AH YES, THE INVENTION OF "CIVILIZATION" |
interesting individuals and ideas that come out of various civlizations |
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How do we define "civilized" and what is its opposite? Barbarism? Right from the beginning of World History we have a set of binary categories. People are either in the club of civilization, or not. The groups typically listed as part of this new club are:
-Nile River Civilization -Tigris and Euphrates Civilization (otherwise called Mesopotamia) -Indus River Valley Civilization -Hwang Ho (or Yellow River) Civilization -Amazon River Civilization The first societies were "Riverine Civilizations" so that tells us they settled near rivers but not much else. They did have a few other major things in common: They needed a lot of labor, in order to develop agriculture, divert or dam the river for irrigation. And to organize this labor they needed a system of leadership and communication in order to coordinate the projects. This means that most of these societies invented a form of record-keeping, number systems, and writing. The critical importance of predicting seasonal flooding of the rivers and its coordination with agriculture led them to develop calenders. But the tenuous nature of their dependence on the success of crops also led to the increased power of priests and religious ritual. In some places the political and religious leader became combined into a sort of God-King. The specifics of the political and religious organization of individual civilizations followed different trajectories in different locations, but everywhere the surplus of food and its attendant political organization led to the emergence of powerful individuals and significant inventions and culture. |
Qin Shi Huang Di and Liu Pang
-gunpowder, silk and paper Pericles, Homer -Trojan War and Polytheistic religion Alexander the Great, Phillip of Macedon, Aristotle -Hellenism and connections across the regions conquered by Alexander Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka, Sammudragupta, Chandragupta II, Kautilya -Hinduism -Buddhism Darius III -the Silk Road 5th to 2nd century BCE Julius Caesar and Ocatvian Caesar Augustus
-roman military strategies Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus Justinian and Theodora |
