Lecture 29: From Villages to Cities

From Villages to Cities ....................................................................

LECTURE

The appearance of Agrarian civilizations, from about 5,000 years ago,

marks an important subordinate threshold in this course.

W

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 They had large, networked communities of many millions

of people.