What are some of the most surprisingly great locations for a civilization that didn't live up to it's potential?

There were urban centers in Gaul, England, southern Germany and Pannonia by around 200 BCE and you early urban centers around 700 BCE in these regions far from Greek settlements as well.
In that sense it wasnt that slower than Italy or Iberia.
If you count the Celtic oppida as urban centres, then yes, you can push it back a couple of hundred years before the Caesars. And there's some evidence of large-scale political organisations in places like Gaul and Britain in the immediate pre-Roman period. But the other bits of the package - notably literacy - are still missing. And by "Central Europe" I was thinking of the areas East of the Rhine and North of the middle Danube - so present day central & east Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, northern Austria & Hungary, - rather than Gaul.

I hadn't heard of any pre-Celtic urban centres anywhere North of the Alps - do you have details?
 
If you count the Celtic oppida as urban centres, then yes, you can push it back a couple of hundred years before the Caesars. And there's some evidence of large-scale political organisations in places like Gaul and Britain in the immediate pre-Roman period.

I hadn't heard of any pre-Celtic urban centres anywhere North of the Alps - do you have details?

"The development of large agglomerations is one of the most important phenomena in later Eurasian prehistory. In west-central temperate Europe, the origins of urbanism have long been associated with the oppida of the second to first centuries BC. However, large-scale excavations and surveys carried out over the last two decades have fundamentally modified the traditional picture of early centralization processes. New results indicate that the first urban centres north of the Alps developed over time between the end of the seventh and the fifth century BC in an area stretching from Bohemia to southern Germany and Central France."

But the other bits of the package - notably literacy - are still missing.
To be honest Rome itself wasn't exactly that literate before 300 BCE, the earliest attestation is from the early 7th century BCE with sparse findings into the 6th and 5th century BCE
And by "Central Europe" I was thinking of the areas East of the Rhine and North of the middle Danube - so present day central & east Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, northern Austria & Hungary, - rather than Gaul.
Not sure what good explanations there are, we can definitely still find some oppida and maybe some lowland towns within the Celtic world, not sure about the Germanic period, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some settlements with more than 1000 people existed in some places, especially were similar such settlements existed in the Celtic period.

Anyway I imagine the main reason is simply because the overall population was small and not that dense. Places like Italy would have been 10 to 30 times as dense as most sizeable regions like Poland, Northern Germany, Denmark and so on.

Also I'm not sure if the distance from the Steppe nomads was that much of a positive considering the presence of sizeable settlements in the Ukrainian forest Steppe and of course coastal Greek colonies in the same region.
 

"The development of large agglomerations is one of the most important phenomena in later Eurasian prehistory. In west-central temperate Europe, the origins of urbanism have long been associated with the oppida of the second to first centuries BC. However, large-scale excavations and surveys carried out over the last two decades have fundamentally modified the traditional picture of early centralization processes. New results indicate that the first urban centres north of the Alps developed over time between the end of the seventh and the fifth century BC in an area stretching from Bohemia to southern Germany and Central France."
I was not aware of that - thanks for the link. Fascinating to think that a European culture that produced urban centres to rival a contemporary mid-range Greek polis has been completely lost to the historical record. But I'll note - as the authors of the paper point out - the culture was short-lived and did not lead to further urban development. None of the sites they mention lasted more than 200 years and all were gone by 400 BC. Interesting that the sites, while extensive, were much lower-density than Mediterranean cites. The authors compare the low-density occupation to Cahokia, Angkor and Great Zimbabwe - all of which were ultimately abandoned. Perhaps such low-density urban models are inherently more fragile than higher density ones?

To be honest Rome itself wasn't exactly that literate before 300 BCE, the earliest attestation is from the early 7th century BCE with sparse findings into the 6th and 5th century BCE
If we want to split hairs, I'll argue the Bronze Age Egypt or Babylonia probably wasn't "that literate" if we measure the percentage of the population who could read or write. Mycenae is generally counted as a literate civilisation even though Linear B was restricted to the palace complexes and apparently used strictly as a record-keeping tool. I don't think anyone has argued that early Rome had no writing, even when it was a small border town on the edge of the Etruscan and Greek worlds. (The earliest Etruscan inscriptions date from around the date of the founding of Rome). Whereas the North & Central European cultures appear to have been without any form of writing.

