An Economic Inquiry into the Nonlinear Behaviors of Nations by Rongxing Guo

Author:Rongxing Guo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Some communities depend on the fish that live in or travel along rivers.

Some rivers carry dissolved minerals and organic compounds.

Alluvial deposits can form fertile deltas where a river flows into a lake or ocean.

The hydrological characteristics of rivers heavily influenced ancient riparian civilizations. Large workforces were needed to divert water for irrigation and to build protective work to minimize flood damage. This led to increasing sedentism, high population density, and the need for a centralized administration along rivers. The cost of hydraulic construction and its subsequent maintenance required a political and social structure capable of forceful extraction of labor. Furthermore, with regard to the utilization and management of water resources in river valleys, upstream communities usually have geographical advantages over downstream residents. As a result, social stratification and armed military forces emerged alongside large-scale water control. These were very important processes in the development of ancient civilizations.

In addition, it is reasonable to suppose that the lower reaches of most, if not all, rivers giving birth to ancient civilizations were characterized as wetlands (not suitable for agriculture) during ancient times, especially in their deltas.12 Probably, this might be the reason why the Indus (or Harappan) and the Chinese civilizations originated in the upper or middle vis-à-vis the lower reaches (and deltas) of the river valleys. However, all these were only necessary conditions for a civilization to emerge. They were not sufficient conditions. Still, there were no earliest civilizations in many large river valleys of the world, which include, among others, the Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, Volga, and Rhine. Thus, the key factor(s) contributing to the emergence of ancient civilizations in river valleys must have been absent there.

Archeologists have recognized that in some cases, simple societies, for one reason or the other, morph into more complex societies, and in the process, some societies become civilizations eventually. Even though there have not been any standard criteria for the creation of a new culture or civilization, the characteristics of complexity recognized in ancient civilizations are pretty much agreed upon as the following:increasing sedentism and high population density

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