Threshold 7 · Agriculture
The Agricultural Revolution
People begin to farm, and farming makes villages, cities, states, writing, empires and inequality possible.
For a quarter of a million years our species lived by foraging. Then, within a few thousand years and in several places independently, people began to plant and to herd. It was not an obvious improvement, and this chapter asks why they did it anyway.
Farming produced surplus, surplus produced cities, and cities produced everything that follows: hierarchy, writing, states, epidemics and trade networks that eventually stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. The Indus Valley civilisation, one of the earliest urban societies on Earth, sits at the centre of this chapter.
The agrarian era lasted ten thousand years and set the pattern of human life for most of recorded history. It ended only when a new source of energy was found.
Lessons
- 7.1 Why farm?Draft
The worst decision anyone ever made, taken independently at least eleven times.
- 7.2 DomesticationDraft
What we did to plants and animals, and what they did to us.
- 7.3 Villages to citiesDraft
How a pile of grain becomes a temple, a scribe, a tax and a king.
- 7.4 The Indus Valley civilisationDraft
The largest of the ancient civilisations by area, with no palaces, no royal tombs, and a script nobody can read.
- 7.5 The price of farmingDraft
The bill for cities: disease, inequality, patriarchy, slavery and soil.
- 7.6 Empires and exchangeDraft
Why agrarian states kept growing, kept collapsing, and kept connecting.