courtesy : Ancient Civilizations
History of the concept
The End of Dinner by Jules-Alexandre Grün (1913). The emergence of table manners and other forms of etiquette and self-restraint are presented as a characteristic of civilized society by Norbert Elias in his book The Civilizing Process (1939).
The English word civilization comes from the 16th-century French civilisé (“civilized”), from Latin civilis (“civil”), related to civis (“citizen”) and civitas (“city”). The fundamental treatise is Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1939), which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the Early Modern period. In The Philosophy of Civilization (1923), Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions: one purely material and the other material and ethical. He said that the world crisis was from humanity losing the ethical idea of civilization, “the sum total of all progress made by man in every sphere of action and from every point of view in so far as the progress helps towards the spiritual perfecting of individuals as the progress of all progress”
Related words like “civility” developed in the mid-16th century. The abstract noun “civilization”, meaning “civilized condition”, came in the 1760s, again from French. The first known use in French is in 1757, by Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, and the first use in English is attributed to Adam Ferguson, who in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society wrote, “Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation”. The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the active pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the French Revolution, “civilization” was used in the singular, never in the plural, and meant the progress of humanity as a whole. This is still the case in French. The use of “civilizations” as a countable noun was in occasional use in the 19th century, but has become much more common in the later 20th century, sometimes just meaning culture (itself in origin an uncountable noun, made countable in the context of ethnography). Only in this generalized sense does it become possible to speak of a “medieval civilization”, which in Elias’s sense would have been an oxymoron.
Already in the 18th century, civilization was not always seen as an improvement. One historically important distinction between culture and civilization is from the writings of Rousseau, particularly his work about education, Emile. Here, civilization, being more rational and socially driven, is not fully in accord with human nature, and “human wholeness is achievable only through the recovery of or approximation to an original discursive or prerational natural unity” (see noble savage). From this, a new approach was developed, especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder and later by philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined by “conscious, rational, deliberative acts”, but a kind of pre-rational “folk spirit”. Civilization, in contrast, though more rational and more successful in material progress, is unnatural and leads to “vices of social life” such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice. In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism and German militarism and nihilism.
Characteristics
The Acropolis of Athens: Greece is widely referred to by many as the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy.
Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Civilizations have been distinguished by their means of subsistence, types 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 energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build 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 use intensive agricultural techniques such as artificial fertilization, irrigation and crop rotation. It is possible but more difficult 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 produced 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 effect on rural population, increasing relative agricultural output 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 permits some people to do things besides producing food for a living: early civilizations included 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 defined as “‘living in cities'”. Non-farmers tend to gather in cities to work and to trade.
