- 6,870
- 16,759
If you want to define "advanced" by how well feed a people are, how quickly and easily they can communicate, how well they can safely and comfortably and quickly they can transport themselves, how comfortable their lives are, their ratio of work to consuming goods and services that they want to have, the amount of books and other written media that get published per year, the ability to measure the minutes and hours, the ability to cure diseases that once were lethal, the ability to reduce infant mortality and the ability to extend the length and enhance the quality of life, our civilization today is more advanced then any of the great civilizations of the past.
Every metric I just mentioned makes the modern Industrialized World even more advanced than any ancient civilization when we apply those measurements to the ordinary person from the present and to those from the distant past. The wealthy and powerful of today live longer, have less physical pain, can communicate faster, can travel faster and generally enjoy more comfortable lives than their elite counterparts. However, the median income person from Ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, China or anywhere else had a standard of living that was appallingly low compared to all but the poorest and most marginalized people in the Developed World of AD 2011. In some respects, even the poor people of A.D. 2011 live better lives than Kings, Pharoahs, Emperors, Shahs, High Priests, Popes and other people at the very top of pre modern societies. Many people who are considered poor in the contemporary US have cars and electronic goods that were obviously unavaliable to anyone in A.D 1800, let alone 1800 BC.
In Canada and France, for instance, a poor person does not even have to pay at the point of servce and he or she can have dental work done with anthestetic and penicillian or get emergency treatment for heart attacks or can have servered limbs reatached or have failing vital organs transplanted. Everywhere in the Developed Nations, middle class people get surgeries (like hip and knee replacement, heart surgery, cancer removal, gall bladder surgery and other fixes to internal organs or to their bones and joints) and medicaions that delay or reverse ailments that ranged from mildly uncomfortable to lethal and that allow people to not only survive but to thrive and be active into their 70's and 80's. This stands in contrast the Ancient World when life expectancy in the ancient world up through the 18th century was consistently in the 30's (and was in the 50's when you accounted for very high infant and mortality and the high percentage of children who died from disease) and that was in times and places when extreme tyranny, famines, warfare, plagues or collapses in social cohesion were not occuring or were kept to a minimum.
To add to the illusaion that we are no better off then the Ancients is the salient fact that not only is history written by the winner but even more reliably, history is written by the elite, more recently people from outside of the rulin gclass have been able to write their own histories. However, for most of the time that people could write the ruleing classes had a virtual monopoly on it, especially before the advent of movable type and before movable type (invented circa AD 1450) the authorship of history and of everything else related to letters, for that matter, was in the hands of the elite. The life of the average person was always very poor an it was simply a matter of the degree of hardship suffered by the masses, life in ancient Egypt would be better for peasant because the Nile was more relaible than other rivers and the Royal and Noble families did provide effective protection from invaders and bandits compared to peasants elsewhere who lived in even deeper squalor than the peasants of the Nile Valley who lived in during the years when the Pharoahs were able to keep out foreign invasion and the slaughter, enslavement and even higher taxation that came with such a traumatic event.
In certain times and places in the non industrialized World (which is to say the entire world before circa 1700 AD), a series of conditions would be met: fate would allow crops to not fail and plagues to not spread and farm animals would not die and floods would not be catastrophic ect. there would be a ruler who could assemble and lead an army against bandits and rival nations and who also possed the legitimacy so that the nation would not face civil war (which was common in those times, domestic warfare would determine who would be the ruler, especially if there was no clear line of succession) and yet this ruler had to be enlightened enough to not impose punishing taxation or to murder huge numbers of his or her own subjects or to start a civil war with his nobles.
If a nation had such good fortune and an exceptional ruler it could provide a marginally better life for its ordinary people. The peasant farmers, who were about 90% of the people in any pre industrial society would not starve and if they had an especially good year they might have enough food to eat and a little extra to make into alcohol and they might even get to have a little bit of cheese a few days of the week and meat a few days of the year. During these relatively good times, the pre industrialized nation would see a very big improvement in the lives of its elite, with farmers being alive and producing grain, they had much more tax revenues and they could build and expand their palaces and their scribes, monks, priests, courtiers and that one one hundredth of the population that could read would look around the palace and declare their times to be drastically better and it was true, if you gauge society's wealthy by how well its very richest people fare.
If there happened to be a few generations of decent rulers, no huge war to kill a large number of the elite (to their credit, ancient rulers did at least lead armies into battle), no famines to ever cause the royal family and the nobles to have to ration food or be hungry or any other calamity visited on the royal and noble houses and there were no civil wars over royal succession, that age would usually be classified as a Golden Age by historians because historians, until relatively recenetly, foused on the lives of the ruling class, they used very little archeology to see how ordinary people lived (In many literate societies, the details of people's lives were never put into writing, most writing was religious or commercial or for government admninistration and if they did write about personal lives, it was about people from the ruling class and therefore only archeology would tell historians about the lives outside of the palaces), they focused on political history and finally, they focused on the artistic and scientific achievments enjoyed by the elites.
