Farmers clustered about it in late prehistoric times; its population may then have numbered 2,000 – 3,000 . Before 6000 BCit had great water tanks which suggest provision for big needs, possibly for irrigation, and there was a massive stone tower which was part of elaborate defences long kept in repair. Clearly its inhabitants thought they had something worth defending; they had property. Jericho was a considerable place.
For all that, it was not the beginnings of a civilization; too much was still lacking and it is worth considering for a moment at the outset of the era of civilization just what it is we are looking for. It is a little like the problem of pinning down in time the first human beings. There is a shaded area in which we know the change occurs, but we can still disagree about the point at which a line has been crossed. In many places both in western and eastern Asia around 5000 BC farming villages provided the agricultural surpluses on which civilization could eventually be raised. Some of them have left behind evidence of complex religious practice and elaborate painted pottery, one of the most widespread forms of art in the Neolithic era. Somewhere about 6000 BC brick building was going on in Turkey at Çatal Hüyük, a site only slightly younger than Jericho. But by civilization we usually mean something more than ritual, art or the presence of a certain technology, and certainly something more than the mere agglomeration of human beings in the same place.
It is a little like speaking of ‘an educated man’: everyone can recognize one when they see him, but not all educated men are recognized as such by all observers, nor is a formal qualifi cation (a university degree, for example) either a necessary or infallible indicator. Dictionary defi nitions are of no help in pinning down ‘civilization’, either. That of the Oxford English Dictionary is indisputable but so cautious as to be useless: ‘a develop advanced state of human society’. What we have still to make up our minds about is how far developed or advanced and along what lines.
Some have said that a civilized society is different from an uncivilized society because it has a certain attribute – writing, cities, monumental building have all been suggested. But agreement is diffi cult and it seems safer not to rely on any such single test. If, instead, we look at examples of what everyone has agreed to call civilizations and not at the marginal and doubtful cases, then it is obvious that what they have in common is complexity. They have all reached a level of elaboration which allows much more variety of human action and experience than even a well-off primitive community. Civilization is the name we give to the interaction of human beings in a very creative way, when, as it were, a critical mass of cultural potential and a certain surplus of resources have been built up. In civilization this releases human capacities for development at quite a new level and in large measure the development which follows is self-sustaining. But let us turn to examples.
Somewhere in the fourth millennium BCis the starting-point of the story of civilizations and it will be helpful to set out a rough chronology. We begin with the fi rst recognizable civilization in Mesopotamia. The next example is in Egypt, where civilization is observable at a slightly later date, perhaps about 3100 BC . Another marker in the western Mediterranean is ‘Minoan’ civilization which appears in Crete about a thousand years later, and from that time we can disregard questions of priorities in this part of the world: it is already a complex of civilizations in interplay with one another. Meanwhile, further east and perhaps around 2500 BC , another civilization has appeared in India and it is to some degree literate. China’s fi rst civilization starts a bit later, a little after 2000 BC . Later still come the Mesoamericans. Once we are past about 1500 BC , though, only this last example is suffi ciently isolated for interaction not to be a big part of explaining what happens. From that time, there are no civilizations to be explained which appear without the stimulus, shock or inheritance provided by others which have appeared earlier. For the moment, then, our preliminary sketch is complete enough at this point.
Cultural Conservativism, Modern Agendas and Growing Sense of Reform
