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River Valley Civilization
A river valley civilization is an agricultural nation or civilization situated beside and drawing sustenance from a river. A "civilization" means a society with large permanent settlements featuring urban development, social stratification, specialization of labour, centralized organization, and written or other formal means of communication. A river gives the inhabitants a reliable source of water for drinking and agriculture. Additional benefits include fishing, fertile soil due to annual flooding, and ease of transportation. The first great civilizations, such as those in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, all grew up in river valleys. Mesopotamian civilization flourished near the Tigris River and the civilization of Egypt flourished near the river Nile. Overview The Uruk period of Mesopotamia dates from about 4000 to 3100 BCE and provides the earliest signs of the existence of states in the Near East. Located along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East, the name given ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agricultural
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture in the twentieth century came to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture. The major agricultural products can be broadly grouped into foods, fibers, fuels, and raw materials (such as rubber). Food classes include cereals ( grains), vegetables, fruits, cooking oils, mea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yellow River
The Yellow River or Huang He (Chinese: , Mandarin: ''Huáng hé'' ) is the second-longest river in China, after the Yangtze River, and the sixth-longest river system in the world at the estimated length of . Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai province of Western China, it flows through nine provinces, and it empties into the Bohai Sea near the city of Dongying in Shandong province. The Yellow River basin has an east–west extent of about and a north–south extent of about . Its total drainage area is about . The Yellow River's basin was the birthplace of ancient Chinese, and, by extension, Far Eastern civilization, and it was the most prosperous region in early Chinese history. There are frequent devastating floods and course changes produced by the continual elevation of the river bed, sometimes above the level of its surrounding farm fields. Etymology Early Chinese literature including the ''Yu Gong'' or ''Tribute of Yu'' dating to the Warring St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meluhha
or ( sux, ) is the Sumerian name of a prominent trading partner of Sumer during the Middle Bronze Age. Its identification remains an open question, but most scholars associate it with the Indus Valley civilisation. Etymology Asko Parpola identifies Proto-Dravidians with the Indus Valley civilization (IVC) and the Meluhha people mentioned in Sumerian records. According to him, the word "Meluhha" derives from the Dravidian words ''mel-akam'' ("highland country"). It is possible that the IVC people exported sesame oil to Mesopotamia, where it was known as ''ilu'' in Sumerian and ''eḷḷu'' in Akkadian. One theory is that these words derive from the South Dravidian I name for sesame (''eḷḷ '' or ''eḷḷu''). However, Michael Witzel, who associates IVC with the ancestors of Munda speakers, suggests an alternative etymology from the para-Munda word for wild sesame: ''jar-tila''. Munda is an Austroasiatic language, and forms a substratum (including loanwords) in Dra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hydraulic Empire
A hydraulic empire, also known as a hydraulic despotism, hydraulic society, hydraulic civilization, or water monopoly empire, is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy. Often associated with these terms and concepts is the notion of a ''water dynasty''. This body is a political structure which is commonly characterized by a system of hierarchy and control often based on class or caste. Power, both over resources (food, water, energy) and a means of enforcement such as the military, is vital for the maintenance of control. Civilizations A developed hydraulic civilization maintains control over its population by means of controlling the supply of water. The term was coined by the German-American historian Karl August Wittfogel (1896–1988), in his book '' Oriental Despotism: A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inca Empire
The Inca Empire (also known as the Incan Empire and the Inka Empire), called ''Tawantinsuyu'' by its subjects, (Quechua for the "Realm of the Four Parts", "four parts together" ) was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was in the city of Cusco. The Inca civilization arose from the Peruvian highlands sometime in the early 13th century. The Spanish began the conquest of the Inca Empire in 1532 and by 1572, the last Inca state was fully conquered. From 1438 to 1533, the Incas incorporated a large portion of western South America, centered on the Andean Mountains, using conquest and peaceful assimilation, among other methods. At its largest, the empire joined modern-day Peru, what are now western Ecuador, western and south central Bolivia, northwest Argentina, the southwesternmost tip of Colombia and a large portion of modern-day Chile, and into a state comparable to the historical empires of Eur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yellow River Civilization
Stone sickle, Peiligang culture (7000–5000 BC)">Peiligang_culture.html" ;"title="sickle, Peiligang culture">sickle, Peiligang culture (7000–5000 BC) Yellow River civilization or Huanghe civilization (), Hwan‐huou civilization is an ancient Chinese civilization that prospered in the middle and lower basin of the Yellow River. Agriculture was started in the flood plain of the Yellow River, and before long, through flood control and the irrigation of the Yellow River, cities were developed and political power found reinforcement. One of the " four major civilizations of the ancient world", it is often included in textbooks of East Asian history, but the idea of including only the Yellow River civilization as one of the four biggest ancient civilizations has become outdated as a result of the discovery of other early cultures in China, such as the Yangtze and Liao civilizations. The area saw the Yangshao and Longshan cultures of the Neolithic era and developed into the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erlitou Culture
