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Civilization

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Civilization



 
 
A civilization is a society
Society

A society is a group of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions....
 or culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 group normally defined as a complex society
Complex society

In anthropology and archaeology, a complex society is a social formation that is otherwise described as a formative or developed state . Social complexity in this sense thus refers typically to political complexity, specifically the presence of a hierarchy in the form of a ruling elite supported by bureaucrats, with associated paraphern...
 characterized by the practice of agriculture
Agriculture

Agriculture refers to the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of civilization, with the animal husbandry of domestication animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more Population density and Social stratification societies....
 and settlement in towns and cities
City

A city is an urban area with a high population density and a particular administrative, legal, or historical status.Large industrialized cities generally have advanced systems for sanitation, utilities, land usage, house, and transportation and more....
. Compared with other cultures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labor and an intricate social hierarchy
Social hierarchy

Social hierarchy is a multi-tiered pyramid-like social or functional structure having an apex as the centralization of power. The term can also be applied to animal societies, but the term dominance hierarchy is preferred most times....
.

The term civilization is often used as a synonym for the broader term "culture" in both popular and academic circles.






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A civilization is a society
Society

A society is a group of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions....
 or culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 group normally defined as a complex society
Complex society

In anthropology and archaeology, a complex society is a social formation that is otherwise described as a formative or developed state . Social complexity in this sense thus refers typically to political complexity, specifically the presence of a hierarchy in the form of a ruling elite supported by bureaucrats, with associated paraphern...
 characterized by the practice of agriculture
Agriculture

Agriculture refers to the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of civilization, with the animal husbandry of domestication animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more Population density and Social stratification societies....
 and settlement in towns and cities
City

A city is an urban area with a high population density and a particular administrative, legal, or historical status.Large industrialized cities generally have advanced systems for sanitation, utilities, land usage, house, and transportation and more....
. Compared with other cultures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labor and an intricate social hierarchy
Social hierarchy

Social hierarchy is a multi-tiered pyramid-like social or functional structure having an apex as the centralization of power. The term can also be applied to animal societies, but the term dominance hierarchy is preferred most times....
.

The term civilization is often used as a synonym for the broader term "culture" in both popular and academic circles. Every human being participates in a culture, defined as "the arts, customs, habits... beliefs, values, behavior and material habits that constitute a people's way of life". However, in its most widely used definition, civilization is a descriptive term for a relatively complex agricultural and urban culture. Civilizations can be distinguished from other cultures by their high level of social complexity and organization, and by their diverse economic and cultural activities.

In an older but still frequently used sense, the term "civilization" can be used in a normative manner as well: in societal contexts where complex and urban cultures are assumed to be superior to other "savage" or "barbarian" cultures, the concept of "civilization" is used as a synonym for "cultural (and often moral) superiority of certain groups." In a similar sense, civilization can mean "refinement of thought, manners, or taste".

In the sixth century, the Roman
Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
 Emperor Justinian oversaw the consolidation of Roman civil law
Civil law (legal system)

Civil law is a most prevalent legal system in the modern world and the oldest in human history. It is based on a code, or "a systematic collection of interrelated articles written in a terse, staccato style." The two other major legal systems in the world are common law and Islamic law....
. The resulting collection is called the Corpus Juris Civilis
Corpus Juris Civilis

The Corpus Juris Civilis is the modern name for a collection of fundamental works in jurisprudence, issued from 529 to 534 by order of Justinian I, Byzantine Emperors....
. In the 11th century, professors at the University of Bologna
Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, in the Po Valley , between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, exactly between the Reno River and the S?vena River....
, Western Europe
Western Europe

Western Europe refers to the countries in the western most half of Europe. This concept has had different meanings, political and cultural as well as geographical issues have influenced the area....
's first university
University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education....
, rediscovered Corpus Juris Civilis, and its influence began to be felt across Western Europe. In 1388, the word civil appeared in English meaning "of or related to citizens". In 1704, civilization began to mean "a law which makes a criminal process into a civil case." Civilization was not used in its modern sense to mean "the opposite of barbarism
Barbarian

"Barbarian" is a pejorative term for an uncivilized person, either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage....
" — as contrasted to civility, meaning politeness or civil virtue — until the 18th century.

According to Emile Benveniste
Émile Benveniste

?mile Benveniste was a France Structuralism linguistics, an apprentice of A. Meillet and his successor, who, in his later years, became enlightened by the structural view of language through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, although he was unwilling to grasp it at first, being a convinced follower of the sociological stance of his teacher....
 (1954), the earlist written occurrence in English of civilization in its modern sense may be found in Adam Ferguson
Adam Ferguson

Adam Ferguson, also known as Ferguson of Raith was a philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is sometimes called "the Fathers of scientific fields of modern sociology."...
's An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767 - p.2): . It should be noted that this usage incorporates the concept of superiority and maturity of "civilized" existence, as contrasted to "rudeness", which is used to denote coarseness, as in a lack of refinement or "civility".

Before Benveniste's inquiries, the New English Dictionary quoted James Boswell
James Boswell

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for his biography of Samuel Johnson....
's conversation with Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson was an English author. Beginning as a Grub Street journalist, he made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer....
 concerning the inclusion of Civilization in Johnson's dictionary:

Benveniste demonstrated that previous occurrences could be found, which explained the quick adoption of Johnson's definition. In 1775 the dictionary of Ast defined civilization as "the state of being civilized; the act of civilizing", and the term was frequently used by Adam Smith
Adam Smith

Adam Smith was a Scotland Ethics and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations....
 in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Beside Smith and Ferguson, John Millar also used it in 1771 in his Observations concerning the distinction of ranks in society.

As the first occurrence of civilization in French was found by Benveniste in the Marquis de Mirabeau's
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

Honor? Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau was a France writer, popular orator and statesman. During the French Revolution, he was a moderate, favoring a constitutional monarchy built on the model of Great Britain....
 L'Ami des hommes ou traité de la population (written in 1756 but published in 1757), Benveniste's query was to know if the English word derived from the French, or if both evolved independently — a question which needed more research. According to him, the word civilization may in fact have been used by Ferguson as soon as 1759.

Furthermore, Benveniste notes that, contrasted to civility, a static term, civilization conveys a sense of dynamism. He thus writes that...

Another source of the word may relate to chivalry: a set of rules of engagement, originally for knights in warfare, but later expanded to cover conduct of knighthood or nobility. The English 'chivalry' comes from the French 'chevalier': a horseman. England and France would therefore have given rise to the terms at similar times.

Characteristics

Sumerian 26th C Adab
Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Civilizations have been distinguished by their means of subsistence, types of livelihood, settlement patterns, forms of government, social stratification, economic systems, literacy
Literacy

The traditional definition of literacy is considered to be the ability to read and write, or the ability to use language to Reading , Writing, Listening, and Speech communication....
, and other cultural traits.