Not sure what good explanations there are, we can definitely still find some oppida and maybe some lowland towns within the Celtic world, not sure about the Germanic period, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some settlements with more than 1000 people existed in some places, especially were similar such settlements existed in the Celtic period.

Anyway I imagine the main reason is simply because the overall population was small and not that dense. Places like Italy would have been 10 to 30 times as dense as most sizeable regions like Poland, Northern Germany, Denmark and so on.
Which reverts us to the original question - why? Europe north of the Alps is notably devoid of mountains, swamps, deserts and other hostile terrain. The soil is generally fertile (Poland was the breadbasket of Europe in the early modern era) and it gets adequate rain. It's heavily forested, but the European forests are hardly South-East Asian jungles full of tigers and tropical diseases. The people had iron tools, farmed cereals and other crops and had several types of domestic animal. There were extensive trade routes to the Mediterranean world. Why did the population stay so low, for so long?

Also I'm not sure if the distance from the Steppe nomads was that much of a positive considering the presence of sizeable settlements in the Ukrainian forest Steppe and of course coastal Greek colonies in the same region.
The steppe nomads bit was tossed in because they were mentioned upthread and also because I've seen the argument that the reason western Europe finally won the global-culture race was because they had eastern Europe between them and the steppes so unlike e.g. China they didn't have to deal with the hordes periodically sweeping in from Central Asia.
 
I was not aware of that - thanks for the link. Fascinating to think that a European culture that produced urban centres to rival a contemporary mid-range Greek polis has been completely lost to the historical record. But I'll note - as the authors of the paper point out - the culture was short-lived and did not lead to further urban development. None of the sites they mention lasted more than 200 years and all were gone by 400 BC. Interesting that the sites, while extensive, were much lower-density than Mediterranean cites. The authors compare the low-density occupation to Cahokia, Angkor and Great Zimbabwe - all of which were ultimately abandoned. Perhaps such low-density urban models are inherently more fragile than higher density ones?
Many denser urban settlements have been routinely abandoned, anywaythe late Celts had low land denser settlements as well like Manching on the Danube in Germany(probably around 5k-8k people)
If we want to split hairs, I'll argue the Bronze Age Egypt or Babylonia probably wasn't "that literate" if we measure the percentage of the population who could read or write. Mycenae is generally counted as a literate civilisation even though Linear B was restricted to the palace complexes and apparently used strictly as a record-keeping tool. I don't think anyone has argued that early Rome had no writing, even when it was a small border town on the edge of the Etruscan and Greek worlds. (The earliest Etruscan inscriptions date from around the date of the founding of Rome). Whereas the North & Central European cultures appear to have been without any form of writing.
By 300 BCE we have writing in Southern Gaul, by the 2nd century CE we have elder futhark inscriptions among Germanic people, interesting not the ones closest to the Romans but in Denmark and Southern Sweden.
It definitely took longer to be adopted compared to peninsular Italy but it still was there.

In fact this literacy requirement would arguably exclude the earliest Indian polities until maybe the Mauryan empire, some other places while they might have written in foreign languages didn't even write down anything in their own languages until quite late, for example Tocharian(despite being located in the Silk Route and likely having had multiple cities), Armenian and Georgian(oldest writing in the 5th century CE), Korean and Japanese(around the late 6th century CE and early 7th century CE), Nubian and Cushitic languages(7th and 8th century CE, Meroitic 2nd Century BCE), Austroasiatic or Austronesian(4th century CE to 7th century CE)
As you can see multiple language families that were close to the birth place of West Eurasian writing didn't manage to leave any surviving inscription, the Lepontic Celts which lived in Northern Italy seem to have preceded all of them.

I guess everyone that could write mainly wrote in Aramaic from Mesopotamia to the Tarim Basin for a while but I think that still shows how limited writing was for us to have basically no inscriptions in the local languages.
Ultimately you can easily make the argument that for most civilizations the use of writing requires complex states to support it and require the usage of writing beyond short inscription, which is probably why Romans start actually writing extensive texts in the 4th century BCE(maybe) and definitey in the 3rd century BCE.
The Greeks are special in their higher literacy rates so they have to be analysed in isolation.

A possible barrier to the spread of useful writing in some region could either be the lack of good material, I'm unsure about it, could everyone have simply used whatever clay they could have found? If so then this argument could fall flat.
Which reverts us to the original question - why? Europe north of the Alps is notably devoid of mountains, swamps, deserts and other hostile terrain. The soil is generally fertile (Poland was the breadbasket of Europe in the early modern era) and it gets adequate rain. The people had iron tools, farmed cereals and other crops and had several types of domestic animal. There were extensive trade routes to the Mediterranean world. Why did the population stay so low, for so long?
It's quite colder, from what I understood from others the terrain also isn't necessarily easy to cultivate regardless of fertility.

