I like that the book is doing more than the usual Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization history. It mentions one in South America coming into itself around the same time and it is going to discuss 7 independently formed civilizations, even if there is a lot more to learn about them as opposed to arguing everything happened around the Mediterranean and spread after that.
It's interesting to see how regimented and exact people of the Saraswati river civilization are, how hard the Indus river valley people were on the land and how even the earliest of Chinese societies was so bent on monarchy. These are all different ways people came up with on how to live.
Fascinating that the earliest cities seemed to be so well thought out and built so regimented when most of the cities in western civilization are characterized as haphazard growths with little to no planning.
It's hard to agree that the Agricultural Revolution and the creation of civilization is what led to inequality when those were both undertakings by humans. Wouldn't that mean that our tendency to classify and divide is naturally inherent? As thought it is just part of the way we try to understand the world around us, by dividing it up into bite-sized pieces.
A little ironic for the author to list out all the reasons civilization is bad when without it, we would be unable to read his work and he'd be unable to write it. I sense a lot of negatives, a sort of necessary evil of civilizations.
I'm counting this as a bright side. Murders decreased as state violence predominated. People did not kill each other for personal reasons as much as they had before the agricultural revolution.
I agree that their use of religion was basically for justification, and it's not like it hasn't been used that way since, but something has to be used to explain things and we haven't hit the scientific revolution yet or the Greeks and their philosophy, so religion and its mystical stories are the only ways to explain the world. I don't know if it is quite as self-serving as the author paints it. If religion only served as justification for the building of hierarchal societies, wouldn't those returning to nature outgrow it? Or perhaps those who champion democracy and a republic? It seems as though putting religion in a box diminishes its importance to the overall culture. And that doesn't sound historically accurate.
The Indus river valley and the Olmec languages of pictures are the only ones that are very easy to read even now.
The big problem I have with this unrelenting critique of civilization is how ostentatious the author paints the social hierarchy. These rulers probably didn't live much longer than the common people and they were just as liable to disease as others. It undercuts the humanity running through civilization, which has to be there since we are the only ones who do it. The author makes it sound like civilization turned elites into inhuman war lords and lower classes into subhuman victims.
It's interesting how historians are reluctant to speak of what affect the environment had on humans but then is able to explain most of the culture by specifically using the geography of the land. Kinda sounds like defeating your own argument to me.
Is it fair to categorize Sumer as a single unit, when they seem to be competing states? It seems like every city-state was out for itself, which doesn't sound like the best unit with which to build a civilization. It sounds like Mesopotamia was grouped together because they were all close by and subject to each other's environments. Which seems awfully based on geography, but I digress.
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