Hi, I am John Green.
This is Crash Course World History and today we are going to talk about civilization.
Oh, Mr Green, Mr Green, I have that video game.
I like to play as the Assyrians(亚述人).
Yeah, Me-from-the past!
It was a video game
In fact, it is still a video game. They’ve continued to update it.
But to actual civilizations, its best days are probably behind it.
So those of you who watched our first series will remember the civilization is a complicated and controversial concept like to describe an individual or a group as civilized is to give them a d status that they maybe haven’t earned while to call someone uncivilized is an insult.
Right?  And according to the usual mythology about civilizations, there are uncivilized barbarians, often from the hills or the forest or the steppe. (大草原)
They realized the benefit of the settled agriculture and give up their barbarian way to settle in the valley, and eventually assimilating into civilized society.
That is a really neatly package story, right?
People all around the world came to the same civilization and they all make progress and became civilized, but what if it’s not actually true?
So today a little something for the anarchist(无政府主义者) historians among you.
We will look at The Art of Not Being Governed. (不被统治的艺术) An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James Scott.
Scott argues that our view of hill people as primitive, tribal barbarians has it all wrong and he calls into question much of what we assumes about civilization.
So as you know, here at crash course History, we like to approach history from many different history aspects because history is not only what has happened. It’s also about how we think about what happened.
So here we go anarchist.
We are finally going to address your burning suspicion that civilization does not really needs a country. Many visitors will remember that many of the early civilizations were founded in the river valleys. Probably river brought water and made agriculture easier and predictable.
You know, you got the big 3: ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley civilization-all near valley civilization.
In fact, one of them is named after the Indus River. Because the land is so fertile for agriculture so you could finally have large, concentrated population because they have food surplus.
Everything we connected with civilizations from the idea of different kinds of people can have different jobs to this video camera-all a result of food surplus.
crash是什么意思Because if somebody could not create enough food for all people,  all people will be more focused on getting food.
Having a food surplus was a huge change compared to like the first 100,000 years of humanity when everyone was hunting together.
Food surplus led to population growth and population concentration which led to states and what we tend to call civilization which is civilized by good things like writing, arts and grocery stores.
So that is the traditional narrative, but that is not the whole story. Let us go thought bubble.
Now we might equate civilization with the high culture, but historically probably not, more adequate to equate it with state control like the Han Dynasty who were a pretty successfu
l civilizing empire back in the day, wrote of the barbarians as people who were beyond of state control. Some of these so-called barbarians were pastoral nomads, whose raiding posed a genuine threat to the Chinese, but others were people who lived in hills.  So the opposition of civilized agricultural societies living in the valleys and barbarian hill people is as old as you know, the hills. And one of the famous and famous examples of the town vs country debate is the Epic of Gilgamesh.(吉尔伽美什史诗) where Enkidu, the wild man from the hills, goes to downs and seven days with prostitute, joins civilization and became Gilgamesh’s best friend.
In Southern Asia, the story that hill people were dazzled by civilization and joined up the circle as well. Here, though, the civilizing force was the reading of religious or the philosophical texts. But More important than either access to Classical age texts or civilizing experiences in the city, was the civilization was based on settled agriculture and were associated with the states. In a way, it can be argued that without a state, there is no such thing as barbarian. But we live in the ststes, we tend to think that they are A necessary., B timeless, C, overall a pretty good thing. Almost all civilizations are associate
d with states like ancient Egypt and China in the remote past or France if you are into western civilization. Thanks, the thoughts bubble. I mean, it’s telling that the Mongols, were argued the greatest conquerors of the premodern world, but usually we do not call it a civilization. They were not just agricultury and state-like enough. Although of course the Mongols being the Mongols , there is the exception to the rule: the Mongols DID settled in a recognized state in Yuan China. History, even exceptions have exceptions. So when we are talking about the states, we need to remember that it’s a pretty common for the creation of states to involve some form of cohesion like in the ancient and sometimes, not ancient societies.

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