why are you there welcome to a new year
at heimlich sister in case you hadn't
heard the new AP World History
curriculum begins in the year 1200 CE or
ad depending on your persuasion and that
means that they have cut millennia out
of the curriculum it's not my intention
to comment on whether or not that's a
good change or a bad change I'm just
here to give you some context so that
when we plop down into 1200 we know
what's going on so sort of the meta
question they're gonna be dealing with
in this video is how did the human race
survive and thrive all the way up to
1200 I'm gonna start about 10,000 years
ago on this massive unfolding event
called the Neolithic Revolution or
sometimes called
the Agricultural Revolution now prior to
the Neolithic Revolution human beings
just basically survived by hunting and
gathering and wandering from place to
place
but somebody and nobody really knows who
discovered that if you plant seeds in
the ground on purpose and then you wait
around for those seeds to sprout up into
crops then you will have a lot more food
than you would by hunting and gathering
phenomenon of farming took place all
around the world at roughly the same
time give or take a few centuries but
the ogee farmers came from Southwest
Asia or to put a finer point on it
Mesopotamia and it is hard to oversell
the consequences of the advent of
farming first instead of wandering from
location to location now people largely
settled in one place and as a result of
that they begin to build permanent
structures especially for the storage of
crops and the purposes of religion I
don't like that but when you've got more
than enough food people start making
babies ad nauseam and there was a huge
population explosion as I mentioned
before this happened all over the world
at different times and in different
circumstances but one thing that was
common to all these agricultural
societies is that they grew up around
water specifically rivers and among the
most important River Valley societies
were the following the Nile River
Society in North Africa the Yellow River
Valley in East Asia the Indus River
Valley in South Asia the river valleys
of Mesoamerica and the Andes mountain
society so apparently when people stay
in one place for their crops for long
enough they will eventually create
cities in fact the word civilization
just means a society that has a city but
first of the major cities came on to the
stage about 6,000 years ago first in
Mesopotamia and then in the Nile River
Valley and the building programs in
these cities was astonishing they built
pyramids and ziggurats and palaces for
the elite and one of the consequences of
this elaborate ordering of society was
hierarchy
hierarchy just means that these
societies were broken up into groups of
people that were distinguished by class
and those at the top of the hierarchy
were usually the ones who were writing
the laws and levying taxes on all the
plebs down below one of the most famous
legal codes was called the Code of
Hammurabi and this code laid down clear
lines for societal hierarchies and
punishments for law breaking now when we
hear an eye for an eye we tend to think
of the first five books of the Jewish
Scriptures namely the books of Moses but
the justice system of Hammurabi was the
first to mention an eye for an eye and
maybe of equal importance during this
time was the invention of writing of the
first uses of this technology were to
keep track of the grain supplies in any
given city in Mesopotamia the written
language was called cuneiform and in
Egypt it was called hieroglyphics but
eventually written language burst free
from these utilitarian purposes and they
began to produce literature and in this
literature they wrote stories have
explained the creation of the world and
expounded the meaning of life the most
famous of these was the epic of
gilgamesh for Mesopotamia the Book of
the Dead from Egypt and the Rigveda from
the Indus Valley also during this time
some of the world's major religions
emerge out of these civilizations out of
the Indus River Valley Hinduism arose
now Hinduism was a polytheistic religion
which is to say they worshipped many
gods and it taught that one over all
God's peer reviewed itself in many forms
and then all the way over in Southwest
Asia to the great monotheistic religions
which is to say they worshiped one God
arose the Persians gave us sorrow
Astraea nism and the Hebrews over in
Israel gave us Judaism now eventually
cities that were in close proximity to
each other especially those who held
similar religious beliefs United to form
the early empires you should know that
the kings of these empires almost always
claimed divinity in order to consolidate
their power and one more thing about
this period not every human being on the
planet during this time was accounted
for in terms of a city or an empire
there was still a significant group of
people who continued their hunting and
gathering in nomadic ways and they are
known as the pastoralists we'll see how
important they were later but for now
you just need to understand that by
going to and fro between the major
civilizations pastoralists fostered
important connections and cultural
exchanges between those empires okay
that gets us up to about 600 BCE in
which there's a new turning point for
the thriving and the surviving of human
beings at this point in history the
world is getting way more populated and
therefore way more complicated so I'm
going to break this down into two
sections first we'll look at religious
and cultural developments and then
