The artificial existence of civilization The biology of civilization The geography of civilization The climate of civilization The relationship between belief and actionTHEMES FOR UNIT ONE
The artificial existence of civilization The biology of civilization The geography of civilization The climate of civilization The relationship between belief and actionUNIT 1 explains how the artificial existence of civilization emerged from the natural consequences of human interaction with geography, biology, and climate during the ancient era of world history. The artificial existence of civilization refers to the growing distance between human living conditions and nature as agriculture separated various peoples in different locations around the world from their passive reliance on the earth’s bounty. The natural consequences of human interaction with biology, geography, and climate refers to the specific events surrounding the development of ancient cities as the people living in these urban centers developed the skills they needed to survive on the new food base generated by agriculture. Plant cultivation in turn imposed specific requirements on ancient human life—irrigation, field preparation, seed selection, food storage, rationing, the development of a calendar, the production of new tools, and an explanation of the local rhythms of nature—that elevated human consciousness to new levels of awareness in their new, but increasingly distant, relationship to the natural world around them. This new level of human consciousness launched world history once the people who dwelled in the oldest urban centers began to record their struggles to exist in the new, artificial setting agriculture had created. That record lies at the heart of ancient world history, the central narrative of Unit 1 of this text.
The artificial existence of civilization began when human foragers created a new biological relationship between their population and a select group of “omega” plants and animals to create agriculture. An omega organism is an individual plant or animal that, thanks to some natural trait, fails to reproduce often or at all. Ancient foragers that selected seeds for food preferred omega plants because they had certain highly desirable qualities. Omega seeds matured at the same time each growing season, their seeds grew to exceptional weight and size, and the parent plants trapped their seeds inside pods or on a cob. From nature’s perspective, these omega plants could not reproduce well because any organism that traps its seeds inside a pod or on a cob denies those seeds access to the ground and the possibility of germination and, in time, reproduction. If a plant cannot reproduce, its genetic message is lost to the local plant population, and its genes soon disappear. If humans, however, select these plants and artificially cultivate their seeds, then these organisms do reproduce and a genetic code is artificially preserved, one that would otherwise disappear. Biologists call this creation of an omega gene pool artificial selection to distinguish it from natural selection. Once this gene pool was in place, the biology of civilization began.
The biology of civilization involves the development of a positive reciprocal relationship between humans and their omega plants and animals, known as a symbiosis. This artificially created symbiosis saw humans clear the land for their omega plants, change the environment, and generate a food surplus. This food surplus supported growing human populations that continued to expand the number and size of the fields they cleared, thereby changing the environment and increasing the number of omega plants humans needed to continue to survive. Over extended periods of time this process completely changed the landscape from a natural to an artificial setting and demanded that people create and perpetuate a whole new set of skills to survive. These skills included water management, soil renewal, and organizing a complex division of labor to secure each year’s food surpluses. Collectively called irrigation, these skills led to the appearance of clusters of agricultural villages, their inhabitants working in unison to dig canals, dredge channels, and build dams. In time, these clusters of villages fell under the authority of large cities that tapped the human labor of the outlying villages to exert control over vast areas under cultivation. For example, a huge amount of labor was required to control a river’s water supply during its flood cycle so that the increased water, and the silt it carried, could reach the cleared fields and renew the land each year. These large cities were the hearths of civilization.
The biology of civilization has another aspect, as it also refers to the pathogens that took up residence with humans, omega plants, and omega animals, using them as hosts to sustain a local disease history. Thus a biological equilibrium developed whereby agriculture increased the numbers of humans, omega plants, and omega animals, with diseases periodically reducing the numbers of each through episodes of epidemics and pandemics: disease events that dramatically altered the course of human history. World history shows, however, that agriculture succeeded in preserving enough humans to sustain a continued growth of civilization and perpetuate an ever-increasing number of people, their omega plants, and their omega animals.
The geography of civilization refers to the specific events surrounding the development of the first cities, whose populations learned the skills needed to survive on the new food base generated by agriculture. Geography focuses attention on specific sites on the surface of the earth where humans took up cultivation. Geography also refers to one site’s location relative to another, which affected the probability of the lessons of agriculture being transferred from one site to another.
The climate of civilization played the final role in the human drama of ancient world history. The ever-increasing number of humans, plants, and animals caused by the symbiosis of agriculture, despite the occasional reductions in populations due to parasites and epidemic disease, expanded the total number of organisms dependent on any one geographic site under cultivation.
