Review Week 2, 4.1 MW
Review:
Image: Ancient Ship in the Mediterranean
This week we traced the rise of the sophisticated cultures in the Middle East over the course of three thousand years that made significant contributions to Western civilization. During the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, the earliest humans developed skills with tools, began to cultivate plants, and domesticated animals. Following this period, two great cultures emerged; one in the Nile Valley, and the other in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Egyptians and Sumerians were remarkable for the complexity of their societies, their architectural achievements, their legal codes, and for the development of writing systems. .
Under the old kingdom the power of the Pharaoh was relatively obsolete. This is the period of the great pyramids. The period when the Pharaoh is not really having to share power with elites within his society. Under the middle kingdom the Pharaoh was going to have to learn to cooperate with those elites, and he's also going to have to satisfy new classes of people who want access to resources. All of this comes to a head under the new kingdom where we start seeing Egypt reaching out into the world around it. Under the middle kingdom, Egypt had begun to establish trading relationships with the peoples of Southern Africa. So if we think about Ethiopia and Nubia Somalia along the East African coastline, and it also begun to look toward the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. Under the new kingdom, all of these factors lead to Egypt's integration with the transnational networks of the Bronze Age. Egypt is no longer a self-contained autonomous culture. It is now part of a larger Bronze Age system.
Egypt and all the great civilizations of the Mediterranean coast very quickly become interdependent upon one another not just for these luxury commodities but also for grain, for some of the basic things that sustain these enormous cultures. Around the year 1200 is that these commercial networks become very rapidly uncoupled. They rapidly unravel. The causes for this are still a little bit mysterious. We know that one of the causes is the movement of a group of people known only as the "Sea People" because they only traveled by the sea. And these peoples are disrupting these commercial networks and making it impossible for the advanced societies to sustain their political systems because they're no longer part of this interconnected global network. And the entire network just dissolves. It's a traumatic event, recognized by people who are living through it as being essentially the end of the world as they know it.
Resources:
Make sure you have watched the videos, and explored the interactive maps found in the content page.
Looking Ahead:
Next week we will be taking a look the states that emerged after the upheaval of 1200 BCE.