second we'll look at the developments of
city-states and empires
alright first religious and
development during this period the major
religions develop and spread into New
Territories Jews for example bring their
religion into all corners of the known
world and usually this happened not
because they chose to but because they
were compelled to by foreign invaders
around 600 BC the Assyrians invaded
Israel and brought many Jews back to
Assyria as prisoners of war and later
the Romans scattered the Jews all over
their empire as well but sometimes
Judaism did spread because it was
carried voluntarily by Jewish merchants
to all the major trade cities across
Europe and South Asia and East Asia are
I go over to India at this time and
Hinduism becomes the fundamental
ordering principle for Indian society
especially its teaching on caste this
teaching said that all living things
were ordered into a hierarchical
structure and a living being can move up
or down that structure not in this life
but in a series of successive lives
depending on their behavior so it's
important to know that Hinduism became
the social glue that held Indian society
together for millennia but these two
religions themselves also experienced
change during this time out of Hinduism
came a new system of belief called
Buddhism which began in South Asia
around 500 BCE Buddhism still held for
example the teaching about reincarnation
that came from Hinduism but it differed
in the way that it did away with the
hierarchical caste system so the main
teaching of Buddhism is that life is
suffering and if the reason why we
suffer is because we desire and
therefore the way to stop suffering is
to kill desire how do you do that while
you live a life that follows a set of
behaviors outlined in something called
the Eightfold Path and then out of
Judaism arose Christianity in the first
century a prophet and a preacher from
northern Israel by the name of Jesus of
Nazareth came on to the scene and he
preached that salvation is not by means
of proper behavior but by believing in
his own saving death and resurrection
for the forgiveness of sin and even
these two innovations were innovated
upon as they spread into different
cultures as Buddhism travelled into
different cultures in the east it
developed new forms you get forms like
tera vaada Buddhism and Mahayana
Buddhism which were more salvation astre
lidge's than the original teachings of
the Buddha and his Christianity spread
there was at least two major distinctive
expressions of you had the Roman
Catholics on the west and then you have
the Orthodox Christians known as the
Byzantines in the East all right let's
fly over to China and see what's
happened in that during this period the
teachings of Confucius came to unify
China after a period of turmoil known as
the warring States Period now confuse
became the bedrock of Chinese society
because it provided a predictable way of
ordering society based on a hierarchical
structure according to Confucius if
everybody in a society plays their
particular role and plays it rightly
then that society will be a piece rulers
must rule wisely subjects must object
themselves with deference and honor
now many empires are going to come and
go throughout Chinese history but
Confucianism is the one thing that seems
to be a continuity throughout all of now
about the same time that Confucianism
was making its debut in China Taoism is
coming onto the scene in East Asia now
Confucius emphasized the ordering of
human relations but Dao is taught that
people must look away from human
creations and institutions and look to
the order of nature for how to live then
if we fly over to Africa and the
Americas and some parts of East Asia
will see a religious form called animism
and shamanism animism taught that the
natural world had spiritual power
embedded in it and shamans were the
priestly kind of folks that had access
to control and direct that spiritual
power and these religious forms had
endless variations depending on where
you found them okay that's how religions
were developing during this period now
let's turn our attention to the
development of city-states and empires
so the major city states and empires for
the most part throughout the world knew
about each other if they were divided by
large distances sometimes they became
trading partners and then just as often
if they were close to one another they
went to war one of the consequences of
frequent war between different empires
was the exchange of Technology oh man
this thing you just stabbed me with is
way better than that thing I just tried
to stab you with hey guys we got to get
one of these all right so let's just fly
around the world again in the six
different regions and see what's going
on with their empires and city-states
let's start with the Persian empires the
first notable mention is the Achaemenid
Empire which lasted from about 550 to
330 BCE and this Empire was so large
that the Emperor used regional leaders
called se traps to govern the affairs of
different districts and they produced an
elaborate highway system that served to
move armies quickly to distant parts of
the Empire this is the case with many of
these old empires the Achaemenids
overextended themselves and therefore
became vulnerable to attack and it was
the Greek hero Alexander the Great who
did the honor of conquering them but
about a century later the Parthian
Empire rose and took back much of what
have been taken by Alexander now the
Chinese Empire here we need to consider
the chin and the Han Dynasty so after a
tumultuous and chaotic period known as
