Civilization

• 1. Introduction

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  A civilization, in its most basic definition, is a society made up of cities. The National Geographic Society puts it that plainly, and the word itself reaches back to the Latin civitas, meaning city. But behind that simple phrase sits a tangle of arguments that has occupied historians, anthropologists, and philosophers for centuries. What exactly separates a civilization from a tribe, a band, or a village of farmers? When did the first ones appear, and why did some forms of farming produce them while others did not? Why have civilizations risen, spread across whole cultural spheres, and then collapsed back into simpler ways of living? And why has the very word carried a sharp edge of judgment, dividing the world into the civilized and the supposedly uncivilized? These are the questions that follow. The answers run from the cereal fields of ancient Sumer to the energy budgets of imagined societies among the stars.

• 2. Anatomy Of A City Society

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  V. Gordon Childe, a social scientist, named a list of traits that mark a civilization apart from other kinds of society. They are distinguished by their means of subsistence, their settlement patterns, their forms of government, their social stratification, and their literacy, among other cultural traits. The state sits at the center of all of it, a political structure more complex than anything found in a tribe or a band.

  State societies are more stratified than other societies, meaning the gulf between social classes runs deeper. The ruling class, usually concentrated in the cities, controls much of the surplus and acts through a government or bureaucracy. Morton Fried, a conflict theorist, and Elman Service, an integration theorist, sorted human cultures into four categories by political system and inequality. Hunter-gatherer bands sit at one end, generally egalitarian. Horticultural and pastoralist societies hold two inherited classes, chief and commoner. Chiefdoms stack up several inherited ranks, from king and noble down to freeman, serf, and slave. Civilizations crown the scheme, with complex hierarchies and institutional government.

  Andrew Nikiforuk pushes the picture darker, arguing that civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities, and he counts slavery as a common feature of pre-modern civilizations.

  Elaborate agriculture, architecture, infrastructure, currency, taxation, and the specialization of labour all gather under the same roof. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, and over other human beings as well.

• 3. The Grain That Built States

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  All civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence, with the possible exception of some early civilizations in Peru that may have leaned on maritime resources. Most lasting civilizations relied on cereal agriculture. The traditional surplus model holds that cereal farming piles up storage and a food surplus, especially with intensive methods like artificial fertilization, irrigation, and crop rotation. Grain matters because it can be stored for a long time, where horticultural produce resists accumulation.

  Research from the Journal of Political Economy contradicts that model. It argues that horticultural gardening was actually more productive than cereal farming. Yet only cereal farming produced civilization, and the reason is appropriability. A yearly grain harvest could be seen, measured, and taxed. Rural populations growing cereals could be taxed, which sustained a taxing elite and let cities grow. Highly productive roots and tubers turned out to be a curse of plenty, preventing the emergence of states and impeding economic development.

  A surplus of food frees some people from producing it. Early civilizations included soldiers, artisans, priests and priestesses, and others with specialized careers. This division of labour, a defining trait, opened a wider range of human activity. The link is not absolute. Some indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest reached food surpluses without farming, as perhaps did the Mesolithic Natufian culture. Surpluses and large-scale organization may even predate the domestication of plants and animals.

  Writing, developed first by people in Sumer, counts as a hallmark of civilization, appearing alongside the rise of complex administrative bureaucracies or the conquest state. Traders and bureaucrats needed it for accurate records. The Inca civilization of the Andes shows it is not strictly required. The Inca used no writing at all, only the quipus, knotted strings of different lengths and colours, and still functioned as a civilized society.

• 4. Coins, Tribute, And Stature

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  In a village, a potter makes a pot for the brewer, and the brewer pays him back with a certain amount of beer. That tidy exchange breaks down in a city. The potter may need a new roof, the roofer new shoes, the cobbler new horseshoes, the blacksmith a coat, and the tanner a pot. These people may not know one another, and their needs may not arrive at the same time. A monetary system organizes these obligations so they get fulfilled.

  Early human cultures ran on a gift economy supplemented by limited barter. By the early Iron Age, civilizations developed money as a medium of exchange for increasingly complex transactions. From the days of the earliest monetarized civilizations, monopolistic control of monetary systems has benefited the social and political elites. Those who do not grow their own food must trade goods and services for it, or surrender it through tribute, redistributive taxation, tariffs, or tithes.

  The move from simpler to more complex economies does not automatically lift the living standards of ordinary people. The Middle Ages, roughly 500 to 1500 CE, is often painted as a decline from the Roman Empire. Yet studies show the average stature of males in the Middle Ages was greater than during the Roman Empire that preceded it, and greater than during the Early Modern Period that followed, roughly 1500 to 1800 CE. The Plains Indians of North America in the 19th century stood taller than their civilized American and European counterparts. Average stature is a good measure of a population's access to necessities, especially food, and its freedom from disease.

