Facts about Civilization

Finally, a compelling case has been made that the lampadephoria, a ceremony of lamp lighting and torch running that was featured in numerous socio-religious festivals, emerged from (or was related to) the veneration of Hephaestus.

Some believe that the world is undergoing another transformation, in which civilizations are entering the stage of the "informational society."

Every society, civilization or not, has a specific set of ideas and customs, and a certain set of items and arts, that make it unique.

The earliest inhabitants of Knossos, the center of Minoan Civilization on Crete, date back to the seventh millennium B.C.E.

The nature of civilization is that it seeks to spread, and to expand, and it has the means by which to do so.

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has argued that the defining characteristic of the twenty-first century will be a "clash of civilizations."

Early civilizations developed in many parts of the world, primarily where there was adequate water available.

The Kardashev scale, proposed by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, classifies civilizations based on their level of technological advancement, specifically measured by the amount of energy a civilization is able to harness.

Religious ascetics have often attempted to curb the influence of civilization over their lives in order to concentrate on spiritual matters.

Mid twentieth-century historian Arnold J. Toynbee explored civilizational processes in his multi-volume A Study of History, which traced the rise and, in most cases, the decline of 21 civilizations and five "arrested civilizations."

Marxists have claimed, "that the beginning of civilization was the beginning of oppression."

Aegean civilization is the general term for the prehistoric civilizations in Greece and the Aegean.

Members of civilizations have sometimes shunned them, believing that civilization restricts people from living in their natural state.

The Kardashev scale makes provisions for civilizations far more technologically advanced than any currently known to exist.

Civilization has also been spread by force, often using religion to justify its actions.

According to Toynbee, most civilizations declined and fell because of moral or religious decline, which led to rigidity and the inability to be creative.

Civilization refers to a complex human society, in which people live in groups of settled dwellings comprising cities.

Boas claimed that development of any particular civilization cannot be understood without understanding the whole history of that civilization.

Currently, world civilization is in a stage that may be characterized as an "industrial society," superseding the previous "agrarian society."

China is one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, with written records dating back 3,500 years.

Toynbee offered two possibilities: they might all merge with Western civilization, or Western civilization might decay and die.

Ultimately, the future of civilizations may depend on the answer to whether history progresses as a series of random events, or whether it has design and purpose, known by religious people as divine providence.

The political structures of civilization were superimposed on their way of life, and so they occupy a middle ground between tribal and civilized.

Different civilizations and societies all over the globe are economically, politically, and even culturally interdependent in many ways.

Toynbee viewed the whole of history as the rise and fall of civilizations.

Some basic religious concepts of early Chinese civilization continued to be held by most Chinese even after the advent of Buddhism and Taoism.

The old is often supplanted by a new civilization with a potent new culture, or character, based on a different worldview bringing different answers to questions of ultimate concern.

By the most minimal, literal definition, a "civilization" is a complex society.

The Indus Valley Civilization boasts the earliest known accounts of urban planning.

What Huntington calls the "clash of civilizations" might be characterized by Wilkinson as a clash of cultural spheres within a single global civilization.

When civilizations utilize new, creative ideas, they overcome challenges and grow.

The term "civilization" or "civilisation" comes from the Latin word civis, meaning "citizen" or "townsman."

Monasticism represents an effort by these ascetics to create a life somewhat apart from their mainstream civilizations.

An alternative model, the gene-centered view of evolution, sees natural selection as working on the level of genes.

On a fundamental level, they say there is no difference between civilizations and tribal societies, and that each simply does what it can with the resources it has.

According to Huntington, conflicts between civilizations will supplant the conflicts between nation-states and ideologies that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The "three-fifths compromise" in the United States counted southerners' slaves as three-fifths of a human for the sake of population count (thus guaranteeing white slaveholders more votes in congressional and presidential elections).

Civilization has been spread by introducing agriculture, writing systems, and religion to uncivilized tribes.

The Indus Valley Civilization is credited with the earliest known use of decimal fractions in a uniform system of ancient weights and measures, as well as negative numbers.

Civilization can be viewed as the external manifestation, and culture as the internal character of a society.

According to David Wilkinson, civilizations can be culturally heterogeneous, like "Western Civilization," or relatively homogeneous, like the Japanese civilization.

Hinduism can be regarded as having some of its roots in the religious life and practices of this civilization.

When used in this sense, civilization is an exclusive term, applied to some human groups and not others.

Through intensive agriculture and urban growth, civilizations tend to destroy natural settings and habitats.

Environmentalists also criticize civilizations for their exploitation of the environment.

Civilizations have more intricate cultures, including literature, professional art, architecture, organized religion, and complex customs associated with the elite.

Another use of the term "civilization" combines the meanings of complexity and sophistication, implying that a complex, sophisticated society is naturally superior to less complex, less sophisticated societies.

Historically, civilizations have experienced cycles of birth, life, decline and death, similar to the life cycle of all living things, including human beings.

According to Toynbee, civilizations develop in response to some set of challenges in the environment, which require creative solutions that ultimately reorient the entire society.

Toynbee argued that as civilizations decay, they experience a "schism in the soul," as the creative and spiritual impulse dies.

The causes of the growth and decline of civilizations, and their expansion to a potential world society, are complex.