Download WHAP Teacher Copy Cities, Inequalities, and New Social Realities

Cities, Inequalities, and New Social Realities
WHAP/Napp
Objective: To identify and explain how the rise of
civilization altered social structures and gender
relationships
Do Now:
What is a hierarchy?
_____________________________________________
Identify several hierarchies that exist in society
today:
_____________________________________________
Cues:
Notes:
I. The First Civilizations
A. Developed around 3500 BCE - 3000 BCE
B. Cradle of Middle Eastern Civilizations – Mesopotamia
1. Competing Sumerian city-states
2. Surplus, Specialization, Cities, Writing
a. World’s earliest written language (Cuneiform)
b. Uruk, largest city, with population of around 50,000 by the
third millennium BCE
c. Ziggurat, temple, in center of city
C. Nile River Valley in northeastern Africa
1. Unified state
2. Cities less prominent than in Sumer
3. Surplus, specialization, class hierarchy, writing
4. Pharaoh – divine ruler
D. Nubia
1. Farther south along Nile
2. Cultural diffusion from ancient Egyptians
3. But borrowing while retaining unique elements
E. Along the central coast of Peru (3000-1800)
1. Little rainfall but dozens of rivers
2. Twenty-five urban centers known as Norte Chico
3. Economy based to an unusual degree on fishing
4. Did not rest on grain-based farming
5. Did not develop pottery or writing
6. However, existence of a 5,000-year-old quipu
7.
(knotted rope to keep records)
F. Indus and Saraswati River Valleys in present-day Pakistan
1. By 2000 BCE, embraced a larger area than Mesopotamia, Egypt,
or coastal Peru
2. Elaborately planned cities
3. Standardized weights and even bricks
Summaries:
Cues:
Notes:
4. Irrigated agriculture
5. Written language, thus far undeciphered
6. However, generated no kings or warrior classes
a. Little indication of a political hierarchy
G. Early Civilization in China
1. Perhaps as early as 2200 BCE
2. Ideal of a centralized stated evident from the days of the Xia
dynasty (2200-1766)
3. By Zhou Dynasty, belief that emperor was the Son of Heaven and
ruled by Mandate of Heaven
4. Early form of writing
H. Teotihuacan – located in central valley of Mexico
1. Perhaps 200,000 people/Dozens of temples/Pyramids
II. Characteristics of Early Civilizations
A. Impersonal, no longer possible to know everyone
B. Class and occupation at least as important as kinship
C. Increased specialization as agricultural surplus freed some people
for different tasks
D. Increased inequality  Hierarchies of class
E. Upper classes/great wealth in land/salaries, avoid physical labor
F. Development of Law Codes
1. Code of Hammurabi early written law code  harsh
punishments but punishments based on social class of violator 
thus class divisions existed  developed in Mesopotamia under
Babylonian king
G. Free Commoners
1. Vast majority of population
2. Artisans, low-level officials, soldiers, police, servants, and
numerous farmers
3. Agricultural surplus appropriated through taxes, rent, required
labor, and tribute payments to support upper classes
H. Slavery
1. Slaves at the bottom of the social hierarchy
2. Slavery was practiced in early civilizations but varied depending
on region and culture
I. Rise of Patriarchy/New Inequalities for Women
1. Role of new and more intensive form of agriculture led to men as
primary farmers…Use of animal-drawn plows favored men
2. Women more often pregnant in settled communities
3. Large-scale military conflict with professional armies also
favored men
4. Patriarchy  male dominance
Summaries:
Strayer Question:
 When and where did the First Civilizations emerge?

What accounts for the initial breakthroughs to civilization?

What was the role of cities in the early civilizations?

In what ways was social inequality expressed in early civilizations?

In what ways have historians tried to explain the origins of patriarchy?

