 Hello, my name is Philip Campbell. I'm a teacher and the author of Story of Civilization by Tan Books. My job is going to be to take you through each chapter of the textbook and help draw out the main points, review, and offer different insights to help you better understand the material. In this book, we're going to be looking at some of history's very earliest civilizations. So let's dive right in. How did people live in the very beginning? Well, there were no cities. There was no farming. There was just nomads. What's a nomad? A nomad is a person that doesn't really have a home. The first people were all nomads. Rather than live in cities, they wandered around. They hunted. They followed the animals. They were hunted wherever they would wander. They gathered berries or other things for food. And so they're always on the move, never settling down in one place. But this isn't civilization. And in this book, we're looking at civilization. When did civilization start and what is civilization? Civilization really begins when the nomadic peoples begin to settle down. They begin to build cities. They begin to live in one spot. That's what gives us civilization. And this began to happen around 7,000 years ago. It didn't happen quick. It took many many centuries. What caused people to settle down? Why did they stop wandering and settle down in one place? Well, we have to remember they were wandering to find food, to chase animals that they needed to eat, or find things to collect, berries, whatever. What happened was they learned how to farm. Once you farm, you can grow food in one spot and you don't have to wander around anymore. And so once people learned farming, they started settling down and people began gathering together and the first cities arose. Where were these first farming cultures? I'll tell you what, they were near rivers. Not just because rivers provided water, but because rivers tend to flood. And when the river floods, all the rich sands and the soil and the nutrients that are in those rivers will wash out over all the lands on the side of the river and make those lands very rich for farming, very easy to grow crops on. Now, if it's easy to grow crops on this land, that means that you can grow more of them and that you can support more and more people. And so more and more people started clustering together by these rivers. What rivers specifically? Well, especially the Tigris and Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, the Indus River in India, the Yangtzee in China, and the Nile River in Egypt. These are the great river valleys where civilization begun as people began farming more intensely and living together in bigger and bigger groups. So how did this change things? Well, the biggest change was once people came together in cities, not everybody needed to farm anymore. The land could produce more than enough food for many people and allowed others to do other occupations, such as being soldiers, being woodworkers, coppersmiths, weavers, or merchants. Merchants were people who loaded up the goods produced by others, maybe crops, maybe pottery, and they load them on ships or caravans and traded them with with other cities. And in this way, through trading different things that were produced, different advances spread. People learned how to do different things. One of the most important advances of the early civilization was writing, because once you can write, you can learn to communicate ideas more easily. If you can write a story down, it can be passed on from generation to generation. But if you just have to tell it over and over again, it's harder for it to be passed on. So once writing developed, this is really when civilization starts to take off. How did writing start? Surprisingly enough, it started with the merchants, these men who were loading, you know, jars of olives or pottery or things like that under these ships and trading them up and down the rivers. You see, when they loaded their ship full of goods, they had to keep track of how much stuff they had. And so they would take little clay tablets and make little marks on them to keep count. Eventually, these marks got more complicated and eventually they started turning into symbols that represented things. And before long, you have the beginning of a real writing, a real written language that was able to pass on information. And once people were able to express themselves in writing, then things began to really get complex. People could write ideas, ideas about religion, about government, about life. And so knowledge began to grow. So this didn't happen quickly. It happened over many hundreds of thousands of years, many times by trial and error. In this chapter, we mention a man named Shuka Latuta who's trying to learn how to farm. He throws a bunch of seed in the ground and then the wind blows down from the mountains and blows it all away. And he tries this again and again and the wind keeps blowing his seeds away. Who knows how many generations of people tried to do the same thing before someone like Shuka Latuta gets the idea hmm, I'm going to plant some trees and bushes to break the wind so it doesn't blow my stuff away. And so in the story Shuka Latuta plants trees and all of a sudden his garden becomes beautiful and grows all sorts of marvelous trees. So that's just an example of the trial and error of how early people had to figure out how to farm, how to build, how to do these certain things. All this happened probably between 4000 and 3000 BC. But by 3000 BC, you definitely had civilization on all these major river valleys. In our next chapter, we're going to take a look at one of the first and greatest civilizations, that of Egypt, which grew up along the Nile Valley. So hang in there and we'll pick up in chapter 2.