germany, in 1942 - a large-scale production of synthetic rubbers in the USA. By 1972, synthetic rubbers were produced in more than 20 countries, and rubber plantations from those are no longer needed by anyone. And so it will be as long as everything is fine with oil and energy.
Part 2. "On the role of water transport"
Without going into the details of the logistic theory of civilization, which is detailed in the book, we will focus on only one important conclusion from it, which allows us to reconstruct historical events.
On the one hand, the main principle of my methodology is very simple: modeling the spread of civilization along communication routes. On the other hand, we are, approximately, in the situation of an old anecdote, when one student says to another just before the anatomy exam: "Come on, quickly tell me about the large and small circulation." The modern world transport system is comparable in complexity to the human circulatory system, if we take into account the capillaries:
On the diagram of human circulation, veins are shown in blue, arteries are shown in red; on the map of world transport, cities are red, blue - sea routes, green - land road network, white - air transport, taking into account traffic intensity
Basics of learning: from general to specific and from simple to complex
Before tackling very complex transport schemes with a huge variety of resources / goods transported in different directions, you need to learn how to deal with simpler schemes.
Our task is facilitated by the fact that from the deepest antiquity until the second half of the 19th century, that is, before the massive spread of railways, the only cost-effective mode of transport was water - sea and river, which is clearly visible on old maps:
On the map of Europe compiled by Mercator, rivers are highlighted as the main routes of communication
Reconstruction of ancient maritime transport routes is an extremely difficult task, therefore, to begin with, we focus on seaports, “land entry points”. But rivers - natural waterways of antiquity - can be found on a physical map and on this objective basis one can construct step by step the spread of civilization over the earth. You just need to know how it's done. And everyone can do it himself … Theory is not a panacea, a dogma, but a guide to action. Training is an Indian's friend and stuff.
Rule 1 - we look at the land only from the side of the sea, as the main universal transport redistributor of resources extracted on land. This is the most important condition for a correct point of view through the eyes of the first civilizing colonizers.
Rule 2 - we are looking for possible places of entry of civilization "into the earth" through the mouths of rivers, against the stream, the river basin is due to a tree-like logistic scheme of the resulting structure of cities and states.
Rule 3 - as you move along the river "deep into the earth" at a distance of a day's journey "step by step", cities - "islands of civilization" are created, primarily on natural and artificially created river islands, in any case, a place is chosen that provides maximum safety with sushi sides.
Rule 4 - the development of a city depends on the importance and volume of resources passing through it, that is, how much flows to them from the controlled river basin and what is useful there, which requires a careful study of the resource base of the area, available mining technologies and existing at a given period of time needs, which ultimately determines the direction of the vector of advancement of civilization. Hence, it is important to represent the main functions of the city in a specific period - a transit transshipment base, a resource warehouse, a place of production or consumption.
Rule 5 - studying the history of a city in relation to other cities in a logistic scheme. Upstream cities extract useful resources and float downstream, whereby commodity flows converge in the city that controls the estuary (estuary, delta) of the river. Changes in commodity flows depend on the extraction of new / depletion of old resources, the creation of new / disappearance of old transport routes, changes in demand for extracted resources due to the emergence of new technologies, changes in market conditions, etc.
Civilization has reached here
Let us recall the classic phrase “civilization has finally reached here”. And let's try to answer the simplest question - by what WAYS did civilization come here? It would seem quite obvious that if there are no paths, then there will be no civilization. But a modern person, spoiled by different communication options, cannot imagine that until about the middle of the 19th century, there were no cost-effective alternatives to water transport in most of the world. Land transport was just a supplement to water transport along the shortest route.
At a glance about the fundamental difference in efficiency between land and water transport:
To transport the artillery gun, 8 horses are harnessed in a train. Each horse eats 15 kg of feed per day, therefore, to transport one cannon, it will take about 120 kg of food per day only for horses + for four drivers:
In a 1900 photograph, a woman is towing a barge (barge) along the Holland canal. Judging by the silhouette of a man pushing off with a pole, the dimensions of the barge are such that at least 2 of the above cannons can easily fit on it, i.e. one woman can carry much more than 16 horses by water:
Even AGAINST the Volga, only 10 barge haulers (as in the famous painting by I. Repin) transported a river vessel barking with a carrying capacity of up to 480 tons, which corresponds to a maximum carrying capacity of 8 modern railway cars.
In fact, the vast majority of cargo in the world was rafted along rivers, which further simplified the transportation process. River vessels for the rafting of resources were disposable and upon arrival at their destination were dismantled for firewood, the largest of them had a carrying capacity of up to 12-13 thousand tons, which corresponds to a maximum carrying capacity of more than 200 railway cars - three full-fledged railroad trains.
Before the advent of railways, no country could become industrialized without water transport. That is why the three countries - Britain, France and Germany - have the most powerful network of artificial waterways.
