Overview of Human Civilization Development Before 1200 CE

why are you there welcome to a new year at heimlich sister in case you hadn't heard the new AP World History

curriculum begins in the year 1200 CE or ad depending on your persuasion and that means that they have cut millennia out

of the curriculum it's not my intention to comment on whether or not that's a good change or a bad change I'm just

here to give you some context so that when we plop down into 1200 we know what's going on so sort of the meta

question they're gonna be dealing with in this video is how did the human race survive and thrive all the way up to

1200 I'm gonna start about 10,000 years ago on this massive unfolding event called the Neolithic Revolution or

sometimes called the Agricultural Revolution now prior to the Neolithic Revolution human beings

just basically survived by hunting and gathering and wandering from place to place

but somebody and nobody really knows who discovered that if you plant seeds in the ground on purpose and then you wait

around for those seeds to sprout up into crops then you will have a lot more food than you would by hunting and gathering

phenomenon of farming took place all around the world at roughly the same time give or take a few centuries but

the ogee farmers came from Southwest Asia or to put a finer point on it Mesopotamia and it is hard to oversell

the consequences of the advent of farming first instead of wandering from location to location now people largely

settled in one place and as a result of that they begin to build permanent structures especially for the storage of

crops and the purposes of religion I don't like that but when you've got more than enough food people start making

babies ad nauseam and there was a huge population explosion as I mentioned before this happened all over the world

at different times and in different circumstances but one thing that was common to all these agricultural

societies is that they grew up around water specifically rivers and among the most important River Valley societies

were the following the Nile River Society in North Africa the Yellow River Valley in East Asia the Indus River

Valley in South Asia the river valleys of Mesoamerica and the Andes mountain society so apparently when people stay

in one place for their crops for long enough they will eventually create cities in fact the word civilization

just means a society that has a city but first of the major cities came on to the stage about 6,000 years ago first in

Mesopotamia and then in the Nile River Valley and the building programs in these cities was astonishing they built

pyramids and ziggurats and palaces for the elite and one of the consequences of this elaborate ordering of society was

hierarchy hierarchy just means that these societies were broken up into groups of

people that were distinguished by class and those at the top of the hierarchy were usually the ones who were writing

the laws and levying taxes on all the plebs down below one of the most famous legal codes was called the Code of

Hammurabi and this code laid down clear lines for societal hierarchies and punishments for law breaking now when we

hear an eye for an eye we tend to think of the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures namely the books of Moses but

the justice system of Hammurabi was the first to mention an eye for an eye and maybe of equal importance during this

time was the invention of writing of the first uses of this technology were to keep track of the grain supplies in any

given city in Mesopotamia the written language was called cuneiform and in Egypt it was called hieroglyphics but

eventually written language burst free from these utilitarian purposes and they began to produce literature and in this

literature they wrote stories have explained the creation of the world and expounded the meaning of life the most

famous of these was the epic of gilgamesh for Mesopotamia the Book of the Dead from Egypt and the Rigveda from

the Indus Valley also during this time some of the world's major religions emerge out of these civilizations out of

the Indus River Valley Hinduism arose now Hinduism was a polytheistic religion which is to say they worshipped many

gods and it taught that one over all God's peer reviewed itself in many forms and then all the way over in Southwest

Asia to the great monotheistic religions which is to say they worshiped one God arose the Persians gave us sorrow

Astraea nism and the Hebrews over in Israel gave us Judaism now eventually cities that were in close proximity to

each other especially those who held similar religious beliefs United to form the early empires you should know that

the kings of these empires almost always claimed divinity in order to consolidate their power and one more thing about

this period not every human being on the planet during this time was accounted for in terms of a city or an empire

there was still a significant group of people who continued their hunting and gathering in nomadic ways and they are

known as the pastoralists we'll see how important they were later but for now you just need to understand that by

going to and fro between the major civilizations pastoralists fostered important connections and cultural

exchanges between those empires okay that gets us up to about 600 BCE in which there's a new turning point for

the thriving and the surviving of human beings at this point in history the world is getting way more populated and

therefore way more complicated so I'm going to break this down into two sections first we'll look at religious

and cultural developments and then second we'll look at the developments of city-states and empires

alright first religious and development during this period the major religions develop and spread into New

