Civilization, writing and the birth of Religions

In the first chapters, the picture of how humans have started inhabiting the earth was really broad because there was not a structure to follow or many groups to capture and compare many differences. We saw how little by little humans started building weapons and gathering food to provide for their groups. On the other hand, after the Agricultural Revolution, a big shift in history happened and it changed the course of humankind. In class, we acted out parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh which at first I did not understand. I got the idea behind the words after we dissected it and we talk about how men had evolved and how being civilized played a very important role in society. As a class, we only saw some of the criteria that men has to put up with in order to become civilized, but in part II of our textbook, Ways of the World by Robert Strayer, where this whole civilization description has been explained and its origins have been discovered. It is important for me to mention that even though we are reading the facts of world history from the same source, these last chapters we have read, have more and more credible evidence because there exists more than just drawings, after civilization became so important, men discovered an excellent way of communicating thoughts and experiences, men learned how to write.

In fact, I did a little research and I found where the first writings have been found.

Later on chapter five, Strayer describes the different cultural traditions civilizations started to follow and how after believing in many gods, humankind started “moving forward Monotheism” (p138). The religion played an important part mainly in the Middle East, where during the Persian Empire gave chance to the division of more religions or sects if we can call it. On the other hands, civilizations such as in Greece, did not follow just religion, their citizens started “the Search for a Rational Order” (p141), which made possible the “emphasis on argument, logic, and the relentless questioning of received WISDOM”. (p141). This type of thought did not last for too long though, the Roman empire picked religion to be the center or the “glue to hold together a very diverse population in a weakening imperial state” (p148). To me it is really interesting how when in the beginnings men were so simple and lived day by day the feeling of manipulation grew so much that people was moved politically and economically according to their religious beliefs.

The Beginnings of Humankind and its evolution (Ch 1,2,3)

In the first class, we learned the five major eras of the world – Paleolithic, Neolithic, Ancient, Classic, and Modern.

These eras are very important to human kind because they portray a very wide picture of how the humans started populating the planet. When reading chapter one of “Ways of the World” by Robert Strayer, one can see the description of how humans have evolved and how long it has taken for us to develop the knowledge, the abilities and the skills to survive and create a whole different world for ourselves. In the beginning, the purpose of humans was simply of “gathering and hunting”, but then I asked myself how historians can tell weather that was the only thing our ancestors did or did not; in the book, it is explained that historians came to that conclusion by studying the Paleolithic era.

In this Era, anthropologists have found many drawings and cavern paintings that have been clue to the discovery of such conclusion. In the drawings, our ancestors portrayed scenes of men and women using tools, made with stones, to be able to hunt and to fight bigger animals. A very interesting description given in the book is that during the Paleolithic era, our ancestors had very closed relationships. I was amazed at the fact that they did not have any kind of hierarchy even though they had chores divided between men and women. Both genders helped their group by providing the food and all enjoyed it.

The Paleolithic era accounts for 95% of humankind history and it has very significant importance in our study of history. It is also important to mention that even though a lot of facts are given in the book, they are more of speculations rather than actual facts, but still very well described according to evidence. So after studying the beginnings of humankind and the many Paleolithic societies that develop from that time, we jump (figuratively speaking) into the Neolithic era which happened 10,000 BC – 3000 BC.

The significance of this era is the birth of the agricultural beginnings and revolution, which “represented a genuinely revolutionary transformation of human life all across the planet and provided the foundation for almost everything that followed” (p36). The agricultural era happened due to the end of the Ice age. The weather was just perfect to start planting and it also helped Homo sapiens to start moving around the globe, which allowed the spreading of humans to different territories.

 I personally think that the agriculture has been one of the most important discoveries for humankind, but at the same time, it has also been the one reason men started hierarchies and the creation of social classes. In the beginning, humans used agriculture as a way to feel both animals and themselves, but the more land they started acquiring and the more they were cultivating, the more they saw the opportunity for growing and exchanging the products. Nowadays societies used the same idea of having more and more to be able to sell and have more wealth than others; this idea of having more than others created gap between societies, the ones that were more “civilized” and the ones that were not. The earliest civilizations that emerged were in three places, “one was called the Cradle of the Middle East, the Mesopotamia and the Sumerian” (p56). All these civilizations “represent a new and particular type of human society, made possible by the immense productivity of the Agricultural Revolution” (p56).