One of the most important new skills that humans living in such sites had to learn included the making of a calendar, forms of literacy, and ways to explain the local rhythms of nature—creating regional traditions and religions. Global fluctuations of wind patterns and sea currents periodically produced massive shifts in the volume and location of rain and snow that disrupted the rhythms of rivers and thereby undermined the survival of a given civilization. In sites accustomed to plentiful supplies of water, droughts undercut the artificial symbiosis of agriculture by disrupting the food supply, causing protracted famines and eroding the division of labor that sustained a civilization. In other, more arid, places, too much water from unexpected storms also disrupted food production, the excess precipitation overwhelming irrigation systems and ruining crops.
Climate also plays a key role in yet another facet of the artificial symbiosis known as agriculture. Humans cultivated omega animals the same way they controlled the reproductive cycle of omega plants. Omega animals are those individuals among social species that, because of their submissiveness or other such trait or quality, cannot compete well with the dominant members of the herd and therefore produce fewer or no offspring. The social hierarchy of the herd imposes the will of the “alphas,” the individuals that natural selection rewards with numerous offspring. In effect, the course of nature partially “tamed” the omega animals before humans made contact with them. Humans selected the omegas because they were more easily controlled, the alphas having already preconditioned them, and their new human “masters” then offered the omega animals the opportunity to engage in sex and reproduce readily for the first time. These omega animals became the draft animals of farmers, or they developed into the domesticated herds that fed nomads. However, this artificial symbiosis created population pressures among nomads (people dependent upon herding animals) similar to those experienced by plant specialists. These pressures caused competition between nomadic tribes and led them to develop the art of war, which they waged to capture and protect the best grazing lands, or pastures. These wars periodically spilled over into the agricultural-based civilizations whenever the nomads unified and targeted the richest cities for conquest. In other words, climate exacerbated the hostile relations between nomads and cities. The droughts that destroyed the omega plants of a sedentary civilization also destroyed the grazing land of nomads. The loss of their grazing land set nomads in motion, these warlike people migrating toward whatever food sources were available. Such migrations caused massive, periodic invasions that civilizations sooner or later suffered.
Climate, then, combined with disease to weaken civilizations living off omega plants and exposing farmers to conquest. Any global shift in weather patterns, therefore, disrupted agriculture in all its forms: both the intensive cultivation of plants by sedentary people and the extensive use of large areas of land by nomadic societies. Short of major pattern changes, even prolonged droughts or storms could set in motion massive migrations that disrupted traditional patterns of life.
If sedentary cultures remained relatively free of disease and their climate conformed for a long period to the regular rhythms as forecasted on their civilization’s calendar, urban societies spawned a new class of people, those with the free time to attain a new level of human consciousness. These people, in turn, were the first authors of world history. The people living in ancient cities that developed literacy described themselves through their art, literature, religion, science, and philosophy. They revealed how their beliefs complemented their actions to sustain the culture of their civilization. Thus was generated the raw material that historians use to this day to study and try to explain the events of the past.
The final element composing the central themes of Unit 1 is, therefore, the relationship between belief and action—that which explains why civilizations around the world generated the extraordinary artifacts, in all of their many forms, that continue to fascinate us. What, for instance, inspired the Egyptians to build pyramids? Why did Chinese philosophy generate such continuity in Chinese history as to produce a pattern of life that lasted longer than any other civilization in world history? Why did the Greeks create a philosophy that did not include any of their gods or goddesses, the so-called Greek miracle, which laid a foundation for science? What is it about Indian civilization that made the people of the subcontinent reject experience as a valid form of information to explain the rhythms of nature?
Remarkably, you can find the answers to all of these questions, and gain a cohesive and coherent picture of the history of the ancient world, by keeping the Themes of Unit 1 in mind as you read. At this point, learning World History probably—and probably should—strike you as a daunting, even impossible, task. Using the themes of Unit 1, however, reminds us of the humanity of our ancient ancestors and makes studying world history manageable. Their struggles in their daily lives and with their environments were very much like our own. Their view of the universe, which complements these struggles, makes perfectly good sense in the context in which they were forged. This type of history, then, is always and immediately relevant to anyone curious about the past. It is this type of history that makes studying past events both useful and enjoyable.
