Order from us for quality, customized work in due time of your choice.
The early history of any civilization is mostly concerned with creating a stable society, which often primarily revolves around finding a source of food. Climate plays an integral part in that process, as a deviation in heat and rainfall can mean the difference between a bumper harvest and a devastating famine. Feeding tens of thousands of citizens through hunting and foraging is not only unsustainable but impossible. Cultivating crops for the people and the livestock is the priority for any settlement.
Egypt is an example of such a static civilization that depends on agriculture. The Nile is the heart of Egypt for a reason: the waters and floods were harnessed by Egyptians to irrigate crops in an otherwise arid region. However, away from the riverbanks, on both sides, lay a desert (Tignor et al. 58). As such, when a drought began, the Egyptians faced a decline in their harvests, and the surrounding desert moved in. Because the Nile was Egypts sole source of both food and cultural identity, the drought produced an abundant literary record [&] full of tales of woe (Tignor et al. 97). The drought threw the nation into a deep decline, which it survived, but suffered greatly in the process.
The population of the Indus River Valley faced the climate change too but adapted very differently. The settlements of Indus River were weak, and they completely disintegrated, as people turned to nomadic lifestyles, looking for pastures to breed livestock. The Vedic nomads ventured outwards from their homeland, and obtained resources, among other ways, through conquest. Each wave of occupation involved violence, but [&] the confrontations led them to embrace many of the ways of the vanquished (Tignor et al. 99). The nomads grew their knowledge of farming and animal husbandry and applied their metalworking skills to drive technological progress in that area to survive and expand.
These two examples show how differently people can suffer from and adapt to climate change. The Egyptians enjoyed the bounty of the Nile and based their entire society around the river, so they could only persevere through a devastating famine. In contrast, the Indus River Valley settlers abandoned their settlements and expanded outwards, conquering agrarian societies and adapting their technology to survive. The lesson of the two examples is that, regardless of how a civilization adapts to climate change, it will be a drastic and often regressive change.
Works Cited
Tignor, Robert, et al. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Order from us for quality, customized work in due time of your choice.