How does civilization develop

This requires food production to be efficient enough for a large minority of the community to be engaged in more specialized activities - such as the creation of imposing buildings or works of art, the practice of skilled warfare, and above all the administration of a centralized bureaucracy capable of running the machinery of state. Civilization requires at least a rudimentary civil service. In the organization of a civil service, a system of writing is an almost indispensable aid.

This is not invariably the case because at least one civilization, that of the Incas in Peru, will thrive without writing. But the development of writing greatly enhances civilization. And with a script comes history.

Our knowledge of prehistory derives from surviving objects - the evidence of archaeology. History, by contrast, is based on documents. These various interconnections mean that history, civilization and writing all begin at the same time. That time is about BC. In about BC the two earliest civilizations develop in the region where southwest Asia joins northeast Africa.

Great rivers are a crucial part of the story. The Sumerians settle in what is now southern Iraq, between the mouths of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Egypt develops in the long narrow strip of the Nile valley. Rivers offer two main advantages to a developing civilization.

The coming of farming had allowed the growth of settled populations to take place, but it did not make the coming of civilization inevitable. With the rise of civilization, small-scale, village-based societies became large-scale ones with cities, advanced technologies, and the capability to mobilize the labor of thousands of workers to achieve specified ends.

How did this development, after farming probably the most significant development in world history , come about? The key to the emergence of civilization is the rise of two social institutions, the State and the City. States and cities must therefore have emerged in tandem. In terms of material wealth, there was little differentiation between families or individuals within village society. All members of the community worked in the fields which were probably communally-owned by clan or village and tended the herds.

The village crafts — weaving, spinning and pottery — were carried out by groups of farmers and their families in the time they could spare from food production and preparation. When fighting was needed, all village males were involved.

And all participated in the village ceremonial and religious life. The early farmers lived in small, self-contained communities of perhaps three hundred people, usually less. Each village was an independent community. Local cult centers commanded the reverence of people from all the villages in an area, and their priests will have been called upon to hear disputes or make decisions affecting more than one village.

They had no power to control or coerce the people to submit to their decisions, however, apart from religious sanction though these would have been very powerful. There was no political authority exerting consistent control over an area on a day-to-day basis, no army, no bureaucracy, no taxes. The villagers were not subjects of a king, nor were they citizens of a republic. Their communal loyalties lay with their own villages; inhabitants of other villages were aliens, and assumed to be hostile.

The moral authority of the cult centers could only go so far, and inter-village tensions often became more intense than could be resolved peaceably. Clashes between villages were frequent and violent. The great civilizations of Mesopotamia , Egypt , the Indus Valley and China all belonged to this category whilst those of Greece, Rome, Japan and Korea are examples of secondary civilizations, as they owed their existence to earlier ones.

River valleys offer areas of well-watered, fertile soil which, because of their very high agricultural productivity, can give rise to large human populations concentrated in a comparatively small area. But why did this situation lead to a completely new kind of society, qualitatively quite different from what had gone before? The answer to this question is to some extent reliant on intelligent guesswork, as no records have survived from these millennia — writing comes at a late stage in the emergence of civilization.

However, modern scholars have developed explanations for how civilization emerged which are consistent with the wealth of archeological evidence available to them. Wheat in the Hula Valley, Israel. In the ancient civilization of China, there were four major types of social classes.

Scholars and political leaders known as shi were the most powerful social class. Farmers and agricultural workers nong were the next most-powerful group. Artists gong , who made everything from horseshoes to silk robes, were the next order of social class. At the bottom of the social classes were the merchants and traders, who bought and sold goods and services. Civilizations expand through trade, conflict, and exploration.

Usually, all three elements must be present for a civilization to grow and remain stable for a long period of time. The physical and human geography of Southeast Asia allowed these attributes to develop in the Khmer civilization, for example.

The Khmer maintained vibrant trading relationships throughout East Asia, the Indian subcontinent , and even Europe and Africa through the Silk Road , a collection of both overland and maritime trade route s. The Silk Road linked the spice and silk markets of Asia with the merchants of Europe.

In addition to material goods, the Khmer civilization facilitated a powerful trade in ideas. In particular, the Khmer were instrumental in spreading the influence of Buddhist and Hindu cultures from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast and East Asia. The primary conflicts of the Khmer civilization were waged with neighboring communities—the Cham, the Vietnamese, and the Thai.

The Cham were a collection of kingdom s in what is today central and southern Vietnam, while the ancient Vietnamese influence extended through what is today northern Vietnam. Thai kingdoms such as Sukothai and Ayutthaya flourished in what are now Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia. The Khmer civilization was founded on the consistent resistance of political pressure from the Cham and Vietnamese, but it ultimately could not withstand pressure from Thai civilizations.

