Task 1
Carrie A. Nuxoll
Western Governor’s University
Themes in U.S. and World History/GKE1
March 10, 2013

Have you ever wondered about any great significant physical geographic factors that contributed to the development of our great United States? I must say, to do this, you must first look at the history of past great human societies trials and tribulations. For example, take a look a look at the history of Egypt and the Nile Valley civilizations. According to our course readings, Keita (2007) feels these ancient civilizations “were defined by the rich alluvial soils that annual floods deposited along the Nile banks and in the delta and the flood plains”. These annual floods gave rise to the development of these early civilizations by cultivating ingenuity, such as a rudimentary calendar, in which these civilizations could plan their years around cultivating the rich fertile land, and in turn, produced goods for these societies to make use of. This lead to the immigration of other societies to the area in order to flourish. With these immigrants came the process of diffusion. According to a PowerPoint created by our readings, diffusion can be defined as a geographic way of describing the way things spread [ (R. Whiting, 2014) ]. As course mentor Robert Whiting, of General Education Social Science states in his PowerPoint presentation, almost anything people think, make, or do can be diffused to another society and that people often change or adapt things to their own situations [ (R. Whiting, 2014) ]. Diffusion works off of a three step process that includes the origin, the transmission, and lastly, the replication. A perfect example of this would be the diffusion of the chariot from the Hyksos invasion into Egypt during the 18th century. As stated earlier, diffusion first starts with transmission, and in this case, the chariot was transmitted from