ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

Ancient Civilization

Ancient Civilization

The Greek world, including the Greek colonies in Italy and Asia Minor, benefited from political decentralization and a geographical situation favorable to trade. During the 1300-1800 period., trade brought new wealth and new ideas—both destabilizing forces—into the Greek city-states, undermining the traditional warrior nobility and bolstering the power of an artisan class. The ensuing class warfare gradually transformed most Greek city-states from aristocracies into mixtures of oligarchy and democracy, with the proportions of each varying from state to state (McNeill, 2006).

This partial shift from a military to a commercial mode of social organization was celebrated by Hesiod, whose poem Works and Days praised productive effort, condemned the predatory behavior of “bribe-eating kings,” and contrasted the hateful effects of military competition with the beneficent effects of economic competition. Later Greek writers were consciously proud of their distinctive institutions; in his history of the Greco-Persian Wars, Herodotus emphasized the contrast between Persian autocracy and Greek liberty (Adams, 2007).

Similarly, it can be said that the memory of the Crusades has not faded; indeed the word is used commonly to describe the ongoing cultural, political, and, at times, military confrontation between the West and the Muslim world. Given this reality, the name and memory of Saladin will no doubt continue to be evoked by Muslims worldwide (McNeill, 2006). In the ancient world, slavery was a near universal institution. Slave labor was used for the whole range of productive tasks, from agriculture to manufacturing, including the few cases of large-scale manufacture such as brick making. Most slaves worked in agriculture, hardly surprising given that these were overwhelmingly agricultural economies where the economics of large-scale agricultural holdings, as in ancient Rome, made slavery most profitable. Although there was an active trade in slaves, the main source of slaves was war—with the enslavement ...