Imperial stabilization

From Modernity to After-Modernity

The axioms of civilization

2. Imperial stabilization


The earth's average temperatures stabilized some 12,000 years ago and the first civilizations, Sumer and Xia, emerged sometime between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago which gives a span of some 7,000 to 8,000 years between tribal societies and the empires that unleashed civilizations upon humanity. But there is still much uncertainty about how those civilizations emerged; ideological considerations are furthermore vastly complicating the story.

Knowledge about that period comes from 2 sources:

• written materials: early written materials that refer to the origins of an empire often remain unproven by archeological discoveries and such material is referred to under the rubric legendary sources.

• archeological discoveries: excavations uncover the material that certifies historical reality. Archeology was initiated by Europeans in the 19th century and European archeologists have focused the bulk of the available money and also their efforts on the areas directly related to the emergence of the European Christian civilization. Those areas were under European colonial rule so the barriers of entry were nonexistent. Countries not under European territorial control were largely off limit to European archeological research and seen that it was exclusively a European affair archeology in those countries has been something of a late comer and in consequence their early history is not as well documented as the history of countries within the Fertile Crescent.

The differential observed in archeological excavations between different areas has led many Europeans to conclude that the oldest civilization on earth is located in the Middle-East. Some historians immediately concluded that civilization originated in the Middle-East and was exported from there to other places. Such an ideological conclusion was often accompanied by a value judgment belittling the histories of others, while aggrandizing their own, for descending from this cradle of civilization.

The traditional history of civilization affirmed that it originated in the Fertile Crescent and from there it would have spread out to the rest of the world. Today most historians agree that civilizations arose in several locations independently from one another and these centers of civilization are now generally viewed as originating the history of 'civilized humanity': Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus River Valley, Yellow-Yangtze River valleys, Mesoamerica, Andean South America and Norte Chico in present-day Peru. Notwithstanding all this most Western scholars continue to state that the Fertile Crescent is the cradle of civilization. But since the countries, where other centers of civilization originated, started to allocate research budgets to their universities new discoveries put that Western-centrism in doubt.

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