The Origin of Civilization

What defines a civilization? How did the first states emerge? How were the world's ancient states similar and different? Answer these and other dramatic questions with this grand 48-lecture course that reveals how human beings around the world transitioned from small farming communities to the impressive cultural and political systems that would alter the course of history. Taking a gripping archaeological and historical approach to formative states such as the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Maya, Professor MacEachern completes your understanding of the history of civilization by exploring it at its earliest stages. Unlike traditional surveys of ancient civilizations, which tend to focus only on the glorious achievements of these cultures, you'll look at those first all-important steps that the world's first civilizations would take on the road to glory. You'll investigate places such as Mesopotamia, where agriculture laid the foundation for groundbreaking experiments in social and political development in places like Uruk and Sumer;?the eastern Mediterranean, where expanding maritime trade during the Bronze Age increasingly knit the different societies of these islands into a web of political and economic relationships; and Mesoamerica, where the indigenous states in and around what are now Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua reveal the full flowering of Olmec and Maya civilization. You'll also take an engaging look at what archaeologists have learned from some of the world's oldest and most intriguing sites. In the end, these lectures will leave you awestruck at the diverse ways that ancient people crafted complex systems - systems whose broad strokes remain with us even today.

All Lectures:
1. Ancient States and Civilizations
2. The History of Archaeological Research
3. Studying the Origins of States
4. Archaeological Interpretation - Çatalhöyük
5. Stepping Stones to Civilization
6. Trajectories of Cultural Development
7. When Is a State a State?
8. A Complex Neolithic - Halafian and Samarran
9. Hierarchy and Urbanism - 'Ubaid Mesopotamia
10. The Uruk World System
11. Sumer and Afterward
12. Civilization and Pastoralism in Mesopotamia
13. The Development of Writing in Mesopotamia
14. The Gift of the Nile
15. The Egyptian Predynastic Period
16. The Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt
17. Divinity and Display in Dynastic Egypt
18. Why So Different? Mesopotamia and the Nile
19. Borders and Territories of Ancient States
20. The Levantine Copper and Early Bronze Ages
21. Hierarchy and Society in the Aegean
22. Early Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations
23. Palace and Countryside on Crete
24. How Things Fall Apart - The Greek Dark Ages
25. First Farmers in the Indus Valley
26. Cities along the Indus
27. Seeing What We Expect - Power and Display
28. Sedentism and Agriculture in Early China
29. State Formation in Ancient China
30. Origins of the Chinese Writing System
31. From Human Sacrifice to the Tao of Politics
32. Spread of States in Mainland Southeast Asia
33. Axumite Civilization in Ethiopia
34. Inland Niger Delta - Hierarchy and Heterarchy
35. Lake Chad Basin - Settlement and Complexity
36. Great Zimbabwe and Its Successors
37. Sedentism and Agriculture in Mesoamerica
38. The Olmec of Lowland Mexico
39. Teotihuacán - The First American City
40.Beginnings of States in Lowland Mesoamerica
41. The Great Maya City-States
42.Epigraphy - Changing Views of the Maya
43. Was There a Maya Collapse?
44. Adaptations in Pacific South America
45. Pyramids and Precocity in Coastal Peru
46. Andean Civilization - Chavín to Chimú
47. The Florescence of the Inka Empire
48. Ancient States - Unity and Diversity?