Civilisations

A conversation in the pub turned somewhat esoteric, when we were suddenly discussing the rise of civilisations (not cultures, which can be vibrant and rich, but often disappear from history, with just limited traces for modern archaeologists to find), and why some areas had not developed a big cradle civilisation? 

The Cradles Of Civilisation

We got as far as agreeing that small island cultures with a few exceptions, would probably not have the resources to develop stone or brick cities etc, and writing as part of being cradle civilisations, even if they had rich cultures.

Now I have to admit it was a rather brief conversation, as only two of us were interested in the idea, and the general conversation quickly turned back to football, barmaids and whose round it was next etc. However it was a question that intrigued me enough to revisit it here as a post. So first we have to agree what constitutes a civilisation? 

For this article I am positing the following as the criteria of a civilisation as opposed to a society with a strong cultural identity:

• Location (agricultural soil, regular water supply such as a permanent river, transportation possibility such as rivers and or the sea).
  
• Stone and Brick Cities (permanence, stability, defence).
  
• Water management (sewage, drains, and farming).
• Writing (information storage/retention, history, politics).
• Paved Roads (transport, trade, warfare)
  
• Maths (accounts, architecture, supplies, planning).
• Astronomy (seasonal calendars, agriculture)
• Politics (King, Dictator, Emperor, Democracy).

... and that for the purposes of this discussion, smaller islands such as those in Polynesia or Hawaii etc wouldn't be able to develop a classical civilisation, even if they had vibrant cultures, because normally  they lacked resources and the population size required for development into a large civilisation. Exceptions such as Crete managed it because of a suitable central trade location in the Mediterranean giving it access to intellectual contacts, materials and resources via trade with other nascent civilisations. 

So for Location

Its noticeable that nearly all the cradles of recognised civilisation have appeared in what on a Mercator map appears to be a global band north of the equator, and many such as Egypt, the Indus Valley, The Yellow River and Mesopotamia had major rivers at their core.

Others were based in tropical forests such as those in central America, and so all had arable land associated with the rivers or the rain forests or coastal plains The one outlier was the empire of the Incas, which was based in the high mountains of the Andes and was exceptional in many regards.   

Stone or brick cities:

Conglomerations of human habitats are not uncommon around the globe, but true cities that last are slightly rarer: For instance, in the UK there were many large round house type villages, and I believe that in the South, nearer the influence of Roman Gaul, there were larger settlements. 

Camulodunon (Colchester) was a large enough settlement to be mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his 'Natural History' in 77 AD, and archaeologists also believe that they found the first pre-Roman planned town in Britain, beneath Silchester (Roman Calleva Atrebatum), near modern Reading. The Iron Age town was built on a grid-iron pattern and evidence suggests the inhabitants imported wine, olive oil, and garum (Roman fish sauce).

Archaeologist Prof Mike Fulford, from the University of Reading, said the people of Iron Age Silchester appear to have adopted an urbanised 'Roman' way of living, long before the Romans arrived. "It is very remarkable to find this evidence of a planned Iron Age layout before the arrival of the Romans and the development of a planned, Roman town. Indeed, it would be hard to see a significant difference between the lifestyles of the inhabitants of the Iron Age town and of its Roman successor in the 1st Century AD."

So even on the edge of the European continent, it appears that proper stone or brick planned cities were starting to take root. More generally, from Greece and Rome, through Persia, Egypt, and in a broad band around the globe through to China, and then across the Pacific to Mesoamerica (The Maya built grand cities with stone structures, including pyramid temples that were central to their religious practices), permanent stone or brick (and even concrete in the case of Rome) cities sprang up, often from more humble beginnings. 

Many such as London (Londinium 47 AD) Rome (509 BC oligarchic Republic founded), Damascus (1350 BC), Beijing (as Jicheng 1045 BC) are still occupied today, and some such as Teotihuacan (1 BC to 500 AD) that are not ... Mexico city is still on the site of the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan

But no long term permanent stone/brick cities were founded in North America, with various wooden settlements established during the Cahokia - Mississippi culture period around 1000 AD to 1500 AD, but largely disappearing after the culture collapsed. But all these settlements did not even have a stone or brick based religious architecture with only earthen mounds, and the Mississippi culture also had no writing system, and did not smelt iron or practice large bronze metallurgy and mining, but rather scavenged surface copper etc for small scale use.

However the Ancestral Pueblo peoples around the Colorado plateau 900 to 1350 AD did build cliff-sited dwellings with stone or brick dwellings ... but again, the settlements were abandoned due to a mixture of strife and climate change, and no permanent cities arose, and with no known writing system the culture disappeared or dissipated.

