AGRICULTURAL CIVILIZATIONS: CHARACTERISTICS AND CONTRIBUTIONS - HISTORY - 2024

The first agricultural civilizations in history began to develop around 5,000 years ago in parts of Africa and Asia. These civilizations are also called fluvial, because they share the common characteristic of having developed on the banks of large rivers that contained very fertile lands suitable for agriculture.

The appearance of these societies marked a radical change in the behavior and life habits of human beings who, in their beginnings, were basically nomads and predators who lived by hunting, fishing and gathering.

Egyptian agriculture

This agricultural change implied novelties such as the domestication of animals and the cultivation of the land, which led to a sedentary lifestyle and production. In this way, we enter what is known as the Neolithic period, which, more than a specific chronological moment, is an evolutionary stage of human societies.

Some civilizations developed on the shores of the sea, being an excellent means of communication. However, it was the peoples who settled inland, in fertile valleys irrigated by wide rivers, that gave rise to agricultural civilizations and later to urban societies.

Before being big cities, these civilizations began as small villages that could be related through trade, magic, religion and war. Their chief was often a warrior priest. Political and religious power was in the hands of some clans united by family because they were descendants of some old chief.

You may also be interested in knowing the 10 most important civilizations of the Far East.

The first agricultural civilizations

Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians

Various civilizations lived in Mesopotamia: the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. The first civilization of this region of the Middle East was the Sumerian, around 3000 BC Because the Sumerians enjoyed prosperity, the region was invaded by nomadic peoples of the region, until the rule of the Akkadian Empire was established, about 2500 BC

With the fall of the Sumerian city of Ur came the Babylonian Empire, whose most prominent king was Hammburabi, about 2000 BC. From 1250 BC the Assyrians would rule in the region.

According to archaeological evidence, the first great human civilization was born in Sumer, a small region of Lower Mesopotamia, also called the Fertile Crescent, because of the crescent moon shape that on the map forms the valley delimited between the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

In the Copper Age, the agricultural societies that settled in that area had to learn to control the flooding of the rivers, thus appearing the first irrigation techniques and the plow.

Mesopotamia was exposed to constant conquering wars and invasions of peoples that came through the northern mountains, the Arabian desert, the steppes of Syria, Iran and Central Asia.

Their cities were almost always walled; the oldest ones date from 6,000 years ago. For the construction they used fired clay partitions. They wrote on clay tablets with signs drawn with an awl. From figurative drawings, they derived combinations of strokes in the form of triangles or wedges, which is why it is called cuneiform writing.

In its oldest version, which is that of the Sumerians, cuneiform writing was ideographic, that is, each symbol represented a word or idea. Later it became syllabic when it was adapted to other languages, so for a long time it retained its ideographic as well as phonetic meaning.

2- Egypt

One of the most enduring civilizations of the Ancient Ages flourished in the Nile River valley of Northwest Africa for more than 3,000 years. It only succumbed to the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD.

Egyptian culture developed along this river, which begins in the eastern highlands of Africa and flows through what are now the republics of Egypt and Sudan.

North of Cairo, the Nile forms a delta that empties into the Mediterranean Sea, which overflows every year as the rainy season arrives in the south. Thus, only the river bank is arable, because with the floods, it receives each year the water and the fertile land that are needed for agriculture.

For more than 5,000 years, the Egyptians knew navigation, practiced trade and cultivated large areas of land with cereals such as millet and wheat. They domesticated and raised cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and birds.

They also lived with the species of the river and its banks such as the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the duck, the hawk, the palm trees and the papyrus, with which they made excellent quality paper.

The Egyptians developed a writing based on drawings or hieroglyphs and lines on paper and stone with ideographic interpretations, initially, and later a phonetic interpretation. In the long run, Egypt had 3 writing systems: the hieroglyph, the hieratic and the demotic, related to each other, but with different uses.

They developed a very interesting and complex religion in which the belief in another life was of great importance, which is why they invented how to preserve the body of the dead: embalming.

The mummies found in ancient Egyptian tombs, along with many belongings, writings and drawings have allowed us to know what the Egyptians were like and how they lived in ancient times. Many of its buildings can still be admired, especially the temples dedicated to their gods and the pyramids that served as tombs for their kings, the pharaohs.

3- China

China was another very important agrarian civilization that developed in the Great Yellow River valley and also lasted very long. It developed throughout the kingdoms of three imperial dynasties: Xia, Zhang, and Zhou.

The Chinese civilization flourished relatively far from the other civilizations of antiquity, but it is evident that it had some kind of contact with its cultural advances, as can be deduced by the development of the wheels of the carriages that is similar from Egypt to China.

At the end of a series of elected warrior kings, the principle of hereditary monarchy was adapted and the first dynasty called Xia was established, which ruled the western and central part of China between the 23rd and 18th centuries BC.

In this period there was already a writing system, metallurgy was mastered, the horse had been domesticated and there was a system of social classes and a stable religious political hierarchy.

The first dynasty of which there is abundant historical and archaeological knowledge is the Zhang dynasty, in which the king was the political, military and religious head of the society.

The Zhangs were permanently at war with their neighbors, but they dominated central China. In this period the work in bronze stands out. Its writing system is the direct predecessor of the current Chinese system of ideographic characters, each of whose signs represents a word or idea.

The Zhang were defeated by the Zhou approximately 1,000 years before Christ. The oldest Chinese books belong to this period, such as the Shujing, which contains historical legends, and the Shijing, with poetic content, which are the basis for the tradition of the teachings of Confucius, a great philosopher of the 6th and 5th centuries BC.

4- India

It is also interesting the civilization that developed in the north of the Indian subcontinent in regions that today share India and Pakistan, in the valleys of another great river: the Indus. This is the oldest civilization in South Asia, more than 4,500 years old.

Archaeological remains of this culture have been found in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Different types of buildings have been located and it is known that several cities were protected by walls. They were generally built with adobe.

These peoples knew a great variety of crafts and made ceramic, wood, basketwork and metal objects. Its writing system has not yet been decrypted.

Common features

These ancient civilizations have the following characteristics in common:

1- They developed from Neolithic peoples.

2- They arose in valleys bordering large and old rivers.

3- They formed, in the long run, communities and large cities.

4- They were societies divided into classes or castes.

5- They were governed by a theocratic-military government regime.

6- They were capable of impressive technical and intellectual development.

7- They evidenced a clear social division of labor.

8- They created their own writing systems.

Transformations in agricultural civilizations

These villages were growing and transforming to become, with the passing of many years, an urban civilization. The main one of these great transformations was the cultivation of extensive cereal crops in charge of most of the settlers, who probably did it in a community manner.

The manufacture of household utensils and farm implements, as well as the construction of houses were adapted to individual needs.

However, in these societies barter began to occur and useful constructions for the community were made in a cooperative way, such as roads, corrals, wells and defensive works.

References

1. Ancient civilizations of the world, first cities of Mesopotamia. Recovered from historiaybiografias.com.
2. The main agricultural civilizations. Recovered from geocities.ws.
3. Topics: Agriculture. Recovered from Eternallegypt.org.