Today we live in a world powered by oil and gas. We can put our cities just about anywhere. Food is shipped in and most of us in developed countries do not know where our food comes from – or if we do - we do not think about it much. However we all need to start thinking about it. To understand how important it is, it helps to take a quick look at a few of those early civilizations that have left us only monuments….

Three of the World’s First Civilizations (Did you notice they were all along rivers?)

The First Civilizations

Between 6000-3750 BC, a major cultural change in human behavior was again taking shape. People of unknown origin, which we call the Sumerians, moved out the mountains and began to settle in the southern flood plain of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Little is known about these people but it is certain that over the course of 2000 years the Sumerians learned to manage crops and animals in the heat and aridity of the lowlands of Mesopotamia. The key to their success was irrigation. In addition, the most important inventions of humankind, the plow and the wheel, came into use. With increasing skill and organization, these irrigation farmers harnessed the destructive spring floods of the Euphrates River, improved their crop yields to the point of producing surpluses, and laid the foundations of the world's first civilization, the city-states of Sumer.


Not long after the beginnings of Sumerian civilization, the elements of civilization emerged along the banks of the Nile River in Egypt and the Indus River in modern day Pakistan. Two civilizations also flourished in the Mediterranean, the Minoan and Mycenaean. Each of these civilizations had their ups and downs. Each made major contributions to human kind but what ties them together is the timing of their final demise. Starting around 2200 BC and culminating around 1200 BC….

“… states large and small along the Mediterranean coast from Anatolia (Turkey) to the Delta (of Egypt) and from the Aegean Sea in the west to the Zargos Mountains in the east collapsed or were destroyed in what seems to have been a general crisis of the civilized world.” Civilization in the West

Look back at the global temperature graph in the previous post. Notice something? The global temperature around 1200 BC was at its lowest point in 3000 years and had been decreasing for about 1000 years. Though historians can and do argue about the cause or causes of each states demise, every one of these civilizations had at least two important things in common – dependence on agriculture and drought.

Drought is lack of rainfall. Growing crops and growing populations require rain either directly or flowing into rivers to use for irrigation. Once human populations became dependent on agriculture to feed themselves, they make themselves dependent on the global climate. Hunter/gathers can move to where the rain is falling, city dwellers can not. When their agriculture is threatened there will be major disruptions in the organization of civilizations created when the climate was right for agriculture. It is just that simple!

The period of time between 1200 and 800 BC is known as the “Greek Dark Age,” at time when the people of the time returned to a “more primitive level of culture and society”.

Next Post: China and the Yellow River
Why Eurasia First? It’s Geography!