DÜNYA MEDENİYETLERİNE GİRİŞ - Deneme Sınavı - 15

The defined civilization is the societal civilization in which the so-called services and growing human communication led towards the formation of cities.

Statements I and III are true about cultural civilizations.

The Japanese civilization is a monocultural civilization whereas the others include multicultural elements.

Infrastructure is the technology-driven additive process of acquiring and applying materials through civilization and beyond.

The defined concept is a spherical community.

Religion, wealth and power are among the attributes that belong to the cultural system of civilization.

When the fourth law is violated there will be a chaos and eventually a collapse as in the example of Poland.

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) in Japan, defined civilization as follows: “civilization comforts man physically and elevates him spiritually…Civilization advances the well-being and dignity of man, since man acquires these benefits through knowledge and virtue.”

Masaki Miyaki (2004) argued that in “the Knowledge Society, people look mostly for artificial intelligence in profit-driven data mining and robotics, and they neglect moral values of natural intelligence."

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) published a book on The Decline of the West, 1918-22, where he reflects the pessimistic atmosphere in Germany after World War I. Spengler maintained that history has a natural development, in which every culture is a distinct organic form that grows, matures, and decays. He insisted that civilizations are independent from external influences. He predicted a phase of “Caesarism” in the future development of Western Culture, which he believed was in its last stage.

An English historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) published his greatest work in the twelve-volume A Study of History (1934-1961). He compared the history of twentysix different civilizations, which everyone follows a similar pattern of evolution through a cyclical pattern of growth, maturity, and decay. He believed that societies thrive best in response to challenges and that a society’s most important task is to create a religion.

A Polish historian Feliks Koneczny (1862-1949) wrote three books on the theory of civilizations: On the Plurality of Civilizations (London 1962), For an Order in History, (only Polish edition, London 1977), and History Laws (only Polish edition, London 1982). He was an empirical theoretician who discovered (in contrast to Spengler’s a priori model) that there is no one linear history of Mankind. A civilization for him is a method of collective life’s regime. His main inquiry was to find factors differentiating civilizations.

A Russian-American Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1969), professor at Harvard, in his Social and Culture Dynamics (1937-41, four volumes) quantified all conceivable components of a culture from Greco-Roman to Western.

Alfred Louis Kroeber is the author of Configurations of Culture Growth.

Fernand Braudel assumes that the history of human development is the history of civilization. Civilization for him is a process rather than a temporarily stabilized construct.

Matthew Melko in his book The Nature of Civilizations (1969) defines some elements of a basic model of civilizations, such as their components (outlook, aesthetics, society, economics, government, international) and developmental stages (crystallization, transition), complete disintegration, ossification (a freezing at a crystal stage) and developmental macro-phases of feudal system, state system, imperial system, which he analyzes separately from stages. He thinks that civilizations are large and complex cultures, which can control their environments.

Immanuel Wallerstein is the author of the book titled "Historical Capitalism."

The invention of fire was much earlier than the occurence of the Mesopotamian Civilization. The Mesopotamian Civilization brought forth some of the most important developments in human history. The innovations of these industrious people included:
• the invention of the wheel,
• the planting of the first cereal crops,
• the development of cursive script,
• mathematics,
• astronomy, and
• agriculture

The Tigris -Euphrates rivers have their point of origin within 80 km of each other in eastern Turkey and they mainly determine the boundaries of the civilization

There are five key characteristics that set its city, Sumer, apart from earlier human habitations, according to the World History Library (library 07.com):
• Advanced cities (commencing at 4000
BCE),
• Specialized workers,
• Complex institutions,
• Record keeping in writing, and
• Improved technology (the wheel)