Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

What evidence do we have on the early history of power, and how reliable is it? How did early leaders establish their authority ...

Lecture 29: From Villages to Cities From Villages to Cities .................................................................... ...

x These communities contained cities and tribute-taking states with bureaucracies and armies. x Most of their resources came f ...

Lecture 29: From Villages to Cities Eurasian steppes. These made it possible to exploit animals throughout their lifetime by usi ...

By 8,000 years ago, there were many villages of irrigation farmers settled along the major rivers north of modern Baghdad. Some ...

Lecture 29: From Villages to Cities Bentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters, chap. 2. Brown, Big History, chap. 6. Christ ...

Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization........................................... LECTURE And one more detail that actually strik ...

Lecture 30: Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization may have had 20,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. They lived in whitewashed mud- bric ...

Cities needed defensive walls and irrigation systems. These could be built and maintained only by powerful rulers capable of org ...

Lecture 30: Sumer—The First Agrarian Civilization 2600 B.C.E., known as the Standard of Ur, depicts the army of Ur, with its don ...

Fernandez-Armesto, The World, chap. 3. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East. Trigger, Early Civilizations. What w ...

Lecture 31: Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions .................................... ...

So did watermelons and other crops from Sudan. By 4000 B.C.E., village communities stretched from the Nile Delta to Nubia, in mo ...

Lecture 31: Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions absence of obvious palaces or royal tombs limits our understanding of the po ...

The Inka Empire, which À ourished in the 15th and early 16th centuries C.E., was the ¿ rst to link these centers into a single p ...

Lecture 32: The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made .............................. ...

Spatially, it is helpful to divide the world before modern times into four separate world zones. The Afro-Eurasian world zone in ...

Lecture 32: The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made Now we focus on some of the shared features of the largest and newest of ...

(which is why the Pharaoh Hatshepsut is often represented wearing a fake beard). However, women often ruled indirectly, through ...

Lecture 33: Long Trends—Expansion and State Power Long Trends—Expansion and State Power.................................... LECT ...