Without a developed transport system, no state can exist in principle. One glance at the map of the Roman Empire is enough to see the role of sea transport in ensuring the connectivity of territories:
Island cities
Cities were based not just on water, but most preferably on the finished islands of the seas and rivers, if there were none, then suitable peninsulas and capes at the confluence of rivers with the help of laid channels were turned into artificial islands and supplemented the protection from local residents with walls. The fact that the protection of cities was intended primarily from attacks from land can be seen on many maps of cities - as a rule, there were no walls from the sea and river.
In any case, the cities were originally islands:
Isle of Cité on the Seine River, from which Paris began.
Museum Island on the Spree River, from which Berlin began.
Cities of the "cape type" do not differ much from cities on islands, for example, the city of Passau, formed at the confluence of three rivers (the Danube and two tributaries):
From the point of view of waterways, the most significant will be the cities located on the border of the sea and rivers, that is, the cities at the mouths of the river and on the islands of river deltas. These include New York on the Hudson Delta Islands; Petersburg on the islands of the Neva delta; the whole of Holland, as located on the delta islands of the three most important rivers of Europe at once - the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt; New Orleans - in the Mississippi Delta; the oldest city in France - Marseille in the Rhone delta.
Map of the navigable rivers of Europe:
In the end (or the beginning?), The three greatest civilizations of antiquity are located in deltas and similar interfluves - in the Nile delta - Ancient Egypt, in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates - Ancient Babylon, in the interfluve of the Indus and Harappa - Indo-Harappan civilization.
The more we rely on objective factors in our research, the better are the virtual fantasies of fabulists and the figures of silence in official history. Therefore, we will repeat once again: for us, markers, reference points, reference points for the restoration of the history of civilization are cities with completely definite geographical coordinates, transport routes - “trees” of different ages and degrees of preservation.
Part 3. "New York"
Continuing the logistic analysis of the history of cities, we turn to New York.
The modern significance of New York is such that too many people, when asked about the capital of the United States, call it New York, although in fact it is Washington, the same "designated capital" as Australian Canberra or Brazilian Brasilia.
When asked about the first capital of the United States, they also try to name New York, although this is Philadelphia, it was in it that the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, and it was the largest in terms of population of the USA until 1835, when finally New York overtook it and since since then it holds the lead, and Philadelphia has slipped to sixth place. New York also visited the capital and even twice, but it was not the capital status that raised it so much.
By the way, it is this cluster of skyscrapers on the southern tip of Manhattan Island that has become a symbol not only of New York, but of the United States as a whole, many believe that “all America” looks like this:
It all began modestly. It is on this southern tip of Manhattan Island that a small settlement has been built with a "Vauban Star" fort and a rampart separating it from the rest of the island. The purpose of the wall is explained in different ways, either so that the cows do not run away, or so that the Indians do not run, which is more plausible judging by the strength of the wall. On the map of New York in 1680, still under the name "New Amsterdam", one can see the dug canals and the obvious small number of residents who have their own private gardens:
This map and the next plan of New York in 1840 are 180 years apart, and although the city has grown noticeably, it is somehow rather weak by modern standards. Especially if we consider that 5 years before the plan was drawn up, that is, in 1835, New York overtook Philadelphia in population and we see the largest US city at that time!
Frankly speaking, upon close inspection, one gets the feeling that this is not a completely real map, but a general plan of the city's development. Moreover, 8 years later, on the Daggerotype of 1848, we see clearly not an urban setting on the famous Broadway:
This is one of the first photographs of New York. The daguerreotype dates from 1848 and depicts an estate on the street at the time known as Bloomingdale Road. The street was built in Manhattan in 1703 and was lined with farms and villages that, as New York grew, became part of it. In 1868, Bloomingdale Road was finally renamed Broadway, and in 1909 the New York Times published a note on the demolition of the last old buildings on Broadway, preserved from the days of Bloomingdale Road.
On a fragment of the plan of New York in 1840, red lines show the mentioned Broadway and the direction of the future Brooklyn Bridge, which will serve as a reference point for us in the following panoramas:
The panorama view roughly corresponds to the above fragment of the 1840 plan, that is, on them we see the territory of almost all of New York at the time when it became the largest city in the United States, focusing on the Brooklyn Bridge, the support of which is clearly visible in the photograph of 1876:
A natural question arises from the series “what is not talked about, what is not taught in school”: “Why did New York become so cool, and not Philadelphia, Newport, Salem, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis or what what other city in the USA?
For the convenience of choosing a seaport city that is more suitable for the capital, I give a map-scheme, on which there are many candidates near New York:
At the end of the 19th century, New York met with a new scourge, which brought with it progress and the rapid almost uncontrollable growth of the city. Due to imperfect road networks, overcrowded areas and a heap of industrial and port buildings, as well as due to bursts of pipes, failures in the operation of horse trams and road accidents, Broadway in lower Manhattan was often plunged into chaos, and its carriageway turned into a seething the whirlpool of their pedestrians, policemen, horse-drawn carriages and carts. In the American press of the late 19th century, the word “blockade” was used to describe what was happening.
