Explain why most historians consider the era around 1000 B.C.E. to have been both destructive and transformative for most major world civilizations. Your answer should draw on examples from Greece, India, Mesopotamia, and China

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: The climacteric of the late second millennium B.C.E. damaged and changed the frameworks of civilization. Transformation was possible because traditions survived, revived,or because there were stimulating outside influences. In Greece and India, people forgot the art of writing, and they had to reinvent it from scratch after hundreds of years. Recovery sometimes happened in new places and among new peoples. After the extinction of the Harappan world, civilization gradually emerged in India, far from the Indus. In Sri Lanka, monumental irrigation works and buildings arose. In Mesopotamia and China, the centers of activity and initiative were relocated, but, again, the continuities of tradition, which are the foundations of progress, were never entirely lost. Traditions spread through neighboring regions. Greek civilization crystallized on the edges of the Greek world, in islands and small colonies around the Ionian and Aegean seas. Fertilized by Phoenicia and Greece, a ring of ambitious cities and states formed around the Mediterranean and Black seas.