Also as above, the question is how accurately are we juxtaposing Central Europe to the rest of Europe or even the world? How big were non-Phonician and non-Greek cities in Iberia really(be they Celtic, Iberian or Tartessian), how big were Italic and Etruscan cities really until the start of the 4th century BCE?
What about the Balkans(again excluding the Greeks)? Tying it to writing those people didn't really write much either to the point where we are virtually unable to categorize those languages in relation to each other or even the rest of Indo-European languages.
I can extend this to most of the Iranian region as well, North Africa too, of course Eastern Europe might have seen some inland town in the iron age but still no real writing.

Ultimately it's a few actors that spread extensive writing or supported urbanization, like the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Mesopotamians(later through Iranians), Indians, Chinese and so on.
Where those people didn't get to or only traded most of the time writing or urbanization took time to really spread, the exceptions are few like the Italians picking up from the Greeks relatively quickly.

Maybe @Jürgen can give his take on the nature of central European and North European agriculture, soils and what was required to increase productvity there from the Celtic Iron Age until the Frankish period.
It's heavily forested, but the European forests are hardly South-East Asian jungles full of tigers and tropical diseases.
Frankly this isn't a good excuse for South-East Asia either, it's not like they grew when they discovered new ways to hunt predators or even new ways to resist to diseases, they grew in population when they discovered better farming technique or had the state apparatus to support such farming techniques.

The steppe nomads bit was tossed in because they were mentioned upthread and also because I've seen the argument that the reason western Europe finally won the global-culture race was because they had eastern Europe between them and the steppes so unlike e.g. China they didn't have to deal with the hordes periodically sweeping in from Central Asia.
I really don't think this is true at all.
 
@Merrick @Gloss

Europe North of the Alps is dominated by clay rich soil, swamps/wetlands and some sandy infertile areas, until the development of the heavy plough which allowed farming to expand into the clay rich soil areas, agriculture was mainly in regions with infertile sandy soil, as a ard plough could be used in those. This all served to keep the population relative low. But there was also other factors working against developing of agriculture. The region had relative low biodiversity thanks to most flora and fauna immigrating to the region after the Ice Age, so there‘s few local crop who h could be developed in the region, next we have the problem of time, the Fertile Crescent has proto-agriculture going back into the Paleolithic and more import when the Neolithic truly began in the Middle East, Northern Europe was still covered in glaciers and tundra. North Europe pretty much had to speed run the different stages of development to catch up with the Middle East, while the neolithic lasted over five millenniums in the Middle East, in Denmark it barely lasted two. It was only in the late Roman Iron Age Northern Europe catched up with the Middle East,
 
I have a very stupid question before being able to contribute to this thread. I see we are all concentrated on the geographic factors, mainly soils and climates, and focusing on the agriculture aspects leading to urban civilizations.

The word 'civilisation', although common in appearance, has only been around for three centuries. It is derived from the Latin civis, meaning citizen, and civitas, meaning city, i.e. all citizens. But then we get into the issue of what a “city” actually is….

I do wonder how we should define civilization, I guess we are using the classical and Eurocentric elements. The term “civilization” as it is used today basically means an archaeological culture that formed an early state.

There is a high degree of task specialization and social stratification. It is characterized by complex societies with division of labor, technological advancement, intensive agriculture, urbanization, systems of writing, monumental construction, and long distance trade and communication. Religion and art are sometimes added to the list.

In other words, a civilization is basically a mode of living. It permits large concentrations of people to live a strictly sedentary lifestyle, within contiguous power structures, over areas that span hundreds of miles.

The non-city-based cultures, both agricultural and hunting and gathering, may have been better suited to the rain-forest environments in parts of central and Western Africa. Is a network of villages or moving pastoralists a civilization?

Should we also consider nomads (fully or not) and seafarers as civilizations? Or even city-states? And are we constrained by specific datations or can we move up to 1899?



I also think that no civilization did simply appear out of the blue and that geography isn’t the most important factor. It seems that the ability to absorb immigrants and conquerors or to import cultural and technological novelties created elsewhere is the most important factor (
"civilizational exchange” and the “civilizational co-evolution”).

