Map #1: The Fertile Crescent
The fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization
If this area wasn't the birthplace of human civilization, it was at least a birthplace of human civilization. Called "the fertile crescent" because of its lush soil, the "crescent" of land mostly includes modern-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine. (Some definitions also include the Nile River valley in Egypt.) People started farming here in 9000 BC, and by around 2500 BC the Sumerians formed the first complex society that resembles what we'd now call a "country," complete with written laws and a political system. Put differently, there are more years between Sumerians and ancient Romans than there are between ancient Romans and us. |
Source: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations, pgs. 28 – 31, Touchstone, 2001
The Checklist of Civilization
Once a stretch of line has been pegged out and marked as civilization's own, observers start noticing or imagining ways in which it is different from the rest. Almost every theorist has proposed checklists of criteria which a society has to meet in order to qualify as a civilization. All these lists are useless. All the characteristics traditionally used to identify civilizations raise problems which are hard, perhaps impossible, to solve. It has often been said, for instance, that nomadic societies cannot be civilized; "civilization began when agriculture and a definite form of organized village life became established." Yet the Scythians, and their heirs on the Asian steppelands, created dazzling and enduring works of art, built impressive permanent structures—at first for tombs, liter for administrative and even commercial purposes—and created political and economic systems on a scale far greater, in the Mongols' case, than those of any of their neighbors whose traditions of life were more settled.
Again, cities have frequently been thought of as essential to civilized life; but no one has ever established a satisfactory way of distinguishing a city from other ways of organizing space to live in. Some of the impressive sites we shall visit in the course of this book—such as Great Zimbabwe or Uxmal—have been denied the status of cities by some commentators, although they were heavily populated and formidably built. In medieval Mexico or Java and Copper Age Southeastern Europe there were peoples who preferred to live in relatively small communities and dwellings built of modest materials; but this did not stop them from compiling fabulous wealth, creating wonderful art, keeping—in most cases—written records (or something very like them), and, in Java, building on a monumental scale.
Some strivers for a definition have insisted that civic communities have to be defined economically—usually by preference for trade or industry over the production of food. This will not do, because, in most societies for most of his-tory, communities recognizable as cities have been part of a wider countryside and most of their populations have been absolutely dependent on agriculture. To disqualify strictly agrarian societies from civilization is to invalidate much of the work that has been done on the subject. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is the kind of radical revision that demands careful justification. No such justification has so far been proposed. Economics, in any case, do not make a city: only the state of mind of the citizens can do that. In Santillana del Mar there are cattle grids in the streets, but civic pride frowns from every crested stone façade. Every real-life "Gopher Prairie" in the American Midwest in the early twentieth century had claques of "boosters" to testify to the urbanity of their wretched little settlements. Every metropolis on an erstwhile frontier existed in the imaginations of its founders—and sometimes in the laughably grandiose plans they scratched on any materials to hand—before it became big or viable or economically specialized. To suppose that a city has to be "post-agrarian" is worse than a mistake, it is a sin: the sin of pride in the sort of cities we have nowadays in the industrialized world, the crime of insisting that our own standards are universal.
Writing is an ingredient often demanded by definers of civilization; but many societies of glorious achievement have transmitted memories or recorded data in other ways, including knotted strings and notched sticks, reed maps, textiles, and gestures. The distinction between writing and other forms of symbolic expression is more easily uttered than justified in detail. Elements of two works which, after the Bible, have had the greatest influence on Western literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were probably composed without writing and—like much ancient wisdom in all societies—transmitted by memory and word of mouth. The epics of almost every literary tradition preserve echoes from an age of oral tradition. Chinese novels, until well into the present century, were divided into chapters by the storytellers' traditional recapitulations and included end-of-chapter "teases" to induce another copper for the pot. In the pages which follow, many societies are seen to have confided what was memorable, and therefore of lasting value, to oral transmission, and to have devised writing systems in order to record rubbish: fiscal ephemera, merchants' memoranda.