It is not surprising at all that ancient Kem't/Egypt would have been seen as very advanced, when you lookat it through the eyes of its elites, its ruling and intellectual class. If someone today used the accounts of the scribes and maybe the ruins of the stone palaces and the artifact of gold found in tombs (or rather a tomb, in the case of Ancient Egypt most were cleared out by tomb robbers centuries before archeologists could get to them) Around 2,000 BC, The Nile Valley had fertile farm land, reliable floods that watered and replenished the soil and the transportation and communication provided by the Nile river allowed Egypr to be ruled centrally so the Pharoah and his nobles had a much larger tax base from which to extract wealth and it allowed there to be scholars and artisans that could peform feats of engineering, mathematics, art and even medicine that were remarkable, certainly by the standards of that time, when even agriculture was not universally practiced in Europe or parts of Eastern Asia. The quality of life for the average ancient Egyptian, however, was not much better during its Golden Ages than during its Dark Ages (or Intermediate periods, as is the case for times in Ancient Egyptian history when the Kingdom was either invaded or when it was politically fractured), nor would it have been much better than the life of the average person in Europe or Asia or the Americas at any time in history before about circa A.D. 1750.
It also should be noted that while civilization has generally been advancing technologically for the last few thousand years there can be decades and centuries of setbacks, disasters or break downs of societies and knowledge can be lost and/or forgotten. Throughout the Ancient and Medieval World there were techniques for making steel, detecting earthquakes (In Han China circa A.D. 100, the occurance of an earthquake in a distant province could be detected with the use of a machine located in the imperial capital) for practicing medicine (Medieval Islamic Doctors were able to remove cataracts from the eye) or for making chemicals or structures that were used and they usually improved the lives of people (I say "usually" because in the case of "Greek Fire," a concotion from the medieval Byzantine Empire which was similar to Napalm, the Arab warriors who were lit on fire by it did not have their lives improved very much, especially when you consider that it was used in Naval battles and this medieval napalm would still burn when you jumped into the water). A Katana from medieval Japan or Damascus Steel swords from the Medieval Islamic World were also very effective pieces of steel that were made made to kill and while knowledge of the how the former is made remains intact, the knowledge of how to make the latter has disappeared like "Greek Fire."
Despite their being useful, a lot of ancient technology was done by craftsmen and artisans and others who were illiterate and/or were unwilling to divulge their secrets so during times when a society would regress the technique could be forgotten and no text on that lost knowledge could exist to be unearthered in later centuries. The fact that useful knowledge can be lost or forgotten is what produced myths and legends of places like Atlantis, it is why the Anglo-Saxons in 8th Century Britain thought that the ruins of the old Roman provincial City, Londinium, were proof a city that was actually once inhabited by giants and in other parts of the World, where ever societies suffered major backslides, the forgotten technology, of which the people knew but about which they knew very little, became the foundation for powerful legends that captured people's imagination and still do today. Contemporary technology had allowed people to mass produce similar products and often times make superior products or substitutes for those products of lost knowledge and just because scientists and engineers cannot reverse engineer all of those products of lost knowledge does not ake that past civilizations were anywhere close to being as advanced as our own.
The most likely explanation for the Pyramids is both extremely banal but also extremely impressive. What is most likely in the case of the Pyramids was that The Nile Valley was ruled by a single powerful ruler who was able to aggregate most of the surplus wealth (that is to say what was produced minus what was consumed in a given period of time) into his hands and he used a great deal of it to have a grand masoleum built for himself. The fact that it was huge shows that Egypt's Nile Valley was especially Fertile and it freed up enough labor and surplus food to allow for the project to happen and the Nile river allowed the heavy stones to be moved from distant quarries to the build site. The fact that the Great Pyramids at Giza are aligned in a manner that was the product of astronomy is no surprise because ancient civilizations that have a permanent class of literate scribes and priests all have studied the stars and the Pyramids reflected their knowledge of the stars. Finally, the Pyramids were also a relefction in a more literal sense, they were once covered with shiny white rocks that were cut at an angle, that would fit into the steps of the Pyramids that allowed the Pyramids to be smooth and to throw off very bright light light. It would have been difficult to look at during the day time and by night it would have reflcted the light of the moon and looked other worldly.
In short, Ancient Egypt did what many ancient civilizations did, the ruler skimmed the surplus produce, minerals and labor from the masses and built huge edifices for the purpose of aggrandizing himself durin gand after his life. The Egyptians used techniques that we do not know exactly how they worked and because history at that time was written entirel yas the voice of the elite, life for the Egyptian elite was heavenly. However, this handful of impressive facts should not be used to create the false conclusion that the average person in Egypt in 2011 B.C. had a better quality of life than even a relatively poor person in the US or Europe of Japan in the year A.D 2011.
