Histories of five major civilizations
So far, we’ve looked at the histories of five major civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley / India, China and
Greece. We can trace the existence of these civilizations to the development of agriculture and despite the
geographic distances between them, you probably noticed that they had some things in common.
We also read an article in week 2 entitled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” In it, scholar Jared
Diamond argues that agriculture was not really a positive development for humans. Instead, he points to some
rather catastrophic consequences such as:
1. Deep class divisions; an elite that became better off while everyone else was worse off
2. Gender inequality
3. Warfare and tyranny
4. An increased spread of infectious disease
With these four consequences as your framework, use the lectures, discussions, and readings from Week 1 through
our survey of Greece to write a 5-page comparative analysis that answers this question:
→ To what extent did the societies we’ve studied follow similar patterns of development and to what
extent do these developments bolster Diamond’s argument that agriculture had catastrophic
consequences?
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