Civilizations can also block or inhibit other civilizations through wars or by their mere existence. The existence of Rome inhibited further development of the Celts and Etruscans and blocked the expansion of neighboring civilizations.

On the other hand, it did prolong some civilizations or their features, transmitted knowledge to our (western) civilizations and pushed further development in remote areas that otherwise would have been slower or not so advanced naturally.

Late Roman civilization also safeguarded and helped Christianity, an outsider, weaker and foreign religion leading to the building of other civilizations on its "ruins". Remember that we do define civilizations artificially and cut timeline in artificial time periods. I will just ask if the Roman civilization really died and what does advancement mean without answering directly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/01/civilization-collapse-rome-angkor-harappa

The biggest motivators for the advancement of a society are how they react with other people’s and trade. And the biggest factor in reacting with other people is the ability to travel. In this, the geographies of Europe, Middle East and Asia were a far better suited than Africa with relatively easy land routes, an abundance of natural harbors, navigable rivers and well established trade routes. But don’t forget that neighboring and older civilizations did help Europe to develop. There would have been no Rome, without Greek influence and no Greek without Persia, no Persia without ….

Ancient Kingdoms of Middle East before the bronze age collapse already had trade routes between each other’s, a lingua franca and diplomatic relations.

The world has always been far more interconnected than we currently think. Ancient trade routes have existed since the Stone Age and we should avoid underrating the possibility of seafaring in trade exchange in that period.

An example of rarely taught subject the trans American trade routes :


You can find similar long trade routes between civilizations on all continents, without forgetting the role of nomads or pastoralists in knowledge and goods transmission. Pristine civilizations don’t’ really exist.

What we do consider a complex urban civilization is often the result of a broader system/network made of various civilizations and cultures (similar or not) cross pollinating each other’s.

Usually early civilizations were made of city networks communicating with each other’s and in contact or even connected with other early civilizations. I think the existence of a broader trading system and means of communication (rivers, trade routes or ocean currents) should be discussed.

If you look at the geography of places that have produced the great civilizations of the past you see cradles of civilization, with the emphasis on “cradles”, each society that developed into a great civilization was to some degree isolated, protected, from the peoples around it by geography, this semi-isolation both protected the increasingly wealthy developing civilization from plunder and served to create national identities, if you look at Europe, Middle East, East Asia, Japan, South Asia the geography is broken up by mountains, deserts and seas, if you look at the Americas the Aztec and Inca civilizations were also protected from their neighbors by terrain. Terrain that served the same function as an egg shell or front door, allowing the control of who enters without being too isolated from external world (trade and war).

If you then go and look at languages where civilization developed you get large geographical blocks with people speaking or understanding the same languages, helping to build larger blocks with a common or similar identity.

A big question is also the need of both writing and literacy. It’s usually believed that through written language, we convey beliefs, record knowledge, and explore our common humanity. It’s forgetting that literacy was really low in the past and that human memory is prodigious. Iliad and Odyssey weren’t always written. Western African griots were living archives and deposited of oral tradition and knowledge, similarly to Celtic bards. Such a social function of history-tellers surely existed in most other cultures, but was lost. Are literacy and writing vital to civilisation?

I think it depends on how you define civilization. If you start from the word meaning "urban culture" then an administration and bookkeeping are necessary, which seemingly can’t be achieved without literacy. Generally, if there is a central government, both literacy and writing seem necessary. Is it true?

If you assume a purely cultural and linguistic community, a written culture is not necessary. There are tribes in Brazil that still do not know any script.

Until they met the Romans, the Celts did not have any script of their own and were nevertheless a powerful civilization. There are a few documents around 400 BC, but they were written in Greek or Phoenician letters. They were familiar with writing, but it was forbidden for religious reasons (!!!) Only graffiti or engravings on swords were common. The Ogham script is an "invention" from the 5th century AD and is based on Germanic runes.

It’s true that past civilizations started without writing systems. Progress in organization and trade is still accelerated by the ability to keep records, but writing is not the only way to keep records.

Agriculture is, for most historians and archeologists, the first step towards building an urban civilization as it yields far higher returns in food for the effort put in than with hunting/gathering, this gives people leisure time, time to think contemplate and invent, it enables a society in which a smaller fraction of the population is devoted to food production with other people being able to specialize in other endeavors, as if social specialization and social complexity only appeared with cities …

Unfortunately the development of agriculture is very vulnerable in an unstable setting, livestock are vulnerable to poaching, you have to wait for months for your crops to grow, if there are no clear borders controlled by your government your farming enterprise is more vulnerable, the risks too high, better to just hunt and gather.

