Ways of the World

I've been trying really hard to make sure that I've been keeping up with all the readings in my classes and recently I have found that they have started to interlink each other. This semester I'm taking five general education classes, I'm getting lucky that some of the material is being covered in more than one class.

In Ways of the World chapter three Strayer talks about the first civilizations including the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Notre Chico, Indus Valley and China. These civilizations are deemed to be the first five that began to represent a new particular type of human society that was made possible through the progression of the Agricultural Revolution. The surplus of food that was starting to emerge from the Agricultural Revolution made it easier for civilizations to start to build communities. The surplus of food also brought not only development of communities but also the freedom of decision making aspects for what extra food should be used for. While it may seem that this may be a common practice to many of us today, the development of civilizations and communities were a slow and evolutionary process that took thousands of years of development.

Something that became prevalent after the development of civilizations was the difference in levels of equality. Hierarchical genders started to emerge and human rights and authoritative roles of society started to come into play more and more as well as the increase of power over others. Inequalities began to exist in gender roles, wealth, status, and power. Gender roles specifically began to change. Women in civilizations began to have more children and instead of work in the fields or gather foods for their families began to focus on work in the home and care after their children. Humans rights started to come into question as the idea of slavery and power over another person came into play. The authority over people to drive them into slavery disregarded all human rights and deny any liberties to that person. The Paleolithic probably did not have any slaves as there was no surplus of goods or power for any need of them. The Agricultural Era stimulated the economy and created this new use for slaves. Power was reflected through terror, authoritative roles in new civilizations used terror as a way to scare people and intimidate them into completing tasks similar to the way slaves were treated.

I think it was interesting in the chapter how Strayer began his discussion about the development of the first civilizations and ended it with comparing two of the more well known civilizations. Most people have learned about the Mesopotamians and Egyptians but little about the Notre Chico or Indus Valley civilizations. While the latter may not have the same interesting aspects surrounding war fare I wish he had spent a little more time on the development of why these new found first civilizations are categorized with the famous Mesopotamians and Egyptians. I feel like if the Notre Chico or newer Indus Valley civilizations were given the chance to be studied in depth they would be as interesting as the Mesopotamians.