CH3, CH4, CH5 & CH6

Things I learned from the reading:

(CH 3)

• The second and third civilizations were not that different from the first civilizations.
• Monarchs continued to rule most of the new civilizations; women remained subordinate to men in all of them; a sharp divide between the elite and everyone else presisted almost everywhere, as did the practice of slavery.
• no technological or economic breakthrough occurred to create new kinds of human societies as the Agricultural Revolution had done earlier or as the Industrial Revolution would do much later.
• Distinctive "wisdom traditions"; the great philosophical /religious systems of Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; Greek rationalism in the Mediterranean; and Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle East have provided the moral and spiritual framework within which most of the world's peoples have sought to order their lives and define their relationship to the mysteries of life and death.
• Technological innovations from China includes: piston bellows, the draw-loom, silk-handling machinery, the wheelbarrow, a better harness for draft animals, the crossbow, iron-chain suspension bridge, gunpowder, firearms, the magnetic compass, paper, printing and porcelain.
• India pioneered the crystallization of sugar and techniques for the manufacture of cotton textiles.
• Roman technological achievements are construction, civil engineering and the art of glassblowing.

• What is an empire: empires are simply states, political systems that exercise coercive power; the term, however, is reserved for larger and more aggressive states, those that conquer, rule, and extract resources from other states and peoples; thus empires have generally encompassed a considerable variety of peoples and cultures within a single political system, and they have often been associated with political or cultural oppression.
• Empires of the second-wave era -- Persia, Greece under Alexander the Great, Rome, China during the Qin and Han dynasties, India during the Mauryan and Gupta dynasties.
• For the most part, the second-wave civilizations in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, and China did not directly encounter one another, as each established its own political system, cultural values and ways of organizing society. Physically adjacent to each other, the emerging Persian Empire and Greek civilization experienced a century long interaction and clash.
• A system of imperial spies, known as the "eyes and ears of the King," of Persian Empire.
• The infrastructure of Persia: a system of standardized coinage, predictable taxes levied on each province, and a newly dug canal linking the Nile with the Red Sea, a "royal road' of 1,700 miles in length.
• The Greeks called themselves Hellenes.
• The political system of the Greeks were small city-states, the idea of "citizenship," of free people managing the affair of state, of equality for all citizens before the law.
• Athenian democracy is different from modern democracy. Women, slaves, and foreigners, together far more than half of the population, were wholly excluded from political participation.
• The Greco-Persian Wars
• The chief significance of Alexander's conquests lay in the widespread dissemination of Greek culture during the Hellenistic era (322-30 B.C.E.) to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India.

• The values of early Roman republic: rule of law, the rights of citizens, the absence of pretension, upright moral behavior and keeping one's word - were later idealized as 'the way of ancestors.'
• Roman's army was well-trained, well-fed, and well-rewarded.
• In acquiring an empire, Rome had betrayed and abandoned its republican origins.
• During the first two centuries C.E., the Empire provided security, granduer, and relative prosperity for the Mediterranean world. It's called the pax Romana, the Roman peace, the era of imperial Rome's greatest extent and greatest authority.

• Qin Shihuandi reunited the warring states of China, with its effective bureaucracy, subordinate aristocracy, army equipped with iron weapons, rapidly rising agricultural output and a growing population. 
• Qin adopted a political philosophy called Legalism, which advocated clear rules and harsh punishments as a means of enforcing the authority of the state.
• Shihuandi imposed a uniform system of weights, measures, and currency and standardized the length of axles for carts and the written form of the Chinese language.
• The Han dynasty that followed retained the centralized features of Shihuandi's creation, although it moderated the harshness of his policies, adopting a milder and moralistic Confucianism in place of Legalism as the governing philosophy of the states.

• Both Rome and the Chinese state invested heavily in public works - roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, protective walls - all designed to integrate their respective domains militarily and commercially.
• Christianity in Rome and Buddhism in China.
• The various peoples from the Roman empire were able to maintain their separate cultural identities far more that was the case in China.
• What makes good government? Rome: good laws. China: good men.

• Political fragmentation and vast cultural diversity of Indian civilization.
• Ashoka of Mauryan India, conversion to Buddhism.
• Culture in art, literature, temple building, science, mathematics and medicine flourished in the Gupta era.