This illustration is called "Blockade on Broadway".
At the end of the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote: “In our North American colonies, plantations were constantly set up on the seashore or along the banks of navigable rivers and hardly anywhere extended to any significant distance from them.” The importance of cities and states was determined by how many useful for the metropolis, they could get food in the river basins and float to the seaports located at the river mouths.
The growth limits of the United States and Canada in the early 19th century were limited to natural waterways from the Atlantic Ocean:
In principle, for the 13 state colonies, the issue was within the reach of available resources. The extensive development path was limited by the size of the navigable boundaries of the river basins and the useful resources available there. By the early 19th century, the largest city in the United States was Philadelphia at the mouth of the Delaware River, while New York at the mouth of the Hudson River lagged behind it, although the river basins were similar in area.
By the early 19th century, the newly minted United States of America still did not have normal transport access inland - the Mississippi Basin, the Great American Plains and the Great American Lakes. The northern English colonies (future Canada), which occupied the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, also could not advance further - the path was blocked by Niagara Falls.
The 1803 acquisition of Louisiana gave the United States ideal access to all of central North America through the mouth of the Mississippi. By all the rules, a sharp rise in New Orleans and all other cities of the Mississippi basin should have begun, but in the first quarter of the 19th century, New York made a "knight's move" and literally made a breakthrough (broke through and broke through), which determined the vector of further development of the United States:
As can be seen from the diagram, the Hudson is an extremely convenient river for communications, which “sawed through” the Appalachian mountain system through and through. From the tributary of the Hudson - the Mohawk River (other options are Mogok, Mohawk, English Mohawk) New York on its own initiative, without the support of the US federal government, in 1817-1825. laid the Erie Canal to the lake of the same name, bypassing the ill-fated Niagara Falls from the south. The red line in the diagram indicates the resulting water transport system, which played an exceptional role in the further development of the United States.
The construction of the Erie Canal became a reality largely thanks to the efforts of the Governor of New York and the influential Senator De Witt Clinton, who perfectly understood its truly revolutionary significance for New York and in 1825, at the opening of the canal, said prophetic words: “Over time the city will become the granary of the world, the center of trade, industry and large financial transactions. By the end of the century, the entire island of Manhattan will be populated very densely and will become one huge city."
Paved in 1817-1825. from the Hudson tributary of the Mohawk River to Lake Erie, the channel of the same name gave New York access to the Great American Lakes, the Mississippi Basin and the Great American Plains with their innumerable resources, the extraction, processing and transportation of which to New York became the cause of the formation in the 1830s. and elevations in the 1850-60s. cities of Chicago, Detroit and Buffalo:
It was along this route that at first the bulk of immigrants-settlers moved to the development of the Wild West, it was through this water system that they floated to New York for further resale the resources-goods mined in the basin of the Great American Lakes and the Mississippi basin, on which New York grew as by leaps and bounds, finally and irrevocably overtaking in 1835 in terms of population the largest US city of that time and the first capital, Philadelphia. From that time on, New York began its ascent to world fame.
The Illinois-Michigan Canal, built in 1848, linked Chicago to the Mississippi Basin, which greatly expanded the potential of the New York-Chicago Transport Corridor. The initial flow of resources to New York was a raw material - meat, grain, timber, etc., but its increasing capacity necessitated the development of transport and processing enterprises, therefore, by the 1860s, a disproportion of the advanced, industrialized North and backward, agricultural South.
Population density in the United States and existing railways as of 1850.
Part 4. "Massacre of Chicago"
A continuous stream of immigrants moved from New York along the Erie Canal through Chicago to the Wild West.
These were the pioneers, pioneers who at first led a semi-natural economy with minimal dependence on civilization.
It was since then that the mass tradition of free possession of firearms in the United States began, with elective sheriffs, special customs and laws in townships and other signs of a forced autonomous existence without hope for a central government.
But we haven’t really said yet about resources, the very attractive magnet that sets in motion all civilizational processes. The territories of the Wild Northwest, which would later become the states of Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, were rich in forests, minerals and fertile lands for agriculture. They could and should have been mastered.
The concept of "free lands" is very conditional, they were really free from settlers, but occupied by Indians, huge herds of tens of millions of heads of wild cowlonghorns, bison and wild mustang horses. In general - over a hundred million heads of wild cattle, not counting every little thing. And all this wealth of nature had to be cleaned out, freed for the activities of migrant farmers.
A big task takes a lot of effort. But there were so many wild animals that it was possible to cope with it only after 50 years, and only skins were removed from the shot bison, solving the main task - to deprive the Indians of food according to the principle of "dead bison - dead Indian."
Wild mustang horses were shot by entire army units.
But the wild Longhorn cows were used to the fullest.
Unlike bison and horses, they could be driven to a meat processing plant in Chicago.