the
warring States period the Qin Dynasty
came into being in 220 BCE now the
Chinese believed in something called the
Mandate of Heaven which said that the
heavens would provide for them a leader
who would rule them with justice that is
until that ruler started governing like
a turd and then he would be ousted so
after the warring States Period the
heavens provided Qin Shi Huangdi and he
established the philosophy of legalism
which gave to the Chinese society clear
rules of command and strict layers of
bureaucracy and everything was good in
that legalistic society as long as you
followed the rules but if not the
punishments were severe now the Qin
Dynasty itself didn't last very long at
all it ended in 206 BCE but it did
establish a dynastic foundation that
would be in place in China for centuries
and millennia to come after the Qin came
the Han Dynasty which lasted for another
400 years and the Han Dynasty existed
roughly at the same time period as the
Roman Republic and the Roman Empire and
as such the Hans and the Romans
established diplomatic ties with one
another and patterns of trade now the
Han Empire was at least as big as the
Roman Empire and at least as wealthy but
pound for pound it was technologically
far more advanced than the Romans were
it was the Hans who began building the
Great Wall of China in order to squash
invasions from the north and that
construction continued for the next
thousand years Han rulers also dug
canals that lengthened north to the
south which not only provided conditions
for a flourishing trade but also helped
the government keep the Empire unified
with the common culture all right let's
look at the Mediterranean empires first
let's stop by the Phoenician city states
because of their advanced seafaring
capabilities the Phoenicians established
colonies all throughout Greece and Italy
and North Africa and Spain and usually
these colonies were established not by
military conquest but by diplomacy and
trade and it was the Phoenicians that
gave us the oldest known alphabet and
taught its people to read from left to
right you can read this bank of
Phoenician now the Phoenicians deeply
influenced the next group of people were
going to consider in the Mediterranean
namely the Greeks the system of Greek
city-states came onto the scene about
600 BCE and exited around 330 BC the
Greeks gave to the world the ideas of
citizenship and democracy just so you
know the democratic process in the Greek
city-states only included free white
males but don't let that sully the idea
that people actually had the ability to
influence their government at the time
this was a revolutionary idea and then a
little later come the Romans
the Romans were deeply influenced by
Greek culture even though the Roman army
conquered Greece about a century after
Alexander the Great's death and the
Romans were deeply dedicated to building
and you see this in there
great aqueducts and their extensive
system of roads and just like the Han
the Romans encouraged the spread and
settlement of its people throughout the
vast stretches of its empire in order to
solidify the Roman culture the western
half of the empire centered in Rome fell
in 476 but the eastern half of the
Empire centred in Constantinople lasted
for another thousand years last of all
let's fly over to the Americas and see
what's happening in the Mesoamerican and
Andean civilization first in Mesoamerica
you've got the mines and in their
civilization they build huge monumental
structures that functioned as religious
temples and they were famous for
advancing the process of agriculture and
systems of writing and astronomical
Charlie let's not forget they got real
good at human sacrifice also another
honorable mention in this area goes to a
city called Teotihuacan you've probably
never even heard of it but it was one of
the largest cities in the world at that
time climbing over two hundred thousand
inhabitants they had a complex
governmental bureaucracy huge reservoirs
and whole apartment complexes made out
of stone and last of all let's visit our
friends in South America the mocha
civilization in the Andean region lasted
from about 100 to 800 seee
its government was controlled by a class
of warrior priests and they bore many
similarities to other Mesoamerican
civilizations ok our troop around the
world while incomplete is complete and
that was a lot to take in but let me try
to summarize everything I've said by way
of comparison before 1200 cities were
important parts of every Empire and all
the ancient cities contain hubs of art
trade religious structures and
governmental buildings the social
structures of ancient civilizations were
pretty similar to for the most part
societies were organized hierarchically
at the top you have the political
religious elites and under them and the
order depends on which civilization
you're looking at you have merchants and
warriors and crafts peoples and laborers
and slaves and all the old empires fell
for some combination of the following
three reasons overextension internal
disruptions and outside invaders they
may have noticed that after all of this
we have not yet reached up to 1200 but
once we start the AP World History
curriculum proper we're gonna be
reaching back into these events in order
to give you the context for everything
that happened in 1200 a good luck this
year in AP World History you want more
videos like this one for the new AP
World History curriculum then subscribe
and come along I'll be releasing new
content videos every single week of the
school year so I'm Laura