All human civilizations have depended on agriculture
Agriculture

Agriculture refers to the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of civilization, with the animal husbandry of domestication animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more Population density and Social stratification societies....
 for subsistence. Growing food on farms results in a surplus of food, particularly when people use intensive agricultural techniques such as irrigation
Irrigation

Irrigation is an artificial application of water to the soil usually for assisting in growing crops. In crop production it is mainly used in dry areas and in periods of rainfall shortfalls, but also to protect plants against frost....
 and crop rotation
Crop rotation

Crop rotation or Crop sequencing is the practice of growing a series of dissimilar types of Crop in the same area in sequential seasons for various benefits such as to avoid the build up of pathogens and pests that often occurs when one species is continuously cropped....
. Grain
GRAIN

GRAIN is an international non-governmental organization based in Barcelona, Spain, which works toward sustainable agriculture. It was formed upon the realization that the genetic diversity of the world's food crops are being drastically eliminated....
 surpluses have been especially important because they can be stored
Food storage

Food storage is both a traditional domestic skill and is important industrially. Food is stored by almost every human society and by many animals....
 for a long time. A surplus of food permits some people to do things besides produce food for a living: early civilizations included artisan
Artisan

An artisan is a skilled manual labor worker who crafts items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewelry, household items, and tools....
s, priest
Priest

A priest or priestess is a person having the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities....
s and priestesses, and other people with specialized careers. A surplus of food results in a division of labour and a more diverse range of human activity, a defining trait of civilizations.

Civilizations have distinctly different settlement patterns from other societies. The word civilization is sometimes defined as "a word that simply means 'living in cities'". Non-farmers gather in cities to work and to trade.

Compared with other societies, civilizations have a more complex political structure, namely the state
State

A state is a political Social contract with effective sovereignty over a geographic area and representing a population. These may be nation states, State or multinational states....
. State societies are more stratified than other societies; there is a greater difference among the social classes. The ruling class
Ruling class

The term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy.The ruling class is a particular sector of the upper class that adheres to quite specific circumstances: it has both the most material wealth and the most widespread influence over all the other classes, and it choo...
, normally concentrated in the cities, has control over much of the surplus and exercises its will through the actions of a government
Government

Government is the body within any organization that has the authority to make and the power to enforce laws, regulations, or rules. Typically, the government refers to a civil government -- local, provincial, or national -- but commercial, academic, religious, or other formal organizations are also administered by governing bodies....
 or bureaucracy
Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is the structure and set of regulations in place to control activity, usually in large organizations and government. As opposed to adhocracy, it is represented by standardized procedure that dictates the execution of most or all processes within the body, formal division of powers, hierarchy, and relationships....
. Morton Fried
Morton Fried

Morton Herbert Fried , was a distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City from 1950 until his death in 1986, and a prominent anthropologist of the twentieth century....
, a conflict theorist
Conflict theory

A conflict theory is a theory which emphasizes the role that a person or group's ability has to exercise influence and control over others in producing social order....
, and Elman Service
Elman Service

Elman Rogers Service was a Cultural anthropology....
, an integration theorist, have classified human cultures based on political systems and social inequality
Social inequality

Social inequality refers to a lack of social equality, where individuals in a society do not have equal social status. Areas of potential social inequality include voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, the extent of property rights and access to education, health care and other social goods....
. This system of classification contains four categories:
  • Hunter-gatherer
    Hunter-gatherer

    A hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary List of subsistence techniques involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either....
     bands, which are generally egalitarian
    Egalitarianism

    Egalitarianism or Equalism is a political doctrine that holds that all people should be treated as equals and have the same political freedom, economic freedom, social justice, and civil rights rights....
    .
  • Horticultural
    Horticulture

    'Horticulture' is the industry and science of plant cultivation. Horticulturists work and conduct research in the disciplines of plant propagation and cultivation, Crop , plant breeding and genetic engineering, plant biochemistry, and plant physiology....
    /pastoral
    Pastoralism

    File:Nomadic Camping .jpgPastoralism or pastoral farming is the branch of agriculture concerned with the raising of livestock. It is animal husbandry: the care, tending and use of animals such as camels, goats, cattle, yaks, llamas, sheep, and so forth....
     societies in which there are generally two inherited social classes; chief and commoner.
  • Highly stratified structures, or chiefdom
    Chiefdom

    A chiefdom is a type of complex society of varying degrees of centralization that is led by an individual known as a Tribal chief.In anthropology, one model of human social development rooted in ideas of cultural evolution describes a chiefdom as a form of social organization more complex than a tribe or a band society, and less complex tha...
    s, with several inherited social classes: king, noble, freemen, serf and slave.
  • Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments.


Economically, civilizations display more complex patterns of ownership and exchange than less organized societies. Living in one place allows people to accumulate more personal possessions than nomadic people. Some people also acquire landed property
Landed property

Landed property or landed estates is a real estate term that usually refers to a property that generates income for the owner without the owner having to do the actual work of the estate....
, or private ownership of the land. Because a percentage of people in civilizations do not grow their own food, they must trade
Trade

Tradeis the willing exchange of goods, Service , or both. Trade is also called commerce. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter , the direct exchange of goods and services....
 their goods and services for food in a market
Market

A market is any one of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy....
 system, or be receive food through the levy of tribute
Tribute

A tribute is wealth one party gives to another as a sign of respect or, as was often case in historical contexts, of submission or allegiance....
, redistributive taxation, tarrifs or tithes
Tithe

A tithe is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a voluntary contribution or as a tax or levy, usually to support a Christian religious organization....
 from the food producing segment of the population. Early civilizations developed money
Money

Money is anything that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts. The main uses of money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value....
 as a medium of exchange for these increasingly complex transactions. To oversimplify, in a village the potter makes a pot for the brewer and the brewer compensates the potter by giving him a certain amount of beer. In a city, the potter may need a new roof, the roofer may need new shoes, the cobbler may need new horseshoes, the blacksmith may need a new coat, and the tanner may need a new pot. These people may not be personally acquainted with one another and their needs may not occur all at the same time. A monetary system is a way of organizing these obligations to ensure that they are fulfilled fairly.

Writing
Writing

Writing is the representation of language in a textual Media through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and the recording of language via a non-textual medium such as Magnetic tape sound recording....
, developed first by people in Sumer
Sumer

Sumer was a civilization and a historical region located in Southern Iraq , known as the Cradle of civilization. It lasted from the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period through the Uruk period and the Dynastic periods until the rise of Babylon in the early 2nd millennium BC....
, is considered a hallmark of civilization and "appears to accompany the rise of complex administrative bureaucracies or the conquest state." Traders and bureaucrats relied on writing to keep accurate records. Like money, writing was necessitated by the size of the population of a city and the complexity of its commerce among people who are not all personally acquainted with each other.

Aided by their division of labor and central government planning, civilizations have developed many other diverse cultural traits. These include organized religion
Religion

A religion is an organized approach to human spirituality which usually encompasses a set of myth, symbols, beliefs and practices, often with a supernatural or transcendence quality, that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a higher power or truth....
, development in the arts
ARts

aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is most famous for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....
, and countless new advances in science
Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
 and technology
Technology

Technology is a broad concept that deals with an animal species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects an animal species' ability to control and adapt to its Natural environment....
.

Cultural identity

"Civilization" can also describe the culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 of a complex society, not just the society itself. Every society, civilization or not, has a specific set of ideas and customs, and a certain set of items and arts, that make it unique. Civilizations have even more intricate cultures, including literature, professional art, architecture, organized religion, and complex customs associated with the elite. Civilization is such in nature that it seeks to spread, to have more, to expand, and the means by which to do this.

