Chapter 6: Commonalities and Variations

Human evolution developed at more or less the same rate across the globe with key differences in each region. These regions are the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Pacific Oceania respectively, the supercontinents being Eurasia, Africa and the Americas. In the Americas there were no animals available to draw plows with the exception of llamas in the Andes. America also did not have the luxury of interacting with with other civilizations like Africa and Eurasia did. The cultures were able to intermingle and borrow from each other in the two eastern supercontinents while the Americas were isolated from all other ways of life.  In africa, there were many small cultures that occasionally shared similarities with other small cultures in the area. There was no central political power that united the continent as "Africans". Many civilizations grew up near river basins and had a mix of agriculture and hunter gathering tendencies. Meroe was a huge power in Nubian civilization south of Egypt between 300 b.c.e. and 100 c.e. Rainfall based agriculture helped Meroe situate further away from river basins than other civilizations. There was a large wealth and military power in meroe derived from long-distance trading connections. Meroe generally seemed to move away from the heavy Egyptian influence of earlier times. Meroitic script became popular in opposition of Egyptian glyphs. The kingdom declined in part to the exhaustion of natural resources as well as the Egyptian trading route switching from the Nile to the Red Sea.  They were eventually overtaken by the neighboring state of Axum. Axum lay in the Horn of Africa and it was a largely agricultural plow based farming system. Axum actively participated in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean commerce. Taxes on merchants proved a huge source of revenue for the Axumite state. At the time Axum had the largest structures ever built from a single piece of rock, some over 100 feet tall. tribute payments exercised a certain level of control over the people of the country. Axum adopted christianity about the same time that the roman empire did. Christianity remained a dominant religion in the area all the way up to present day.  Shortly after 571 the empire began to decline again mostly due to over exhaustion of natural resources.  The state was revived after the collapse in Ethiopia several centuries later.  The middle stretches of the Niger River in West Africa were mostly urbanized. MesoAmerica was a separate world all its own. It never interacted with other continents until the later European

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 4: Culture and Religion

Once there were scholars there was a need for guidance and for belief on how to act and what life was all about. Confucianism was a religion developed around a strict patriarchy and was about those who were "superior" being dignified and genuine and those inferior being obedient in response to the niceness of those above them. Daoism was created in opposition of confucianism, being largely centered around the natural world and the gods who are in it. In Daoism there were no formal worship places or rituals as in confucianism. Hinduism was developed in India and was written in language imaccesible to most of the people. It was centered around good values that would result in good karma or higher caste placement in reincarnation. Women were still subordinate to men, educating themselves to serve their husbands. Buddhism was in response to this elite religion, with no formal wordhip place nor rituals. It's founder, Buddha, or Siddhartha believed that enough devotion to Buddh...
Read more

REVISED Chapter 5: Society and Inequality in Eurasia/North Africa

Chinese Society: Only men can move into positions of political power. The wealthy elite made up most of those who went on to hold great positions of power. Wu Di established an academy in 124 B.C.E where young men of promise could be trained in history, literature, art, and mathematics with an emphasis on confucian teachings before they were sent to the capital for examinations. The examination system provided a bit of limited mobility that the was not otherwise offered by the hierarchal structure of Chinese society. Men from common families could attend school if they were sponsored, perhaps by landowners, to bring honor to their village and enter the circle of elite officials. The examination system was a key factor unique to chinese society. Those who entered bureaucracy traveled in carriages, wore robes and headdresses, and given seals appropriate to their rank as doing so was considered of the greatest honor. In China, wealth meant land. in 210 B.C.E. most small-scale peasants and...
Read more

Ch. 1 (First Farmers) Sections: Breakthroughs to Agriculture to end of chapter

Agriculture can be qualified as the beginning of a relatable way of life.  It was the beginning of a new era when gatherer hunters began to establish more permanent settlements and abandoned their nomadic ways. The domestication of plants and animals known as farming is a practice that eventually replaced gathering and hunting all together as a means of survival. The domestication itself became a mutual relationship as the plants and animals used in farming could no longer survive in the wild, and could therefore be said to be just as dependant on the farmers as the farmers were on them. Scholars believe that agriculture was able to come about because the last known ice age ending coincided with the migration of homosapiens across the planet. This means that until global warming took place agriculture was not a possibility. There was a long period when gathering-hunting practices coincided with agriculture, meaning that these peoples had many different food sources (broad spectr...
Read more