Four Major River Valley Civilizations

2. What were the environmental surroundings of each of the four major river-valley civilizations?
The four major river valleys were: Nile river (Egypt), Indus (Pakistan) Tigris and Euphrates (what is now Iraq), and the yellow river (what is now china). Egypt (Nile River) was surrounded by marshlands, ponds, and lakes. There was “black earth”, an alluvial plain created from regular floods from central African headwaters, Egypt was bordered by the Sahara desert, with scattered oasis. Indus (Pakistan) had wide alluvial floodplain and frequent changing river courses. They had varied climate-coastal outposts, hot interior, upriver Himalayan headwaters and flooding twice a year from spring snowmelt and monsoon rains. Mesopotamia (Iraq) like Egypt,
had marshlands, ponds, lakes, waterways; upriver alluvial plains flooded irregularly; harsh summer sandstorms, intense heat; winter floods, rainstorms; and a lack of forests. China had unpredictable river floods surrounding areas creating loess soil which is needed for agriculture. China also had more rainfall than the other three regions.
(Armesto, pg. 77)

3. How did environment affect the development of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River valley, and in China?
Between 5000 and 2000 B.C.E. people in these regions (the four major river-valley civilizations) exploited more land and changed at a faster pace than other regions. Change was measured in terms of intensified agriculture, technological innovation, development of state power and construction of cities. The four river valleys housed societies more civilized than earlier cases we know of. They modified the landscape with fields and irrigation works or smothered it with monumental buildings on a scale that no people before attained or perhaps even conceived. The all had certain environmental gestures: a gradually warming and drying climate; relatively dry soils; and a reliance on seasonally flooding rivers. We can also see how divergence opened cultural chasms inside this ecological framework. In the Tigris and Euphrates region, the farmers were very resourceful people. They made ships in a country with no timber, worked masterpieces in bronze in art of the world where no metal could be found, built fabulous cities without stone by baking mud into bricks. (Armesto, pg. 68-74)

4. What types of government and religion developed in each of these regions?
Egypt (Nile river) - The ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods and goddesses.
Most Egyptian gods represented one principle aspect of the world: for example, Ra was the sun god. Egypt was prone to floods because the level of the river falls. About 2500 B.C.E a king revealed his dream, the river failed to flood because the people neglected the gods who ruled beyond the cataracts, where the waters came from. From reading this you can assume ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses represented aspects of the Egyptians’ natural and “supernatural” surroundings and helped them understand its many aspects. The Egyptians believed in after life. Evidence shows that tombs were built and were places of interrogation after a moral preparation for the next life. The examined soul renounces; it was a long list of sins that concentrated on three areas: sacrilege, sexual perversion, and the abuse of power against the weak. When the good deeds appear such as, obedience to human laws, and divine will, acts of mercy, offerings to the gods and the spirts of ancestors, bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and a ferry for him who was marooned. The reward of the good is a new life in the company of Osiris, the ruler of the universe. For those who failed, the punishment was extinction. In Egypt, the law remained in the hands of the pharaoh, and people did not question his power. The pharaoh maintained a strong central government and he had almost absolute power. (Armesto, pg.
71-81)

Mesopotamia city states- Unlike Egypt, a single state under a single ruler, Mesopotamia was divided into numerous small rival kingdoms called city-states. Each was based on a single city. In Mesopotamia, kings were not gods, which is probably why the earliest known law codes come from there. The code of king Lipit-Ishtar of Sumer and Akkad, was an attempt to regulate the entire society. It explained that the laws were divinely inspired and ordained “in accordance with the word of Enlil,” the supreme god. Their purpose was to make children support the father and the father children, abolish enmity and rebellion, cast out weeping and lamentation, bring righteousness and truth and give wellbeing to Sumer and Akkad. People in this region believed in gods and goddesses. They were prone to floods and storms and believed that gods controlled the storms and floods. The two most important gods they worshipped were Nintu and Enki because they represented earth and water. The goddess Nintu personified earth- zealous, jealous mother, yielding nourishment, suckling infants, and guarding embryos. The god of water, was a male god, Enki, empowered “to clear the pure mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates, to make greenery plentiful, to make dense the clouds, to grant water in abundance to all plough lands, to make corn lift its head in furrows and to make pasture abound in the desert. They also prayed to him to awaken the lands fertility (Armesto, pg. 74-81)

