Название: Early Civilizations of the Old World
Автор: Charles Keith Maisels
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 2001
Страниц: 505
Формат: pdf
Размер: 14,94 MB
Язык: английский

The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia India and China.

How the world’s first civilizations came into existence is the subject of this book. It charts, analyses and compares the parallel paths followed in each of the seminal areas of the Old World (Africa and Asia), from the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic) right through to historical times. It documents the circumstances that gave each region its distinctive cultural characteristics: settling down, the domestication of plants and animals, economic specialization, class stratification, city and state formation.
It is, then, a book about the processes by which hunter-gatherers became farmers (the Neolithic), villagers became townspeople with a complex division of labour (the Chalcolithic) and, beginning around 5000 years ago, cities, states, writing, calculation and institutional religion emerged (the Bronze Age).