Nevertheless, some tribes or people remained uncivilized even to this day (2009). These cultures are called by some "primitive
Primitive

Primitive is a subjective label used to imply that one thing is less "sophisticated" or less "advanced" than some other thing. Being a comparative word it is also relative in nature....
," a term that is regarded by others as pejorative. "Primitive" implies in some way that a culture is "first" (Latin = primus), and as all cultures are contemporaries today's so called primitive cultures are in no way antecedent to those we consider civilized. Many anthropologists use the term "non-literate" to describe these peoples. In the USA and Canada, where people of such cultures were the original inhabitants before being displaced by European settlers, they use the term "First Nations
First Nations

First Nations is a term of ethnicity that refers to the Aboriginal peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor M?tis people....
." Generally, the First Nations of North America had hierarchical governments, religion, and a barter system, and oral transmission of their traditions, cultures, laws, etc. Respect for the wisdom of elders and for their natural environment (7th Generation decision-making) sustained these cultures for over 10,000 years.

The civilized world has been spread by invasion
Imperialism

Imperialism has two meanings; one describing an action and the other describing an attitude.#Action: Imperialism is the practice of extending the power, control or rule by one country over areas outside its borders....
, religious conversion
Religious conversion

Religious conversion is the adoption of a new religion identity, or a change from one religious identity to another. This typically entails the sincere avowal of a new belief system, but may also present itself in other ways, such as adoption into an identity group or spiritual lineage....
 the extension of bureaucratic control
Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is the structure and set of regulations in place to control activity, usually in large organizations and government. As opposed to adhocracy, it is represented by standardized procedure that dictates the execution of most or all processes within the body, formal division of powers, hierarchy, and relationships....
 and trade
Trade

Tradeis the willing exchange of goods, Service , or both. Trade is also called commerce. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter , the direct exchange of goods and services....
, and by introducing agriculture, and writing to non-literate peoples. Some non-civilized people may willingly adapt to civilized behaviour. But civilization is also spread by force: if a non-literate group does not wish to use agriculture or accept a certain religion it is often forced to do so by the civilized people, and they usually succeed due to their more advanced technology, and higher population densities. Civilizations often use religion to justify its actions, claiming for example that the uncivilized are "primitive," savages, barbarians or the like, which should be subjugated by civilization.

The intricate culture associated with civilization has a tendency to spread to and influence other cultures, sometimes assimilating them into the civilization (a classic example being Chinese
China

China is a Culture of China, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
 civilization and its influence on Korea
Korea

Korea is a geographic area composed of two sovereign countries, a civilization, and a former state situated on the Korean Peninsula in East Asia....
, Japan
Japan

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south....
, Vietnam
Vietnam

Vietnam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam , is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by People's Republic of China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea to the east....
, and so forth, all of them sharing the fact that they belong to an East Asian civilization, sharing Confucianism, Mahayana Buddhism, a "Mandarin
Mandarin (bureaucrat)

A Mandarin was a bureaucrat in Imperial era of Chinese history, and also in History of Vietnam where the system of Imperial examinations and scholar-bureaucrats was adopted under Chinese influence....
" class an educated understanding of Chinese ideograms and much else). Many civilizations are actually large cultural spheres containing many nations and regions. The civilization in which someone lives is that person's broadest cultural identity.

Whereas the etiology of civilization is Latin or Roman, defined above as the application of justice by "civil" means, one may also examine and reflect upon Jewish or Hebrew civilization. A Hebrew "civilization" is defined not as an expression or extension of the subjective trappings of culture and society, but rather as a human society and/or culture being an expression of objective moral and ethical moorings as they are known, understood and applied in accordance with the Mosaic Covenant. A "human" civilization, in Hebrew terms for instance, may contrast sharply with conventional notions about "civilization." A "human" civilization, therein, would be an expression and extension of the two most basic pillars of human "civilization." These two pillars are, honest standardized weights and measures and a moral and healthy constitution. Everything else, whether technology, science, art, music, etc., is by this definition considered as
commentary. Indeed, to the degree the surface terrain of a human society, i.e., culture is "civilized," is to the degree the internal terrain (characteristics, personality or substance) of the people and leadership must also have been inoculated by, and inculcated with a moral foundation. The Biblically described Sodom, for instance, while being a society of people with a culture, would by Jewish or Biblical standards of "civility" have been uncivilized. And while the Roman sentiment is largely focused upon how justice must "appear" to be done in a "civil" manner, the Hebrew or Biblical approach to justice, in principle, is never limited to subjective pretenses or appearance, but more importantly, justice must be predicated upon objective principles. Ultimately, there is no true or lasting "civility" for any man in the absence of moral composure.

Many historians have focused on these broad cultural spheres and have treated civilizations as single units. One example is early twentieth-century philosopher Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West in which he puts forth a cyclical pattern theory of the rise and decline of civilizations....
, even though he uses the German word "Kultur," "culture," for what we here call a "civilization." He said that a civilization's coherence is based around a single primary cultural symbol. Civilizations experience cycles of birth, life, decline and death, often supplanted by a new civilization with a potent new culture, formed around a compelling new cultural symbol.

This "unified culture" concept of civilization also influenced the theories of historian Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold Joseph Toynbee Order of the Companions of Honour was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global perspective....
 in the mid-twentieth century. Toynbee explored civilization processes in his multi-volume
A Study of History
A Study of History

A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of United Kingdom historian Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961. In this immensely detailed and complex work, Toynbee traces the birth, growth and decay of some 21 to 23 major civilizations in the world....
, which traced the rise and, in most cases, the decline of 21 civilizations and five "arrested civilizations." Civilizations generally declined and fell, according to Toynbee, because of the failure of a "creative minority", through moral or religious decline, to meet some important challenge, rather than mere economic or environmental causes.

Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington

Samuel Phillips Huntington was an United States political science who gained prominence through his Clash of Civilizations thesis of a post-Cold War new world order....
 similarly defines a civilization as "the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species." Besides giving a definition of a civilization, Huntington has also proposed several theories about civilizations, discussed below.

Complex systems


Another group of theorists, making use of systems theory
Systems theory

Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field of science and the study of the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science. More specifically, it is a framework by which one can analyze and/or describe any group of objects that work in concert to produce some result....
, looks at a civilization as a complex system
Complex system

A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties not obvious from the properties of the individual parts....
, i.e., a framework by which a group of objects can be analyzed that work in concert to produce some result. Civilizations can be seen as networks of cities that emerge from pre-urban cultures, and are defined by the economic, political, military, diplomatic, and cultural interactions among them. Any organization is a complex social system, and a civilization is a large organization. Systems theory helps guard against superficial but misleading analogies in the study and description of civilizations.

For example, urbanist Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, Order of Canada, Order of Ontario was an United States-born Canadian urbanist, writer and activist. She is best known for ?The Death and Life of Great American Cities? , a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States....
 defines cities as the economic engines that work to create large networks of people. The main process that creates these city networks, she says, is "import replacement". Import replacement is the process by which peripheral cities begin to replace goods and services that were formerly imported from more advanced cities. Successful import replacement creates economic growth in these peripheral cities, and allows these cities to then export their goods to less developed cities in their own hinterlands, creating new economic networks. So Jacobs explores economic development across wide networks instead of treating each society as an isolated cultural sphere.

