Where and Why Did the First Cities and States Appear?발음듣기
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Where and Why Did the First Cities and States Appear?
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In the last unit, we crossed the seventh major threshold of complexity in this course, agriculture.발음듣기
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We saw how, from about 10,000 years ago, small agricultural villages began to spread in many different parts of the world.발음듣기
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Now, at first that may seem surprising because when we think of human history, we often think first of the great agrarian civilizations.발음듣기
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But without the slow spread of simple farming villages, those agrarian civilizations could never have existed.발음듣기
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you need to be able to get more resources from a given area, particularly more food resources.발음듣기
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Thanks to farming, between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, human populations seemed to have increased from about five million to ten times as much - about 50 million.발음듣기
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A lot of those humans still lived as foragers, but probably by 5,000 years ago, the vast majority of them lived as peasant farmers.발음듣기
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Now, within each agrarian area, villages began to bud off, both within the core regions and at their edges, so villages began to spread.발음듣기
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They developed new crops and they began to develop new and more productive technologies of farming.발음듣기
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From about 6,000 years ago, some communities began to find more productive ways of using their domestic animals.발음듣기
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Instead of just using them for their meat or skin, which you can only do when you slaughter them,발음듣기
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they began to use them for products that they develop while they're still alive such as their fur or their milk or their draft power.발음듣기
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A human can deliver perhaps 75 watts of power, but a horse or an ox can deliver almost ten times as much.발음듣기
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And using that power to pull plows, some communities began to farm lands that you couldn't possibly farm using just ordinary hand-held hoes.발음듣기
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And using that power, you could also carry goods in a way that was impossible just for human porters.발음듣기
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And finally, these more productive ways of using animals made it possible for so-called pastoral nomads to settle the arid steppe lands of Eurasia, traveling nomadically with their herds of livestock.발음듣기
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If those areas have fertile soils, which a lot of them do, then you can get huge crops through irrigation,발음듣기
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particularly if you introduce large-scale, sophisticated irrigation systems with canals and ditches that require a lot of organization.발음듣기
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As farming technologies became more complex and more productive, they eventually allowed the creation of larger,발음듣기
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This transition seems to have happened first in Mesopotamia, in the lands south of the Fertile Crescent, and also at about the same time along the Nile Valley.발음듣기
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In these regions, as villages spread and farming became more productive, eventually there appeared the first really large villages and then towns and cities.발음듣기
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In the lands between the great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, irrigation systems emerged that produced huge crops and supported large populations.발음듣기
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And then from about 5,000 years ago, there appeared in the south of Mesopotamia, in the region called Sumer, the first real cities.발음듣기
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They had walled gardens. They had fortifications around them. They had temples, they had palaces, and they had complex irrigation systems.발음듣기
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The real key to the creation of cities seems to be the tiny surpluses that peasant farmers produce, particularly as their farming became more productive.발음듣기
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And now, something happened that was a bit like something that had happened already 500 or 600 million years earlier with the appearance of the first multicelled organisms.발음듣기
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Individuals got so dependent on each other that they began to need some sort of coordinating mechanism.발음듣기
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Town dwellers and farmers needed someone to maintain the huge irrigation systems on which they depended.발음듣기
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And everyone, frankly, needed someone to organize all of these increasingly complex relationships.발음듣기
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Most of these were men and what they did was they began to take on the role of coordinating society.발음듣기
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but as power brokers became more powerful and had more resources, eventually they began to hire paid enforcers who could impose their will by force.발음듣기
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And now, for the first time, we have true states and true governments, and also have something else.발음듣기
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But above them there's now a new layer of elite groups who extract resources from the farmers by the threat of force.발음듣기
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At the top there's a small minority of people who are very rich and very powerful who extract resources from the vast majority of peasants who may make up 90% of society.발음듣기
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And in addition, there's always, we find, a small class of menials or slaves at the very bottom of the heap.발음듣기
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They had different languages, different religious traditions, different artistic traditions, but there were also hugely important similarities.발음듣기
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All of them, for example, had big cities, and those cities had what we call monumental architecture: temples, pyramids, palaces.발음듣기
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And supporting the whole thing was a large population of peasants, most of whom lived outside the major cities.발음듣기
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Agrarian civilizations also had writing - all of them, and this is really important because it seems to have accelerated collective learning.발음듣기
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Writing probably originated as a system of accounting as those elites and power brokers who were accumulating more and more resources tried to keep track of their resources.발음듣기
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But eventually the symbols used for accounting could be used to convey all the nuances of everyday languages and generate literatures and history - proper writing.발음듣기
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So this means it appeared in all the core regions of agriculture with some interesting exceptions.발음듣기
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It didn't appear in Papua New Guinea, probably because the root crops that were grown there could not be stored and agriculture was not quite productive enough to generate surpluses and support specialists.발음듣기
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As we've seen, the first real agrarian civilizations seem to have appeared in Mesopotamia and along the Nile Valley about 5,000 years ago.발음듣기
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Some of these consisted really of little more than cities with surrounding villages, but some were huge, including the first Egyptian state, which covered a vast area along the Nile.발음듣기
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By about 4,000 years ago, we have evidence of agrarian civilizations in China and other parts of Asia, including Korea, which is where this folk village is.발음듣기
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We get evidence of cities also appearing in other regions such as central Asia and in Pakistan along the river Indus.발음듣기
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Then, by about 3,000 years ago, we get evidence of huge empires such as the Assyrian empire.발음듣기
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The first real agrarian civilizations in the Americas seem to have appeared about 2,000 years ago, just over 2,000 years ago.발음듣기
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By 500 years ago, when Europeans first reached the Americas, the Inca and the Aztec empires covered a colossal territory.발음듣기
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Agrarian civilizations, like the agrarian technologies on which they were based, slowly evolved, spread, developed, got more complex, more populous over 4,000 years.발음듣기
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