When a civilization appears on the scene, it marks a significant leap in human social complexity. But scholars disagree about what defines a civilization and how best to categorize societies as either civilized or non-civilized. Regardless, the rise of civilizations seems to mark an important transition point in world history and offers clues about the origins of modern culture.
What is clear is that most – but not all – civilizations evolved from agrarian communities, which required more food than the hunter-gatherers who populated the earth before them. The development of cities allowed for increased agricultural production, intensified social hierarchies, and the formation of governments. Civilizations also brought forth a variety of cultural and technological innovations, including metallurgy, writing, and religion.
Civilizations usually appeared in places where the geography was favorable to intensive agriculture, and they typically grew around water sources, as prehistoric hunter-gatherers gravitated toward these resources for survival. This is partly because a city’s success depends on being able to reliably produce enough food for its inhabitants, but it is also likely that people needed access to water as a source of drinking and washing. Civilizations developed a variety of technologies and practices for water management, and they also began to organize themselves into political units governed by elite rulers who maintained power through the use of taxes.
Despite the diversity of their cultures, features that most civilizations share include written language, a system of measurement, complex buildings, art, and craftsmanship technology. Early civilizations also tended to unite their people through shared institutions, such as state government, religion, and ideology. Social stratification, a fancy term for the different categories of society, was common in these cultures and often led to specialized roles, like priests and soldiers, for a given people group.
It was also typical for the power of a civilization’s political leaders to be linked to its religion, with religious leaders acting as representatives or even incarnations of a god or deities. In the case of ancient Egypt, pharaohs practiced divine kingship and claimed to have special powers from the gods.
One of the challenges of the word “civilization” is that it tends to set up harmful oppositions between world societies, with “civilized” being seen as superior to “non-civilized.” Many historians, anthropologists and archaeologists today reject this polarization, and they avoid using the word civilization at all. However, some big historians do continue to use the term and define it carefully as a particular type of community with specific features.