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What Is Civilization

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‘‘What is civilization?’’

Civilization made up from the effects of many different cultures and different actions of people. From past to today every culture had to pass different stages of life to survive in the wild nature. Gradually they developed themselves about procuring food and habitation. First they were hunter and gatherer, later they started to make agriculture and became more effective on the nature which was one of the very important part of the civilization. For all the cultures habitation and finding food is depend on the environments that they placed on and all the cultures are in relation with each other.
A Senegalese social scientist Cheikh Anta Diop has a theory about the roots of the civilization. He supports that Ethiopians and the Egyptians played a key role in the processing of civilization by their developments in science, art and religion. These developments were required for the adaptation of the people. The Greeks interiorized the elements of civilization which they inspired from Egyptians, continued to develop them and spread them to the Eurasians. The Greek philosophers and scholars thoughts were shaped by the Egyptians. Their style of architecture was similar with the Egyptians’. They also effected from Egyptians’ literature like fables. One of the French writers, La Fontaine, inspired from a Greek writer, Aesop. Diop also claim that Greeks impressed their gods from Egypt. He proved that with the foreign sources which were mostly written by Egyptians.
Apart the theory of Diop, there is a big relation between religion and civilization. People had found supernatural solutions or explanations for natural problems like climate change, volcanic eruptions or darkness and lightness and they also have a supernatural solution for fertility – mother goddess which was a symbol of fertility – which was very important for the people who have sedentary lifestyle. Because they were depend on land and with the increasing of the population they were going to need more crops and that meant need more people to work on lands.
Cheikh Anta Diop’s last thesis about the spread of the civilization is about the origins of the Egyptians’. He said that ‘‘Egypt is a Negro country, with a civilization created by Blacks’’ and he support that as a reason for the denial of the roots of civilization.

Elif Mengü – 15741

Referance: * Exchanges: A Global History Reader * Lecture notes

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