While in Central/Southern Africa, only one large stone settlement at Great Zimbabwe from around the 11th century has really been found  (active until the 16th century when it was totally abandoned). Again no writing system, has meant that the culture became just a folk memory for local tribes until modern investigation started to reveal its history.

Paved Roads:

Paved roads naturally sprang from the development of stone/brick cities .... for instance street paving has been found from human settlements around 4000 BC in cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Roads in the towns were straight and long, intersecting one another at right angles, and, in fact, the first paved streets also appear to have been built in Ur in Mesopotania in 4000 BC. 

By 2,000 BC stone-cutting tools were generally available in the Middle East and Greece, allowing local streets to be paved. Notably, in about 2,000 BC, the Minoan's built a 50 km paved road from Knossos in northern Crete through the mountains to Gortyn and Lebena, a port on the south coast of the island, which had side drains (water management). In 500 BC Darius the Great of Persia started extensive road building across his Empire. Roads were built in a number of Indian based Empires.

Roman Roads

By the time of the Roman Empire, road building took on a new fervour (to transport legions and facilitate trade across its vast empire) .... this rate of paved road building was not matched in Europe again until the late 18th century.

So successful were the Roman roads, that they continued to be used well into the Middle ages and indeed the construction method was copied, where resources and wealth allowed new roads to be built, up until modern roads started to be built.

Post Rome, the Arab empire built new roads in their conquests, but in Europe generally the art of road building had declined, so roads generally fell into poor repair until post 1750 AD. An African outlier was the Ashanti Empire (Modern Gambia, in West Africa) which in the 18th century maintained a network of well-kept roads that connected the Ashanti capital with territories within its jurisdiction and influence .... but this practise didn't spread further afield into Central/Southern Africa. 

In the Americas, there were ceremonial stone roads in Mesoamerican cities, but the Inca Empire in the Andes had thousands of kilometres/miles of roads but these were not all paved and were often tracks.

Writing:

Perhaps a key or even the key feature of most civilisations is writing. With writing a civilisation can develop, it can record its achievements, its culture and its history, and most importantly knowledge is no longer generational and not at such risk of being lost. Even if the civilisation collapsed or was conquered, the culture could survive and revive given written records.

It's now generally accepted that there have been four independent inventions of writing

• Mesopotamia (c. 3400–3100 BC),
• Egypt (c. 3250 BC),
• China (before 1250 BC),
• and Mesoamerica (before 1 AD).

and that these four regions spread the idea via cultural diffusion. 

So for example, writing entered Europe via Greece, where several types were attempted, but eventually it was contact with the Phoenicians that led to the adoption of the Phoenician Alphabet as the basis of the Archaic Greek alphabets. So by the beginning of the 9th century BC, various adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived in Greece, early Latin (Italic) and the Anatolian (Roughly modern Turkey area) scripts. 

In Mesoamerica inscriptions identifiable as Maya date to the 3rd century BC, and writing was in continuous use from the 1st century AD until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, in fact the Maya had developed a sophisticated writing system that was the most advanced in the pre-Columbian Americas, whereas the North American Pueblo and Mississippi cultures didn't develop writing and didn't survive their collapse. The Chinese had writing systems as early as 1250 BC and retained a system until today.

In black Africa, the Nile cultures (Kerma [Nubian], Eritrean's and Ethiopians) either adapted the *Ancient South Arabian script (The Geʽez script native to Ethiopia and Eritrea) or the Egyptian scripts. The later Kush kingdom in the same area (today's Sudan) had its own script. *derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script of South Sinai. However there doesn't seem to have been a spread to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

Mathematics:

Its obvious that some method of counting physical objects such as arrow heads or tallying sheep/cattle must have existed early in human developments worldwide, but the evidence for more complex mathematics such as addition and subtraction, and more abstract concepts does not appear until around 3,000 BC, when the Babylonians and Egyptians began using advanced arithmetic, algebra, and geometry for taxation and other financial calculations, for building and construction, and for astronomy. The Greeks really went to town on mathematics and its uses with Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Hipparchus, and Diophantus all pushing the subject forwards.

The Arabs (in the 9th and 10th century when they still prized study), built on the Greeks work, noticeably Diophantus with the development of Algebra along with Persian mathematics. They also gave us the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Indian mathematicians also made discoveries. The Chinese used mathematics, but the history of their maths is not well known (possibly they got some from India and along the silk road). 

