The Maya and Shang relied on similar agricultural methods and political structures with small kingdoms and one ruler; however, they differed culturally since the Shang had no religion and the Mayans did. Both civilizations organized into hierarchies of power, although the Mayan small city-kingdom system worked better than the Shang decentralized states. Unlike the Mayans, the Shang had many governors and trusted them to carry out the orders. However, the governors were not hundred percent loyal to their king and rebelled a lot. The only reason they stayed in power for a certain time was that they could monopolize their bronze.
Because of this, both of these civilizations depended on rivers to sustain a productive agriculture. This is especially important to both because they lived in arid lands. However, the rivers that the Egyptians and Mesopotamians used were far different from each other. The Egyptians lived near the Nile
While ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies are very similar they can be different in some ways too. In the Middle East, in Mesopotamia, before the Common Era, the first civilizations began to appear. Then Egypt’s Nile River Valley began to populate soon after. These civilizations began to thrive and develop their own politics, economies and social class structures. Even though they were very similar, they did have their differences.
Victoria Valean 09-07-13 Period 01 Egypt and Mesopotamia: Compare and Contrast During the New Stone Age, also known as the Agricultural Revolution, two civilizations ascended. Although many similarities can be shown between the two, they each are very different from each other culturally, geographically, socially, politically, and religiously. Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt developed during the same time period, 5000-6000 B.C., geographically; they both had a source main of freshwater; the Nile River for Egypt, and the Tigris and Euphrates River for Mesopotamia. Both civilizations also have access to major trading seas, coming from their main Rivers. Egypt and Mesopotamia’s river’s provided most of the needed water for their crops.
Agriculture was also a very important role in the Mayan and Incan civilizations. They used a system called the Terrace system. This system helped decrease erosion and surface run-off and are affective for growing crops requiring much water. Despite their many similarities, they also had differences. The Mayans had a writing system which was Hieroglyphics, however the Incans did not.
Ancient Egyptian communities settled on the banks of the Nile, to profit from the fertile soils for farming and agriculture. Agriculture…gave rise to increasingly cooperative and centralised social interactions characteristic of all early civilizations. In contrast, the ancient Greek villages were quite isolated from one another as the terrain isolated one village from another. The extremely mountainous terrain discouraged communication by land and favored political independence; through most of ancient Greek history, the various cities, raised on small isolated plains, remained autonomous political entities. The formation of villages and communities in both Egypt and Greece led to the introduction of politics and structured religion in the regions.
The basis of our lives today started way back with ancient civilizations that were similar but also very different. Ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt were somewhat similar in the sense that they advanced in science, that they were set up near river valleys and that they shared some beliefs. They were somewhat different in their class divisions, their jobs and the surrounding geography. Egyptian and Mesopotamia were somewhat similar with their economic advancements, their economic set up and their geography. The two share a polytheistic belief system.
Pyramids in Egypt were also used as a burial site for pharaohs, because they strongly believed in life after death. Egypt and Mesopotamia were also constructed differently. In Mesopotamia, they had small, cramped city-states. Because of the lack of natural defense, they were required to build walls around their cities to protect against invasion from hostile nomads and natural discrepancies, such as the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates. In Egypt, there was a lack of urbanization due to “the ease of farming on the banks of the Nile” (A Tale of Two Rivers), and the
The rivers would easily flood at unplanned times that would result in devastations and floods that made it harder for the civilization to develop. Mesopotamia also didn’t have any natural barriers to prevent from attack and invasion of foreigners, and was constantly being taken over and occupied by different people groups. Due to Mesopotamian civilization being the first, Egypt was influenced by the Mesopotamian culture and revised many of the ideas and developments created there. Due to the time that these civilizations surface, both of the civilizations were Polytheistic; meaning that they believed in several gods. In the earlier times all of the religions were focused around the strength and power of the gods, which they inferred to be a part of nature.
This similarity shows that, though neither civilization was dependent on it, land trade played an important role in the cultures of the two civilizations. These trade roads also played a large part in the cultural diffusion of Rome and Latin America. In Classical Latin America and the early years of Classic Rome, Mountainous terrain isolated cities, towns, and villages, but through the complex trade routes, these two civilizations could interact with their surrounding civilizations. Another similarity between the two cultures was that the Aztecs, a classical civilization of Latin America, and the Romans both conquered new territory for either political or economic reasons. With Rome conquering Western Europe and the Aztecs conquering the majority of Central America, the two civilizations gathered a large amount of wealth from the conquered states.