Glossary
The vocabulary of civilization, in plain words.
- Civilization
- Used here descriptively: a society with cities, specialised occupations and institutions that organise cooperation among strangers.
- Complex society
- The term many archaeologists now prefer, because it ranks no one.
- Domestication
- The breeding of plants and animals, over generations, into forms that depend on people.
- Neolithic
- The “new stone age”: the period of the first farming, before metal tools.
- Fertile Crescent
- The arc of land from the eastern Mediterranean through northern Syria to the Persian Gulf, where Near Eastern farming began.
- Sedentism
- Living in one place all year.
- Surplus
- Food produced beyond what its producers need.
- Specialisation
- Full-time work other than producing food.
- Urbanisation
- The growth of cities and of the share of people living in them.
- City-state
- A city and its surrounding land, governed as an independent state.
- State
- A society with a central government that can make and enforce rules over a territory.
- Chiefdom
- A ranked society led by a hereditary chief, without the full-time officials of a state.
- Bureaucracy
- Administration by appointed officials who keep records.
- Cuneiform
- The wedge-shaped script of Mesopotamia, pressed into clay.
- Hieroglyphs
- The pictorial script of ancient Egypt.
- Khipu
- The Andean system of recording information with knots on coloured cords. Also spelled quipu.
- Bronze Age
- The period in which bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was the main metal for tools and weapons.
- Irrigation
- Bringing water to fields by canals and ditches.
- Monumental architecture
- Building on a scale far beyond practical need, requiring organised labour.
- The division of a society into ranked classes.
- Tribute
- Goods or labour owed to a ruler.
- Collapse
- A rapid, lasting loss of social and political complexity.
- Radiocarbon dating
- Dating organic remains by the decay of carbon-14.
Inner foundations
Terms used on the inner foundations of civilization and in its timeline.
- Axial Age
- The period from roughly 800 to 200 BCE (named by Karl Jaspers in 1949) during which foundational philosophical and religious systems arose independently in China, India, Iran, Judea, and Greece, shifting human obligation from tribal ritual to individual conscience and universal ethics.
- Apatheia & ataraxia
- Two distinct Greek ideals of mental self-governance. In Stoicism, apatheia denotes freedom from irrational, destructive passions (pathē) while remaining ethically active; in Epicureanism and Pyrrhonian Skepticism, ataraxia denotes untroubled peace of mind free from anxiety.
- Cognitive paradox
- A linguistic pairing of opposites (found in Zen koans, Daoist aphorisms, and Advaita texts) used in contemplative traditions to interrupt habitual linear rumination and redirect attention toward direct observation.
- Non-duality (Advaita, Advaya)
- The philosophical and experiential recognition that the boundary between the observer (“self”) and the observed (“world”) is a temporary construct of perception, beneath which lies undivided consciousness (in Advaita Vedanta) or emptiness (Śūnyatā, in Buddhism).
- Transcending
- The capacity of human consciousness and culture to step beyond immediate biological, social, or conceptual limits—from scaling cooperation beyond Dunbar’s number through shared symbols to overcoming the illusions of ego and the constraints of the physical body.