(CH4)

• Around 500 B.C.E., Confucianism and Daoism in China, Upanishads gave expressions to the classical philosophy of Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism and Judaism in the Middle East, and a rational and humanistic tradition found expression in the writings of Socrates, Plato Aristotle and others in Greece. Jewish religious outlook later became the basis for Christianity and Islam.
• Chinese and Greek thinkers focused more on the affairs of this world and credited human rationality with the power to understand that reality.
• Indian, Persian, and Jewish intellectuals explored the unseen realm of the divine and the relationship of God or the gods to human life.
• The notion of the Mandate of Heaven in China.
• To Legalist thinkers, the solution to China's problems lay in rules or laws, clearly spelled out and strictly enforced through a system of rewards and punishments.
• Confucian answer to solving the problems was not laws and punishments, but the moral example of superior was the key to restore social harmony. In both political and family life, the cultivation of ren - translated as human-heartedness, benevolence, goodness, nobility of heart - was the essential ingredient of a tranquil society.
• Believing that people have a capacity for improvement, Confucius emphasized education as the key to moral betterment.
• Daoists urged withdrawal into the world of nature and encouraged behavior that was spontaneous, individualistic, and natural.
• Indian elite culture embraced the divine and all things spiritual with enthusiasm and generated elaborate philosophical visions about the nature of ultimate reality.
• The Vedas and the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. Atman, moksha, samsara, karma. Bhakti moement: devotion to a particular deity.
• Buddha's teaching: suffering and the end of suffering.
• Theravada and Mahayana (the Great Vehicle). Bodhisattvas, spiritually developed people who are postponing their own entry into nirvana to assist those who are still suffering.
• Zoroastrianism of Persian Empire. Did not last in its birth place. Some elements of Zoroastrianism were incorporated into Judaism: the conflict of God and an evil counterpart (Satan); the notion of a last judgement and resurrected bodies; a belief in the final defeat of evil; the arrival of a savior (Messiah); and the remaking of the world at the end of time, and the concept of heaven and hell.
• The Jews came to understand their relationship to Yahweh as a contract or a covenant.
• The Greek way of knowing: its emphasis on argument, logic, and the relentless questioning of received wisdom; its confidence in human reason; its enthusiasm for puzzling out the world without much reference to the gods.
• As Christianity spread within the Roman Empire and beyond, it developed a hierarchical organization, with patriarchs, bishops, and priests - all men - replacing the house churches of the early years, in which women played a more prominent part.
• Doctrinal differences: the nature of Jesus, his relationship to God (equal or inferior), and the concept of Trinity.

(CH5)

• The examination system in China provided a modest measure of social mobility in an otherwise quite hierarchical society.
• Hard conditions provoked periodic peasant rebellions, which have punctuated Chinese history for over 2,000 years.
• In India, birth determined social status for most people; little social mobility was available for the vast majority; sharp distinctions and great inequalities characterized social life; and religious traditions defined these inequalities as natural, eternal and ordained by the gods. The caste system.
• Jati, occupationally based groups, blended with the varna system to create India's unique caste-based society.
• Marriage and eating together were permitted only within an individual's own jati. Each jati was associated with a particular set of duties, rules, and obligations, which defined its members'unique and separate place in the larger society.
• India's social system gave priority to religious status and ritual purity, whereas China elevated political officials to the highest of elite positions.
• Virtually all civilizations practiced some form of slavery. Although, the second-wave civilizations differed considerably in the prominence and extent of slavery in their societies. In China, it was a minor element, amounting to 1% of the population. Indian slavery was more restrained than that of other ancient civilizations. 
• The Greco-Roman world society was based on slavery. In Athens, about one-third of the total population was slaves. By the time of Christ, the Italian heartland of the Roman Empire had some 2 to 3 million slaves, representing 33 to 40% of the population. The vast majority of Roman slaves had been prisoners captured in the many wars that accompanied the creation of the empire. Unlike American slavery of later times, Roman practice was not identified with a particular racial or ethnic group. Egyptians, Syrians, Jews, Greeks, Gauls, North Africans... 

(CH6)

• The Mesoamerican Maya and the Andean Tiwanaku civilizations and several sub-Saharan civilizations such as Meroe, Axum and the Niger river valley thrived during the secon-wave civilization era.
• The absence of most animals capable of domestication meant that no pastoral societies developed in the Americas, and apart from llamas and alpacas in the Andes, no draft animals were available to pull plows or carts or to carry heavy loads for long distances.
• Civilization in the Niger River valley region, such as the city of Jenne-jeno, has very little archeological evidence of centralized state structures.
• The cosmic calendar of the Maya.
• The Maya political system: no central authority. Various centers of Maya civilization rose and fell.
• Because none of the civilizations from the Andes developed writing, historians are largely dependent on archaeology for an understanding of these civilizations.
• Moche was governed by warrior-priests.
• There advantages of farming people, as seen in the Bantu poeple:1)numerical, as agriculture generated a more productive economy, enabling larger numbers to live in a smaller area than was possible with a gthering and hunting way of life, 2) disease, for tje farmers brought with them both parasitic and infectious diseases - malaria... - to which foraging people had little immunity, 3)iron, so useful for tools and weapons, which Bantu migrants brought to many of their interactions with peoples still operating with stone-age technology.
• Pueblos of the North America. Among the Chaco elite were highly skilled astronomers.
• The Mound Builders of the eastern woodlands of North America. The Hopewell culture.