Systems theorists look at many types of relations between cities, including economic relations, cultural exchanges, and political/diplomatic/military relations. These spheres often occur on different scales. For example, trade networks were, until the nineteenth century, much larger than either cultural spheres or political spheres. Extensive trade routes, including the Silk Road
Silk Road

The Silk Road is an extensive interconnected network of trade routes across the Asian continent connecting East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean world, including North Africa and Europe....
 through Central Asia
Central Asia

Central Asia is a region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east, and from southern Russia in the north to northern India in the south....
 and Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering about 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by Asia ; on the west by Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and Australia; and on the south by the Southern Ocean ....
 sea routes linking the Roman Empire
Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the Roman Republic phase of the Ancient Rome, characterised by an autocracy form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
, Persian Empire
Persian Empire

The 'Persian Empire' was a series of successive Iranian or Persianization empires that ruled over the Iranian plateau, the original Persian homeland, and beyond in Southwest Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and the Caucasus....
, India
India

India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, the List of countries by population country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world....
, and China
China

China is a Culture of China, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
, were well established 2000 years ago, when these civilizations scarcely shared any political, diplomatic, military, or cultural relations. The first evidence of such long distance trade is in the ancient world. During the Uruk phase Guillermo Algaze has argued that trade relations connected Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran and Afghanistan. Resin found later in the it is suggested was traded northwards from Mozambique.

Many theorists argue that the entire world has already become integrated into a single "world system", a process known as globalization
Globalization

Globalization in its literal sense is the process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together....
. Different civilizations and societies all over the globe are economically, politically, and even culturally interdependent in many ways. There is debate over when this integration began, and what sort of integration – cultural, technological, economic, political, or military-diplomatic – is the key indicator in determining the extent of a civilization. David Wilkinson has proposed that economic and military-diplomatic integration of the Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern Iraq, as well as some parts of northeastern Syria, some parts of southeastern Turkey, and some parts of the Khuzestan Province of southwestern Iran....
n and Egyptian
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
 civilizations resulted in the creation of what he calls the "Central Civilization" around 1500 BC. Central Civilization later expanded to include the entire Middle East and Europe, and then expanded to a global scale with European colonization, integrating the Americas, Australia, China and Japan by the nineteenth century. According to Wilkinson, civilizations can be culturally heterogeneous, like the Central Civilization, or relatively homogeneous, like the Japanese civilization. What Huntington calls the "clash of civilizations" might be characterized by Wilkinson as a clash of cultural spheres within a single global civilization. Others point to the Crusades
Crusades

The Crusades were a series of religious war waged by much of Christian Europe against external and internal opponents. Crusades were fought mainly against Muslims, though campaigns were also directed against Paganism Slavic peoples, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Church, Mongols, Catharism, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians, and political enemi...
 as the first step in globalization. The more conventional viewpoint is that networks of societies have expanded and shrunk since ancient times, and that the current globalized economy and culture is a product of recent European colonialism.

Future


Political scientist Samuel Huntington
Samuel Huntington

Samuel Huntington may refer to:* Samuel Huntington , American jurist, statesman, and revolutionary leader* Samuel H. Huntington American jurist...
 has argued that the defining characteristic of the 21st century will be a clash of civilizations
Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations is a theory, proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, that people's cultural and religious Identity will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world....
. According to Huntington, conflicts between civilizations will supplant the conflicts between nation-state
Nation-state

The nation-state is a certain form of state that derives its legitimacy from serving as a Sovereignty entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit....
s and ideologies that characterized the 19th and 20th centuries. These views have been strongly challenged by others like Edward Said
Edward Said

Edward Wadie Sa?d Royal Society of Literature was a Palestinian American Literary theory, cultural critic, and an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights....
 and Mohammed Asudi. Ronald Inglehart
Ronald Inglehart

Ronald F. Inglehart is a political science at the University of Michigan. He is director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 85 percent of the world's population....
 and Pippa Norris
Pippa Norris

Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University....
 have argued that the "true clash of civilizations" between the Muslim world and the West is caused by the Muslim rejection of the West's more liberal sexual values, rather than a difference in political ideology.

Currently, world civilization is in a stage that has created what may be characterized as an industrial society
Industrial society

In sociology, industrial society refers to a society with a modernity societal structure. Such a structure developed in the west in the period of time following the industrial revolution....
, superseding the agrarian society
Agrarian society

An Agrarian Society is one that is based on agriculture as its prime means for support and sustenance. The society acknowledges other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses on agriculture and farming, and was the main form of socio-economic organization for most of recorded human history....
 that preceded it. Some futurists believe that civilization is undergoing another transformation, and that world society will become a so-called informational society
Informational society

In sociology, informational society refers to a postmodernity type of society. Theoreticians like Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells argue that since the 1970s a transformation from industrial society to informational society has happened on a global scale....
.

Some environmental scientists see the world entering a Planetary Phase of Civilization
Planetary Phase of Civilization

The Planetary Phase of Civilization is a concept defined by the Global Scenario Group , an environmental organization that specializes in scenario analysis and forecasting....
, characterized by a shift away from independent, disconnected nation-states to a world of increased global connectivity with worldwide institutions, environmental challenges, economic systems, and consciousness. In an attempt to better understand what a Planetary Phase of Civilization might look like in the current context of declining natural resources and increasing consumption, the Global scenario group
Global scenario group

The Global Scenario Group was a team of environmental scholars, headed by Paul Raskin, who used scenario analysis to analyze future paths for world development in the face of environmental pressures and crises....
 used scenario analysis
Scenario analysis

Scenario analysis is a process of analyzing possible future events by considering alternative possible outcomes . The analysis is designed to allow improved decision-making by allowing consideration of outcomes and their implications....
 to arrive at three archetypal futures: Barbarization, in which increasing conflicts result in either a fortress world or complete societal breakdown; Conventional Worlds, in which market forces or Policy reform
Policy reform

Policy reform, in addition to its more general meanings, has been used to refer to a future scenario which relies on government action to correct economic market failures and to stimulate the technological investment necessary for sustainable development and the creation of a truly sustainable planetary society....
 slowly precipitate more sustainable practices; and a Great Transition, in which either the sum of fragmented Eco-Communalism
Eco-communalism

Eco-communalism is an environmental philosophy based on ideals of simple living, local economies, and self-sufficiency . Eco-communalists envision a future in which the economic system of capitalism is replaced with a global web of economically interdependent and interconnected small local communities....
 movements add up to a sustainable world or globally coordinated efforts and initiatives result in a new sustainability paradigm.

The Kardashev scale
Kardashev scale

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization level of technology advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective....
 classifies civilizations based on their level of technological advancement, specifically measured by the amount of energy a civilization is able to harness. The Kardashev scale makes provisions for civilizations far more technologically advanced than any currently known to exist
(see also: Civilizations and the Future, Space civilization).

The fall of civilizations


There have been many explanations put forward for the collapse of civilization.

