The foundations of civilization
For most of their history people lived in small bands that everyone in them could know by name. Within the last twelve thousand years, in several parts of the world independently, some began to live by the tens of thousands, among strangers. This site sets out what that change rested on.
Around 1200 BCE most of the palace societies of the eastern Mediterranean failed within a few decades. Joseph Tainter argued in 1988 that complexity is a problem-solving tool with rising costs and diminishing returns. “Collapse” seldom means that the people vanished: more often institutions simplified, cities shrank, and life went on at a smaller scale.
No early civilization was self-sufficient. Bronze needs tin, which is rare and usually came from far away. Lapis lazuli in the royal tombs of Ur, from about 2500 BCE, had travelled from mines in what is now Afghanistan. Coined money came late, in Lydia around 600 BCE; long-distance trade is thousands of years older.
A village runs on reputation; a city cannot. Written rules, standard weights and measures, and officials to enforce them allow dealings between people who will never meet again. The oldest surviving law code is that of Ur-Nammu, from about 2100 BCE, three centuries before the better-known code of Hammurabi.
The earliest writing is bookkeeping: the clay tablets of Uruk, from about 3300 BCE, count grain, sheep and rations. Writing was invented independently in Mesopotamia, in China and in Mesoamerica, and perhaps in Egypt. It is not strictly required: the Inca ran the largest state of the pre-Columbian Americas with records kept on knotted cords.
By Robin Dunbar’s well-known estimate of 1992, a person can keep track of about a hundred and fifty relationships. Beyond some such number, order depends on institutions: temples, councils, officials, armies. Gordon Childe named the change the “urban revolution” in 1936 and in 1950 set out its marks: specialists who grow no food, monumental buildings, and a ruling class supported by the surplus.
A farmer who grows more than a household needs can feed someone else: a potter, a priest, a soldier. Cereal grains suit this especially well, because they ripen together, keep for years and are easily measured — which also makes them easy to tax, as James Scott stressed in 2017. Surplus pays for specialists, and for inequality.
From about 11,500 years ago people began to farm: wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent, rice and millet in China, maize in Mesoamerica, potatoes in the Andes, each independently. Childe called it the “Neolithic revolution” in 1936. The order is not always tidy: the great stone enclosures of Göbekli Tepe were raised about the same time by people who still lived by foraging.
Read from the bottom up — but not as a ladder every society had to climb. The order below is the common one; the archaeological record contains exceptions to almost every step, and some are noted.
Go further
Early civilizations →
Complex societies arose independently in about six regions: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, the Andes and Mesoamerica.
Timeline →
c. 9500 BCE to 1995 in 21 steps.
Glossary →
28 terms in plain words.
Inner foundations →
Meaning and ritual, self-regulation, a protocol for living among strangers, and a timeline of consciousness in 21 steps.