The Erlitou culture was an early Bronze Age urban society and archaeological culture that existed in the Yellow River valley from approximately 1900 to 1500 BC. A 2007 study of radiocarbon dating proposed a narrower date range of 1750 to 1530 BC. The culture was named after the site discovered at Erlitou in Yanshi, Henan. The culture was widely spread throughout Henan and Shanxi and later appeared in Shaanxi and Hubei. Chinese archaeologists generally identify the Erlitou culture as the site of the Xia dynasty, but there is no firm evidence, such as writing, to substantiate such a linkage, as the earliest evidence of Chinese writing dates to the late Shang dynasty. Erlitou site The Erlitou culture may have evolved from the matrix of Longshan culture. Originally centered around Henan and Shanxi province, the culture spread to Shaanxi and Hubei provinces. After the rise of the Erligang culture, the site at Erlitou diminished in size but remained inhabited. Discovered in 1959 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harappa
Harappa (; Urdu/ pnb, ) is an archaeological site in Punjab, Pakistan, about west of Sahiwal. The Bronze Age Harappan civilisation, now more often called the Indus Valley Civilisation, is named after the site, which takes its name from a modern village near the former course of the Ravi River, which now runs to the north. The core of the Harappan civilization extended over a large area, from Gujarat in the south, across Sindh and Rajasthan and extending into Punjab and Haryana. Numerous sites have been found outside the core area, including some as far east as Uttar Pradesh and as far west as Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast of Baluchistan, not far from Iran. The site of the ancient city contains the ruins of a Bronze Age fortified city, which was part of the Harappan civilisation centred in Sindh and the Punjab, and then the Cemetery H culture. The city is believed to have had as many as 23,500 residents and occupied about with clay brick houses at its greatest extent durin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indus Valley Civilization
The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also known as the Indus Civilisation was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. Together with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was one of three early civilisations of the Near East and South Asia, and of the three, the most widespread. Its sites spanned an area from much of Pakistan, to northeast Afghanistan, and northwestern India. The civilisation flourished both in the alluvial plain of the Indus River, which flows through the length of Pakistan, and along a system of perennial monsoon-fed rivers that once coursed in the vicinity of the Ghaggar-Hakra, a seasonal river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan. The term ''Harappan'' is sometimes applied to the Indus civilisation after its type site Harappa, the first to be excavated early in the 20th century in what was then the Punjab province of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crop Rotation
Crop rotation is the practice of growing a series of different types of crops in the same area across a sequence of growing seasons. It reduces reliance on one set of nutrients, pest and weed pressure, and the probability of developing resistant pests and weeds. Growing the same crop in the same place for many years in a row, known as monocropping, gradually depletes the soil of certain nutrients and selects for a highly competitive pest and weed community. Without balancing nutrient use and diversifying pest and weed communities, the productivity of monocultures is highly dependent on external inputs. Conversely, a well-designed crop rotation can reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers and herbicides by better using ecosystem services from a diverse set of crops. Additionally, crop rotations can improve soil structure and organic matter, which reduces erosion and increases farm system resilience. History Agriculturalists have long recognized that suitable rotations — suc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irrigation
Irrigation (also referred to as watering) is the practice of applying controlled amounts of water to land to help grow crops, landscape plants, and lawns. Irrigation has been a key aspect of agriculture for over 5,000 years and has been developed by many cultures around the world. Irrigation helps to grow crops, maintain landscapes, and revegetate disturbed soils in dry areas and during times of below-average rainfall. In addition to these uses, irrigation is also employed to protect crops from frost, suppress weed growth in grain fields, and prevent soil consolidation. It is also used to cool livestock, reduce dust, dispose of sewage, and support mining operations. Drainage, which involves the removal of surface and sub-surface water from a given location, is often studied in conjunction with irrigation. There are several methods of irrigation that differ in how water is supplied to plants. Surface irrigation, also known as gravity irrigation, is the oldest form of irrigati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bronze Age India
The Bronze Age in the Indian subcontinent begins around 3000 BCE, and in the end gives rise to the Indus Valley Civilisation, which had its (mature) period between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE. It continues into the Rigvedic period, the early part of the Vedic period. It is succeeded by the Iron Age in India, beginning in around 1000 BCE. South India, by contrast, remains in the Mesolithic stage until about 2500 BCE. In the 2nd millennium BCE, there may have been cultural contact between North and South India, even though South India skips a Bronze Age proper and enters the Iron Age from the Chalcolithic stage directly. In February 2006, a school teacher in the village of Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu discovered a stone celt with an inscription estimated to be up to 3,500 years old. Indian epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan postulated that the writing was in Indus script and called the find "the greatest archaeological discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu". World timeline ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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