Some of the other criteria—division of labor, economically structured class systems, states or state like institutions, organs for making and enforcing laws — are so obviously plucked from the social environments of the men who have proposed them as to be unworthy of consideration. Most societies have them, and can rejoice or repine in mixed measures. But there is nothing particularly civilized about any of them. Other supposed desiderata are too vague to be useful, or occur too selectively, or depend on incomplete prior arguments about how societies in general "evolve" or "develop." They are usually presented in a ragbag represented as a systematic analysis. The editor of the 1978 Wolfson Lectures on The Origins of Civilization speculated on the possible relevance of irrigation, technology, population pressures, "evolving social structures," "property concepts," ideology, and trade. In the end, city life, religion, and literacy were selected as the only criteria; in consequence, the lectures revealed something about the origins of city life, religion, and literacy, but those of civilization were left untouched.
In proposing to treat civilization as a relationship between man and nature, 1 am not merely erecting, in place of those I have discarded, another set of hurdles—another list of criteria which societies have to meet before they can be ad-mitted to the ranks of the civilized. I am, rather, extending a scale along which societies place themselves according to the degree to which they modify their natural environments. Some of the civilizations chosen as examples in the rest of the book are familiar to readers of comparative studies of civilizations. This should not be taken as an endorsement of the criteria: it is a purely practical de-vice to enable readers to relate the more unfamiliar, recherché, or surprising examples to what they already know. It is also intended as a way of showing that many societies excluded from traditional lists of civilizations actually fulfill some of the conventional criteria or possess characteristics generally thought to define, or at least to mark, civilization.
Back to Nature: Array by Environment
There are four principal reasons for classifying civilizations according to environment.
First, it represents a change of perspective by comparison with the usual angles of approach. Even if the experiment fails, it is worth making, because every new vantage point extends vision. History is glimpsed between leaves: the more you shift your viewpoint, the more is revealed. Second, environment—although riven by boundaries which are matters of subjective judgment—is real and objective: rain and sand, heat and cold, forest and ice can be seen or felt and their intensity measured, whereas, if one classifies civilizations according, say, to their degree of "development," the result will almost certainly be a ranking determined by the beholders' sympathies. The criteria will be scraped off the surface of a mirror. The phases or stages, templates, and types usually used to split civilizations into manageable groups are all constructed by students, whereas environment is imposed by nature. Third, the usage I advocate is justified by tradition. The term "civilization" was coined in eighteenth-century Europe in the course of men's attempts to distance themselves from the rest of nature. In part, their project was of self-domestication: to fillet out the savagery within by means of social rituals, manners, and rules of "polite" conduct. At a further level, the same project reached out to reform nonhuman nature: to tame animals, or scientifically breed beautiful or exploitable beasts and plants, or landscape parks and gardens, "improve" land, and generally turn the physical environment into a setting fit for the activities of politesse. The epithet "polite" and its cognates in most European languages suggest both polish and politeia. Landscapes too wild to be re-crafted were explored, surveyed, measured, and sometimes reimagined by painters of the picturesque, who rearranged their elements and soothed their irregularities. A Dutch writer of 1797 actually defined civilization as the reformation of nature. One of the virtues of Toynbee's writings on civilization was that they kept in touch with this tradition. In 1919, long before he became an eco-logical prophet and spokesman for the defense of the "biosphere," Toynbee formulated a definition of civilization as a stage "in a process in which human individuals are molded less and less by their environment . . . and adapt their environment more and more to their own will. And one can discern, I think, a point at which, rather suddenly, the human will take the place of the mechanical laws of the environment as the governing factor in the relationship." Fortunately, he forgot or abandoned this definition, for there is no such threshold or turning point: processes by which environments are adapted are continuous and cumulative. Nevertheless, Toynbee was a pioneer of historical ecology, who never left the environment out of his descriptions of civilizations; and his doc-trine of "challenge and response"- - according to which challenging environments inspire civilizing responses—is a powerful and useful characterization of one of the ways in which civilization is measurable.
