Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

part i | civilisations
1.3
HISTORICAL
CIVILISATIONS, STATES
AND ANCIENT CITIES
Even in distant antiquity, as far back as the 2nd to the early 1st
millennium BC, the process of the formation of distinct and unique individual
civilisations was taking place in Central Asia; these included the civilisations of
Bactria, Margush, Sogdia, Khorezm and Ferghana-Chach, among others. They were
each characterised by stages and features of historical and cultural process, local
trends and particularities of development arising from a highly complex genesis of
culture, ethnicity and statehood. They were essentially river-dependent civilisations
based on irrigated agriculture, and therefore also urban, since cities and towns were an
inseparable part of their existence at all stages of their development – from embryonic
proto-urban forms to the most developed conurbations such as Alexandria, Balkh,
Merv and Samarkand. Pastoralism, both domestic and nomadic, played a huge role
in this region, but it did not determine its fundamental character.
The states that emerged from the foundations of these civilisations, and as an
expression of them, developed in parallel, providing the civilisations with sustainability
and longevity and, in some periods, political, economic and cultural cohesion.
If we consider writing to be the most important factor for the development of
advanced forms of statehood, then it follows that civilisations emerge simultaneously
alongside states, since writing is also one of their most important elements (albeit not
the decisive one).
But if a civilisation, and above all a historical civilisation, is a stadial phenomenon
that can be observed at all the chronological stages in the development of human
society, starting with the Stone Age, then statehood is a secondary phenomenon, a
derivation of civilisation, which emerges at a particular stage in the development of
society, namely in the Bronze Age, when the first embryonic forms of the state –
the so-called city-states – emerged in the historical civilisations of Mesopotamia, the
Eastern Mediterranean and the lower reaches of the Nile.
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