Describe the defining features of agrarian civilizations.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Wherever agrarian civilizations appeared, they displayed similar features, and these are the features used to define and identify this type of human community. Here is a brief shortlist of the types of things one expects to find when encountering an agrarian civilization:

Agriculture: Agrarian civilizations were based on the productivity of large numbers of peasants or agriculturalists. Their basic technology was agriculture,just as the basic technology of the Paleolithic era was foraging.

Cities: They also contained cities, regions of very dense settlement and with a greater variety of jobs and specializations than villages. The cities drew in the wealth and resources of their rural hinterlands, so it was in the cities that most wealth was found.

States: It was also in the cities that power was concentrated. Here was where rulers spent most of their time and where the largest buildings, the highest walls, and the most beautiful temples wereusually to be found. The cities and their leaders were at the heart of these large coercive power structures, which have beenidentified as “states.”

Specialization and a Division of Labor: Agrarian civilizations were characterized by a much greater variety of human occupations and roles than all earlier types of societies. This was one measure of their greater complexity, but also a major explanation for the huge increase in the diversity of ideas and therefore in the synergy of Collective Learning in this era.

Armies: Rulers and states also concentrated power, and the most obvious form this concentration took was the creation of armies, large disciplined bodies of fighters who could be used to conquer neighbors or suppress internal opposition.

Writing: All agrarian civilizations developed writing in some form, because writing was itself a powerful way of controlling resources (in the form of accounting) or ideas (in the form of laws or religious pronouncements, or even in the form of auguries announced by rulers often with the help of soothsayers or astronomers).

Tributes:In agrarian civilizations, flows of wealth commonly took the form of tributes. Tributes are very different from trade: they are flows of wealth and goods and labor that are controlled mainly through the threat or reality of coercion. Slavery is the most obvious form of tribute, but a tribute-taking society is one in which many flows of resources are controlled by the threat of force, in which physical violence is regarded as admirable in many contexts (so that elites are warriors), and is regarded as acceptable in the household not just in relations with slaves butalso within the family.