Every metric I just mentioned makes the modern Industrialized World even more advanced than any ancient civilization when we apply those measurements to the ordinary person from the present and to those from the distant past. The wealthy and powerful of today live longer, have less physical pain, can communicate faster, can travel faster and generally enjoy more comfortable lives than their elite counterparts. However, the median income person from Ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, China or anywhere else had a standard of living that was appallingly low compared to all but the poorest and most marginalized people in the Developed World of AD 2011. In some respects, even the poor people of A.D. 2011 live better lives than Kings, Pharoahs, Emperors, Shahs, High Priests, Popes and other people at the very top of pre modern societies. Many people who are considered poor in the contemporary US have cars and electronic goods that were obviously unavaliable to anyone in A.D 1800, let alone 1800 BC.
In Canada and France, for instance, a poor person does not even have to pay at the point of servce and he or she can have dental work done with anthestetic and penicillian or get emergency treatment for heart attacks or can have servered limbs reatached or have failing vital organs transplanted. Everywhere in the Developed Nations, middle class people get surgeries (like hip and knee replacement, heart surgery, cancer removal, gall bladder surgery and other fixes to internal organs or to their bones and joints) and medicaions that delay or reverse ailments that ranged from mildly uncomfortable to lethal and that allow people to not only survive but to thrive and be active into their 70's and 80's. This stands in contrast the Ancient World when life expectancy in the ancient world up through the 18th century was consistently in the 30's (and was in the 50's when you accounted for very high infant and mortality and the high percentage of children who died from disease) and that was in times and places when extreme tyranny, famines, warfare, plagues or collapses in social cohesion were not occuring or were kept to a minimum.
To add to the illusaion that we are no better off then the Ancients is the salient fact that not only is history written by the winner but even more reliably, history is written by the elite, more recently people from outside of the rulin gclass have been able to write their own histories. However, for most of the time that people could write the ruleing classes had a virtual monopoly on it, especially before the advent of movable type and before movable type (invented circa AD 1450) the authorship of history and of everything else related to letters, for that matter, was in the hands of the elite. The life of the average person was always very poor an it was simply a matter of the degree of hardship suffered by the masses, life in ancient Egypt would be better for peasant because the Nile was more relaible than other rivers and the Royal and Noble families did provide effective protection from invaders and bandits compared to peasants elsewhere who lived in even deeper squalor than the peasants of the Nile Valley who lived in during the years when the Pharoahs were able to keep out foreign invasion and the slaughter, enslavement and even higher taxation that came with such a traumatic event.
In certain times and places in the non industrialized World (which is to say the entire world before circa 1700 AD), a series of conditions would be met: fate would allow crops to not fail and plagues to not spread and farm animals would not die and floods would not be catastrophic ect. there would be a ruler who could assemble and lead an army against bandits and rival nations and who also possed the legitimacy so that the nation would not face civil war (which was common in those times, domestic warfare would determine who would be the ruler, especially if there was no clear line of succession) and yet this ruler had to be enlightened enough to not impose punishing taxation or to murder huge numbers of his or her own subjects or to start a civil war with his nobles.
If a nation had such good fortune and an exceptional ruler it could provide a marginally better life for its ordinary people. The peasant farmers, who were about 90% of the people in any pre industrial society would not starve and if they had an especially good year they might have enough food to eat and a little extra to make into alcohol and they might even get to have a little bit of cheese a few days of the week and meat a few days of the year. During these relatively good times, the pre industrialized nation would see a very big improvement in the lives of its elite, with farmers being alive and producing grain, they had much more tax revenues and they could build and expand their palaces and their scribes, monks, priests, courtiers and that one one hundredth of the population that could read would look around the palace and declare their times to be drastically better and it was true, if you gauge society's wealthy by how well its very richest people fare.
If there happened to be a few generations of decent rulers, no huge war to kill a large number of the elite (to their credit, ancient rulers did at least lead armies into battle), no famines to ever cause the royal family and the nobles to have to ration food or be hungry or any other calamity visited on the royal and noble houses and there were no civil wars over royal succession, that age would usually be classified as a Golden Age by historians because historians, until relatively recenetly, foused on the lives of the ruling class, they used very little archeology to see how ordinary people lived (In many literate societies, the details of people's lives were never put into writing, most writing was religious or commercial or for government admninistration and if they did write about personal lives, it was about people from the ruling class and therefore only archeology would tell historians about the lives outside of the palaces), they focused on political history and finally, they focused on the artistic and scientific achievments enjoyed by the elites.
