"Old Europe", roughly modern southeast Europe before about 3000 BC, is a popular could-have-been cradles of civilization that by unfortunately didn't boom or last.Being more mountainous, richer in trees, and not having a navigable river, would've made for a very different civilization than what we got in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Maybe more like the Levant?What are other candidates for cradle-of-civilization that didn't happen? And just general musings on the topic.
>>18004235A proposed reason for why Old Europe didn't do as well as Egypt or Iraq is that it wasn't surounded by deserts and sea, and therefore people could just move away from government and be free. Therefore the government couldn't gather strength and vertically integrate (which is what we call civilization).Civilization kind of requires good land, surounded by bad land, and bandits in the bad land to scare people into having a government.
>>18004256That’s an interesting thought I’ve had before, but not necessarily re Old Europe. It seems that you need to hit certain population densities to necessitate a drive to create complicated social systems, like those you see in proper civilizations. You need to bring order somehow when a bunch of people are living on top of each other—and in the cases of Egypt and the Levant have nowhere else to easily go.
>>18004235The Balkans are cursed, idk what it is but that place has all the prerequisites to prospers yet it has always been a hellhole.
>>18004235What? The Danube is a massive navigable river. You’re retarded
>>18004810>>18004235The real reason is that the Danube freezes for half the year, while the Euphrates and Nile do not.
>>18004256I wonder if a lack of written language for logistics and bureaucracy isn't also an issue. This is me talking out my ass but written language allows for continuity that memorization doesn't, since if your rememberers die then as long as someone knows the script you're fine, and I'd wager there's more scribes than rememberers. All of that is to say that when someone came in and took over in Mesopotamia they often just inherited the written language and you achieved a kind of continuity of knowledge. Even if bits and pieces got lost the fundamentals were kept. If you have rememberers, not scribes (IE druids) they are not going to be passive actors but instead an elite threat. Hence why Romans come in and kill the druids instead of co-opt them.So in prehistory let's say 3000 BC, the Cucuteni are invaded by the Fagati. In Mesopotamia when this happens the savages co-opt the scribes and are civilized and the systems of the conquered continue. In a non-literate population you don't have mental scribes (presumably), the people who remember shit are a threat for your power so they die. Now there's no continuity, now there's no building momentum. It's start from scratch each time.tl;dr imagine if in Mesopotamia when the primitive akkadians met the sumerians they just wiped the slate clean and had to start over. Then when the Kassites came they wiped the slate clean and had to start over. Then the Arameans came and did the same. That may be what happened in non-literate Danubian basin.
>>18004834walls(or barriers) are needed to keep barbarians out and serfs in, barbarians often serve as a arm of civilization delivering other barbarians that can be turned into serfs
>>18004256Is that really justifiable? What about the Indus valley and China?
>>18004235What counts as a cradle? What are the pre-requisites, I mean.Papua could have technically been one. They invented agriculture. But they didn't have pottery. Or livestock. Arguably because environmental factors.
>>18004446>that place has all the prerequisites to prospers???Half of it is mountains, distributed such that there's no one big fertile plain.It borders the sea, and the steppe, and the g*rmans, for optimal barbarian invasions.Most of its coast, and almost all of its good ports, are on "locked" seas, that you need to control the entries and exists from to even use.The one navigable river that exists comes from far away foreign place, and drops into a tripple locked sea, right next to the steppe nigerians.Most of the climate is too hot for comfort, but not hot enough for citrus, olives, etc. Scortching summers and freezing winters.No oil, few minerals, etc, etc, though it did pop off early with close to surface gold and copper (shit got mined out before writing was discovered).But of course, the one, big, main, massive reason, is that when the taxman comes you can just go innawoods (or inna mountains, as it is). Just walk away from the government, and go back home when the government leaves. Literally 5000 years of this. It only stopped in the 1960s or so.
>>18004810The Danube is the border of the Balkans, not the core of it. And it freezes every year. And it used to flood uncontrollably. And it empties into a huge swampy delta, next to the steppenig region. And it empties into a locked sea, that used to be very hard to navigate. And the good farmland is significantly above the water level of the Danube, not next to it, which mattered before cars and rail.Danube is a river that was mostly used as a border before modernity, canals, engine boats, rail, etc, for a reason. There is no "Danubian civilization" for a reason. The modern river is man made. The old river sucked.
>>18004435Supposedly as the Sahara dried up, all the people ended up in Egypt. Big population, on a narrow highway, that the taxman can patrol on a boat and you can't hide.It was the "richest province" of Rome for a reason - not because it had the most wealth, but because you could extract the most wealth. Easiest to tax.
>>18004956>What counts as a cradle?Invented, rather than imported, a way of life and industry that was sophisticated enough to then spread and be imported by other people who couldn't invent it.
>>18004834Writing is the result of civilization, rather than a prerequisite.You invent writing, to keep stock of your warehouse, economy, law and religion (state ideology). You get civilization first, then writing.