It takes a large group of people sharing a common identity living without a continuous threat from neighbors – stability – to build an urban civilization, which is why they were rarer than non urban ones.

A little off-topic :

Coming back to geographic factors, we must never underrate them. Here is why Europeans colonized the rest of the world and not the opposite. It did also determine where ancient and modern colonies appeared.

1664610974935.png


1664611119699.jpeg


You can also add the rivers systems and reliefs to further understand it, then deserts and forests, climates, etc.

Alternate history and comparative history are good tools for professional archeologists, historians, anthropologists, even sociologists or economists, but they can only be well used if we accept the fact that our past was constrained by multiple factors (not only geography).
 
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It lasers maybe, but certainly spaceships. One of the things about the first period of European colonialism in South and South-East Asia (up until about 1850), was the Europeans did not have a significant technological advantage in land combat, since both sides were using the same basic gunpowder package. But no Asian nation came close to matching European ships, which gave them unrivalled strategic mobility. For example, the British won the First Anglo-Burmese War by launching a naval invasion of Yangon while the main Burmese army was in Bengal.

I suspect the reason that Siam retained its independence was that its territory (apart from the Bangkok region itself) was largely inaccessible from the sea, and that the Thais realised early on that they were in a tributary situation and concentrated on being a good little tribute-state rather than launching hopeless wars.
The Burmese historian Thant Myint-U in "The Making of Modern Burma" notes how the Brits used one of the first steamships to fight in the First Anglo-Burmese War, outcompeting the skilled rowers of the massive Burmese river war boats. There's also drilling and tactics in which you have to take into account (considering quite a few of the British soldiers and officers who fought in the First Anglo-Burmese War were Peninsular War veterans). The Thai historian David K. Wyatt argues that the sack of Ayutthaya forced the Siamese elites to unite under a single banner and be loyal to the Siamese monarch rather than to elite concerns (which plagued the Ayutthaya court for the latter half of its existence as a result of court intrigue and chronic succession conflicts due to a lack of a designated line of succession). The post-Ayutthaya Siamese elite were also keen observers of the outside world (first recognizing the need to be loyal tributes to the Qing to recover the post-1767 devastated economy and then latter to Europe and adopting cultural and civic elements of their civilization). Some of the kings played their part too in this regard.
 
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I do wonder how we should define civilization, I guess we are using the classical and Eurocentric elements. The term “civilization” as it is used today basically means an archaeological culture that formed an early state.

There is a high degree of task specialization and social stratification. It is characterized by complex societies with division of labor, technological advancement, intensive agriculture, urbanization, systems of writing, monumental construction, and long distance trade and communication. Religion and art are sometimes added to the list.

In other words, a civilization is basically a mode of living. It permits large concentrations of people to live a strictly sedentary lifestyle, within contiguous power structures, over areas that span hundreds of miles.

The non-city-based cultures, both agricultural and hunting and gathering, may have been better suited to the rain-forest environments in parts of central and Western Africa. Is a network of villages or moving pastoralists a civilization?

Should we also consider nomads (fully or not) and seafarers as civilizations? Or even city-states? And are we constrained by specific datations or can we move up to 1899?
A very generic alternative metric for civilizations could just be the ability of a larger amount of people to organize themselves or compel others for any specific purpose in a more permanent fashion.

In some sense I feel like this encapsulates many of the ideas behind the word "civilization" or the idea of increased societal complexity with lead to city-states, small tribes, larger groupings of tribes, states, kingdoms, empires and the modern nation-states-

I also think that no civilization did simply appear out of the blue and that geography isn’t the most important factor. It seems that the ability to absorb immigrants and conquerors or to import cultural and technological novelties created elsewhere is the most important factor (
"civilizational exchange” and the “civilizational co-evolution”).
In some sense that's also in large part determined by geography, at least insofar as geographic barriers to contact and trade go, as you said below.

The world has always been far more interconnected than we currently think. Ancient trade routes have existed since the Stone Age and we should avoid underrating the possibility of seafaring in trade exchange in that period.
I'm not sure how much long distance trade there was in the Neolithic or Chalcolithic, long distance trade needs organization, wealth and a strong need for certain goods, otherwise the cost associated with transporting those goods would make them prohibitively expensive for simpler societies.