Indus/Harappa- In a class system, individuals can rise or fall through the ranks of society. In a caste system, an individual’s class is determined by birth. In harappan cities, manpower were people who were; soldiers, slaves, and scholars. There were huge warehouses that suggested there was a distribution of food. We have to imagine harappan societies as republics or theocracies. There were governments that priests ran. One important figure from Mohenjo-Daro, was described as having almond eyes and a rigidly fluted beard. He wore a headband with what looks like the setting for a gem. He has been called a priest-king or philosopher-king. We can assume that priests dominated as the ruling class. Since we know so little about harappan politics, religion, and life, we have no way of interpreting him. We can only describe him. Society and politics of ancient Harappa remain mysterious because little art survives as a clue to what went on. (Armesto, pg. 85-86) Yellow river (China) – As we know so far, china was a unitary state. The dynasty known as Shang, dominated the yellow river for most of the second millennium. There was evidence about the nature of the Shang state that was inscribed on oracle bones, animal bones and turtle shells and oracle bones paid in tribute. The king was a mediator with the gods. He performed sacrifices, prepared for and conducted oracle readings, breaking the soil, praying for rain, and founding towns. As a mediator with the gods, the king was a substitute for the shaman. (Armesto, pg. 84)

5. What types of trade and writing developed in each of these regions?
In Egypt, their economy was dedicated to a cult of everyday abundance, meaning it guaranteed basic nutrition for a large population, not individual abundance. Most individuals lived on bread and beer (a much grainer, more nutritious brew than modern beer). A surplus gathered and guarded against hard times was at the disposal of the state and priests, eaters who relied on wheat and barley of the irrigated dry lands were vulnerable to routine malnutrition and to famine in years of drought. However, there were greater quantities of the basic products of the economy than Egyptians could eat. The surplus generated trade, which made up for the country’s lack of timber and aromatic plants for perfumes and incense. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, and china, their large amount of sources revealed how states grew by conquest. In Egypt, the Nile supported a unitary state. More than the source of life-giving mud, the river was a highway through a long, thin land. Culture and trade could flow freely from the coast to the cataracts. One reason the early Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, and harappans were known as being “civilized” was because they were the first generation to use symbolic methods to record information and pass it on to future generations. Mesopotamians made wedge shapes of the writing known as cuneiform to be easily incised, or cut, in the clay tablets used to keep records. Egyptians used hieroglyphs. They were texts and the symbols carved on Chinese oracle bones that were known as logograms. They were had pictures that provoked mental associations with ideas they were intended to represent or with sounds of their spoken names. We can understand the writing of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and china, but scholarship could not crack the code for the harappan writing. The surviving harappan texts are on clay seals, which suggests they served commercial proposes. We cannot decipher them, but they clearly mark the cord or sacks of merchant’s goods. The most famous relic of ancient Mesopotamia literature, the epic of Gilgamesh, sheds further light on the nature of leadership or heroism, on which leadership is modeled. When Gilgamesh, the hero of the poem, confronts a monster who breathes fire and plague, the gods blind the attacker with a scorching wind. When Gilgamesh explores the ocean of death to find the secret of immortality, he encounters the only family to have survived a primeval flood. The disaster, wrought by divine whim, had destroyed the rest of the human race and even left the gods themselves, “cowering like dogs crouched against a wall”. The character of Gilgamesh is a poetic invention, embodied onto the stuff of legends. These civilizations developed writing systems of great usefulness but for three reasons, we can no longer claim that writing was a special and defining feature that made them the first civilizations. First, writing systems originated independently in widely separated parts of the world and were far more varied than traditional scholarship has supposed. Second, it is not clear why we should consider writing special compared to information-retrieval systems based on memory. Finally, how much information does a system have to be able to convey before we can call it writing? (Armesto, pg. 88-89)

6. In Perspective: How did the factors of environment and interaction with one another help the early river-valley civilizations become successful?
Mesopotamia and Egypt were very close to each other. It shows that china’s yellow river valley was relatively isolated by long distances and physical barriers such as, mountains, deserts, and ocean. The environment was very similar and developments unfolded in familiar ways. All four river valleys shared a type of environment suited to tyranny, meaning strong states exercising minute control over their subjects’ lives. For people living on the banks of silt-bearing, flood-prone rivers, intensified agriculture could have been a consequence, not a cause of the politic achages that accompanied it. Increased food supply requiring more political organizations, a tyrannical leader may have forced people to farm more land to produce a surplus for trade, war, and feasts. All regions practiced divine or sacral kingship. They all had rigid social hierarchies and placed the lives and labor of the inhabitants at the disposal of the state. (Armesto, pg. 79) Interactions are very important because societies can learn from each other, compete with each other, and exchange culture with each other. Egypt was in touch with Mesopotamia and Mesopotamia was in touch with Harappa. All these societies kept relatively large zones of exchange. Environmental diversity gave the river valley peoples extra resources. Egypt had the Nile delta. China had two ecological systems; the yellow river and Yangtze valleys. Mesopotamia had a hinterland of pastures and Mesopotamia and Harappa had access to each other by sea. (Armesto, pg. 90)