Thousands of Thai peoples migrate d from the north what is now the Yunnan region of China , establishing small kingdoms in the southwest of the Khmer Empire. The Khmer civilization relied heavily on rice farming, and developed a complex irrigation system to take advantage of the rivers and wetland s that dotted their territory. An efficient series of irrigation canal s and reservoir s, called barays, allowed fewer farmers to produce more rice.

This, in turn, allowed more people to pursue non-agricultural lifestyles and migrate to great urban areas, such as Angkor. Angkor, the capital of the ancient Khmer civilization, is home to one of the largest most distinctive religious monuments in the world, Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat was originally constructed as a series of shrine s to the Hindu god Vishnu in the early 12th century, although it became a Buddhist temple complex less than a hundred years later.

Angkor Wat and its sister complex, Angkor Thom, are beautiful examples of classic Khmer architecture. The thousands of square meters of wall space at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom are decorated by thousands of bas-relief s and sculptures depicting Hindu stories and characters. The Khmer monument at Angkor Wat helps define the modern nation of Cambodia today. Many civilizations have flourished and then failed or fallen apart. There are many reasons for this, but many historians point to three patterns in the fall of civilizations: internal change, external pressure, and environmental collapse.

The fall of civilizations is never the result of a single event or pattern. Population dynamics are the most pervasive forces of internal change to a civilization. Populations may grow, due to migration or a period of unusual health. Populations may shrink, due to disease , extreme weather , or other environmental factors.

Finally, populations may redefine themselves. As civilizations grow, cities may grow larger and become more culturally distinct from rural, agricultural areas. Internal changes contributed to the collapse of the Maya civilization, which had thrive d in Mesoamerica for more than a thousand years.

Diseases such as dysentery and lethal hemorrhagic fever s killed and disabled thousands of Mayans. Millions more were forced to relocate from cities to more rural area s. Such huge population shifts reduced the ability of the Maya to communicate, administrate, and unite against outside forces and natural disaster s such as drought. The clearest example of external pressure on a civilization is foreign invasion or sustained warfare. External pressure can lead to the relatively abrupt end of a civilization and, often, the adoption of another.

The fall of the Aztec Empire with the arrival of European conquistador es is such an example. External pressures can also lead to the gradual diminish ing of a civilization. Egypt had faced longstanding, intermittent conflict on its borders, with competing civilizations such as the Nubians to the south , the Assyrians in the Middle East , and the Libyans to the west.

Later, Egypt encountered the civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome, and eventually became part of the Roman Empire. Ancient Egypt also faced external pressures not directly associated with armed conflict.

The powerful forces of Christianity and Islam influenced the eradication of both hieroglyphics , the writing system of Ancient Egypt, and its polytheistic religion. Some anthropologist s think that both natural disasters and misuse of the environment contributed to the decline of many civilizations. Natural hazards such as drought, floods, and tsunami s, become natural disasters as they impact civilizations. Drought contributed to the fall of civilizations such as the Maya and the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization.

The Indus Valley Civilization depended on seasonal monsoon rains to supply water for drinking, hygiene, and irrigation. Climate change made monsoons much more unpredictable and seasonal flooding less reliable.

Harappans suffered from water-borne diseases and were unable to effectively irrigate their crops. The collapse of Minoan civilization, a major influence on Ancient Greece, is often associated with a catastrophic eruption of the Thera volcano on the island of what is now Santorini. The eruption caused a massive tsunami that reduced the population, trading capabilities, and influence of the Minoans.

The land could not support the crops necessary to sustain Viking livestock , including goats, cattle, and sheep. The Vikings in Greenland also faced internal pressures, such as a weak trading system with Europe, and external pressures, such as a hostile relationship with their Inuit neighbors.

The disappearance of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization is one such mystery. Ancestral Puebloan civilization developed around BCE and thrived for more than a thousand years. Ancestral Puebloan civilization was marked by monumental architecture in the form of apartment-like cliff dwellings and large urban areas known as pueblo s.

Culturally diverse Ancestral Puebloans were connected by a complex road system, a standard style of religious worship, and a unique art style evidence d by pottery and petroglyph s. Ancestral Puebloans seem to have abandon ed their urban areas around CE.

The disappearance of this civilization remains a mystery, although most scientists say Ancestral Puebloans engaged in warfare with their Navajo neighbors, internal groups competed for land and resources, and sustained droughts reduced Ancestral Puebloan ability to irrigate crops in the arid Southwest. The Pueblo people never disappeared, of course: Diverse groups developed their own, competing civilizations after the Ancestral Puebloans migrated or fell apart.

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