In addition, Longhorns had a remarkable property not to lose at all, like domestic cows, but even to gain weight due to pasture when driving.
It was then that cowboys appeared, and along the way also American traditions of steaks and steaks, horse and bull racing, catching gobies with the help of a lasso, etc.
Cowboys formed herds of wild cows and drove them first directly to Chicago, and then to the nearest purchase points organized near the railways.
Having received the money, on the way back, the cowboys drank it in passing saloons, and only this part of their life received special attention from the cinema. The wild cows have ended - the profession of a cowboy as a daring ferryman has also disappeared, activities and famous slaughterhouses have been severely curtailed, the "golden age of American cattle breeding" has ended. Sometimes there is a statement that these cows were raised by settlers. Well, yes, in 1862 they were just invited to explore the Wild West, they just went en masse, and in 1865 the Chicago massacres had already begun to work. Only by the 20th century, due to the labor of settlers, the range of slaughtered livestock became much wider: domestic cows, rams, pigs.
Chicago is often called "the second capital of the USA", "the capital of industry". Without diminishing the importance of the woodworking enterprises and the port for the development of Chicago, the famous Chicago slaughterhouses became the most important city-forming enterprises, which deserve a more detailed description, since the technological equipment of the slaughterhouses was a miracle of the 19th century and their activities led to the creation of a huge interconnected structure of enterprises.
So, the amount of running wild meat on the Great American Plains was so great that already at the beginning of 1865 in Chicago, a complex of a barnyard, slaughterhouses, office buildings, stations and railways was built, which made it possible to transport cattle directly to the corrals intended for him.
The slaughterhouses employed between 25,000 and 50,000 people, depending on the season.
Long before Henry Ford, a conveyor belt was introduced to the slaughterhouse. The work was organized so that each laborer knew only one operation.
The carcasses of the animals were moved from worker to worker along an inclined ceiling rail, using only the force of gravity, if necessary, they were lifted by an elevator or transported by electric conveyors. There was a conveyor belt for canning and packaging. Hot water and electricity were generated centrally for the entire slaughterhouse area.
Two conveyors of the largest company - Armora, allowed to kill up to 1200 animals per hour at a peak load while working 16 hours a day (up to 20 animals per minute, three seconds each). By 1890, 9 million head of livestock were being killed in slaughterhouses every year, 82% of the US meat was produced here.
Everything was in motion: in addition to canning factories and refrigerated, to a slaughterhouse built workshops and factories for the production of leather, soap, fertilizers, adhesives, artificial ivory, gelatin, shoe polish, buttons, perfume, medicine, feed, string, etc…
In In 1872, the winter harvesting of ice and its use on an industrial scale began to cool meat.
This allows the slaughterhouses to be seasonally independent and continue to operate during the hottest months.
In 1882, Gustav Swift invents the ice-cooled refrigerator car, which significantly increases the ability to transport meat, primarily to the populated eastern states of the Atlantic coast.
Vladimir Mayakovsky spoke about the Slaughterhouses in 1925: “Here there are screeching and wheezing, and at the other end of the factory, seals are already being placed on the hams, the thrown out cans of lightning flash in the sun in a hail of cans, then refrigerators are loaded - and by courier trains and steamers the ham goes to the sausage and restaurants around the world”. And the vast majority of these products were exported through New York.
By 1870, a railroad from Chicago reached the Missouri River off Kansas City and was being laid further in Nebraska to connect with the Union Pacific Railroad.
Railroads from Chicago sprout through the American Great Plains like blood vessels.
In addition to the Swift refrigerated cars, it was in Chicago that the famous Pullman began his activity with his luxury cars in 1863, which, in fact, created the standard of railway service, which we now take for granted: a dining car, berths, toilets and much other.
In 1867, in an alliance with the famous businessman Andrew Carnegie in Chicago, he created The Pullman Palace Car Company.
With the opening of the Michigan-Illinois Canal in 1848, Midwestern farmers began to come to Chicago to sell their grain crops, and so that same year, a group of 82 enterprising grain traders founded the Chicago Board of Trade, the oldest and now one of the world's largest futures exchanges.
Officially, the time of the appearance of the first futures contract is considered to be 1865, when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange took its first self-regulatory step to streamline grain trading: one-time futures contracts for grain (they bought future crops from farmers). It should be noted that the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), trading in futures contracts, was established much later - in 1882. Now it ranks first in the world in terms of oil futures trading, but it started with the same agricultural products as the Chicago one - eggs, butter, milk, grain.
The liberated territories were occupied according to the principle of fencing already worked out in England, only here, on the Great Plains, the tree was in short supply, so the barbed wire invented on this occasion in Illinois in the early 1870s came to the rescue, which prevented the entry of wild animals into the land and kept the household in the pasture. In the USA 270 tons of barbed wire were produced in 1875, and by 1900 production had increased to 150,000 tons.
