What makes an area good for ancient civilization?

First precondition, is lots of population density in a particular area, which ideally means very fertile land surrounded by a sharp dropoff in density beyond that, hence river valleys.
Second precondition, is that you need a reason for people to cooperate (or be forced to cooperate) in large groups, and there needs to be enough coercion to maintain this.

One idea about why this might happen is that once the population density gets high, and humans tending some degree of warfare, then people will tend to band together in larger groups to form larger "war bands". These also tend to have lower size relative to the group (as more people pool together the "army" that they need include relatively fewer of the adult males).

This is then what results in cities, as centres of coordination for larger military groups, and as the result of war bands who form relatively rich elites with enough residual wealth for trade, etc. (as they're drawing a marginal part of the income of a large population).

The other idea about why this may happen is for irrigation, and for control of river flooding and such, agricultural works that benefit a large amount of people, but need large groups to coordinate them.

So ideal for civilization is probably high population density, lots of local competition, and also irrigation or river fed agriculture that requires a lot of coordination.

(Hence one idea about why Europe was not a place to which civilization emerged early, despite being a place where early farmers actually moved to quite early. Much of the continent probably did not maintain very high population densities from the slightly ill adapted Near Eastern agricultural toolkit suited to a warmer climate, and agriculture tended to be rain fed. Then it tended to adopt pastoralist elements that pushed further towards lower population densities and to increased mobility which again pushed further against large scale cooperative agricultural works.)
 

samcster94

Banned
The Greeks had few of these traits but had trade to take advantage of and could build boats, which by Mycenaean times, was well developed.
 
River valleys make good starters for a number of reasons, but not all river valleys produced civilizations and not all ancient civilizations were based on river valleys. They have many benefits and you can make many decent guesses but environmental determinism is something to be avoided. If you try to come up with a narrative there's going to be examples that defy that narrative. The Southern Lowlands of the Maya region have poor or even toxic soils and spotty rainfall. The Maya that built there, to use a famous quote by Arthur Demarest, had no business being there. Yet they found a way to build a powerful civilization that circumvented environmental disadvantages leading to a high population density that relied on that manipulation of nature. And Andean civilization can't even be traced to a floodplain of any kind.

You could have the best land for an ancient superpower, but it ultimately rests in a culture's interpretation of the landscape and willingness to live according to that interpretation. Granted some places are more practical to apply that interpretation than others, but human behavior is prone to unpredictability. People might think a river valley so fertile they didn't need to grow anything (like many river valleys and floodplains), or they might have extensive irrigation and other engineering projects without requiring an obvious top-down hierarchical command structure (like the Hohokam).

The basic requirements really seem to be the ability to form a high population density, some means of moving resources, and some means in which consent to urbanized polities is encouraged (in other words, 'going back' doesn't feel like a good idea). There's a million ways this could start, the rest is up to culture.

Heck, Baja California could be a cradle of civilization. It's super arid, but it's got plenty of halophyte plants and water can be obtained through wells, fog collection (Baja may not rain often, but it can get very foggy) and primitive desalination methods. A hydrological civilization there may be quite different from what we'd be used to but still have full potential to be a fascinating complex society.

So while you can get by with types of geography that have historically reliably produced agriculture societies, you're definitely not restricted to those types. As an alternate history writer and worldbuilder, as long as you can come up with some believable reason for why people might do what you want them to do, you have tremendous freedom in how you write your own history. To quote Bob Ross, "this is your world, you're the creator!". Going with something more unconventional might even make your timeline all the more interesting.
 
Something interesting I noticed is that the region surrounding narrow sea passages are also another important centers for civilization; almost acting as an alternative to river valleys. Ancient Greece (Aegean and the Bosphorus) along with Indonesia (Straight of Malacca and the Java Sea) are the prime examples in this.
 
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