I feel like the article already does a good job at showing how weak this trade was beyond each integrated region.

What we do consider a complex urban civilization is often the result of a broader system/network made of various civilizations and cultures (similar or not) cross pollinating each other’s.
To some extent this is true but for the very first pioneers of new things(cities, states, bureaucracies) inspiration can only go so far.

Usually early civilizations were made of city networks communicating with each other’s and in contact or even connected with other early civilizations. I think the existence of a broader trading system and means of communication (rivers, trade routes or ocean currents) should be discussed.
I wouldn't overstate early trade or long distance contact so much, it was there but I personally it should always be seen as less important compared to future period.

If you look at the geography of places that have produced the great civilizations of the past you see cradles of civilization, with the emphasis on “cradles”, each society that developed into a great civilization was to some degree isolated, protected, from the peoples around it by geography, this semi-isolation both protected the increasingly wealthy developing civilization from plunder and served to create national identities, if you look at Europe, Middle East, East Asia, Japan, South Asia the geography is broken up by mountains, deserts and seas, if you look at the Americas the Aztec and Inca civilizations were also protected from their neighbors by terrain. Terrain that served the same function as an egg shell or front door, allowing the control of who enters without being too isolated from external world (trade and war).
I'm not sure I agree here, it may apply to Egypt but to me it seems most other cases were well open to warfare with neighbouring regions.

Let me ask a counter-factual question, what is a region that you think wasn't protected enough by geography?

If you then go and look at languages where civilization developed you get large geographical blocks with people speaking or understanding the same languages, helping to build larger blocks with a common or similar identity.
Chicken and egg, the increasing complexity might help creating more homogeneity and if you look at places like Mesoamerica you could argue that linguistic homogeneity really wasn't needed to create a coherent cultural region, although we may debate how unified any given region really was..

A big question is also the need of both writing and literacy. It’s usually believed that through written language, we convey beliefs, record knowledge, and explore our common humanity. It’s forgetting that literacy was really low in the past and that human memory is prodigious. Iliad and Odyssey weren’t always written. Western African griots were living archives and deposited of oral tradition and knowledge, similarly to Celtic bards. Such a social function of history-tellers surely existed in most other cultures, but was lost. Are literacy and writing vital to civilisation?

I think it depends on how you define civilization. If you start from the word meaning "urban culture" then an administration and bookkeeping are necessary, which seemingly can’t be achieved without literacy. Generally, if there is a central government, both literacy and writing seem necessary. Is it true?
You can make the argument that in the long term writing will be picked up by complex societies because it's useful and that writing helps complex societies in becoming more complex, expanding bureaucracies and allowing for better spread of language.

But it's important to note how low the actual literacy levels were in many of the very complex empire, as far as I know some scholars like William V. Harris argue that only around 5-10% of the Roman population could actually read at the economic peak of the Roman empire, in some regions the value was even lower which shows how you don't need the vast majority of the population to know any letters to be able to still benefit from literacy.

Also I'm not sure if "oral culture" was really "lost" when writing appeared, as I said above most people couldn't read a single thing so passing on oral stories would have been valuable to them still.
Until they met the Romans, the Celts did not have any script of their own and were nevertheless a powerful civilization. There are a few documents around 400 BC, but they were written in Greek or Phoenician letters. They were familiar with writing, but it was forbidden for religious reasons (!!!) Only graffiti or engravings on swords were common. The Ogham script is an "invention" from the 5th century AD and is based on Germanic runes.
Lepontic Celts had some inscriptions around 500 BCE

Agriculture is, for most historians and archeologists, the first step towards building an urban civilization as it yields far higher returns in food for the effort put in than with hunting/gathering, this gives people leisure time, time to think contemplate and invent, it enables a society in which a smaller fraction of the population is devoted to food production with other people being able to specialize in other endeavors, as if social specialization and social complexity only appeared with cities …
Specialization and societal complexity existed before and outside of cities, there is nothing that intrinsically said you can specialize only within a denser sizeable settlement, artisans, smiths, warriors existed even in societies with virtually no cities like the Germanic societies among others, sure one can say this specialization didn't go as far but that's another argument.

