Cats World History Blog

Using art as evidence: What can we learn about Indus Valley civilization from these visual sources? How does our level of understanding of this civilization differ from that of Egypt and Mesopotamia, where plentiful written records are available? These visual sources are very open for interpretation about the Indus Valley people, especially compared to the written records of Egypt and Mesopotamia. We can only speculate as to what it all means and not one interpretation can be definitively right. I like the idea of the stamps in Source 2.1 being connected to status, it seems likely that the use of animals was a universally understood hierarchy indicating who the letter is from. The use of animals may tell us that the Indus Vally societies remained in touch with their natural side and their gatherer-hunter ancestors. It may tell us of a deeper appreciation for wildlife and greater importance placed on them than the Egyptian and Mesopotamians might have. Source 2.2 appears to be a man o...

Civilization was the beginning of the end. With agriculture came deforestation, organized hierarchy, gender inequality and general demise of equity. Mesopotamia and Egypt were among the first civilized societies. A third civilization appeared around the same time in modern day Peru called Norte Chico. Unlike Mesopotamia and Egypt, Norte Chico developed slowly and lacked economic specification. Norte Chican people traded and continued hunting and gathering long after Eurasian civilization stopped due to a lack of animals available to develop agriculture at the same rate.  In eurasia caste systems as well as City States developed near or in the Fertile Crescent. These divides often led to conflict between peoples in the same region unlike Egyptians who were ruled by one Pharaoh. Living in close procimities and under one rule established order and protection that was desirable compared to wandering and fending for yourself. Agriculture in Egypt depended heavily on the annual gentle fl...

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...

Yay im done!