• 5. The Word As A Weapon

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  Adam Ferguson, in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society, wrote that not only does the individual advance from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation. That line carries the first known use of the word in English. The abstract noun, meaning a civilized condition, arrived in the 1760s from French, the first French use traced to 1757 by Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau. The word stood opposed to barbarism, fixed inside the Age of Enlightenment's pursuit of progress.

  During the French Revolution, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, civilization was used only in the singular, meaning the progress of humanity as a whole. The plural, civilizations as a countable noun, drifted into occasional use in the 19th century and grew common only in the later 20th. The idea of civilization implies a progression from a previous uncivilized state, and cultures calling themselves civilized often defined themselves against others they labeled barbarians, savages, and primitives.

  The modern Western idea of civilization grew as a contrast to the indigenous cultures European settlers met during the colonization of the Americas and Australia. By the 19th century, European culture cast itself as civilized and superior, and civilization became a core part of European identity. The idea also served as a justification for domination. In Australia, British settlers justified displacing Indigenous Australians by noting the land looked uncultivated and wild, reflecting in their eyes inhabitants not civilized enough to improve it. Anthropologists have since largely condemned the term primitive for its derogatory connotations and its false implication that such cultures are unchanging relics of the past.

  Not everyone in the 18th century saw civilization as improvement. Rousseau, in his work on education, Emile, argued that civilization, more rational and socially driven, sits out of accord with human nature. From this grew a German tradition, first in Johann Gottfried Herder and later in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, that saw cultures as natural organisms and civilization as unnatural, breeding vices like guile, hypocrisy, envy, and avarice. Having fled Germany, Leo Strauss argued in New York during World War II that this very view of civilization lay behind Nazism, German militarism, and nihilism.

• 6. Spheres, Cycles, And Systems

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  Oswald Spengler, an early twentieth-century philosopher, used the German word Kultur, culture, for what many call a civilization. He believed a civilization's coherence rests on a single primary cultural symbol. Cultures, in his telling, pass through birth, life, decline, and death, often replaced by a potent new culture built around a fresh symbol. For Spengler, civilization itself marks the beginning of a culture's decline, the most external and artificial state a developed humanity can reach.

  Arnold J. Toynbee carried this unified-culture idea into the mid-twentieth century. His multi-volume A Study of History traced the rise and, in most cases, the decline of 21 civilizations and five arrested civilizations. Civilizations fell, he argued, because a creative minority failed through moral or religious decline to meet some important challenge, rather than from mere economic or environmental causes. Samuel P. Huntington defined civilization as the highest cultural grouping of people, the broadest level of cultural identity short of what separates humans from other species.

  A different group of theorists treats a civilization as a complex system, a network of cities emerging from pre-urban cultures and defined by economic, political, military, diplomatic, social, and cultural interactions. These spheres operate on different scales. Until the nineteenth century, trade networks ran much larger than either cultural or political spheres. The Silk Road through Central Asia and Indian Ocean sea routes linked the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, India, and China two thousand years ago, when those civilizations shared almost no political or cultural ties. During the Uruk period, Guillermo Algaze has argued, trade connected Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Resin later found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur is suggested to have been traded north from Mozambique.

  Many theorists hold that the world has already merged into a single world system through globalization. David Wilkinson proposed that economic and military-diplomatic integration of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations created what he calls the Central Civilization around 1500 BCE. It later spread across the Middle East and Europe, then went global with European colonization, absorbing the Americas, Australia, China, and Japan by the nineteenth century. What Huntington calls the clash of civilizations, Wilkinson recasts as a clash of cultural spheres inside one global civilization.

• 7. Cradles Of The Urban Revolution

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  The Natufian culture in the Levantine corridor offers the earliest case of a Neolithic Revolution, with cereal crops planted from about 11,000 BCE. The earliest Neolithic technology and lifestyle took hold first in Western Asia, at sites like Göbekli Tepe from around 9,130 BCE, then in the Yellow River and Yangtze basins of China among the Peiligang and Pengtoushan cultures, and spread across Eurasia. Mesopotamia hosts the earliest civilizations, developing from 7,400 years ago. Beverley Milton-Edwards judged this area to have inspired some of the most important developments in human history, including the wheel, the earliest cities, and written cursive script.

  Similar neolithic revolutions began independently from 7,000 BCE in northwestern South America, with the Caral-Supe civilization, and in Mesoamerica. The Black Sea area served as a cradle of European civilization, and Solnitsata, a fortified stone settlement dated 5500 to 4200 BCE, is believed by some archaeologists to be the oldest known town in present-day Europe. The 8.2 Kiloyear Arid Event and the 5.9 Kiloyear Inter-pluvial dried out semiarid regions and spread deserts. That climate change shifted the cost-benefit ratio of violence between communities, ending unwalled villages and raising walled cities, seen by some as a mark of early civilizations.