It takes a large group of people sharing a common identity living without a continuous threat from neighbors – stability – to build an urban civilization, which is why they were rarer than non urban ones.
As I said above I don't really buy this "free from threats" theory, it doesn't seem to match the evidence IMO.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]
 
I'm very happy this thread is getting attention. I do want to state that I don't mean this particular area is going to rival the Yangtze river basin. But I think it's a relatively good location in Africa that surprisingly didn't really have a notable civilization or kingdom up to the modern era.
View attachment 776932
The first kingdoms in the Congo basin arose around the Kwango river and the Upemba Depression. Their isolation did not stop them from developing relatively developed unique cultures. The place where the Luba kingdoms arose, the Upemba Depression for example is incredibly isolated. But still spread it's culture from the Congo basin to the Zambezi river. While an area with acces to trade around Lake Chad, the Nile and some of the only fertile soil in the area has nothing for thousands of years? I just thought it was curious.


Hmm that's interesting but, how big of an problem would this be? Some of the most densely populated areas in Africa are in hilly land or highlands. The area was populated by farmers around 3000-2000 BC. These would have already had yam, pearl millet, hausa potatoes and latter the Bantu would bring plantains. I think an connection between these people and those of upper Nubia would have been possible. And could have provided the spark of civilization. We know Nubia traded at least as far as southwestern Sudan and South Sudan.

The Sudd is indeed a great barrier for river transport. But we shouldn't confuse Africa for Europe or Asia. My point wasn't that they could sail to the Mediterranean. Most African rivers are not navigable for their entire length.
View attachment 776942
If our imaginary traders reach the Bahr El Arab. They can trade their wares with the nomads of Darfur and Kordofan. These herders seasonally migrate between this river, the wadis of Western Sudan and the main stream of the Nile. And they've done this since the desertification of the Sahara thousands of years ago.

It's true Lake Chad is an endoreic basin but when you've reached Lake Chad you're basically already in West Africa. You can reach Hausaland directly from Lake Chad. And from there the vast trading networks of West Africa. View attachment 776945

The area has major issues but most inland kingdoms in Africa had those. The sheer emptiness of this particular area even when the conditions aren't particularly terrible. Is what's puzzling to me.
The answer is simple, civilization is gae. Why entrench yourself under and oppressive ruler when you can be free?. I say the people there just chose to more more decentralized and "free" over being subjugated to Kings.
 
The answer is simple, civilization is gae. Why entrench yourself under and oppressive ruler when you can be free?. I say the people there just chose to more more decentralized and "free" over being subjugated to Kings.
yep. Civilization develops where there is no alternative, and dies when it becomes incoherent. Rome rose on the periphery and died when it became the core. The tools of 'civilization' are useful and convenient, but the systems of control they create and propagate end up creating men fit for slavery.
 
As I've written before, the Columbia Plateau of eastern Oregon/Washington/Idaho seems odd to have been so underdeveloped (even by the standards of North America) given the similarities to the Loess of China. It had salmon/trout resources that encouraged sedentary population even OTL and is also incredibly fertile assuming you can get water to it. It is located fairly close to all sorts of diverse environments ranging from the true desert to temperate rainforests which gives a diversity of resources and encourages trade. It seems like a natural area in which either a "hydraulic despotism" type of civilisation would have arose, or perhaps something along the more cooperative lines of Oasisamerican civilisation with the focus on irrigation and flood control.

I believe the reason why is that maize agriculture proved too challenging to adapt to the area. In Idaho it seems sporadically experimented with (perhaps introduced by trade with the Fremont culture of Utah), but the summers in the inland Northwest are too dry even compared to places like Arizona and irrigation/dam building too much of a hurdle to introduce (and the Fremont were pretty small-scale at that compared to the more classical Puebloans to their south). That said, native domesticates might be possible given how humans played a role in transplating both camas and the local species of oak and how the area is the center of biological diversity for the biscuitroots (Lomatium, many species of which served as food or medicine)

As for trade, before a major landslide around 1450 formed the rapids in the Columbia Gorge (now submerged by Lake Bonneville), it was possible to sail from the Pacific to Celilo Falls, which permits very long distance trade. This suggests the western side of the Cascades would probably be part of the same civilisation complex, probably with offshoots arising in the "classic" Northwest Coast area (Haida Gwaii/southern Alaska/adjacent coastal parts of BC), the interior plateaus of British Columbia (different climate, much colder, so might be a rather separate civilisation), and southern Oregon/northern California.