Edward Gibbon's
Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788....
 work
"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" began an interest in the Fall of Civilizations, that had begun with the historical divisions of Petrarch
Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca , known in English language as Petrarch, was an Italy scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanism. Petrarch is often popularly called the "Father of Humanism"....
 between the Classical period
Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome....
 of Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece

The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
 and Rome
Rome

Rome is the capital city of Italy and Lazio, and is Italy's largest and most populous city, with 2,724,347 residents in an urban area of some ....
, the succeeding Medieval Ages
Middle Ages

File:Karl 1 mit papst gelasius gregor1 sacramentar v karl d kahlen.jpgThe Middle Ages of European history are a period in history which lasted for roughly a millennium, commonly dated from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the beginning of the Early Modern Period in the 16th century, marked by the division of Western Christi...
, and the Renaissance
Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
. For Gibbon:-

"The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long."[Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed., vol. 4, ed. by J. B. Bury (London, 1909), pp. 173-174.] Gibbon suggested the final act of the collapse of Rome was the fall of Constantinople
Constantinople

Constantinople was the empire capital of the Roman Empire , the Byzantine Empire , the Latin Empire , and the Ottoman Empire . Strategically located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara at the point where Europe meets Asia, Byzantine Constantinople had been the capital of a Christendom empire, successor to ancient ancient Greece...
 to the Ottoman Turks
Ottoman Turks

The Ottoman Turks were the subdivision of the Ottoman Muslim Millet that dominated the ruling class of the Ottoman Empire. Reliable information about the early history of the Ottomans is scarce....
 in 1453 AD.
  • Theodor Mommsen
    Theodor Mommsen

    Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was a Germany classics, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist, and writer generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century....
     in his
    "History of Rome
    History of Rome

    The History of the city of Rome spans 2,800 years of the existence of a city that grew from a small Italy village in the 9th century BC into the center of a vast ancient Rome that dominated the Mediterranean Sea region for centuries....
    ", suggested Rome collapsed with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire
    Western Roman Empire

    The Western Roman Empire refers to the western half of the Roman Empire, from its division by Diocletian in 285; the other half of the Roman Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire, today widely known as the Byzantine Empire....
     in 476 AD and he also tended towards a biological analogy of "genesis," "growth," "senescence," "collapse" and "decay."
  • Oswald Spengler
    Oswald Spengler

    Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West in which he puts forth a cyclical pattern theory of the rise and decline of civilizations....
    , in his
    "Decline of the West" rejected Petrarch
    Petrarch

    Francesco Petrarca , known in English language as Petrarch, was an Italy scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanism. Petrarch is often popularly called the "Father of Humanism"....
    's chronological division, and suggested that there had been only eight "mature civilizations." Growing cultures, he argued, tend to develop into imperialistic civilizations which expand and ultimately collapse, with democratic forms of government ushering in plutocracy
    Plutocracy

    Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth.In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low....
     and ultimately imperialism
    Imperialism

    Imperialism has two meanings; one describing an action and the other describing an attitude.#Action: Imperialism is the practice of extending the power, control or rule by one country over areas outside its borders....
    .
  • Arnold J. Toynbee
    Arnold J. Toynbee

    Arnold Joseph Toynbee Order of the Companions of Honour was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global perspective....
     in his
    "A Study of History
    A Study of History

    A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of United Kingdom historian Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961. In this immensely detailed and complex work, Toynbee traces the birth, growth and decay of some 21 to 23 major civilizations in the world....
    " suggested that there had been a much larger number of civilizations, including a small number of arrested civilizations, and that all civilizations tended to go through the cycle identified by Mommsen. The cause of the fall of a civilization occurred when a cultural elite became a parasitic elite, leading to the rise of internal and external proletariat
    Proletariat

    The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. Originally it was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their sons....
    s.
  • Joseph Tainter
    Joseph Tainter

    Joseph A. Tainter is a U.S. anthropology and historian. He studied anthropology at the University of California and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D....
     in
    "The Collapse of Complex Societies
    Societal collapse

    Societal collapse is the large scale breakdown or long term decline of the culture, civil institutions or other major characteristics of a society or a civilization, temporarily or permanently....
    " suggested that there were diminishing returns
    Diminishing returns

    In economics, diminishing returns is also called diminishing marginal return or the law of diminishing returns. According to this relationship, in a production system with fixed and variable inputs , beyond some point, each additional unit of variable input yields less and less output....
     to complexity
    Complexity

    In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement. In science there are at this time a number of approaches to characterizing complexity, many of which are reflected in this article....
    , due to which, as states achieved a maximum permissible complexity, they would decline when further increases actually produced a negative return. Tainter suggested that Rome achieved this figure in the 2nd Century AD.
  • Jared Diamond
    Jared Diamond

    Jared Mason Diamond is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeography, lecturer, and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles....
     in his recent book
    "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
    Collapse (book)

    Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a 2005 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles....
    " suggests five major reasons for the collapse of 41 studied cultures.
  • Environmental damage, such as deforestation
    Deforestation

    Deforestation is the logging or burning of trees in forested areas. There are several reasons for doing so: trees or derived charcoal can be sold as a commodity and are used by humans while cleared land is used as pasture, plantations of commodities and human settlement....
     and soil erosion
  • Climate change
    Climate change

    Climate change is any long-term significant change in the expected patterns of average weather of a specific region over an appropriately significant period of time....
  • Dependence upon long-distance trade
    International trade

    International trade is exchange of Capital , goods, and services across international borders or territories. In most countries, it represents a significant share of gross domestic product ....
     for needed resources
  • Increasing levels of internal and external violence, such as war or invasion
  • Societal responses to internal and environmental problems
  • Peter Turchin
    Peter Turchin

    Peter Turchin is a Russian people scientist, specialized in population dynamics and a type of mathematical modeling of historical development, called "cliodynamics"....
     in his and Andrey Korotayev
    Andrey Korotayev

    Andrey Korotayev is an anthropology, economic historian, and sociology....
     
    et al. in their suggest a number of mathematical models describing collapse of agrarian civilizations. For example, the basic logic of Turchin's "fiscal-demographic" model can be outlined as follows: during the initial phase of a sociodemographic cycle
    Social cycle theory

    Social cycle theories are one of the earliest social theories in sociology. Unlike the theory of social evolutionism, which views the evolution of society and human history as progressing in some new, unique direction, sociological cycle theory argues that events and stages of society and history are generally repeating themselves in cycles....
     we observe relatively high levels of per capita production and consumption, which leads not only to relatively high population growth
    Population growth

    Population growth is the change in population over time, and can be quantified as the change in the number of individuals in a population using "per unit time" for measurement....
     rates, but also to relatively high rates of surplus production. As a result, during this phase the population can afford to pay taxes without great problems, the taxes are quite easily collectible, and the population growth is accompanied by the growth of state revenues. During the intermediate phase, the increasing overpopulation
    Overpopulation

    Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. In common parlance, the term usually refers to the relationship between the world population and its environment , the Earth....
     leads to the decrease of per capita production and consumption levels, it becomes more and more difficult to collect taxes, and state revenues stop growing, whereas the state expenditures grow due to the growth of the population controlled by the state. As a result, during this phase the state starts experiencing considerable fiscal problems. During the final pre-collapse phases the overpopulation leads to further decrease of per capita production, the surplus production further decreases, state revenues shrink, but the state needs more and more resources to control the growing (though with lower and lower rates) population. Eventually this leads to famines, epidemics, state breakdown, and demographic and civilization collapse (Peter Turchin.
    Historical Dynamics. Princeton University Press, 2003:121–127).
  • Peter Heather
    Peter Heather

