heyyou welcome back i'm mrs. Baur anak and this is video 2 of my series for AP World History answering the question how did we get here covering material that's significant your understanding of the course but that's no longer covered since we became AP World History modern today we're going to talk about ancient urban civilization instead of going through each civilization separately though I'm going to do an overview of common themes in these ancient civilization sometimes called river valley civilization and these are the categories that I'll be using to discuss them you may actually want to pause the video and take a good look because these pieces of society are something that we'll be talking about and using all year pretty soon you'll be breaking down societies into their pieces - let's start with politics around the world as populations grew larger there was a greater need than ever for political structure because of all of the projects that and people that needed organizing some people rose to leadership positions and began creating the systems that they would need for control and to keep their power one common theme starting here around 3500 BCE and that would continue into the 1700s and in some places beyond was the linking of leaders in religion Kings claimed to be able to speak to the gods read the signs of the gods or that they were gods regardless of how they sold it when people are deeply religious that gives a leader great power over the population another common theme was the beginning of Taxation to be part of society people had to help pay for the supports of society beyond supporting the leader these funds were used to build much needed irrigation systems create walls for safety around their cities or support the military and militaries for another new innovation most of these were citizen armies but some civilizations had standing armies - they were needed because as civilizations cultivated more and more land and built structures they were proud of they needed to protect them from neighbors who either needed more land and we're looking to or were looking to expand the rule some river valley civilizations saw very little warfare like the nile valley in Egypt which was united for thousands of years and others saw way too much warfare like the city-states of Mesopotamia and lastly in every civilization there was some form of laws created some were written down and others were not on the screen in front of you you see the Narmer tablet in the middle that tells the story of the Uniting of upper and lower egypt by the first Pharaoh it seems to have included quite a bit of bloodshed and on the right is the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi from Mesopotamia which includes the famous phrase an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth which says a lot about their conception of justice it was based on older law codes from Mesopotamia but was inscribed upon this stone color in 1754 BCE another thing that these amazing early civilizations had in common was that they were always innovating they say that necessity is the mother of invention and a cities grew life became more complex people needed better and more efficient ways of doing everyday things record-keeping for trade and taxes was essential in Mesopotamia what started with tokens representing different items eventually became a pictographic writing system where pictures were drawn on clay representing the words that they showed but then they became a log of graphic style where symbols were written on clay that could represent more abstract concepts like love in Egypt there are hieroglyphics like you see in the upper left hand corner of the book picture here and in the Andean region in the Americas a complex system of different colored strings and not called khipu were used for record-keeping and mathematics was needed for everything from organizing the state economy to building irrigation systems and for keeping track of stars for religious ceremonies tools like ploughs and sail and wheeled vehicles to move goods all came out of these early civilizations and were adopted by later civilizations who were still using some of these when our course begins in 1200 economically most regions depended on agriculture but eventually the use of the land intensified and not everyone was needed to farm so job specialization began people took products of the land and turn them into something up like turning clay into pottery or wheat into bread and those goods were bought and sold using the barter system where people decide of the objects or are of equal value or how many Chiz are worth one banana in addition to the local markets there was also some inter-regional trade happening items from the Indus Valley Civilisation in South Asia and Egypt have been found in Mesopotamia right over here and vice-versa so we know that people were starting to venture into other regions and they probably brought more than just good this is another lesson that you'll hear over and over again in world history when people trade goods they also trade culture ideas and beliefs are often moved from place to place by merchants as you can see above I am only halfway through talking about the pieces of society but I'm really trying to keep these videos to under six minutes in length so I'm going to wrap this one up and make another one to cover culture environment and society and that will be video number three