Territories Jews for example bring their religion into all corners of the known world and usually this happened not

because they chose to but because they were compelled to by foreign invaders around 600 BC the Assyrians invaded

Israel and brought many Jews back to Assyria as prisoners of war and later the Romans scattered the Jews all over

their empire as well but sometimes Judaism did spread because it was carried voluntarily by Jewish merchants

to all the major trade cities across Europe and South Asia and East Asia are I go over to India at this time and

Hinduism becomes the fundamental ordering principle for Indian society especially its teaching on caste this

teaching said that all living things were ordered into a hierarchical structure and a living being can move up

or down that structure not in this life but in a series of successive lives depending on their behavior so it's

important to know that Hinduism became the social glue that held Indian society together for millennia but these two

religions themselves also experienced change during this time out of Hinduism came a new system of belief called

Buddhism which began in South Asia around 500 BCE Buddhism still held for example the teaching about reincarnation

that came from Hinduism but it differed in the way that it did away with the hierarchical caste system so the main

teaching of Buddhism is that life is suffering and if the reason why we suffer is because we desire and

therefore the way to stop suffering is to kill desire how do you do that while you live a life that follows a set of

behaviors outlined in something called the Eightfold Path and then out of Judaism arose Christianity in the first

century a prophet and a preacher from northern Israel by the name of Jesus of Nazareth came on to the scene and he

preached that salvation is not by means of proper behavior but by believing in his own saving death and resurrection

for the forgiveness of sin and even these two innovations were innovated upon as they spread into different

cultures as Buddhism travelled into different cultures in the east it developed new forms you get forms like

tera vaada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism which were more salvation astre lidge's than the original teachings of

the Buddha and his Christianity spread there was at least two major distinctive expressions of you had the Roman

Catholics on the west and then you have the Orthodox Christians known as the Byzantines in the East all right let's

fly over to China and see what's happened in that during this period the teachings of Confucius came to unify

China after a period of turmoil known as the warring States Period now confuse became the bedrock of Chinese society

because it provided a predictable way of ordering society based on a hierarchical structure according to Confucius if

everybody in a society plays their particular role and plays it rightly then that society will be a piece rulers

must rule wisely subjects must object themselves with deference and honor now many empires are going to come and

go throughout Chinese history but Confucianism is the one thing that seems to be a continuity throughout all of now

about the same time that Confucianism was making its debut in China Taoism is coming onto the scene in East Asia now

Confucius emphasized the ordering of human relations but Dao is taught that people must look away from human

creations and institutions and look to the order of nature for how to live then if we fly over to Africa and the

Americas and some parts of East Asia will see a religious form called animism and shamanism animism taught that the

natural world had spiritual power embedded in it and shamans were the priestly kind of folks that had access

to control and direct that spiritual power and these religious forms had endless variations depending on where

you found them okay that's how religions were developing during this period now let's turn our attention to the

development of city-states and empires so the major city states and empires for the most part throughout the world knew

about each other if they were divided by large distances sometimes they became trading partners and then just as often

if they were close to one another they went to war one of the consequences of frequent war between different empires

was the exchange of Technology oh man this thing you just stabbed me with is way better than that thing I just tried

to stab you with hey guys we got to get one of these all right so let's just fly around the world again in the six

different regions and see what's going on with their empires and city-states let's start with the Persian empires the

first notable mention is the Achaemenid Empire which lasted from about 550 to 330 BCE and this Empire was so large

that the Emperor used regional leaders called se traps to govern the affairs of different districts and they produced an

elaborate highway system that served to move armies quickly to distant parts of the Empire this is the case with many of

these old empires the Achaemenids overextended themselves and therefore became vulnerable to attack and it was

the Greek hero Alexander the Great who did the honor of conquering them but about a century later the Parthian

Empire rose and took back much of what have been taken by Alexander now the Chinese Empire here we need to consider

the chin and the Han Dynasty so after a tumultuous and chaotic period known as the

warring States period the Qin Dynasty came into being in 220 BCE now the Chinese believed in something called the