    Peter Heather is an historian of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, currently Professor of Medieval History at King's College London.Heather was born in Northern Ireland in 1960....
     argues in his book
    The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians that this civilization did not end for moral or economic reasons, but because centuries of contact with barbarians across the frontier generated its own nemesis by making them a much more sophisticated and dangerous adversary. The fact that Rome needed to generate ever greater revenues to equip and re-equip armies that were for the first time repeatedly defeated in the field, led to the dismemberment of the Empire. Although this argument is specific to Rome, it can also be applied to the Asiatic Empire of the Egyptians, to the Han
    Han Dynasty

    The Han Dynasty followed the Qin Dynasty and preceded the Three Kingdoms in China. The Han Dynasty was ruled by the family known as the Liu clan who had peasant origins....
     and Tang
    Tang Dynasty

    The Tang Dynasty was an Dynasties in Chinese history preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire....
     dynasties of China, to the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate, and others.
  • Bryan Ward-Perkins
    Bryan Ward-Perkins

    Bryan Ward-Perkins is an archaeologist and historian of the later Roman Empire and early Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the transitional period between those two eras, an historical sub-field also known as Late Antiquity....
    , in his book
    The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization shows the real horrors associated with the collapse of a civilization for the people who suffer its effects, unlike many revisionist historians who downplay this. The collapse of complex society meant that even basic plumbing disappeared from the continent for 1,000 years. Similar Dark Age
    Greek Dark Ages

    The Greek Dark Ages refers to Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean civilization in the 12th century BC, to the first Ancient Greece poleiss in the 9th century BC....
     collapses are seen with the Late Bronze Age collapse
    Bronze Age collapse

    The Bronze Age collapse is the name given by those historians who see the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, as violent, sudden and culturally disruptive, expressed by the collapse of palace economy of the Aegean Region and Anatolia, which were replaced after a hiatus by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Ages of the Ancie...
     in the Eastern Mediterranean, the collapse of the Maya, on Easter Island
    Easter Island

    Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeastern most point of the Polynesian triangle. The island is a special territory of Chile....
     and elsewhere.
  • Arthur Demarest
    Arthur Demarest

    Arthur Demarest is an anthropology and archaeology, known for his studies of the Maya civilization....
     argues in
    Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization, using a holistic perspective to the most recent evidence from archaeology, paleoecology
    Paleoecology

    Paleoecology uses data from fossils and subfossils to reconstruct the ecosystems of the past. It includes the study of fossil organisms and their bromalites and other trace fossils in terms of their Biological life cycle, their living interactions, their natural environment, their manner of death and burial....
    , and epigraphy, that no one explanation is sufficient but that a series of erratic, complex events, including loss of soil fertility, drought and rising levels of internal and external violence led to the disintegration of the courts of Mayan kingdoms which began a spiral of decline and decay. He argues that the collapse of the Maya has lessons for civilization today.
  • Jeffrey A. McNeely has recently suggested that "A review of historical evidence shows that past civilizations have tended to over-exploit their forests, and that such abuse of important resources has been a significant factor in the decline of the over-exploiting society."
  • Thomas Homer-Dixon
    Thomas Homer-Dixon

    Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the Centre for International Governance Innovation Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario, and is a Professor in the Centre for Environment and Business in the Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo....
     in "", considers that the fall in the energy return on investments
    EROEI

    In physics, energy economics and energetics, EROEI , ERoEI, EROI or less frequently, eMergy, is the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource....
    ; the energy expended to energy yield ratio, is central to limiting the survival of civilizations. The degree of social complexity is associated strongly, he suggests, with the amount of disposable energy environmental, economic and technological systems allow. When this amount decreases civilizations either have to access new energy sources or they will collapse.


Criticism

Civilization has been criticized from a variety of viewpoints and for a variety of reasons. Some critics have objected to all aspects of civilization; others have argued that civilization brings a mixture of good and bad effects.

Some environmentalists
Environmentalism

Environmentalism is a broad philosophy and social movement centered on a concern for the Conservation movement and improvement of the environment ....
 like Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen is an United States author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California, California. Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame ....
 criticize civilizations for their exploitation of the environment. Richard Hienberg argues that through intensive agriculture and urban growth, civilizations tend to destroy natural settings and habitats, and deplete the resources on which it depends. This is sometimes referred to as "dominator culture". Proponents of this view believe that traditional societies live in greater harmony with nature than civilizations; people work with nature rather than try to subdue it. The sustainable living
Sustainable living

Sustainable living refers to a specific lifestyle that attempts to reduce an individual or society use of the Earth natural resource. Practitioners of sustainable living often attempt to reduce their carbon footprint by altering methods of transportation, energy consumption and diet ....
 movement is a push from some members of civilization to regain that harmony with nature.

Primitivism
Anarcho-primitivism

Anarcho-primitivism is an Anarchism critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to Agriculture subsistence gave rise to Social_stratification#Non-stratified_societies, coercion, and Social alienation....
 is a modern philosophy totally opposed to civilization. Primitivists accuse civilizations of restricting human potential, oppressing the weak, and damaging the environment. They wish to return to a more primitive way of life which they consider to be in the best interests of both nature and human beings. Leading proponents are John Zerzan
John Zerzan

John Zerzan is an United States anarchism and anarcho-primitivism philosopher and author. His works criticize agriculture civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of hunter gatherer as an inspiration for what a free society should look like....
 and Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen is an United States author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California, California. Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame ....
, whereas a critic is Roger Sandall
Roger Sandall

Roger Sandall is an essayist and commentator on cultural relativism and is best known as the author of The Culture Cult. He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1933 but has spent most of his career in Australia....
.

However, not all critics of past and present civilization believe that a primitive way of life is better. Some have argued that many negative aspects of current 'civilized' nations can be overcome. Karl Marx
Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosophy, political economy, historian, sociologist, humanism, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism....
, for instance, argued that the beginning of civilization was the beginning of oppression
Oppression

Oppression is the use of social power to disempower, marginalize, silence or otherwise subordinate one social group or category, often in order to further empower and/or privilege the oppressor....
 and exploitation
Exploitation

The term "exploitation" may carry two distinct meanings:# The act of utilizing something for any purpose. In this case, exploit is a synonym for use....
, but also believed that these things would eventually be overcome and communism
Communism

Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarianism, classlessness, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general....
 would be established throughout the world. He envisioned communism not as a return to any sort of idyllic past, but as a new stage of civilization. Conflict theory
Conflict theory

A conflict theory is a theory which emphasizes the role that a person or group's ability has to exercise influence and control over others in producing social order....
 in the social sciences also views the present form of civilization as being based on the domination of some people by others, but does not judge the issue morally.

Given the current problems with the sustainability of industrial civilization, some, like Derrick Jensen
Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen is an United States author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California, California. Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame ....
, who posits civilization to be inherently unsustainable, argue that we need to develop a social form of "post-civilization" as different from civilization as the latter was with pre-civilized peoples.

