Chapter 2 - Early River Valley Civilizations

Before 4500 B.C., people began to dwell and plow the flat, swampy regions of southern Mesopotamia.
  * Around 3300 B.C., the Sumerians, who you learned about in Chapter 1, appeared on the scene.
  * The advantage of good soil was what drew these settlers in.
  * There were, however, three drawbacks to their new surroundings.
Sumer's inhabitants devised answers to these issues over a lengthy period of time.
They created irrigation ditches to provide water, which brought river water to their fields and allowed them to cultivate a surplus of crops.
They built city walls out of mud bricks for defense, and they exchanged food, cloth, and handcrafted tools with people from the highlands and the desert.
* They were given raw commodities such as stone, wood, and metal in exchange.
The temple priests were in charge of Sumer's early administrations.
* Farmers thought that the gods' blessings were necessary for their harvests to succeed, and priests served as intermediaries between the gods and the farmers.
The surplus food produced on Sumer's farmland helped the city-states grow.
* Sumerians were able to increase long-distance trade by exchanging surplus grain and other goods for those they required.

Sumerian Statue

As in Mesopotamia, yearly flooding brought the water and rich soil that allowed settlements to grow.
* Every year in July, rains and melting snow from the mountains of east Africa caused the Nile River to rise and spill over its banks.
* When the river receded in October, it left behind a rich deposit of fertile black mud called silt.
Egyptian farmers were significantly more fortunate than Mesopotamian people.
* In comparison to the unpredictability of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Nile flowed like clockwork.
Ancient Egyptians lived along the Nile from its mouth all the way into Africa's interior.
* River navigation was frequent, but it came to a stop at the Nile's cascade, where rocks convert the river into churning rapids.

The Indus Valley was protected from invasion by the world's largest mountains to the north and a huge desert to the east.
No one knows when human habitation in the Indian subcontinent began.
* Those who arrived by sea from Africa may have settled in the south.
Northern migrants may have passed over the Hindu Kush mountains' Khyber Pass.
Harappa is a wonderful example of this type of urban development.
* To defend the city from flooding, it was built largely on mudbrick platforms.
* It was enclosed by a three-and-a-half-mile-long masonry wall.
Inside was a fortification that protected the royal family while also serving as a temple.
The Harappan cities exhibit exceptional religious and cultural unity.
  * The dwelling implies that there were not many socioeconomic distinctions in the society.
  * Clay and wooden children's toys indicate a highly rich civilization that could afford to manufacture non-essential commodities.
  * Few weapons of war have been discovered, implying that the conflict was brief.

Map of Harapan City

China's initial civilization, like the other ancient civilizations in this chapter, arose in a river valley.
* Floods were a threat to China as well, but the country's geographic isolation posed its own set of problems.
Early Chinese cultures were creating agrarian communities along the Huang He even before the Sumerians settled in southern Mesopotamia.
Some of these communities matured into China's earliest cities around 2000 B.C.
According to legend, the Xia (shyah) Dynasty, the earliest Chinese dynasty, arose about this time.
* Yu, an engineer and mathematician, was the group's head. His flood-control and irrigation efforts enabled communities to expand by taming the Huang He and its tributaries.
* Yu's mythology illustrates the technological level of a society transitioning to civilization.