Reading Blog #3

One interesting thing that was kind of covered in the last chapter but ties into this chapter is how different civilizations became civilized all around the same time. This includes the civilizations in Mesopotamia such as Babylon, all the way to civilizations in South America called Norte Chico. Also interesting was the writing in ancient civilizations. It is interesting that each civilization came up with their own writing systems, for example the Sumerians had cuneiform, the Egyptians had Hieroglyphs, and Chinese civilizations had pictographs. I would have thought that all of the writings would have been fairly similar to each other as these civilizations all became civilizations at the same time, but this was not the case. Also interesting is that after 5500 years, almost none of these ancient writings are around anymore. Most civilizations have developed the modern day alphabet. Lastly interesting was the differences between city states, such as Sumer, and the large one area nations such as Egypt. Sumer had about a dozen or more city states, so it was not really one unified civilization like Egypt might have been. Egypt was a cosmopolitan urban center where it had one center and around it was an agricultural base. Both, while different, were exceptional ancient civilizations that flourished in their areas.