Jose Betancourt
First Civilizations
Pan Andrews
09/19/12
Cities,
States, and Unequal Societies (3500 B.C.E.-500 B.C.E)
After
the Paleolithic and Neolithic times, there is an encounter with a new way of thinking
for humans: A new paradigm, or shift of understanding of the world. Around the
year 3500 BCE, there are some historical records to show that civilizations
begun to rise. There were three civilizations that rose around 3000 BCE and 500
BCE. One of them was the ‘cradle’ of the middle eastern civilization, expressed
in the may and competing city-states of summer, and southern Mesopotamia”(56). The Mesopotamian civilization is modern
day Iraq. Written language was first known as coming from the Sumerian
civilization. The language used was used to “record the good received by
various temples”(56). The second civilization was growing through out the Nile River.
The second civilization was the Egyptian civilization. The Egyptians are known
for their pharos and their triangular pyramids. Finally, the third civilization
was the Peruvian civilization, which could have risen around d the years 3,000
BCE through 1,800 BCE. “Norte Chico was distinctive in many ways. Its cities
were smaller than those of Mesopotamia and show less evidence of economic
specialization”(57). Therefore, one could say that these civilizations were
very smart and innovative. They were able to move out from the forests, create
cities, invent city tools, and in may ways create a new reality for the future
humans.
Furthermore,
it is vital to know and to at least think about the question of how all this
civilizations came to exist. Some speculate that the reason for the rise of
civilizations were the warfare and trade. A scholar argues that, a growing
density of population, producing more congested and competitive societies, was
a fundamental motor of change”(62).
To add more, “such settings provided incentives for innovations, such as
irrigation or plows that could produce more food, because opportunities for
territorial expansion were not readily available”(62). Therefore, the
competitiveness of who had more of a specific plant, vegetable, animal, were
reasons to grow in culture, grow in understanding as ones culture to be better
than the other one, and either creating war, or making the neighboring city
slaves. In addition, it is interesting how now, humanity looks at the past and
thinks that maybe they were not thinking, and that all that happened were
random guessed and speculations, but it seems when analyzing the data, and information’s,
that they knew what they were doing, and understood what actions could give
them power and which actions gave them glory to overcome hunger, but also
manipulate people. Ancient people also had developed ways of doing economy in a
city-state. “All of them were highly productive agricultural economies”(62),
and “Various forms of irrigation, drainage… enabled early civilizations to tap
the food-producing potential of their regions”(62). In that case, people could
see that ancients did know what they were doing, and knew that if they could
control floods, and if they could maintain stability in their region, they
would be able to produce a lot and store more, either to ale, or have power
over neighboring peoples.
Finally, it is also
interesting how the hierarchies of classes were born, and ho they have impacted
society to this present time. “At the bottom of the social hierarchies
everywhere were slaves”, and it seems that, “Slavery and civilization, in fact
emerged together”(65). It is odd and uncertain how the idea of slavery came to
be, but it is true that maybe it could have risen because cities who controlled
large amounts of stored produced foods and merchandise needed working people,
and in the lack of ways of making people work, they went around making war, and
criminalizing people, and to make people who owed them something their slaves,
to work hard and produce more, to become “wealthier”(65).
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