This textbook is the best one-volume survey of earlier civilizations I’ve found. It supplies a couple of overview chapters and then summarizes every ancient civilization in Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas in fair detail. I relish its planetary perspective.The important point is that cultural, political, and social complexity arose in widely separated areas; this complexity was diverse in origin but remarkable in sharing a number of common features:<\/p>\n
-Intensive, well-organized agriculture, which supported dense populations but at the cost of great social inequality and sometimes catastrophic environmental degradation
\n-Strongly centralized political and social organization, which institutionalized social inequality the right of a tiny minority of the population to command the labor of thousands of farmers, artisans, and slaves
\n-Stratified social classes with a well-defined nobility, often closely linked by kin ties, at the peak of pyramidlike society in which upward mobility was difficult to achieve except on the battlefield
\n-A universal set of religious beliefs, which often supported the notion of the leader as divine monarch, a living god on earth
\n-Elaborate public architecture, which usually mirrored the symbolic architecture of the state: for example, Angkor Wat or Teotihuacan or, in their own way, the parthenon at Athens and the Colosseum at Rome
\n-A closely organized, centralized bureaucracy, backed by force or the threat of force. This bureaucracy administered the gathering of tribute, a major activity in many preindustrial civilizations
\n-Some form of record keeping, usually a written script in the hands of powerful officials. Power came from literacy
\n-Some type of communication system by land or water, often road networks or caravan routes, usually administered by the state
\n-Cities, or lesser but still large administrative centers and agglomerations of population, and a hierarchy of lesser centers positioned strategically across the landscape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Global perspective of human civilization<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11363,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/11363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}