And the world had changed again. Mesopotamia in the Near East was the first to see the transforming power for civilization. The city of Ur rose on the Euphrates river by 3500 b.c. In Egypt, the kingdom of the Pharaohs grew on the Nile around the same time. The valley around the Indus river followed in 2500 b.c.; and the Chinese civilization around the Yangtze blossomed in 1800 b.c.
Any hunter from the beginning of our story would have been lost in these great cities, unaccustomed to the new roles (farmers, craftsmen, soldiers, kings) and to the new ideas (writing, organized religion, money). To us, on the other hand, a visit would be no more than an exotic vacation. The differences between 2000 b.c. and our time are no more than those that can be covered in a good travel guide.
In a.d. 1969 two ape-descended human beings walked on the surface of the moon. On Earth, 600 million people watched or listened, using two recent inventions known as television and radio. At the exact same moment, two other ape-descendants held the power to launch thousands of nuclear missiles, very similar to the ones that had just propelled the astronauts to the moon, and loaded with enough destructive power to kill most of those 600 million people.
3,000 years earlier, we struggled to understand the world: What laws governed the motion of the planets? What were rocks, trees, and rivers made out of? What caused diseases and how could they be cured? What was the best way to defeat the enemy? How should people be governed? Many ideas were proposed to answer these and other questions. Some of those ideas succeeded in answering interesting questions—other ideas did not fit the facts. Over the years, the successful ideas were kept while the unsuccessful ones were discarded. And always, ideas built on other ideas, so the more we learned about the world, the easier it was to learn more.
On the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, the civilization of the Greek city-states produced many new ideas. Greek philosophers measured the circumference of the Earth, speculated on the circulation of blood, and launched a massive research-and-development program to develop the catapult. Democracy was another such idea. Instead of a permanent king who ruled over all, Greek democracy called for shared rule, in which each landowner took turns serving in a ruling council.
In the second century b.c. the Greek civilization was conquered by the Romans, but the ideas that the Greeks possessed were not lost—they were simply adopted by the Romans. And in turn, the Romans built on the past and developed new technologies to improve their life.
Author and Credits: George Moromisato