Finally, the very act of classifying civilizations environmentally reveals truths: that no linear or progressive story unites their histories; that they are neither determined nor uninfluenced by environment; that no habitable environment is utterly uncivilizable; that environmental diversity helps; that civilizations start in specific environments but can sometimes conquer, colonize, or cross others; and that peoples of diverse provenance have excelled as civilizers in different conditions. No part of the world is uniquely privileged, no people uniquely fitted for civilization.
Once a stretch of line has been pegged out and marked as civilization's own, observers start noticing or imagining ways in which it is different from the rest. Almost every theorist has proposed checklists of criteria which a society has to meet in order to qualify as a civilization. All these lists are useless. All the characteristics traditionally used to identify civilizations raise problems which are hard, perhaps impossible, to solve. It has often been said, for instance, that nomadic societies cannot be civilized; "civilization began when agriculture and a definite form of organized village life became established." Yet the Scythians, and their heirs on the Asian steppelands, created dazzling and enduring works of art, built impressive permanent structures—at first for tombs, liter for administrative and even commercial purposes—and created political and economic systems on a scale far greater, in the Mongols' case, than those of any of their neighbors whose traditions of life were more settled.
Again, cities have frequently been thought of as essential to civilized life; but no one has ever established a satisfactory way of distinguishing a city from other ways of organizing space to live in. Some of the impressive sites we shall visit in the course of this book—such as Great Zimbabwe or Uxmal—have been denied the status of cities by some commentators, although they were heavily populated and formidably built. In medieval Mexico or Java and Copper Age Southeastern Europe there were peoples who preferred to live in relatively small communities and dwellings built of modest materials; but this did not stop them from compiling fabulous wealth, creating wonderful art, keeping—in most cases—written records (or something very like them), and, in Java, building on a monumental scale.
Some strivers for a definition have insisted that civic communities have to be defined economically—usually by preference for trade or industry over the production of food. This will not do, because, in most societies for most of his-tory, communities recognizable as cities have been part of a wider countryside and most of their populations have been absolutely dependent on agriculture. To disqualify strictly agrarian societies from civilization is to invalidate much of the work that has been done on the subject. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is the kind of radical revision that demands careful justification. No such justification has so far been proposed. Economics, in any case, do not make a city: only the state of mind of the citizens can do that. In Santillana del Mar there are cattle grids in the streets, but civic pride frowns from every crested stone façade. Every real-life "Gopher Prairie" in the American Midwest in the early twentieth century had claques of "boosters" to testify to the urbanity of their wretched little settlements. Every metropolis on an erstwhile frontier existed in the imaginations of its founders—and sometimes in the laughably grandiose plans they scratched on any materials to hand—before it became big or viable or economically specialized. To suppose that a city has to be "post-agrarian" is worse than a mistake, it is a sin: the sin of pride in the sort of cities we have nowadays in the industrialized world, the crime of insisting that our own standards are universal.
Writing is an ingredient often demanded by definers of civilization; but many societies of glorious achievement have transmitted memories or recorded data in other ways, including knotted strings and notched sticks, reed maps, textiles, and gestures. The distinction between writing and other forms of symbolic expression is more easily uttered than justified in detail. Elements of two works which, after the Bible, have had the greatest influence on Western literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were probably composed without writing and—like much ancient wisdom in all societies—transmitted by memory and word of mouth. The epics of almost every literary tradition preserve echoes from an age of oral tradition. Chinese novels, until well into the present century, were divided into chapters by the storytellers' traditional recapitulations and included end-of-chapter "teases" to induce another copper for the pot. In the pages which follow, many societies are seen to have confided what was memorable, and therefore of lasting value, to oral transmission, and to have devised writing systems in order to record rubbish: fiscal ephemera, merchants' memoranda.