What were the sources of state authority in the First Civilizations?
1. One of the main innovative ideas in
Hammurabi's law code was that
(A) the ruler's will is to be followed at all
costs
(B) the upper classes are to have the most
rights
(C) the lower classes were to have special
privileges
(D) a consistent set of regulations should
govern society
(E) anyone who spoke against the king
would be executed
2. In 3100 B.C.E., the history of Egypt is
said to have begun when
(A) Cleopatra met Mark Antony
(B) King Menes united Upper and Lower
Egypt
(C) the Old Kingdom began
(D) the Egyptians rebelled against the
Hyksos
(E) pyramids began to be constructed
3. What do many researchers now think
brought about the fall of the Indus River
society?
(A) fighting between the Hindus and Sikhs
(B) outside invasions from Mesopotamia
(C) environmental factors
(D) population growth
(E) all of the above
4. Surplus production
(A) is caused by poor cultivation methods
(B) prevents specialization of labor
(C) gives rise to the specialization of labor
and stratification of society
(D) can never occur in modern societies
(E) none of the above
5. How did pastoralism affect early social
development?
(A) Herding societies tended to settle on
particular lands, and thus civilization
emerged relatively quickly.
(B) Pastoralism led to the adoption of a
monotheistic approach to religion.
(C) No pastoral societies mixed animal
husbandry with the domestication of plants.
(D) Herding societies tended to migrate
frequently, and thus civilization took longer
to emerge.
(E) Pastoral societies tended to be led by
women.
6. Which of the following is the least
advanced agricultural technique?
(A) slash-and-burn
(B) shifting
(C) irrigation
(D) fertilizing
(E) mixing crop types
A Reflection from The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, PhD
Patriarchy was created at a specific time in history out of many complex processes
involving demographic, ecological, cultural, and historical factors which developed as
lifestyles changed and people adapted to new circumstances. These processes were
dialectical processes which mean they were mutually interactive, mutually reinforcing
processes at the end of the Neolithic Era and the beginning of civilization. Some of these
new lifestyles and processes, which eventually led to male dominance, were…women in the
agricultural villages were needed for their hard work and for their life-giving capabilities.
The more children they could bear the better because people were needed to cultivate the
ever-expanding farmland. Women's reproductive ability was a village resource and her
reproductive capacity became like a commodity or like a form of property owned by the
rulers of the group. Children now became an economic asset.
Excerpts from an interview with Dr. Lerner:
*… I undertook [this work] because the question of women and history is a very
problematic question. When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago,
the field did not exist. It was not recognized; people didn't think that women had a history
worth knowing. The professors that taught me thought that it was an exotic specialty and I
was wasting my talents pursuing it. And for women, looking back to the past has usually
been painful, because what we would learn would be an absence. We would learn that
women had not done this, and they had not done that, and that essentially, according to the
traditional view, women had contributed very little to the making of human society, and
even less to the making of the intellectual product of Western civilization. Now, I knew that
not to be the case; I knew that that was false. I've been working for thirty years in the field
of women's history, and the fact is that women do have a history, that they have
participated in making history, but that we have not until very recently recognized that.
And that has created enormous problems for society as a whole, for both men and women.
I think the problems are that it has given women a totally wrong impression of their
connection to the work of the world…Well, you see, I asked myself the question, which I
think most women ask themselves sometimes in their lives, "How come that we did not
even know that we were subordinated for such a long time?" Other groups that were
subordinated in history -- peasants, slaves, colonials, any kind of group, ethnic minorities -all of those groups knew very quickly that they were subordinated, and they developed
theories about their liberation, about their rights as human beings, about what kind of
struggle to conduct in order to emancipate themselves. But women did not, and so that was
the question that I really wanted to explore. And in order to understand it I had to
understand really whether patriarchy was, as most of us have been taught, a natural,
almost God-given condition, or whether it was a human invention coming out of a specific
historic period. Well, in Creation of Patriarchy I think I show that it was indeed a human
invention; it was created by human beings, it was created by men and women, at a certain
given point in the historical development of the human race. It was probably appropriate
as a solution for the problems of that time, which was the Bronze Age, but it's no longer
appropriate, all right? And the reason we find it so hard, and we have found it so hard, to
understand it and to combat it, is that it was institutionalized before Western civilization
really, as we know it, was, so to speak, invented, and the process of creating patriarchy was
really well completed by the time that the idea systems of Western civilization were formed.