From Villages to Cities Lecture 29
The appearance of Agrarian civilizations, from about 5,000 years ago, marks an important subordinate threshold in this course.
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Lecture 29: From Villages to Cities
ith Agrarian civilizations we get, for the ¿rst time, cities, states, and … writing! This means that for the ¿rst time we have written evidence, precise dates, and even some names. In short, we enter the realm of what many historians might regard as “real history.” Suddenly, we have a mass of information and ideas. This creates new problems. Whereas in discussing biology or geology there was a broad consensus about the main ideas, historians debate endlessly about the main lines of historical development, so there is more room for controversy here than in any earlier part of this course. From now on, our main challenge will be to avoid getting too caught up in the details or the controversies of historians and try to keep our eye on the overall shape of human historical development. Lectures Twenty-Nine through Thirty-Seven survey the 5,000 years or so during which “Agrarian civilizations” dominated the history of most people on Earth. This is the largest single group of lectures in this course. This lecture de¿nes Agrarian civilizations and offers a brief chronology of their initial appearance. Then we turn to Mesopotamia, located in modern Iraq, to describe how increasing productivity created the foundations for some of the earliest Agrarian civilizations. The term “civilization” can be used in many different ways, so I need to explain that I use it neutrally, as a label for a particular type of human community. I do not use it to imply any value judgments about these communities. However, I will argue that Agrarian civilizations were more complex than all earlier human societies. Agrarian civilizations had distinctive characteristics. x
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They had large, networked communities of many millions of people.