In Chicago, many things were the first in the world, for example: after the fire of 1871, Chicago began to be rebuilt, and in 1885 the world's first high-rise building was erected. Chicago skyscrapers, already at the end of the 19th century, amazed with their design, gave the name to one of the areas of architecture - the Chicago School.
We are forced to describe each element separately, but everything was done in parallel. In just 30 years, from 1840 to 1870, the population of Chicago increased from 4 to 300 thousand people, Chicago became the second largest city in the United States, solely due to access to useful resources and good transport links to the port of New York.
If you do not know that, in a logistical sense, Chicago is an industrial suburb of New York, although they are hundreds of kilometers apart, then this phenomenon of explosive growth of both cities will not be understood.
Part 5 "Seas and rivers"
When studying history, all attention is usually concentrated on events that took place on land. As a result, the seas are usually perceived by a land person as being nearby and meaningless empty spaces - "holes". To model civilizational processes, one should categorically change this erroneous point of view and look at the development of "terrestrial" civilization through the eyes of an "extraterrestrial", that is, "sea" civilization.
Let's take a physical map and look at the numerous islands of the Aegean (Achaean) Sea, on which the already mentioned ancient Cycladic (Cycladic), Hellenic, Hellenic, Cretan, Mycenaean and other civilizations were located - is it possible for their existence without navigation? Ancient Greece, the Byzantine, Roman, Ottoman empires, the Arab Caliphate - the location of these states on the shores and islands of the Mediterranean shown on historical maps clearly indicates that without developed water transport there could be no connectivity of space and, therefore, their statehood.
For completeness, we will mention the great sea states - Venice, Genoa, Spain, Portugal, Holland, England and others - all of them spread civilization along the sea routes.
Do you think these are completely different civilizations? No, from the point of view of logistic theory, civilization is one and the same type, that is, it is universal (universum - “universe” - inhabited). Local manifestations of this single civilization, of course, can vary greatly in terms of external features.
Differences are easy to find, but they are often misleading when reconstructing the past, so it is more productive to look for common features. For example, Serbs and Croats are essentially one people speaking the same language, but some are Christians and use the Cyrillic alphabet, while others are Muslims and write in Latin. In Uzbekistan, at first everything was written in Arabic letters, then they switched to Cyrillic, now professional criminals - who would be more reluctant to keep records than sailors. … They kept their knowledge to themselves and were in no hurry to share it."
Thor Heyerdahl spoke in tune with him: “Let it seem absurd, but maybe science needs a consultant from the criminal investigation department? In a person who, perhaps, does not understand the intricacies of archeology and Latin names, but is endowed with an inquisitive look, the ability to generalize and a detective's flair? And knows a thing or two about mathematical probability? After all, what is a criminal investigation if not a logical reconstruction of events that took place in the past?"
The difficulties of restoring the history of navigation are also due to the fact that most of it belongs to the so-called "prehistoric" period, which means the pre-written part of the history of civilization. You can safely google Stone Age sites for any European island. There will surely be archaeological evidence of the existence of settlements, piers, etc. aged from 4 to 10 thousand years.
It is difficult for an average person who imagines the Stone Age in the images of "a savage in animal skin" - "digging stick" - "hunting for a mammoth" that at the same time, somewhere there was developed navigation, intercontinental transport of goods and cities ! For example, 50 kilometers from the Turkish city of Konya, there is the ancient settlement of Çatal Hüyük, which in Russian translation is politically correctly referred to as either Chatal-Guyuk or Chatal-Huyük - a large settlement of the ceramic Neolithic and Eneolithic times. The earliest cultural layers found date back to 7500 BC. The settlement existed until 5700 BC. e. The inhabitants left the settlement before the onset of the Bronze Age. There was a canal between the two hills of the settlement, diverted from the nearest river.
Research by archaeologists around the world shows that many objects are found thousands of kilometers from their place of origin: cowrie shells, obsidian (volcanic glass), etc. And not only some trifle they transported in the Stone Age, even large animals - horses, bulls, red deer, etc.
In addition to the listed complexities, modeling civilizational processes on the seas requires a fairly deep knowledge of the history of navigation, including shipbuilding, navigation methods and instruments, nautical charts, sea currents and winds, as well as many other wisdom. Therefore, we will focus on land, not forgetting the fundamental principle of the primacy of maritime logistics.
Entrance "to the ground": river mouths
The second rule: civilization enters "into the earth" through the mouths of rivers. In historical descriptions of maritime discoveries, the classic phrase "the ship dropped anchor at the mouth of the river" is often found. And this is not accidental at all.
Delta of the Nile.
The mouth of the river is a very good reference point for sailors, there you can replenish supplies of fresh water, and if the river is deep and wide enough, then right on the ship you can enter "the land" and continue exploring open lands, or send a boat there, which was usually done initially so as not to risk in vain.