Because the Mississippi River flows over a hugely diverse set of landscapes that range from semi-tropical marshes to frigid taiga, to say nothing of its tributaries which include stretches over arid plains and the infertile karstic landscape of the Cumberland Plateau. It also technically was a cradle of civilisation given the widespread interaction spheres of the Hopewellian and Mississippian cultures and the fact it even produced its own agricultural package (the most notable of which are sunflowers).

Can't the excessive diversity that you use to explain away the Mississippi Basin also be used to explain the Columbia Plateau?. After all it is argued that Civilization tends towards mono-culture not just Agriculturally, but in terms of economy and culture as a single system proves far more easy to tax and manage than dozens of food webs and methods of livelihoods.
 
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This vid explains why US geography is essentially OP and the best starting location of any civilisation (all other things being equal).
 
South America is funny, civilization begun in the Andes region, a high plateau hard for human life, and not in the La Plata basin, the most fertile land of the continent

Argentina the most fertile land in south America is there along with the best river system in south America
There is no real mineral wealth in the Parana delta, so the area isn't conductive to anything past a stone age civilization. There are iron ores in Paraguay, about 500 miles overland to the north, which can be quite a lot for an early civilization. The northern rivers (the Bermejo, the Northern Salado) are rather shallow, although that shouldn't be that much of a problem by the start of civilization. There is the older geological formation of Tandilia. In modern times, construction materials are extracted there, but no industrial metals like cooper or iron, but I don't know if that's because they aren't present or because we Argentines are stupid when it comes to mining.
 
This vid explains why US geography is essentially OP and the best starting location of any civilisation (all other things being equal).
Given that the US didn't spawn any particularly impressive civilisations even by New World standards, I'm going to doubt that.

Best location in a globalised world where you can trade with, and therefore borrow ideas and technology from, all the world's other civilisations? Sure. Best location to start a civilisation from scratch? Not so much.
 
Given that the US didn't spawn any particularly impressive civilisations even by New World standards, I'm going to doubt that.

Best location in a globalised world where you can trade with, and therefore borrow ideas and technology from, all the world's other civilisations? Sure. Best location to start a civilisation from scratch? Not so much.
I said "all other things being equal." I'm well aware North America did not have the plant and animal species (which originated from Mesopotamia) that allowed for husbandry and agriculture. This is what made the Old World civilisations. But supposing, ALL the factors were equal, I'd choose the North American continent.
 
Can't the excessive diversity that you use to explain away the Mississippi Basin also be used to explain the Columbia Plateau?. After all it is argued that Civilization tends towards mono-culture not just Agriculturally, but in terms of economy and culture as a single system proves far more easy to tax and manage than dozens of food webs and methods of livelihoods.
To a degree, yes. Although I suppose there are counter-examples, like there's obviously a difference between the Persian gulf lowlands and the highlands of Anatolia/Armenia/etc. but they were more or less part of the same civilisation.
 
There is no real mineral wealth in the Parana delta, so the area isn't conductive to anything past a stone age civilization. There are iron ores in Paraguay, about 500 miles overland to the north, which can be quite a lot for an early civilization. The northern rivers (the Bermejo, the Northern Salado) are rather shallow, although that shouldn't be that much of a problem by the start of civilization. There is the older geological formation of Tandilia. In modern times, construction materials are extracted there, but no industrial metals like cooper or iron, but I don't know if that's because they aren't present or because we Argentines are stupid when it comes to mining.
Tbf idk why Andean civ never spread out of the Andes like Andean civs always die off after a few thousand years. Their crops are quite nice for what they are too so it's weird that there was no stable society. It's like they stayed in the bronze age until the Europeans came.

Seriously if some nomads got their hands on llamas and managed to make some kind of chariot from the metals they had I could see them being the Mongols of SA and they'd loot their sedentary neighbours for metal or something.
 
Tbf idk why Andean civ never spread out of the Andes like Andean civs always die off after a few thousand years. Their crops are quite nice for what they are too so it's weird that there was no stable society. It's like they stayed in the bronze age until the Europeans came.
It kind of did but it was strikingly late. IIRC agriculture spread fairly slowly south. Even stranger, potatoes are apparently native to Chiloe but civilization began far to the north. It could've been a much more integrated region.
Seriously if some nomads got their hands on llamas and managed to make some kind of chariot from the metals they had I could see them being the Mongols of SA and they'd loot their sedentary neighbours for metal or something.
Doubt llamas could efficiently pull a chariot.
 
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