Earliest Civilizations

Boundaries: Geography, Culture, War, and Trade

Geography played an integral role in the formation of the earliest civilizations. Civilizations most commonly emerged in areas surrounding rivers, where individuals cohabitated in their common endeavor to harvest reliable crops. For example, Mesopotamia, the earliest known civilization, lay in the rich marshland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, with Nubia and Egypt relying on the floods from the river Nile. Ancient India flourished on the banks of the Ganga (Ganges) and Indus rivers. A temperate geography with reliable harvests not only fused civilizations through a shared spatial locale but also brought people together in organized societies through agriculture. Distinct from nomadic hunter-and-gatherer societies, the earliest civilizations were efficient, commercial communities built around the production of goods. The relative autonomy that governed early human life was replaced by increasing interdependence as irrigation and the production and storage of agricultural goods required communities to cohabitate, cooperate, and assume more specialized roles in the division of labor. The resources that fertile land produced enabled the surplus of supplies, perpetuating social interaction through trade and war.

While many early civilizations of the ancient world were bound by a common culture, it was only through war and trade that the inhabitants of neighboring civilizations came into direct contact with one another. For example, in an attempt to control Nubia's rich resources, the Egyptians annexed property in a series of continuous battles and successions of power. Not only was war a source of communication between rival civilizations, it also facilitated social networking within cultures, as exemplified by ancient Greece, which was in fact a collection of separate, neighboring polis (city-states) that only interacted in times of war and in trade.

[Page 222]Trade was the primary mode of interaction in the early civilized world. More than a source of commercial success, trade influenced the ways in which the earliest civilizations culturally adapted and grew. In approximately 10,000 B.C.E. in an area of the Middle East between Syria and Anatolia referred to as the Fertile Crescent, people began to grow barley and wheat, creating a surplus of crops using advanced agricultural techniques through which natural resources could be traded. Jericho, one of the earliest towns discovered, dates back to 8000 B.C.E. and appears to have been an important trade route for salt and bitumen, with ancient Tamil poems outlining how the Greeks and Romans brought gold to India in exchange for pearls and textiles.

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