Mandate of Heaven which said that the heavens would provide for them a leader who would rule them with justice that is

until that ruler started governing like a turd and then he would be ousted so after the warring States Period the

heavens provided Qin Shi Huangdi and he established the philosophy of legalism which gave to the Chinese society clear

rules of command and strict layers of bureaucracy and everything was good in that legalistic society as long as you

followed the rules but if not the punishments were severe now the Qin Dynasty itself didn't last very long at

all it ended in 206 BCE but it did establish a dynastic foundation that would be in place in China for centuries

and millennia to come after the Qin came the Han Dynasty which lasted for another 400 years and the Han Dynasty existed

roughly at the same time period as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire and as such the Hans and the Romans

established diplomatic ties with one another and patterns of trade now the Han Empire was at least as big as the

Roman Empire and at least as wealthy but pound for pound it was technologically far more advanced than the Romans were

it was the Hans who began building the Great Wall of China in order to squash invasions from the north and that

construction continued for the next thousand years Han rulers also dug canals that lengthened north to the

south which not only provided conditions for a flourishing trade but also helped the government keep the Empire unified

with the common culture all right let's look at the Mediterranean empires first let's stop by the Phoenician city states

because of their advanced seafaring capabilities the Phoenicians established colonies all throughout Greece and Italy

and North Africa and Spain and usually these colonies were established not by military conquest but by diplomacy and

trade and it was the Phoenicians that gave us the oldest known alphabet and taught its people to read from left to

right you can read this bank of Phoenician now the Phoenicians deeply influenced the next group of people were

going to consider in the Mediterranean namely the Greeks the system of Greek city-states came onto the scene about

600 BCE and exited around 330 BC the Greeks gave to the world the ideas of citizenship and democracy just so you

know the democratic process in the Greek city-states only included free white males but don't let that sully the idea

that people actually had the ability to influence their government at the time this was a revolutionary idea and then a

little later come the Romans the Romans were deeply influenced by Greek culture even though the Roman army

conquered Greece about a century after Alexander the Great's death and the Romans were deeply dedicated to building

and you see this in there great aqueducts and their extensive system of roads and just like the Han

the Romans encouraged the spread and settlement of its people throughout the vast stretches of its empire in order to

solidify the Roman culture the western half of the empire centered in Rome fell in 476 but the eastern half of the

Empire centred in Constantinople lasted for another thousand years last of all let's fly over to the Americas and see

what's happening in the Mesoamerican and Andean civilization first in Mesoamerica you've got the mines and in their

civilization they build huge monumental structures that functioned as religious temples and they were famous for

advancing the process of agriculture and systems of writing and astronomical Charlie let's not forget they got real

good at human sacrifice also another honorable mention in this area goes to a city called Teotihuacan you've probably

never even heard of it but it was one of the largest cities in the world at that time climbing over two hundred thousand

inhabitants they had a complex governmental bureaucracy huge reservoirs and whole apartment complexes made out

of stone and last of all let's visit our friends in South America the mocha civilization in the Andean region lasted

from about 100 to 800 seee its government was controlled by a class of warrior priests and they bore many

similarities to other Mesoamerican civilizations ok our troop around the world while incomplete is complete and

that was a lot to take in but let me try to summarize everything I've said by way of comparison before 1200 cities were

important parts of every Empire and all the ancient cities contain hubs of art trade religious structures and

governmental buildings the social structures of ancient civilizations were pretty similar to for the most part

societies were organized hierarchically at the top you have the political religious elites and under them and the

order depends on which civilization you're looking at you have merchants and warriors and crafts peoples and laborers

and slaves and all the old empires fell for some combination of the following three reasons overextension internal

disruptions and outside invaders they may have noticed that after all of this we have not yet reached up to 1200 but

once we start the AP World History curriculum proper we're gonna be reaching back into these events in order

to give you the context for everything that happened in 1200 a good luck this year in AP World History you want more

videos like this one for the new AP World History curriculum then subscribe and come along I'll be releasing new

content videos every single week of the school year so I'm Laura