*Epoch of Origins (4,000BCE - 500BCE)*
I find it hard to believe that things just happened and all of a sudden people decided to start settling down and building communities. I wonder what it was that caused them to want a change and to begin a different way of life. As hunter-gather societies, I suppose they must have traveled a lot and must have gained a lot of knowledge on good hunting grounds and such things as fertile grounds too. If so, how come they chose to settle down on such an arable land as was the area of Mesopotamia? I mean, they could have chosen a better place for agriculture. But then again, if they would've done so, they wouldn't have had the need to develop methods for agriculture and so the 1st significant step in the historical process of man's interaction with the environment would have never occurred, or it would have taken longer to occur, therefore, slowing down the whole process that followed such as the creation of governmental structures and city-states.
In the Babylonian empire, Hammurabi came up with the idea to give the judges a set of rules to follow. I think it was great he came up with the idea but I don't think that his "Code" is synonymous w/ the beginnings of civilization based on distinct and specific legal codes. I'm sure that even back when people traveled in hunter-gather societies, there was someone who was in charge of the "society" and that they had rules to keep order and that they were distinct and specific legal codes, not necessarily written down but that they were set in a way so that everyone was aware of them, otherwise it would have been chaotic. I think that if anything, Hammurabi's Code was just a more sophisticated way of setting laws/codes. But i could just be understanding wrong what it means for something to be 'synonymous with the beginnings of a civilization based on distinct and specific legal codes.'
What I don't seem to be able to understand is exactly how it was that other societies sprung up in other geographic regions. I mean, what made people want to move further out and expand into different spaces and begin building empires? I suppose that those that went into those spaces migrated from the Mesopotamian region, but why? Were they not happy? Were they just very ambitious? Or were they just curious to learn what was out there??? And okay, say it was for all three reasons and some more, but how did so many more people get to places like Egypt, China, and Europe? Was it through the need to communicate with nearby societies that they learned of other ones and decided to go or was it just through population increase? And then once the societies began to expand and grow more, I suppose they were good for a while, expanding into unclaimed land. Once they began to reach limit with other's how was it that some empires decided to go onto another's land and CONQUER it?
I think that for us, its hard to understand how these things came to be because all the things that we do now are modeled after things that happened before us such as the things these empires/communities/societies did during this epoch. For example, philosophical and political thinking is something ordinary and normal for us but back in ancient Greece, when it first emerged it must have been something unique and original. I'm sure that philosophical and political ways of thinking existed long before the Greeks. It just wasn't something that people began to work on and try to further understand and expand on.
I agree. It must have been very hard to deal with things for all the people in this epoch. They didn't have any other stories to look at and think, hey, maybe we should try that and see if it works for us too. They began on a blank page and they really did get the ball rolling.
No comments:
Post a Comment