History


Prehistory


Old World
Fertile Crescent Map
  • Sumer
    Sumer

    Sumer was a civilization and a historical region located in Southern Iraq , known as the Cradle of civilization. It lasted from the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period through the Uruk period and the Dynastic periods until the rise of Babylon in the early 2nd millennium BC....
    : The Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer is widely accepted as the first complex civilization to develop on Earth
    Earth

    Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Earth is the largest of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System in diameter, mass and density. It is also referred to as the World and Wiktionary:Terra.Note that by International Astronomical Union convention, the term "Terra" is used for naming extensive land masses, rather...
    .
  • Ancient Near East
    Ancient Near East

    The Ancient Near East refers to early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia , Fars Province, Elam and Medes , Anatolia , the Levant , and Ancient Egypt, from the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BCE until the region's conquest by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE, or covering both th...
    • Ancient Egypt
      Ancient Egypt

      Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
    • Mesopotamia
      Mesopotamia

      Mesopotamia is the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern Iraq, as well as some parts of northeastern Syria, some parts of southeastern Turkey, and some parts of the Khuzestan Province of southwestern Iran....
      /Sumer
      Sumer

      Sumer was a civilization and a historical region located in Southern Iraq , known as the Cradle of civilization. It lasted from the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period through the Uruk period and the Dynastic periods until the rise of Babylon in the early 2nd millennium BC....
    • Levant
      Levant

      The Levant describes, traditionally, the Eastern Mediterranean at large, but can be used as a geographical term that denotes a large area in Western Asia formed by the lands bordering the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, roughly bounded on the north by the Taurus Mountains, on the south by the Arabian Desert, and on the west by the M...
      /Canaan
      Canaan

      Canaan is an ancient term for a region encompassing modern-day Israel and Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Jordan, Syria and northeastern Egypt....
    • Elam
      Elam

      Elam was an ancient civilization located in what is now southwest Iran.Elam was centered in the far west and southwest of modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of Khuzestan and Ilam Province , as far as Jiroft in Kerman province and Burned City in Zabol, as well as a small part of southern Iraq....
  • Minoan civilization
    Minoan civilization

    The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age civilization which arose on the island of Crete. The Minoan culture flourished from approximately 27th century BC to 1450 BC; afterwards, Mycenaean Greece culture became dominant at Minoan sites in Crete....
  • Indus Valley Civilization
    Indus Valley Civilization

    The Indus Valley Civilization , abbreviated IVC, was an ancient civilization that flourished in the Indus River basin. Primarily centered along the Indus river, the civilization encompassed most of Pakistan, including its Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan provinces, and extending into modern day Indian states of Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab...
  • Prehistoric Armenia
    Prehistoric Armenia

    The Armenian Highland shows traces of settlement from the Neolithic era. The Shulaveri-Shomu culture of the central South Caucasus region is the earliest known prehistoric culture in the area, carbon-dated to roughly 6000 - 4000 BC....
  • Helladic period
    Helladic period

    Helladic is a modern archaeological term meant to identify a sequence of periods characterizing the culture of mainland ancient Greece during the Bronze Age....
     Ancient Greece
  • Ancient China
    History of China

    China civilization originated in various city-states along the Yellow River valley in the Neolithic era. The written history of China begins with the Shang Dynasty ....
  • Ancient Korea
    History of Korea

    The history of Korea stretches from Lower Paleolithic times to the present. The earliest known Korean pottery dates to around 8000 BC, and the Neolithic period began before 6000 BC, followed by the Bronze Age around 2500 BC....


New World
Perucaral01
  • Norte Chico
    Norte Chico civilization

    The Norte Chico civilization was a complex Pre-Columbian society that included as many as 30 major population centers in what is now the Norte Chico of north-central coastal Peru....
    , Caral
    Caral

    Chico civilization]]'Caral' is a large settlement in the Supe Valley, near Supe, Barranca province, Peru, some 200 km north of Lima. Caral is one of the most ancient cities of Americas and as a matter of fact of the entire world, and is a well-studied site of the Norte Chico civilization....
    , or Caral-Supe
    Supe Puerto

    Puerto Supe, officially known as Supe Puerto , is as small harbor town located in the province of Barranca Province, in the Lima Region region, on the coast of Peru....
     Civilization
  • Olmec
    Olmec

    The Olmec were an ancient Pre-Columbian people living in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, in what are roughly the modern-day Mexican state of Veracruz and Tabasco....
  • Toltec
    Toltec

    The word Toltec in Mesoamerican studies has been used in different ways by different scholars to refer to actual populations and polity of pre-Columbian central Mexico or to the mythical ancestors mentioned in the mythical/historical narratives of the Aztecs....
  • Aztec civilization
    Aztec

    Aztec is a term used to refer to certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl and who achieved political and military dominance over large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the Late post-Classic period in Mesoamerican chronology....
  • Maya civilization
  • Inca Empire
    Inca Empire

    The Inca Empire was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cuzco in modern-day Peru....
  • Zapotec civilization
    Zapotec civilization

    The Zapotec civilization was an indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished in the Valley of Oaxaca of southern Mesoamerica. Archaeological evidence shows their culture goes back at least 2500 years....


Classical Antiquity

Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers

Karl Theodor Jaspers was a Germany psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. Trained in and practiced psychiatry, Jaspers later turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system....
, the German historical philosopher, proposed that the ancient civilizations were affected greatly by an Axial Age
Axial Age

Germany philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term the axial age to describe the period from 8th century BC to 2nd century BC, during which, according to Jaspers, similarly revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India and the Occident....
  in the period between 600 BC-400 BC during which a series of male sages, prophets, religious reformers and philosophers, from China, India, Iran, Israel and Greece, changed the direction of civilizations forever. Julian Jaynes
Julian Jaynes

Julian Jaynes was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , in which he argued that ancient peoples did not consciousness , but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the god...
 proposed that this was associated with the "collapse of the bicameral mind", during which subconscious ideas were recognized as simply subjective, rather than being voices of spirits. William H. McNeill
William H. McNeill

William Hardy McNeill is a noted World History. He is among the world's most respected historians and was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago....
 proposed that this period of history was one in which culture contact between previously separate civilizations saw the "closure of the oecumene", and led to accelerated social change from China to the Mediterranean, associated with the spread of coinage, larger empires and new religions. This view has recently been championed by Christopher Chase-Dunn and other world systems theorists
World Systems Theory

The World-systems approach is a post-Marxist view of world affairs, one of several historical and current applications of Marxism to international relations....
.

