Why Did Civilizations Form?
A half century ago, V. Gordon Childe specified the traits that he believed contributed to the evolution of early civilizations. His list reflects the view that civilization is an outgrowth of increasing productivity, social complexity, and economic advantage (Childe, 1950). The use of writing, mathematics, animalpowered traction, wheeled carts, plows, irrigation, sailing boats, standard units of weight and measure, metallurgy, surplus production, and craft specialization, Childe argued, all had a stimulating effect and were themselves products of changes initiated by earlier Neolithic activities. It was soon clear that Childe’s catalog of inventions and new social institutions was not applicable to all early civilizations. Childe also failed to grasp that a civilization is more than the sum of its parts. His catalog of traits characterized the Near Eastern civilizations with which he was most familiar, but it didn’t fit important New World societies such as the Maya and Inca. Nevertheless, these were clearly civilizations, even though they didn’t use sailing boats, animal traction, wheeled carts, and so on. By the later twentieth century, most archaeologists also agreed that descriptive approaches like Childe’s were inadequate at best because they couldn’t account for why and how the earliest civilizations emerged when and where they did. The search for such answers continues to be one of the most important objectives of archaeological research on complex societies. Let’s now consider several competing explanations, with emphasis on Near Eastern civilizations, which offer the advantage of being among the most studied of the world’s earliest civilizations. Bear in mind, however, that a good general explanation should apply just as effectively to all civilizations, including those in the New World.
Environmental Explanations
At first glance, it may seem unlikely that the rise of civilizations could be the product of purely natural causes, independent of the actions of humans. Nevertheless, researchers have weighed the merits of these and many other possible factors over the past century. Theories that account for the origins of civilization tend to take a position between the extremes of environmental determinism, in which people, culture, and everything else obey the same laws of nature, and cultural determinism, the cultural relativist position that maintains that human behavior can be explained only in cultural and historical terms (Trigger, 2003, pp. 653–655). Let’s look briefly at an example of a strong environmental hypothesis. Arie Issar, a geologist, and his colleague Mattanyah Zohar, an archaeologist, argue that the fluctuating availability of water resources caused by major climatic changes was a key factor in the development of civilization in the Near East (Issar and Zohar, 2004). Based on their chemical analyses of lake sediments and cave stalagmites, these researchers identify several periods between 6,000 and 5,000 ya during which the Near East was drier than present and periods during which it was colder than present. When correlated with major cultural changes documented in the archaeological record of the region, climatic conditions, they argue, are sufficient to account both for production surpluses and for the concentration of the control of these surpluses in the hands of ruling classes. This control gradually became more successful as administrative institutions and such inventions as writing developed in Mesopotamian society. Interregional commerce, the military, administrative bureaucracies, and local ruling dynasties, they argue, emerged because of the changes promoted by optimal climatic conditions. Climatic changes may also account for the catastrophic flood legends that are indigenous to the region (Issar and Zohar, 2004, pp. 112–113). Elsewhere, however, research has shown that the possible causal relationships between environmental factors and early civilizations are much less likely. In fact, in a recent international conference on the relationship between climatic change and early civilizations, the participants agreed on one main point: “Climatic change for each civilization or community can act as a driving force, or a supporting player, or merely as background noise” (Catto and Catto, 2004). In other words, environmental explanations generally and climatic change in particular can’t, by themselves, explain the rise and fall of all early civilizations.
Cultural Explanations
If environmental theories sometimes leave little room for human culture and agency to play important causal roles in the development of civilization, some cultural explanations go to the other extreme and deny the importance of the environment. According to the views of cultural relativists, culture plays the significant role in shaping human behavior, not noncultural factors such as climate, population growth, and the like. From this perspective, culture cannot merely be reduced to the category of human reactions to the whims of nature, but is a force to be reckoned with in explaining major prehistoric changes such as the development of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. For example, Kwang-chih Chang argues that the rise of the earliest civilizations in China may have owed more to the differential access by some groups to the means of communication than to the means of production (Chang, 2000). In short, Chang (2000, p. 2) asserts that “the wealth that produced the civilization was itself the product of concentrated political power, and the acquisition of that power was accomplished through the accumulation of wealth. The key to this circular working of the ancient Chinese society was the monopoly of high shamanism, which enabled the rulers to gain critical access to divine and ancestral wisdom, the basis of their political authority. Most of the markers of the ancient civilization were in fact related centrally to this shamanism.” Chang’s hypothesis is particularly interesting because it depends entirely on cultural factors as the active ingredients in developing early Chinese civilization. He pointedly denies the importance of technological advances and increasing control of the means of production, factors that are often mentioned as key aspects in general theories of the development of the early civilizations. Although it’s contested by many specialists on Chinese civilization, Chang’s hypothesis has a novel twist in that he also argues that all early civilizations, with the notable exception of Mesopotamia in the Near East, controlled the means of communication (Chang, 2000, pp. 7–10). It was only in Mesopotamia, Chang reasons, that controlling the means of production was a key factor in developing the region’s earliest civilizations. This difference, he conjectures, led to the creation of states that were fundamentally different from those of China and greatly influenced the development of much of Western civilization. In his recent monumental comparative analysis of early civilizations, Bruce Trigger (2003) identifies several important uniformities that cast doubt on civilization theories that adopt extreme positions, whether they’re in the direction of cultural relativism or environmental forces. To take only a few examples, Trigger found no evidence of Chang’s control of the means of communication; but in the cases he examined, he did encounter relatively uniform conceptions of kingship, class systems, support of the upper classes through the controlled use of force, and control of the means of production (Trigger, 2003, pp. 272–273, 663). Significantly, Trigger also found that only two types of political organization and two types of general administrative institutions are present in all early civilizations. What’s striking about these and the many other cultural similarities he identifies is that it’s not the sort of picture we would expect to see if human culture were unconstrained by noncultural forces. If culture were a free agent, so to speak, we would expect considerable diversity in these and other institutions across early civilizations as they respond to local cultural traditions and history. Similarly, these cultural uniformities can’t be easily explained by the action of general environmental factors, because the cases Trigger examines are environmentally diverse, ranging from tropical rain forest settings to near-desert conditions. If culture and natural factors such as climate cannot fully explain the rise of the earliest civilizations, what is the answer? Trigger (2003, pp. 272–274) proposes an essentially functional argument based on information theory. At its root is the observation that the transition from villages to cities and states is fundamentally one of increasing societal complexity, driven by economic or political forces. With the increased complexity of the organization of society, there must also be comparable increases in the institutions that manage this complexity. To put it another way, you can’t manage a Fortune 500 multinational corporation from a small storefront in a suburban strip mall. What’s missing from that picture is the massive organizational infrastructure necessary to keep a major corporation running on a daily basis, much less to keep it profitable. To Trigger, a state faces the same basic problem. The growth of the earliest cities and states also required the creation of new decision-making institutions and the distribution of power and authority. This is effectively what’s seen archaeologically with increased material evidence for the emergence of social classes, ruling elites, administrative bureaucracies, settlement hierarchies, and the like. But Trigger’s most important point may be that for all the ways in which early civilizations differed around the world— and there were many—“for societies to grow more complex they may have to evolve specific forms of organization.” And as Trigger also observed, humans found only a limited number of ways to do this!