Rivers are the perfect guide: "water leads." After all, no matter what tributary the boat of the pioneers turns into, they can always easily return back downstream to where the ship is waiting for them. Traveling by river is incomparably safer than by land, you can carry a sufficient amount of weapons and containers for water and food. If something useful is found in the newly discovered lands, there are subsequently equipped with docks, a base-parking, a fort, a prison, which then grow into a full-fledged city that provides extraction, storage and loading of useful resources onto ships.
The expression “inside the earth” was not invented by me; such a description was given to cities in the guidebooks of the first half of the 19th century. The enumeration of cities was usually given from the sea inland. Seaside port cities were localized along the corresponding seas, and then cities "inside the earth" were listed, and each was defined as "a city such and such on a river such and such."
Before moving on to specific examples, we will give a little information from hydrology and etymology.
There are three types of river mouths:
- an ordinary mouth, the place where the river flows into another body of water;
- estuary - very wide mouth (from Latin aestuarium - flooded river mouth)
- one-armed, funnel-shaped mouth of the river, widening towards the sea;
- delta - a branching mouth of a triangular shape, forming a complex network of branches and ducts.
The fact that river mouths should be viewed from the sea side also follows from etymology. From the point of view of a land person, the mouth is simply the end of the river, the place where it flows into the opposite of the source, the beginning of the river. But from the side of the sea or river, the place where the river flows into looks like a mouth, mouth, throat. It is from this "marine" point of view that the etymology of the river mouth in different languages becomes clear: mouth-mouth - Latin os, ostio (ostium - door); French bouche - mouth, mouth, mouth of the river - embouchure; in English, the mouth of the river - mouth of the river "mouth of the river", river mouth "river mouth" or simply mouth "mouth, mouth"; on Dutch mouth, estuary - mond, monding, etc.
The situation is even more interesting with the river delta. Many sources claim that the name of the triangular branched variety of the river mouth "delta" comes from the capital letter of the Greek alphabet Δ (delta), by the similarity with which it was given in antiquity to the triangular delta of the Nile River. But the triangle of the Nile delta looks upward only from the side of the sea, which, however, is not surprising, because the ancient Greeks lived mainly on the islands and, as a seaworthy nation, this was the only way they perceived this area. For the locals themselves, the shape of their territory on the map was on a drum, and they called the Nile Delta - Swamp. This is what the “inhabitants of the Swamp” wrote in the papyri, as opposed to, for example, “the inhabitants of Elephantine,” that is, Upper Egypt.
The "delta" and other corresponding fourth letters of very many alphabets have two more characteristic logistic meanings.
First, the meaning is "door, entrance". For example, the letter "Dalet" is the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The letter ד comes from the word “delet” (Hebrew ת לֶ דֶ - door). In the ancient Semitic alphabet, the outline of this letter was a pictogram, a schematic representation of a door, an entrance to a tent, a tent. In other languages: Sumerian du "to go" - passage, hole; lit. dùrys, duris, Latvian. duris, durvis - door; Goth. daúr - "gate"; English door - door; goll. deur - door; Danish, Norwegian dør - door; Swedish dörr, Irish doras, Armenian "dor" - door; Icelandic "door" - dyr, dyra (just Russian "hole"!).
Secondly, the letter Δ (delta) or the term "delta" in physics and some other sciences is usually used to denote the difference between certain parameters. In finance, delta is the difference between the buying and selling price. Sometimes delta refers to your interest in a transaction or the resulting benefit.
And all of the above values of the "delta" arose quite reasonably. Indeed, it is convenient to build a port in the river delta, which is both a river and a seaport, which means that goods can be received both from overseas and from the depths of the country. From the sea side, the delta is the entrance, the door "into the earth".
And it is in the port that the redistribution of the wealth created (mined) on the ground takes place, the transshipment takes place between river and sea vessels with a corresponding difference in the purchase / sale price. It is safer to create “islands of civilization” in the river delta, because each island in the delta is a fortress in itself.
Let's start with recent historical examples, when civilization settled at river mouths, and gradually move on to more ancient ones:
- the very first permanent English colony in America: “In 1607, one hundred and twenty colonists, exclusively men, arrived on three large ships and chose the peninsula at the mouth of the James River in Virginia for settlement - a swampy place with a huge number of mosquitoes, but with a convenient bay and favorably located to defend against possible attacks. The settlement in honor of King James I was named Jamestown."
- Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States and the largest city in the United States before 1835, is located at the mouth (estuary) of the Delaware River;
- New York - on the islands at the mouth of the Hudson River;
- New Orleans - in the Mississippi Delta;
- the largest Australian port city of Adelaide at the mouth of the Torrance River;
- India's largest port, Kolkata (since 2001, Kolkata), is in the Ganges delta. The main part of the city is located on the eastern bank of the Hooghly branch (river), in wetland conditions. Therefore, it took the British many decades to adapt these territories for life;
- Shanghai is the largest city in China and the first most populous city in the world located in the Yangtze River Delta;
- Pearl River Delta. The term South China generally refers to the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, which includes nine cities in the province;
- Mumbai (until 1995 - Bombay), the most populated city in India - at the mouth of the Ulhas River, occupies the islands of Bombay, Salsett and the adjacent coast;
- a symbolic mistake with Rio de Janeiro - the Portuguese considered the Guanabara Bay to be the mouth of the river and gave the city the appropriate name - "January River";
- the capital of Thailand - Bangkok - is located on the islands of the Chaopraya River Delta (Chao Prai);
- the Mekong (Red River) Delta is the main cultural and historical center of Vietnam. The first state arose here in the 10th century;
- Tokyo is located at the confluence of the Edogawa, Arakawa, Sumida, Tama rivers into Tokyo Bay;
- Hiroshima - in the Matoyasu and Ota delta;
- Nagasaki - in the delta of the Urakami and Nakajima rivers;
- Arkhangelsk - in the delta of the Northern Dvina River, from there the path to the inner basin of the Volga River through Vologda;
- Petersburg is on the islands of the Neva River delta, and the history of the Russian Empire is quite easy to learn through the logistic analysis of the formation of the city in this very place;
- Le Havre, France's largest port, and Honfleur at the mouth of the Seine;
- Liverpool - at the mouth of the River Mersey;
- Plymouth, Britain's largest historic port, at the confluence of the Plyma and Tamara rivers;
- Saint-Malo, the famous "pirate" city-fortress on the islands - at the mouth of the Rance, which flows into the English Channel;
- Lisbon - at the mouth of the Tagus River (Spanish Tajo), or Tagus (port.
- Tejo), lat. Tagus is the largest river in the Iberian Peninsula;
- Amsterdam, the capital of modern Holland, is built in the delta of the Amstel River, which flows into the North Sea. In general, the whole of Holland is located in the deltas of three rivers at once - the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt;
- Lübeck, the capital of the Hanseatic League, which played a huge role in the Baltic, is located on an island at the mouth of the Trave River;
- Marseille, the oldest city in France, is located at the mouth of the Rhone River. The notable name of the administrative unit is the Ust'ev department (Bouches du Rhône - "The mouths of the Rhone").
Along the Rhone River - the historical region of Dauphiné, where all French kings come from, and in general - it is there that the original history of France, and not at all in Paris; In the end (or the beginning of beginnings?), Three "greatest civilizations of antiquity" are located in deltas and similar interfluves: in the Nile delta - Ancient Egypt, in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates - Ancient Babylon, in the interfluve of the Indus and Harappa - Indo-Harappan civilization.
In all these examples, civilization came there from the sea and settled in the most convenient places from a transport point of view. The only difference is when it happened: in historical or prehistoric times. Moreover, the significance of these cities for the rest of civilization changed over time, and in some cases individual cities and their entire systems, the so-called "civilizations of antiquity", fell into decay. Why? Historians in this regard come up with the most intricate versions instead of trying to collect all available direct and indirect information about the available resources, the dynamics of commodity flows and analyze them.
Cities are created step by step - "islands of civilization"
Rule 3: as you move along the river "deep into the earth" at a distance of a day's journey, step by step (Italian grado per grado) cities are created - "islands of civilization" on natural and artificially created river islands, in any case, a place is chosen that ensures maximum safety from the land side. The distance of the day's crossing depends on the speed of the river, the configuration of the banks, the transport used and other factors.
The distance of the day's crossing is the very step (ital. Grado), which forces us to take up grado-building and create safe places for parking, overnight stays, stations, and the places for midday rest will look like half-stations. Day pass is a universal ancient unit of measurement of "space-time", which is of great practical importance. It is no coincidence that the most ancient maps were scaled not in kilometers, miles or other absolute units of length, but in “travel days”, which made the seas look small and the land huge, because the speed of movement along it was much lower. There are modern analogs of such maps - these are ordinary geographical maps with lines of hourly and daily reach of the area - "isochrones" - from a certain point.
The islands of the seas and rivers met the requirements for a safe overnight stay. We have already mentioned the cities located on the islands of the river deltas, such as New York, Petersburg, Amsterdam. But even “inside the earth” many cities were originally formed on natural river islands: Paris - the Cité island on the Seine river, Berlin - Museum island on the Spree river, Strasbourg - islands at the mouth of the Ile river at its confluence with the Rhine, Montreal - on an island in the middle of the river St. Lawrence, Brest - on an island formed by the branches of the Mukhavets River at its confluence with the Western Bug, etc. By the way, the famous Zaporozhye Sich was located on the Dnieper island of Khortitsa, and in general all the Cossacks until the 19th century were entirely waterfowl.