It is not surprising at all that ancient Kem't/Egypt would have been seen as very advanced, when you lookat it through the eyes of its elites, its ruling and intellectual class. If someone today used the accounts of the scribes and maybe the ruins of the stone palaces and the artifact of gold found in tombs (or rather a tomb, in the case of Ancient Egypt most were cleared out by tomb robbers centuries before archeologists could get to them) Around 2,000 BC, The Nile Valley had fertile farm land, reliable floods that watered and replenished the soil and the transportation and communication provided by the Nile river allowed Egypr to be ruled centrally so the Pharoah and his nobles had a much larger tax base from which to extract wealth and it allowed there to be scholars and artisans that could peform feats of engineering, mathematics, art and even medicine that were remarkable, certainly by the standards of that time, when even agriculture was not universally practiced in Europe or parts of Eastern Asia. The quality of life for the average ancient Egyptian, however, was not much better during its Golden Ages than during its Dark Ages (or Intermediate periods, as is the case for times in Ancient Egyptian history when the Kingdom was either invaded or when it was politically fractured), nor would it have been much better than the life of the average person in Europe or Asia or the Americas at any time in history before about circa A.D. 1750.
It also should be noted that while civilization has generally been advancing technologically for the last few thousand years there can be decades and centuries of setbacks, disasters or break downs of societies and knowledge can be lost and/or forgotten. Throughout the Ancient and Medieval World there were techniques for making steel, detecting earthquakes (In Han China circa A.D. 100, the occurance of an earthquake in a distant province could be detected with the use of a machine located in the imperial capital) for practicing medicine (Medieval Islamic Doctors were able to remove cataracts from the eye) or for making chemicals or structures that were used and they usually improved the lives of people (I say "usually" because in the case of "Greek Fire," a concotion from the medieval Byzantine Empire which was similar to Napalm, the Arab warriors who were lit on fire by it did not have their lives improved very much, especially when you consider that it was used in Naval battles and this medieval napalm would still burn when you jumped into the water). A Katana from medieval Japan or Damascus Steel swords from the Medieval Islamic World were also very effective pieces of steel that were made made to kill and while knowledge of the how the former is made remains intact, the knowledge of how to make the latter has disappeared like "Greek Fire."
Despite their being useful, a lot of ancient technology was done by craftsmen and artisans and others who were illiterate and/or were unwilling to divulge their secrets so during times when a society would regress the technique could be forgotten and no text on that lost knowledge could exist to be unearthered in later centuries. The fact that useful knowledge can be lost or forgotten is what produced myths and legends of places like Atlantis, it is why the Anglo-Saxons in 8th Century Britain thought that the ruins of the old Roman provincial City, Londinium, were proof a city that was actually once inhabited by giants and in other parts of the World, where ever societies suffered major backslides, the forgotten technology, of which the people knew but about which they knew very little, became the foundation for powerful legends that captured people's imagination and still do today. Contemporary technology had allowed people to mass produce similar products and often times make superior products or substitutes for those products of lost knowledge and just because scientists and engineers cannot reverse engineer all of those products of lost knowledge does not ake that past civilizations were anywhere close to being as advanced as our own.
The most likely explanation for the Pyramids is both extremely banal but also extremely impressive. What is most likely in the case of the Pyramids was that The Nile Valley was ruled by a single powerful ruler who was able to aggregate most of the surplus wealth (that is to say what was produced minus what was consumed in a given period of time) into his hands and he used a great deal of it to have a grand masoleum built for himself. The fact that it was huge shows that Egypt's Nile Valley was especially Fertile and it freed up enough labor and surplus food to allow for the project to happen and the Nile river allowed the heavy stones to be moved from distant quarries to the build site. The fact that the Great Pyramids at Giza are aligned in a manner that was the product of astronomy is no surprise because ancient civilizations that have a permanent class of literate scribes and priests all have studied the stars and the Pyramids reflected their knowledge of the stars. Finally, the Pyramids were also a relefction in a more literal sense, they were once covered with shiny white rocks that were cut at an angle, that would fit into the steps of the Pyramids that allowed the Pyramids to be smooth and to throw off very bright light light. It would have been difficult to look at during the day time and by night it would have reflcted the light of the moon and looked other worldly.
In short, Ancient Egypt did what many ancient civilizations did, the ruler skimmed the surplus produce, minerals and labor from the masses and built huge edifices for the purpose of aggrandizing himself durin gand after his life. The Egyptians used techniques that we do not know exactly how they worked and because history at that time was written entirel yas the voice of the elite, life for the Egyptian elite was heavenly. However, this handful of impressive facts should not be used to create the false conclusion that the average person in Egypt in 2011 B.C. had a better quality of life than even a relatively poor person in the US or Europe of Japan in the year A.D 2011.
