x These communities contained cities and tribute-taking states with
bureaucracies and armies.x Most of their resources came from agriculture, and most of their
inhabitants (often as many as 90%) were small-holding peasants
living in villages.Like agriculture, Agrarian civilizations evolved independently in different
parts of the world. But because they depended so much on agriculture, they
appeared in regions where agriculture was well established.
x Just over 5,000 years ago, the ¿ rst Agrarian civilizations appeared
in Mesopotamia and Northeast Africa/Egypt.x About 4,500 years ago, the ¿ rst Agrarian civilizations appeared in
North India/Pakistan.x Just over 4,000 years ago, the ¿ rst Agrarian civilizations appeared
in northern China.x About 2,500 years ago, the ¿ rst Agrarian civilizations appeared in
Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, and
also in a new world zone, the Americas.x During the last 1,500 years, states appeared by diffusion in one or
two islands of the Paci¿ c zone, but none were large enough to count
as fully developed Agrarian civilizations.The emergence of Agrarian civilizations was driven mainly by increasingly
productive technologies that generated more resources and larger
populations. Two clusters of innovation were particularly important in Afro-
Eurasia: the “secondary products revolution” and irrigation. Archaeologist
Andrew Sherratt (1946–2006) identi¿ ed a cluster of innovations he called
the “secondary products revolution.” When ¿ rst domesticated, animals were
used mainly for their meat and hides, which meant you had to slaughter
them to make use of them. From about 5,000 years ago, new methods of
exploitation evolved over a wide area reaching from Northwest Africa to the