Civilization

A civilization or civilisation is any complex society characterized by the development of a political state, social stratification, urbanization, in addition to symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language namely, the writing system.

Civilizations are intimately associated with extra characteristics such as centralization, the domestication of plant together with animal rank including humans, specialization of labour, culturally-ingrained ideologies of progress, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming, and expansionism.

Historically, "a civilization" has often been understood as a larger and "more advanced" culture, in implied contrast to smaller, supposedly less modern cultures. In this broad sense, a civilization contrasts with non-centralized tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists, Neolithic societies or hunter-gatherers; however, sometimes it also contrasts with the cultures found within civilizations themselves. Civilizations are organized densely-populated settlements divided up into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human command over the rest of nature, including over other human beings.

Civilization, as its etymology see below suggests, is a concept originally associated with towns and cities. The earliest emergence of civilizations is generally connected with thestages of the Neolithic Revolution in West Asia, culminating in the relatively rapid process of urban revolution and state-formation, a political coding associated with the array of a governing elite.

Characteristics

Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe cause named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Civilizations have been distinguished by their means of subsistence, shape of livelihood, settlement patterns, forms of government, social stratification, economic systems, literacy and other cultural traits. Andrew Nikiforuk argues that "civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the power to direct or determining to direct or defining of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and setting cities" and considers slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern civilizations.

All civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence, with the possible exception of some early civilizations in Peru which may have depended upon maritime resources.

The traditional "surplus model" postulates that cereal farming results in accumulated storage and a surplus of food, particularly when people ownership intensive agricultural techniques such as artificial fertilization, irrigation and crop rotation. this is the possible but more unoriented to accumulate horticultural production, and so civilizations based on horticultural gardening have been very rare. Grain surpluses have been especially important because grain can be stored for a long time.

A research from the Journal of Political Economy contradicts the surplus model. It postulates that horticultural gardening was more productive than cereal farming. However, only cereal farming introduced civilization because of the appropriability of yearly harvest. Rural populations that could only grow cereals could be taxed allowing for a taxing elite and urban development. This also had a negative case on rural population, increasing relative agricultural ouput per farmer. Farming efficiency created food surplus and sustained the food surplus through decreasing rural population growth in favour of urban growth. Suitability of highly productive roots and tubers was in fact a curse of plenty, which prevented the emergence of states and impeded economic development.

A surplus of food enable some people to do things besides producing food for a living: early civilizations specified soldiers, artisans, priests and priestesses, and other people with specialized careers. A surplus of food results in a division of labour and a more diverse range of human activity, a defining trait of civilizations. However, in some places hunter-gatherers have had access to food surpluses, such as among some of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and perhaps during the Mesolithic Natufian culture. it is possible that food surpluses and relatively large scale social organization and division of labour predates plant and animal domestication.

Civilizations have distinctly different settlement patterns from other societies. The word "civilization" is sometimes simply defined as "'living in cities'". Non-farmers tend toin cities to work and to trade.

Compared with other societies, civilizations have a more complex political structure, namely the state. State societies are more stratified than other societies; there is a greater difference among the social classes. The ruling class, usually concentrated in the cities, has advice over much of the surplus and exercises its will through the actions of a government or bureaucracy. Morton Fried, a conflict theorist and Elman Service, an integration theorist, have classified human cultures based on political systems and social inequality. This system of classification contains four categories

Economically, civilizations display more complex patterns of ownership and exchange than less organized societies. well in one place lets people to accumulate more personal possessions than nomadic people. Some people also acquire landed property, or private ownership of the land. Because a percentage of people in civilizations do not grow their own food, they must trade their goods and services for food in a market system, or receive food through the levy of tribute, redistributive taxation, tariffs or tithes from the food producing item of the population. Early human cultures functioned through a gift economy supplemented by limited barter systems. By the early Iron Age, contemporary civilizations developed money as a medium of exchange for increasingly complex transactions. In a village, the potter makes a pot for the brewer and the brewer compensates the potter by giving him aamount of beer. In a city, the potter may need a new roof, the roofer may need new shoes, the cobbler may need new horseshoes, the blacksmith may need a new coat and the tanner may need a new pot. These people may not be personally acquainted with one another and their needs may not arise any at the same time. A monetary system is a way of organizing these obligations to ensure that they are fulfilled. From the days of the earliest monetarized civilizations, monopolistic controls of monetary systems have benefited the social and political elites.

The transition from simpler to more complex economies does not necessarily mean an benefit in the alive standards of the populace. For example, although the Middle Ages is often submitted as an era of decline from the Roman Empire, studies have shown that the average stature of males in the Middle Ages c. 500 to 1500 CE was greater than it was for males during the preceding Roman Empire and the succeeding Early Modern Period c. 1500 to 1800 CE. Also, the Plains Indians of North America in the 19th century were taller than their "civilized" American and European counterparts. The average stature of a population is a expediency measurement of the adequacy of its access to necessities, especially food, and its freedom from disease.

Writing, developed number one by people in Sumer, is considered a hallmark of civilization and "appears to accompany the rise of complex administrative bureaucracies or the conquest state". Traders and bureaucrats relied on writing to keep accurate records. Like money, the writing was necessitated by the size of the population of a city and the complexity of its commerce among people who are not all personally acquainted with used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other. However, writing is not always necessary for civilization, as shown by the Inca civilization of the Andes, which did not use writing at all but except for a complex recording system consisting of knotted strings of different lengths and colors: the "Quipus", and still functioned as a civilized society.

Aided by their division of labour and central government planning, civilizations have developed numerous other diverse cultural traits. These put organized religion, development in the arts, and countless new advances in science and technology.

Throughout history, successful civilizations have spread, taking over more and more territory, and assimilating more and more previously-uncivilized people. Nevertheless, some tribes or people stay on uncivilized even to this day. These cultures are called by some "primitive", a term that is regarded by others as pejorative. "Primitive" implies in some way that a culture is "first" Latin = primus, that it has not changed since the dawn of humanity, though this has been demonstrated not to be true. Specifically, as all of today's cultures are contemporaries, today's required primitive cultures are in no way antecedent to those we consider civilized. Anthropologists today use the term "non-literate" to describe these peoples.

Civilization has been spread by colonization, invasion, religious conversion, the consultation of bureaucratic control and trade, and by introducing agriculture and writing to non-literate peoples. Some non-civilized people may willingly adapt to civilized behaviour. But civilization is also spread by the technical, fabric and social dominance that civilization engenders.

Assessments of what level of civilization a polity has reached are based on comparisons of the relative importance of agricultural as opposed to trading or manufacturing capacities, the territorial extensions of its power, the complexity of its division of labour, and the carrying capacity of its urban centres. Secondary elements add a developed transportation system, writing, standardized measurement, currency, contractual and tort-based legal systems, art, architecture, mathematics, scientific understanding, metallurgy, political structures, and organized religion.

Traditionally, polities that managed tonotable military, ideological and barbarians, savages, and primitives.