Early Communities

Hunter-gatherer – The period in which man’s appropriation of “products” in their natural state predominates; the products of human art are chiefly instruments which assist this appropriation. Group marriage. Matrilineal.
Nomadic pastoralists (10,000 BCE). Domestication of animals (for food and secondary products), movement to grazing lands (transhumance).
Villages (9,000-8,000 BCE). Sedentism. The period during which man learns to breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity. Pairing family (polygamy for male, monogamy for female).
Civilization – The period in which man learns a more advanced application of work to the products of nature, the period of industry proper and of art. A civilization is classified according to its means of subsistence, types of livelihood, economic systems, settlement patterns, institutions, social stratification, literacy, and other cultural traits such as artistic output. Monogamy.

Old World Civilizations

Year	Region	City-State
3500 BCE	Mesopotamia	Uruk
3000 BCE	Mesopotamia	Sumeria
3000 BCE	Egypt	Old Kingdom
2500 BCE	India	Harappa
2000 BCE	Crete	Minoan
1600 BCE	China	Shang Dynasty
800 BCE	Greece	Ancient Greece
100-200 CE	Rome	Ancient Rome

Ancient Greece 800-600 BCE to 600CE
Classical Greece 500-400 BCE
Socrates (469-399) BCE
Plato (424-347) BCE
Aristotle (384-322) BCE

Humans are beings “who can not only think, but think about [their] own thinking, who can observe [themselves] in the act of observing, so that [they are] simultaneously the subject and the object of thought and observation.” E.H. Carr. What is History?

“[H]omo sapiens, endowed with reflective thought, was able to develop both graphic schematization and verbal conceptualization as he attempted to analyze the universe” (Martin 6).

“Mankind increasingly chooses for itself, and even in prehistory the story of change is therefore increasingly one of conscious adaptation. So the story will continue into historical times, more intensively still. This is why the most important part of the human story is the story of consciousness; when, long ago, it broke the genetic slow march, it made everything else possible. Nature and nurture are there from the moment that human beings are first identifiable; perhaps they can never be quite disentangled, but man-made culture and tradition are increasingly the determinants of change” (Roberts 37).

“Language … is the most direct and comprehensive expression of the social expression of the group.” Thus, it reflects reality (Saussure) and is developed in intimate contact with the group’s reality: the inhabitants of Lesu (Pacific island) have a dozen words for pigs (sex, color, provenance) because pigs play a large role in their domestic economy (Goody & Watt 306). Where there is little interest or need, there are no words. So it is not neutral, as it reflects not only its speakers’ perception and close relationship to reality, but also the interpretations that have been made in the past and are being transmitted as true.

“Each age and every society has its own image of the human past: an image which shapes its attitude to the present and governs the nature of what is seen to be possible and appropriate action in the world. In most societies that image has been part of the received” (Renfrew).

“Humanity’s unique achievement is its remarkably intense level of activity and creativity, its cumulative capacity to create. All animals have ways of living, some complex enough to be called cultures. Human culture alone is progressive; it has been increasingly built by conscious choice and selection within it as well as by accident and natural pressure, by the accumulation of a capital of experience and knowledge which man has exploited” (Roberts 2).

From 1500 BCE onward, all civilizations except for Meso-Americans have come into contact and none can be explained “without the stimulus, shock or inheritance provided by others” (Roberts 42).

Civilization
A civilization is classified according to its means of subsistence, types of livelihood, economic systems, settlement patterns, institutions, social stratification, literacy, and other cultural traits such as artistic output.

“Civilization was to bring conscious attempts on a quite new scale to control and organize men and their environment. It builds on a basis of cumulative mental and technological resources and the feedback from its own transformations further accelerates the process of change. Ahead lies faster development in every field, in the technical control of environment, in the elaboration of mental patterns, in the changing of social organization, in the accumulation of wealth, in the growth of population” (Roberts 36).

Religion
Religion is a “framework of beliefs” about the world and the way it works, related to “forces which are not merely those of the everyday material world, but which go beyond it and transcend it” (Renfrew 175).

Early civilizations weave invisible links between reality and the hereafter through the use of alphabet and language. For them, life is consecrated to the service of the gods.

“If speech is the voice of the spirit, writing is the drawing of the spirit.” (from a first century B.C.E. Chinese author, Martin 24).

Writing

“Writing arose among agricultural people […] on lands whose intensive cultivation required a clear division of labor and a rigorous hierarchy. And it arose in city-states dominated by a theocracy” (Martin 8).

Writing is transformational: it submits the content to its rules. It consists of mental acts, and as such, it is the abstraction, the means by which myths are articulated. It is the medium. The fact that writing has rules and order necessarily rules and orders the reality that lies under the word, the world that enters it (Martin).

Counting and naming and therefore represents invisible acts, and imply a relationship with the invisible gods. More, it states what may be said and not said (God’s name). It dictates the social order (Martin).

Bibliography
Bottéro, Jean. Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods. 1992 [1987].
Jean, Georges. Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts. 1992 [1987].
Martin, Henri-Jean. The History and Power of Writing. 1994 [1988].
Renfrew, Colin. “Literacy and the Development of Mind” in Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind. 2007. 175-177.
Roberts, J.M. The New History of the World. 2003.