Similarly, both the Mayans (250 AD - 900 AD), and the later Aztecs had a sophisticated mathematical system that included a base-20 number system, a variety of symbols, and the Aztecs had a unique way of calculating land area for tax purposes. The Maya were one of the first ancient cultures to use zero as a place holder (The Indians did as well, which the Arabs copied in the 7th century before it transferred to the West after the crusades). Again the North American Pueblo and Mississippi cultures didn't develop a recorded mathematics system that has ever been found.

Astronomy:

As civilisations developed around the globe, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Persia, India, China, and Central America, astronomical observatories were created in each of these cultures, and then ideas on the true nature of the Universe began to be developed. This early astronomy usually consisted of the mapping of the positions of the stars and planets.

The ancient Greeks, Persians, Arabs and Chinese all made extensive studies of the night skies, studies that continued in the West, post Roman world, often funded by the Catholic church (in the hunt for the date of Easter), and its believed that the southern African ruins of the stone city in Zimbabwe (which is the largest stone structure in pre-colonial Southern Africa), may also have also housed some sort of observatory (although there is no firm evidence for this, or of what state their sky observations were at, if any), and some Muslim black states in West Africa started making observations in the Middle ages, using Arabic methods. 

The Maya used mathematics to predict eclipses and created detailed calendars using complex calculations, including three dating systems: one for the gods, one for civil life, and an astronomical calendar known as the Long Count. The Aztec's in the 1300s through to the 1500s AD coordinated the solar calendar with the lunar calendar with Venus cycles. They used proportional calculations to do this. 

Agriculture and Water Management:

Food surpluses are one of the keys for civilisations developing ..... the Americas had maize corn, Asia had rice, Europe had barley, Africa maize, and Middle East had wheat, all of which could be grown intensively to help feed more people with less effort, and crucially produce surpluses for trade or give drought resistance. But of course not all land is arable, nor all climates favourable for agriculture, and so these could be a limiters as well as assisters.

The Cretans, Greeks and The Romans had all used water cisterns, but the Romans of course famously built aqueducts transporting water very large distances for both civil and agricultural purposes, many of these are still standing and some of their sewer systems are still in use in cities today. The Chinese built a series of  massive canals starting around 486 BC with the Han Canal, and eventually they became linked via rivers to form the Grand Canal, still the longest artificial waterway in the world, and maintained for over two millennia. These canal had military, civil and agricultural applications. 

The Maya developed sophisticated irrigation and terracing techniques to farm crops like maize, beans, and squash and the Incas and Aztec's also had sophisticated water management systems.

All of these civilisations were based upon having agricultural surpluses to allow for trade and development, and the support for a centralised government, political leaders, religious leaders, and the public works of the urban centres such as buildings, water supply, sewage etc.

Many other cultures failed simply through droughts, or climate changes, and the lack of an adequate water management system to hoard and target the resource .... 'water is life' as the saying goes.

Politics:

With writing comes written records. With written records, comes speeches and royal decrees .... in other words history, power and politics. 

So for example we know what ancient Greek politicians in Athens, did and thought, and what they wrote. Similarly, we have records of the speeches and actions of Roman politicians and generals through the period of the Republic and of course of Roman Emperors later on. Similarly the records of Persian Kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Indian Rulers and Chinese Kings and Emperors allow us to understand the politics of their time periods .... and their history.

Similarly, the Hieroglyphic writing being used in the Maya region by the 3rd century BC allowed for detailed records of events to be kept as the Maya elite were highly literate. The Maya recorded their history and ritual knowledge in screen-fold books, of which only three uncontested examples remain, the rest having been destroyed by the Spanish, so we mostly only have the stone carved versions available to us today. For those areas without writing systems their histories, politics, thoughts and knowledge are often lost. 

I am just a blogger, and this is simply my take on a complex subject ..... readers may not agree with my interpretations or definitions and could I suspect just as easily make out another case, or even claim that cultures that I've suggested are not cradle civilisations such as the Mississippi etc are indeed cradles. However historians have traditionally claimed the areas on the map above, as the cradle civilisations so I am not working of an unsupported premise.

Generally its considered that there are only a limited number of locations where all these things have come together to allow long lasting civilisations to develop ... often known as cradles they are:

•  Mesopotamia (Fertile Crescent)  
• Ancient Egypt,
• Ancient India (Indus Valley),
• Ancient China (Yellow River),
• Mesoamerica (The Caral–Supe civilization of coastal Peru and the Olmec civilization of Mexico upon which the later civilisations of the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas were built)

.... plus in Europe the Greco/Romano area as the cradle of Western civilisation.