Some of the other criteria—division of labor, economically structured class systems, states or state like institutions, organs for making and enforcing laws — are so obviously plucked from the social environments of the men who have proposed them as to be unworthy of consideration. Most societies have them, and can rejoice or repine in mixed measures. But there is nothing particularly civilized about any of them. Other supposed desiderata are too vague to be useful, or occur too selectively, or depend on incomplete prior arguments about how societies in general "evolve" or "develop." They are usually presented in a ragbag represented as a systematic analysis. The editor of the 1978 Wolfson Lectures on The Origins of Civilization speculated on the possible relevance of irrigation, technology, population pressures, "evolving social structures," "property concepts," ideology, and trade. In the end, city life, religion, and literacy were selected as the only criteria; in consequence, the lectures revealed something about the origins of city life, religion, and literacy, but those of civilization were left untouched.
In proposing to treat civilization as a relationship between man and nature, 1 am not merely erecting, in place of those I have discarded, another set of hurdles—another list of criteria which societies have to meet before they can be ad-mitted to the ranks of the civilized. I am, rather, extending a scale along which societies place themselves according to the degree to which they modify their natural environments. Some of the civilizations chosen as examples in the rest of the book are familiar to readers of comparative studies of civilizations. This should not be taken as an endorsement of the criteria: it is a purely practical de-vice to enable readers to relate the more unfamiliar, recherché, or surprising examples to what they already know. It is also intended as a way of showing that many societies excluded from traditional lists of civilizations actually fulfill some of the conventional criteria or possess characteristics generally thought to define, or at least to mark, civilization.
Back to Nature: Array by Environment
There are four principal reasons for classifying civilizations according to environment.
First, it represents a change of perspective by comparison with the usual angles of approach. Even if the experiment fails, it is worth making, because every new vantage point extends vision. History is glimpsed between leaves: the more you shift your viewpoint, the more is revealed. Second, environment—although riven by boundaries which are matters of subjective judgment—is real and objective: rain and sand, heat and cold, forest and ice can be seen or felt and their intensity measured, whereas, if one classifies civilizations according, say, to their degree of "development," the result will almost certainly be a ranking determined by the beholders' sympathies. The criteria will be scraped off the surface of a mirror. The phases or stages, templates, and types usually used to split civilizations into manageable groups are all constructed by students, whereas environment is imposed by nature. Third, the usage I advocate is justified by tradition. The term "civilization" was coined in eighteenth-century Europe in the course of men's attempts to distance themselves from the rest of nature. In part, their project was of self-domestication: to fillet out the savagery within by means of social rituals, manners, and rules of "polite" conduct. At a further level, the same project reached out to reform nonhuman nature: to tame animals, or scientifically breed beautiful or exploitable beasts and plants, or landscape parks and gardens, "improve" land, and generally turn the physical environment into a setting fit for the activities of politesse. The epithet "polite" and its cognates in most European languages suggest both polish and politeia. Landscapes too wild to be re-crafted were explored, surveyed, measured, and sometimes reimagined by painters of the picturesque, who rearranged their elements and soothed their irregularities. A Dutch writer of 1797 actually defined civilization as the reformation of nature. One of the virtues of Toynbee's writings on civilization was that they kept in touch with this tradition. In 1919, long before he became an eco-logical prophet and spokesman for the defense of the "biosphere," Toynbee formulated a definition of civilization as a stage "in a process in which human individuals are molded less and less by their environment . . . and adapt their environment more and more to their own will. And one can discern, I think, a point at which, rather suddenly, the human will take the place of the mechanical laws of the environment as the governing factor in the relationship." Fortunately, he forgot or abandoned this definition, for there is no such threshold or turning point: processes by which environments are adapted are continuous and cumulative. Nevertheless, Toynbee was a pioneer of historical ecology, who never left the environment out of his descriptions of civilizations; and his doc-trine of "challenge and response"- - according to which challenging environments inspire civilizing responses—is a powerful and useful characterization of one of the ways in which civilization is measurable.
Finally, the very act of classifying civilizations environmentally reveals truths: that no linear or progressive story unites their histories; that they are neither determined nor uninfluenced by environment; that no habitable environment is utterly uncivilizable; that environmental diversity helps; that civilizations start in specific environments but can sometimes conquer, colonize, or cross others; and that peoples of diverse provenance have excelled as civilizers in different conditions. No part of the world is uniquely privileged, no people uniquely fitted for civilization.
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