  Childe introduced the term urban revolution in the 1930s. From the 4th millennium BCE it marked the start of accumulated transferable surpluses, and it came bound to a state monopoly of violence, a warrior class, endemic warfare, fast-developing hierarchies, and the use of human sacrifice. Power was monopolized by an elite ruling class who practiced it.

  From around 3600 BCE, elitist Chalcolithic civilizations rose in various cradles, beginning with Mesopotamia and swelling into Bronze Age empires, among them the Akkadian Empire, the Indus Valley Civilization, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and the Hittite Empire. Outside the Old World, urbanization in the Caral-Supe civilization on the Peruvian coast began about 3500 BCE. The Olmec civilization emerged about 1200 BCE, the oldest known Mayan city in present-day Guatemala dates to about 750 BCE, and Teotihuacan near modern Mexico City held a population of about 125,000 in 350 CE, one of the largest cities in the world.

• 8. Why Civilizations Fall

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  Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dated the final act of Rome's collapse to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE. The decline of Rome, he wrote, was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness, the stupendous fabric yielding to the pressure of its own weight. Theodor Mommsen, in his History of Rome, instead placed the collapse at the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, leaning on a biological analogy of genesis, growth, senescence, collapse, and decay.

  Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah shaped theories of the growth and decline of Islamic civilization, suggesting that repeated invasions by nomadic peoples and limited development could trigger social collapse. Spengler, in his Decline of the West, counted only eight mature civilizations and argued that growing cultures become imperialistic civilizations that expand and ultimately collapse. Joseph Tainter, in The Collapse of Complex Societies, pointed to diminishing returns to complexity, suggesting Rome reached its maximum permissible complexity in the 2nd century CE. Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse studied 41 cultures and named five major reasons, including environmental damage, climate change, dependence on long-distance trade, rising internal and external violence, and a society's response to its problems.

  Peter Turchin in Historical Dynamics and Andrey Korotayev offer mathematical models of agrarian collapse. Turchin's fiscal-demographic model traces a cycle. Early on, high per capita production feeds population growth and easily collected taxes. As population swells, per capita output falls, taxes grow hard to collect, and state expenses rise, until famine, epidemic, state breakdown, and collapse arrive. Bryan Ward-Perkins, in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, argued from archaeological evidence that the western collapse gutted living standards, so that even basic plumbing for the elite vanished from the continent for 1,000 years.

  Arthur Demarest, in Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization, concluded that no single explanation suffices, that erratic events including soil loss, drought, and rising violence disintegrated the courts of Mayan kingdoms. Civilizations traditionally end one of two ways, either absorbed into an expanding rival, as Ancient Egypt passed into Hellenistic Greek and then Roman civilization, or by collapsing into a simpler form, a so-called Dark Age.

  Samuel P. Huntington holds that the 21st century will be marked by a clash of civilizations, replacing the conflicts between nation-states and ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. The view drew strong challenge from Edward Said, Muhammed Asadi, and Amartya Sen. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris argued the true clash between the Muslim world and the West stems from the rejection of the West's more liberal sexual values, not political ideology. In Identity and Violence, Sen questioned dividing people along a single supposed civilization defined by religion and culture, since it ignores the many other identities that make up a person.

  Morris Berman, in Dark Ages America: the End of Empire, argues that the very traits that lifted the corporate consumerist United States, extreme individualism, territorial and economic expansion, and the pursuit of material wealth, have pushed it past a threshold where collapse is inevitable. The urban planner Jane Jacobs makes a kindred case, naming five decaying pillars of United States culture: community and family, higher education, the effective practice of science, taxation and government, and the self-regulation of the learned professions. Derrick Jensen defines civilization as a culture that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities, and argues it inherently adopts imperialist, expansionist, and coercion-based forms because cities must routinely import food and other necessities.

  The Kardashev scale ranks civilizations by the energy they can harness, a hypothetical measure that places energy consumption in a cosmic perspective. An alternative view holds that ever-increasing energy use may mark a crude phase rather than a universal law. A future society might instead pursue technological minimalism, optimization, efficiency, and extreme miniaturization, performing complex functions on negligible energy through quantum-scale engineering. Viewed from interstellar distances, such a world could look pristine, a flourishing biosphere with little trace of industry.

  The scientific consensus holds that human beings are the only animal species on Earth with the cognitive ability to create civilizations. The silurian hypothesis, a recent thought experiment, asks whether an industrial civilization could even be detected in the geological record given how little we know of eras before the quaternary. Astronomers still speculate about communicating alien intelligences within and beyond the Milky Way, often through variants of the Drake equation, searching for technosignatures and proposing a field called xenoarchaeology to study the artifact remains of non-human civilizations, should any ever be found and confirmed.