Outlier: 

Now in the interests of fairness, I should point out that one of these cradles of civilisation was very different from the others. The Incas of the Andean empire developed without the development the wheel, limited draft animals (llamas), no iron or steel, and no known system of writing, but yet had monumental stone architecture and sophisticated water management and agriculture methods. 

They developed an extensive road network to all corners of their empire, and created finely-woven textiles. They used of knotted strings for record keeping and communication, and developed agricultural innovations and production, in the difficult environment of the dry highlands. Thus proving that location and restricted resources need not be a handicap to the development of a core civilisation.

So the question is, why did no such large civilisation flowering occur elsewhere on the planet, such as far northern and Eastern Europe up to the Ural's, Siberia and particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa or North America. Both these latter regions had large numbers of human habitation, plenty of fertile lands upon which large scale agriculture could and often was practised. Long rivers such as the Mississippi and the Congo (water access often being another prerequisite for civilisations to flourish), and resources such as Coal (fuel), Metal ores, and Wood (fuel and building). Yet despite this and at least some large cultures developing around 1000 AD in both of these areas, they never quite motored on to develop stone or brick cities or writing systems or higher mathematics etc.

It could be that in some areas such as Siberia, the climate generally didn't favour the development .... maybe in some other areas such as central Africa it was just too easy to get the food and resources to maintain life, and so this stopped the developments needed to create more complex societies or technology to occur? 

Or even that in some areas, human tribes were too far apart from each other for competition to drive development between them? So in sub-Saharan Africa for example, there was plenty of land, and food needs could often be met by essentially small holding garden agriculture, winters were generally not harsh, and there was therefore less need for the large scale agriculture that produces surpluses and large population centres.

The transition from hunter gatherer, to agriculture is the first step towards advancing civilisation and in fact as there were still African hunter gatherer societies well in to the 20th century, this incomplete societal transition in some areas, could be the reason for that part of the region not creating a full blown civilisation. 

In North America, as mentioned, there were some societies such as the Anasazi, who lived in Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, and in particular the Mississippian culture 1050–1350 AD that appear to have started down the road of creating large civilisations. This latter culture had earth mound building (in the style of Mayan stepped stone pyramids) which began with the emergent Mississippian cultural period, around the 9th century AD, but no stone/brick buildings, no water management.

However the inhabitants of the Cahokia complex, also left no written records beyond scratched symbols on pottery, shells, copper, wood, and stone. However the evidence of elaborately planned community, wood-henge, mounds, and burials later in time reveal a complex and sophisticated culture that appear to mirror the central American civilisations. However the complex was completely abandoned by 1400 AD for uncertain reasons.

Then there is the question of animals suitable for domestication .... did North America and Sub-Saharan continents lack suitable food animals or pack animals? North America lacked *horses, or oxen to pull ploughs, and apparently had no suitable alternatives, and also had large numbers of apex predators, who would have made herding dangerous. *Horses are a post Columbian import. 

Whilst Central and South America had Alpacas and llamas, North America had no native pack animals. Africa had domesticated cattle in the Horn area (Ethiopia/Eritrea) and these spread to the north and west BUT crucially above the line of the tsetse fly distribution/range  ... there seems to be little evidence of early domesticated cattle in Central/Southern Africa where the Tsetse fly was prevalent. Although in the far south cattle were domesticated and an important part of the economy e.g. Great Zimbabwe

Tsetse Fly Distribution Inhibited Civilisation

The Tsetse fly, has had a pronounced economic and public health impacts in sub-Saharan Africa (both human and animals), with evidence of a statistically significant weakening of the agriculture, levels of urbanisation, institutions and subsistence strategies. 

The Tsetse fly decimated livestock populations, forcing early states to rely on slave labour to clear land for farming, and preventing farmers from taking advantage of natural animal fertilisers to increase crop production. These long-term effects may have kept population density low, and discouraged cooperation between small-scale communities, thus preventing stronger nations from forming.

Its not entirely clear why these two areas (North America and Central/Southern Africa) didn't develop any early cradle civilisations as you might have expected, given some of the favourable circumstances of their surroundings, but perhaps the factors I described above may be part of the reasons for them not doing so.

Now I should point out that I am just a blogger and not a social historian, and this is simply my take on a complex subject ..... readers may not agree with my interpretations or definitions and could I suspect just as easily make out another case, or even claim that cultures that I've suggested are not cradle civilisations such as the Mississippi etc are indeed cradles. 

However historians for centuries have traditionally claimed the areas on the map above as cradle civilisations, so I am not working of an unsupported premise ... feel free to comment if you have a contrary opinion, but please keep it civilised!😉