Civilizations affected by these developments include
  • Mediterranean Civilizations of the Classical Period
    Classical period

    Classical period can refer to the following:*The Classical_Greece of ancient Greece, which fell between its Archaic period in Greece and Hellenistic Greece....
  • Ancient Greece
    Ancient Greece

    The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
     and Hellenic
    Hellenism

    Hellenism may refer to*Hellenism , an esthetic movement in 18th and 19th century England and Germany*Hellenism , the academic study of ancient Greece ...
     civilization
  • Phoenicia
    Phoenicia

    Phoenicia was an ancient civilization centered in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal regions of modern day Lebanon, extending to parts of Israel, Syria and the Palestinian territories....
  • The Roman Empire
  • Second Temple
    Second Temple

    The Second Temple was the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem which stood between 516 BCE and 70 CE. During this time, it was the center of Judaism worship, which focused on the sacrifices known as the korbanot....
     Judaism
    Judaism

    Judaism is a set of beliefs and practices originating in the Hebrew Bible , as later further explored and explained in the Talmud and other texts....
  • La Tène Celts


  • Middle Eastern Civilizations
  • Iranian Civilization since the Achaemenids
  • Phoenician
    Phoenician

    Phoenician may refer to*Phoenicia, the ancient civilization*Phoenician alphabet*Phoenician languagePhoenician may also be*A native or resident of Phoenix, Arizona...
     Civilization
  • Islam
    Islam

    Islam is a Monotheism, Abrahamic religion originating with the teachings of the Prophets of Islam Muhammad, a 7th century Arab religious and political figure....
    ic Civilizations
  • Georgian
    Georgia (country)

    Georgia is a transcontinental country in the Caucasus region, located at the dividing line between Europe and Asia. It is bordered by the Russia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, Armenia to the south, and Turkey to the southwest....
     and Armenia
    Armenia

    Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in South Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea....
    n Civilizations


  • Indian Hindu and Buddhist Civilizations
  • Mauryan and Post-Mauryan Indian Civilization
  • Gupta Empire
    Gupta Empire

    The Gupta Empire was ruled by members of the Gupta dynasty from around 280 to 550 CE and covered most of Northern India, Southern and Eastern Pakistan, parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan and what is now western India and Bangladesh....
     in North India
    North India

    Northern India is a loosely defined region in the northern part of India. The exact meaning of the term varies by usage. The dominant geographical features of northern India are the Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Himalayas, which demarcate the region from Tibet and Central Asia....
  • Chola Empire in South India
    South India

    South India is the area encompassing India's states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu as well as the Union territories of India of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry, occupying 19.31% of area....
  • Civilizations of ancient Ceylon


  • East Asian Civilizations
  • Chinese Civilization
  • Korean Civilization
  • Vietnamese Civilization
  • Japanese
    History of Japan

    The written history of Japan begins with brief references of Twenty-Four Histories, a collection of Chinese historical texts, in the 1st century AD....
     Civilization


  • The Civilizations of South East Asia
  • Funan
    Funan

    Funan was an ancient pre-Angkor Indianized kingdom Khmer kingdom located around the Mekong Delta. It is believed to have been established in the first century C.E, although extensive human settlement in the region may have gone back as far as the 4th century B.C.E....
     and Chen-la
  • Angkor
    Angkor

    Angkor is a name conventionally applied to the region of Cambodia serving as the seat of the Khmer empire that flourished from approximately the ninth century to the fifteenth century A.D....
     Cambodia
    History of Cambodia

    Archaeological evidence indicates that parts of the region now called Cambodia were inhabited from around 1000-2000 BCE by a Neolithic culture that may have migrated from South Eastern China to the Indochinese Peninsula....
  • Srivijaya
    Srivijaya

    Srivijaya or Sriwijaya was an ancient Malays kingdom on the island of Sumatra, Southeast Asia which influenced much of the Malay Archipelago. The earliest solid proof of its existence dates from the 7th century; a Chinese monk, I-Tsing, wrote that he visited Srivijaya in 671 for 6 months....
    , Singhasari
    Singhasari

    Singhasari was a monarchy located in east Java between 1222 and 1292....
     and Majapahit Civilizations
  • Burmese, Thai
    History of Thailand

    The history of Thailand begins with the migration of the Thai people from their ancestral home in southern China into mainland southeast Asia around the 10th century AD....
     and Lao
    History of Laos

    Earliest known history and the founding of Lan XangThe earliest Lao legal document is known as "the laws of Khun Borom" , still preserved in manuscript form....
     Civilizations


  • Central Asian Civilization
  • Tibet
    Tibet

    Tibet is a Tibetan Plateau in Asia, north of the Himalayas, and the home to the indigenous Tibetan people and its related ethnic groups. With an average elevation of 4,900 metres , it is the highest region on Earth and has in recent decades increasingly been referred to as the "Roof of the World"....
    an Civilization
  • Turkic
    Turkic peoples

    The Turkic peoples are Eurasian peoples residing in northern, central and western Eurasia, and who mostly speak languages belonging to the Turkic languages....
     and Mongol Civilizations


  • European Civilizations
  • Western Christendom
  • Byzantium
    Byzantium

    Byzantium was an Ancient Greece city, which was founded by Greeks colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas or Byzantas ....
     and Eastern Orthodox Christendom
  • Russian
    History of Russia

    The history of Russia begins with that of the East Slavs. The first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus', adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavs cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium....
     Civilization


Since the voyages of discovery by European explorers of the 15th and 16th century, another development has occurred whereby which European forms of government, industry, commerce and culture have spread from Western Europe, to the Americas, South Africa, Australia, and through colonial empires, to the rest of the planet. Today it would appear that we are all parts of a planetary industrializing world civilization, divided between many nations and languages.

See also


  • Culture
    Culture

    Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
  • History of the world
    History of the world

    The history of the world is the recorded history memory of the experience, around the world, of Homo sapiens. Ancient human history begins with the invention, independently at several sites on Earth, of writing, which created the infrastructure for lasting, accurately transmitted memories and thus for the diffusion and growth of knowledg...
  • The Holocene calendar
    Holocene calendar

    The Holocene calendar, popular term for the Holocene Era count or Human Era count, uses a dating system similar to astronomical year numbering but adds 10,000, placing a zero at the start of the Human Era the approximation of the Holocene for easier geological, archaeological, dendrochronological and historical datin...
    , which uses a dating system similar to astronomical year numbering but adds 10,000, placing a zero at the start of the
    Human Era (HE, the beginning of human civilization cca. 11,500 years ago), approximating the Holocene Epoch (HE, post Ice Age) and spanning the whole of civilization, for easier geological, archaeological, dendrochronological and historical dating.
  • Human population
  • Kardashev scale
    Kardashev scale

    The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization level of technology advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective....
  • Civilized core
    Civilized core

    Civilized Core refers to the four advanced civilizations that emerged before and around 1000 BCE. These were, in no particular order, the civilizations located in present day Mesopotamia, China, India, and Greece....


Bibliography

  • , Discussion and news surrounding the clash and concepts such as dialog, equality, acceptance etc between civilizations.
  • Wiktionary: civilization, civilize
    1. From the Earliest Times to the Battle of Lepanto. ISBN 0-306-80304-6 (1987 reprint).
    2. From the Defeat of the Spanish Armada to the Battle of Waterloo. ISBN 0-306-80305-4 (1987 reprint).
    3. From the American Civil War to the End of World War II. ISBN 0-306-80306-2 (1987 reprint).
  • Korotayev, Andrey, World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7734-6310-0
  • Kradin, Nikolay
    Nikolay Kradin

    Nikolay Nikolaevich Kradin is a Russian anthropologist and archaeologist. Since 1985 he has been a Research Fellow of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology, Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok....
    . Archaeological Criteria of Civilization.
    Social Evolution & History
    Social Evolution & History

    Social Evolution & History is an international journal focused on the development of human societies in the past, present and future. By integrating anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy and historical theory, the journal serves as an interdisciplinary forum for scholars....
    , Vol. 5, No 1 (2006): 89-108. ISSN 1681-4363.
  • A. Nuri Yurdusev, International Relations and the Philosophy of History: A Civilizational Approach (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).


External links

  • Maps to be combined and compared