At the distance of a day's crossing, of course, river islands were not always encountered, and then suitable peninsulas and capes at the confluence of rivers with the help of laid channels (a moat filled with water) were turned into artificial islands and supplemented the protection from local residents with walls - cape-type cities were obtained …
But the primary parking bases, of course, did not immediately grow into cities in the modern sense. At first, the pioneers, most of them in the Stone Age, created the primary equipment of the transport route. For a modern person, road signs are a completely natural element of infrastructure, but when historians and laymen come across primitive road signs, for some reason, they have a cognitive dissonance and stones with incomprehensible signs are declared either simply mysterious megaliths or cult pagan stones. Of course, not all megalithic structures are road signs, but the logic of their location suggests that it makes sense to try to interpret the images on them by analogy with the modern schemes of cities established for tourists with a bold point “you are here”. And then the incomprehensible lines, arrows, dots and crosses can be explained in terms of the configuration of the sea coast, the river with its tributaries and other information useful for the traveler.
In the places indicated by the waystones, first, moorings and fenced parking were equipped, then churches and monasteries were built. Signpost stones were in their places for a long time, and already in the 19th and 20th centuries, the clergy began to remove these stones aside, as "pagan", so that now they are mostly not in their original place.
The coincidence of such ancient monuments and megaliths with the modern location of temples, natural heights and water crossings gave rise to the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins to put forward in 1921 the theory of the "ley line", that is, lines created for the convenience of river navigation and overland movement during the Neolithic and existed then over the millennia. As is sometimes the case with perfectly logical hypotheses, instead of thorough and comprehensive testing, his idea was distorted beyond recognition, and recently the term "ley line" has become associated with spiritual and mystical theories about the shape of the earth, including Chinese feng shui.
Instead of megaliths-road signs, which not everyone has seen, we will give another example with objects that everyone has observed repeatedly - these are temples of all confessions without exception anywhere in the world, but only created before the 20th century, because newly-made temples are now located anywhere " how prettier. " So, the overwhelming majority of the temples (of course, there are exceptions) were built near the water - a river, lake, sea. If you see a temple - there is a river nearby, if you are moving along the river, then at approximately equal intervals you will find temples, on the descent from which there are or were marinas, at least traces of the road leading to the water can still be found very often.
This pattern can be independently checked everywhere: temples, sanctuaries and other similar places are located at approximately equal distances along the trade route. By observing the range of placement of temples on a given river (road), you will determine the distance of the day and noon passage in this area and can confidently predict where the next temple (sanctuary) should be located.
I recall the cult phrase from the film "Repentance" directed by Tengiz Abuladze: "Why is this road needed if it does not lead to the Temple?" Alas, this is again a modern shape-shifting spirituality. In reality, it was like this: "Why do we need a temple if there is no road leading to it?" Initially, the temples of all confessions, without exception, were created as offices of governing structures at the sites of extraction and transportation routes of resources. There goods were stored, trade deals were concluded, standards of measures and weights were stored, transaction record books, "production meetings" were held in the modern sense, hotel services were provided in rooms-cells, comfortable for that time, money exchange and so on. A temple, a monastery was a mini-city and sometimes grew into a city in the modern sense of the word. As the network of railways and then roads develops,the former water and land roads lost their exclusive significance, and with them the functions of the temples changed: they took up "spiritual nourishment of the flock" and the purely economic function was replaced by the ideological treatment of the masses in the style of rendering religious services.
Of course, for those who see in religious systems only "spirituality" and mystical principles, such an interpretation of the functions of churches of all confessions can cause rejection. But the facts will not change from this: the state-forming role of religious systems is described in sufficient detail in history, but their real economic, economic activities are usually covered very sparingly, therefore the modern stereotype of the perception of religion greatly interferes with understanding the essence of the process.
Whether the primitive site would turn into a prison, fortress or monastery, whether they would grow to the size of a city in the modern sense, depended on the importance of this place for organized trade flows. If the flow of goods for some reason stopped, then we see the ruins of caravanserais, churches, mausoleums and other ancient heritage. Let's draw an analogy with a living organism. If the blood circulation is disturbed, for example, we pinch the blood vessels, then the part of the body fed from it begins to degrade: first, dystrophy - insufficient nutrition, and then necrosis due to atrophy - lack of nutrition.
In our case, the "blood vessel" -the river may dry up or it will remain in place, but oxygen and nutrients (goods-resources) will not flow through it.
The difference in the development of “day steps” -cities also depends on the heterogeneity of space in different directions (anisotropy). It is more difficult to move against the current - and the distance of the day's crossing is shorter, and it is faster to float downstream - and the distance of the day's crossing is longer. Since the whole system was conceived in order to melt the extracted resources, the main trade flow went with the flow, and, depending on the speed of the alloy, every 3-4th city turned out to be more in demand than others, which is why more significant cities were separated from each other by a distance of 3-4 day crossings downstream.
Naturally, for land routes, this condition is applicable only to mountains and other elevations, and on the plain, any inns, caravanserais and different "sanctuaries" with the same functions differed from each other depending on the predominantly performed task of night or midday rest, or the steepest were located at forks and crossroads.
Author: Igor Shkurin